The Local Author Of Behind The Curtain Books Explains His Drive

A message from Joey Anthis below who has written "Behind the Curtain: The Unraveling" an inspirational book which would make a great gift for the holidays, following "Behind the Curtain: The Illusion".

"Hey neighbors,

I’ve rewritten this a dozen times, because some things are hard to say out loud — especially to the place that raised you.

I’m a Dayton local. I grew up between Dayton and Reno, under these wide Nevada skies that teach you two things early: how to love open space… and how good we are at keeping things buried.

Some of you might remember me from the years right after high school.

I was the kid with the cards.

The magician.

Doing tricks at gatherings, around town, anywhere someone would let me shuffle a deck. Some of you watched me turn paper into wonder. Coins into disappearance. A moment into a distraction.

Back then, magic wasn’t just entertainment.

It was survival.

Magic taught me how to control a room.

How to keep eyes where I wanted them.

How to make people smile so they wouldn’t look too closely at what I was hiding.

Illusion is a strange thing.

It doesn’t erase the truth — it just delays it.

What most people didn’t see were the things happening when the curtain dropped.

The grief inside my family.

The fractures that didn’t heal.

The questions that never made it past closed doors.

Years later, after losing my sister, silence stopped being something I could live with.

I asked questions.

I followed threads.

I waited — patiently at first — for answers that never came.

And I learned something Northern Nevada understands better than most:

sometimes quiet isn’t peace.

Sometimes it’s a decision.

That silence — from institutions, from systems, from people sworn to protect — became heavier than the loss itself. It pressed in. It demanded to be named.

So I put the cards down.

I stopped performing illusions and started writing instead.

That writing became a memoir trilogy called Behind the Curtain — a story rooted deeply in this place, this landscape, and the cost of telling the truth when it would be easier to let it fade.

These books aren’t about magic.

They’re about what happens when the tricks stop working.

About grief that doesn’t resolve neatly.

About questions that don’t get answered.

About learning that some stories are buried not because they’re false — but because they’re inconvenient.

I’m sharing this here not to promote myself, but to acknowledge something quietly powerful: this community shaped me. The wonder. The silence. The resilience. The things we talk about… and the things we don’t.

If you ever saw one of my tricks years ago and wondered where life took me — this is where it led.

From a boy who learned how to misdirect attention…

to a man who refuses to look away.

— Joey"