In novels like ILL WILL and SLEEPWALK, Dan Chaon has shown that he is adept at blending classic elements of mystery and suspense with fine writing. His latest, ONE OF US, carries on in that vein. The result is a heartfelt story about an improbable sort of family, linked to an absorbing thriller plot.

Set in the heart of the rural Midwest in the summer of 1915, ONE OF US centers on Eleanor Lambkin and her brother, Bolt, impoverished 13-year-old twins (she’s the elder) from Ohio. Eleanor and Bolt wind up working in a traveling carnival and circus after the death of their widowed mother, when they flee from a man who suddenly appears at their door claiming to be their “Uncle Charlie” and representing himself as their protector.

In truth, this sinister figure is a murderous con man and card sharp who had roamed the Midwest for a time with their late father and was present when he died by suicide. He enters the lives of these vulnerable children when, unable to afford a funeral, they have buried their mother in the backyard and lost to foreclosure the meager boardinghouse they had helped her run.

"The hours spent in the company of Eleanor, Bolt and the members of Harland Jengling’s unforgettable troupe are well worth the price of admission to this memorable roadshow."

“[B]right-eyed and tart-tongued,” Eleanor is a strong-willed introvert who wants no more from life than to savor her solitude in the company of a good book. Bolt is a lonely child who longs for a sense of connection with the members of his new circus family even as he seeks “a life full of moments of wonder that you carry with you, a life of bewitchments and astonishments.” Despite their striking differences, the twins possess a shared talent: the ability to read each other’s thoughts. It’s a gift that becomes eerily important at the novel’s startling and emotionally powerful climax. The siblings are multidimensional creations who fully engage our sympathies, even as Chaon takes care not to portray them as total innocents.

After initially fleeing Charlie, Eleanor and Bolt make their way to an event in Iowa designed to match homeless children with willing caregivers. There, they are taken in by Harland Jengling, the proprietor of Jengling’s Emporium of Wonders. It’s a traveling show that features everything from a pair of clowns named Tickley-Feather and Thistle-Britches, to human oddities that include Elmer the dog-faced boy, the “mad wreckage of a man” dubbed the Piltdown Man, and Strong Baby, “a man with the hairless, toothless head of an infant, but whose body is as big as a grizzly bear on its hind legs.”

Jengling fancies himself as “a new Noah,” whose human menagerie represents “a gathering of all the diverse tribes of humankind.” On the train that carries the show through a succession of small towns in Nebraska and South Dakota, he also maintains a large collection of human specimens and skulls, among other objects, that suggests a high level of scientific curiosity, but perhaps more.

From almost its first page, when we learn that the Lambkin twins’ mother raised them in the Progressive Psychic Spiritualist Church, and that their late father was “a mentalist of great power,” the theme of spiritualism is threaded through the novel. Jengling’s carnival features a two-foot-tall woman named Mme. Clothilde, who regularly conducts séances, while Rosalie, another tiny woman with what appears to be a small head growing from the back of her skull, specializes in fortune-telling, focusing on the date and circumstances of her clients’ deaths. Much of the book plays out in the liminal space between life and death.

For all the weirdness of its characters, what elevates ONE OF US above the formulaic is the care that Chaon takes to portray so many of them as human beings worthy of compassion who form what someone, in an epilogue of sorts, calls “a utopic community for the disenfranchised.” That’s true, obviously, of Eleanor and Bolt, tossed out into the world after their deformed shared childhood and welcomed into this odd assemblage of kindhearted misfits.

But Chaon’s sympathies extend beyond his protagonists to many of the novel’s lesser figures. They include Dr. Chui, a seven-foot-tall mesmerist with a hornlike protrusion growing from the crown of his head, who lost his parents in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, when racist white miners massacred Chinese workers they accused of taking their jobs. Herculea the Muscle Lady, once a “skinny little girl named Mona Finkel” working in a Philadelphia textile mill, experiences a teenage growth spurt that turns her into an object of ridicule and ultimately a sideshow freak. And there’s Billy Bigelow, a nearly naked tattooed man possessed of a larcenous mynah bird, who becomes a sort of confidant and protector of Eleanor.

Chaon manages all of this while sustaining the terror of the homicidal maniac Charlie’s pursuit of his human prey. He further deepens the pleasure of ONE OF US with rich period detail and succeeds in creating a setting that’s simultaneously utterly alien and deeply familiar. The hours spent in the company of Eleanor, Bolt and the members of Harland Jengling’s unforgettable troupe are well worth the price of admission to this memorable roadshow.