{"id":23647,"date":"2025-09-15T11:34:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T11:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/23647\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T11:34:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T11:34:06","slug":"in-dan-chaons-circus-set-one-of-us-kids-flee-from-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/23647\/","title":{"rendered":"In Dan Chaon’s circus-set ‘One of Us,’ kids flee from evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019d love to kill you sometime,\u201d murmurs a character in \u201cOne of Us,\u201d all but announcing the quiet, matter-of-fact evil that will drive him to pursue the book\u2019s protagonists over the next 200 pages.<\/p>\n

Charlie is his name. Or, at least, that\u2019s what he calls himself but he also says he\u2019s the uncle of sister-and-brother escapees Eleanor and Bolt and we know for sure that isn\u2019t true. Whatever his name is, he\u2019s a violent criminal who murders strangers as if to relieve an itch, who is casually racist and who wants to possess the siblings because he believes they have supernatural gifts.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also why a traveling circus wants them in Dan Chaon\u2019s novel, which is set in the early 1900s. The adolescent siblings, who are orphans, flee from their uncle\u2019s \u201ccare\u201d and fall in with a circus, where their extra-sensory abilities don\u2019t seem unusual when they\u2019re in the company of a little person who is said to be able to tell anyone when they will die, a muscle woman with a heart of gold and a bestial man who has somehow transformed from a huckster into a groaning monster who eats random chicken parts (not for nothing, the title \u201cOne of Us,\u201d quotes a line of dialogue from the classic, circus-set film \u201cFreaks\u201d).<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a reader, Chaon is a name you should know. He writes literary fiction, but he\u2019s attracted to dark undercurrents of humanity in a way that will ring bells with Stephen King fans (or fans of Ray Bradbury, who also liked circus settings and who\u2019s one of several writers to whom \u201cOne of Us\u201d is dedicated).<\/p>\n

Probably because they\u2019re the most vulnerable among us, children are often in danger in Chaon\u2019s books, which include \u201cAwait Your Reply,\u201d in which a girl believes she\u2019s in love with her teacher; \u201cSleepwalk<\/a>\u201a\u201d in which an unscrupulous man agrees to deliver a package that turns out to be an infant; and \u201cIll Will,\u201d which I\u2019d call his best novel. It\u2019s about the aftermath of a massacre and it\u2019s so claustrophobic that it made a friend of mine swear off Chaon forever.<\/p>\n

With its creepy setting and matter-of-fact violence, I don\u2019t think \u201cOne of Us\u201d is the Chaon book to change her mind. But she is missing out on gorgeous writing like this description of the sibling\u2019s late (and, because this is Chaon, neglectful) mother: \u201cTheir mother was a butcher\u2019s daughter with a lovely timid voice, a tinklebell sigh of soft misery.\u201d She\u2019s missing humor like this take-down of the kids\u2019 would-be guardian: \u201cThe smell of Uncle Charlie\u2019s breath suggested that he\u2019d had sardines and beer for dinner at a pub, then smoked cigars and drank whiskey for a while, then vomited in a ditch while he was stumbling home in the rain.\u201d And on insights like this one into the darkness in (some) people\u2019s hearts: \u201cMost people expect cruelty as the normal order of things, but for poor Lacis, it is a constant shock, he has always believed in the essential goodness of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chaon, on the other hand, does not seem to be surprised by terrible behavior. Atmosphere is crucial to his books, and it\u2019s usually a combination of hope and page-turning dread (the first half of \u201cOne of Us\u201d is so propulsive that it may be inevitable that the second half lags a bit).<\/p>\n

Like all of his work, \u201cOne of Us\u201d acknowledges the dark forces that challenge the goodness in his characters. That\u2019s why his books are so gripping: Good and evil are in constant battle and it\u2019s not at all clear which will win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019d love to kill you sometime,\u201d murmurs a character in \u201cOne of Us,\u201d all but announcing the quiet,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-23647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}