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It’s generally assumed that a summer novel worthy of the name should be disposable and altogether unchallenging. Not so. An easy read needn’t be a shallow one. All that’s really required for a satisfactory summer novel is a plot that moves along at a nice clip, a protagonist the reader can safely root for (no anti-heroes or unreliable narrators), and a hopeful, if not necessarily happy, ending. If it were published today, Jane Eyre would be marketed as a summer novel. With Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish, has produced a multilayered fantasy that fulfills every requirement for painless summer reading yet is thoughtful enough to earn a permanent place on the bookshelf.

The Negro magician of the title is Henry Walker, a has-been performer eking out a living in a 1950s Southern circus. He’s a complete washout as an illusionist, but his race makes him a novelty to be exhibited along with the freaks: “For a magician was nothing, really, the same way a cow was nothing. But a Negro magician—or, say, a two-headed cow—now, that was something. Better even than a Chinese acrobat.”

Henry was once an extraordinary magician, with supernatural gifts bestowed on him in childhood by the mysterious Mr. Sebastian, a.k.a. the Devil. Ten-year-old Henry makes his Faustian bargain in innocence, but the evil one extracts his payment just the same, robbing Henry of the person he loves most in the world. His lifelong quest for revenge against Mr. Sebastian, and the consequences of that quest, unfold in a series of overlapping narratives told by a variety of characters—the circus owner, the freaks, the ghost of Henry’s long-dead mother, as well as a private detective who tracks him down.

Nobody wants to read something earth-shattering while she’s lolling on the beach, so a good summer novel can’t shock, and Mr. Sebastian doesn’t; but it does offer up unexpected plot turns and a few genuine surprises. So many, in fact, that it’s difficult to explore any of the action beyond the first few pages without risking a spoiler. Suffice it to say that the facts of Henry’s life are ultimately revealed to be less horrifying and more poignant than they first seem. The supernatural fantasy gradually gives way to an emotional reality as powerful and destructive as any monster that inhabits a child’s mind.

Employing multiple narrators has become a cliché in contemporary fiction, but Wallace makes it work quite well here. Henry, who presents many versions of himself to the world, has a fluid, shifting sense of his own identity, and the book easily navigates that layered reality through the varied storytellers. Like witnesses at a trial, each narrator testifies to a different aspect of Henry’s experience, in voices ranging from the gruff cynicism of the circus owner—“A sad story. I’d cry if there weren’t a million others just like it”—to the poetic ruminations of Henry’s fellow freak, the Ossified Girl: “I think he saw beneath my carapace to who I was, as I saw beneath his. This is what love is, of course, the second sight, this spyglass to the soul. But what if there’s nothing there to see? If the heart has died, withered, and hardened?”

The trouble with a shifting point of view is that it can be jarring when an engaging voice yields to the next speaker. That problem is especially evident in the final segment of Mr. Sebastian, when the detective takes over the story. His grounded narrative does the plot work of sifting out fact from fantasy, but it feels a bit drab as a follow-up to the freaks and ghosts. Readers are apt to resist being brought so abruptly down to earth, even as their curiosity about the book’s central mystery is satisfied.That’s not to say that Wallace leaves his lively summer fable mired in mundane fact. The hard reality of Henry’s life leads the story to a revelation of the true magic he possessed but could never see. It’s a painful enlightenment that’s nevertheless full of spiritual hope—a potent epiphany that will make this novel worth reading again when summer’s long over.