Carnival's Hide, the primary setting for The Tricksters, is familiar Mahy territory. The family getaway is an isolated, haunted house with a life of its own on the fringes of civilization and the sea. The home was built by Edward Carnival, an eccentric widower who decided to raise and educate his two children, Minerva and Teddy, away from civilization and according to his own educational philosophy. In the father's scheme, emotion and instinct are banished in favor of reason, and the two children are brought up in a strict, doctrinaire, and lonely manner with little contact with the outside world.

The Hamilton family, which now owns the home, recounts ritualistically the story of Teddy's alleged drowning in the cove below the Hide. He drowned at the age of twenty, a romantic and tragic figure whose body was never found and whose ghost may be lurking in the cave...