VIENNA — Nearly 100 years after a dance hall explosion shook a small Missouri town, an author who grew up there has found inspiration in the story for her debut novel.

Michelle Collins Anderson grew up in West Plains near where Highway 63 crosses the Arkansas border. Her first book “The Flower Sisters” tells a fictionalized version of one of the most infamous nights in the town’s history. Heartland Regional Library System (HRLS) selected the book for its recent community read, and Anderson joined readers at the Vienna Library on April 11 to discuss it.

On April 13, 1928, West Plains’s Bond Dance Hall exploded during a busy Friday night. The blast killed 39 people, injured 22 more and made international headlines. Witnesses reported feeling the force of the explosion up to 30 miles away. More than 7,000 people attended the funerals in a town that only had a population of around 3,000 when the deaths occurred.

“‘The Flower Sisters’ is really a book that’s close to my heart,” Anderson said. “It’s the novel that I knew I had to write when I found out about the West Plains dance hall explosion.”

Despite growing up in West Plains, Anderson only heard about the explosion about a dozen years ago when her father gave her the nonfiction book “The West Plains Dance Hall Explosion” by Lin Waterhouse. As a way of distancing the fiction of her book from the real-life tragedy, she changed the names of people and places while keeping the story firmly rooted in the Missouri Ozarks. West Plains became Possum Flats and Bond Dance Hall became Lamb Dance Hall.

“The Flower Sisters” follows Daisy, a teenager sent to spend the summer in Possum Flats with her grandmother, the local mortician. While in town, Daisy learns about the explosion as she works an internship with the local newspaper, and she begins to uncover more details about the incident and its lingering effects on the community.

Anderson said she leaned on some of her own experiences as a young reporter at the West Plains Daily Quill while writing the book.

“I am not exactly like Daisy,” she said. “She had a lot more guts than I did at that age. She did not take no for an answer.”

When Anderson learned about the explosion, she was earning a master’s degree in creative writing to change careers from marketing. She began a lengthy research process. She not only had to learn the major players in the events leading up to the explosion and its aftermath but also the culture of the Ozarks on the eve of the Great Depression. Among the most crucial details was understanding the religious climate that affected the public’s perception of the tragedy.

“I really wanted to understand that part of it because even though I didn’t share the outlook that it was God’s will or wrath raining down on these young people, I wanted to understand that religion and where they were coming from,” Anderson said. “I did some research into the Pentecostal movement.”

Anderson’s research also led her to learn much about the mortuary business to develop one of the main characters, who was inspired by one of the real explosion’s victims, a female funeral home director. Her desire to learn more took her to the Heaton-Bowman-Smith and Sidenfaden Chapel Funeral Museum in St. Joseph.

“It’s very interesting,” Anderson said. “One of the challenges of my novel is that it’s set in 1928 but also 1978, and there are some years in between there. The funeral home technology changed quite a bit from the ‘20s to the ‘70s, so I wanted to make sure that I was getting it right.”

Monuments to the victims of the dance hall explosion remain in West Plains. The city donated land at the Oak Lawn Cemetery for burial. A mass grave contains the remains of 20 people. Of those, 19 people were unable to be identified because of the conditions of their bodies. The body of one woman was identified but placed in the mass grave so she could be with the remains of her husband, who was unidentified but known to be among the deceased.

The cemetery has become a hot spot for ghost stories because of the explosion’s infamy.

“It’s not uncommon for (urns on the headstone) to shift and wiggle off or almost fall off their pedestals,” Anderson said. “There are some rumors that sometimes the ghosts are up dancing and shake the pedestals off, but realistically, it’s probably because there’s a train that runs through there.”

“The Flower Sisters” is available for checkout at HRLS branches or for sale through online retailers. Anderson’s follow-up book, “The Moonshine Women,” is also set in the Ozarks and is expected to be released next spring.