Cinephiles will spot the allusion to Tod Browning’s 1932 cringe fest Freaks in the title of Dan Chaon’s equally unsettling and mesmeric novel, One of Us. Killers and circus curiosities abound in both works, and the creepy chants of “One of us!” directed at the trapeze artist in the Browning film are echoed in this early 20th-century tale of orphaned twin siblings, the traveling carnival that takes them in and their supposed uncle who has a side gig as a serial killer.
That may sound grisly, but a good chef can make any ingredient toothsome—and Chaon is a great chef. The twins are Bolt and Eleanor, teens with telepathic powers whose mother runs a boardinghouse in Oberlin, Ohio. They never knew their father, who traveled west to seek his fortune and never returned. After their mother dies in 1914 and the bank takes their house, a mysterious man calling himself Uncle Charlie comes to claim them, dosing them with laudanum to keep them from escaping.
The kids don’t yet know that he’s a serial killer, although these days “he rarely gets to really enjoy it the way he’d like to.” Luckily, Uncle Charlie doesn’t know that the twins are killers, too, having slipped arsenic into a neighbor’s tea. A little poison stirred into drunk Uncle Charlie’s beer allows them to get away. They end up being taken in by Jengling’s Emporium, a traveling circus that includes a three-legged woman; a “dog-faced boy” who runs the rigged milk bottle toss; and a girl named Rosalie, who has a second head growing out of the back of her skull and who, when Bolt feeds her gruel, says, “Don’t I know you?”
The novel grows more mystical and dreamlike as it progresses. Along the way, Chaon seasons the violence with meditations on God, death and much else. One of Us isn’t for the fainthearted, but readers who like thrillers that stimulate their intellect as much as their emotions will savor every unpredictable twist.