Blambustercated

Sanjena Sathian speaks with Dan Chaon about his new novel, “One of Us.”

By Sanjena SathianDecember 4, 2025

• Fiction

SET IN 1915, Dan Chaon’s new novel One of Us follows a pair of orphaned twins, Bolt and Eleanor, who run away from their evil caretaker to join the circus. There, they fall in with a merry gang of sideshow workers, among them Elmer, the “dog-faced boy”; Rosalie, a psychic with two faces; Herculea, “the Muscle Lady”; Dr. Chui, a horned hypnotist; and Tickley-Feather, a clown. Where Bolt finds a home among the “freaks,” Eleanor withdraws into herself. Meanwhile, their guardian, the colorfully sketched villain Uncle Charlie, is in hot pursuit.

Heartfelt and humorous, the novel mingles sideshow historical fiction, runaway thrills, and Lynchian tales of psychics and astral planes. With One of Us, Chaon treads new genre territory while also picking up the threads that have wound through his previous seven books, including the collection Among the Missing (2001), a National Book Award finalist, and the critically acclaimed Ill Will (2017).

I spoke to Chaon—whose career has already spanned realism, thriller, horror, and dystopian science fiction—about his forays into history, magic, and the strange.

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SANJENA SATHIAN: What drew you to write about the circus?

DAN CHAON: The dream of running away to the circus is a dream of being special, a dream of getting away from whatever is ordinary in your life. But if somebody says to you, “You belong in the circus,” it means that you’re an outsider and you’re not normal. One is a fantasy, and one is a fear. It seemed like a very particular metaphor for American life: the dream of escaping and being special, alongside the pressure to conform and not be a “freak.”

The title of the novel and several scenes explicitly reference the 1932 classic film Freaks. What moves you about this ur-text of so-called freak shows and sideshows?

One of my goals in writing has been to engage with the books and movies that have meant something to me, to have a conversation with them. The reason we become writers is that we fall in love with a book and a world, and we want to exist in that place for as long as possible. Initially, the urge for me was to write fan fiction. I wrote about these places that I loved: Middle-earth, Watership Down.

When I became a professional writer, I felt like sometimes I was losing the aspect of my writing that was like play. I was more worried about, What will the critics say? Will I win a prize? And that really didn’t help me at all.

As for Freaks: it’s one of the rare horror movies in which the normies are the real monsters. That was something I really wanted to play around with.

Bolt and Eleanor end up with the circus by way of the 1915 Orphan Train, in which children—some real orphans, some just poor—were shipped to the Midwest, where they were almost auctioned off for their labor. I caught a reference to the Orphan Train in your first novel, You Remind Me of Me (2004), which also deals with adoption in a very different key. How long has this idea been rattling around in your brain?

Adoption is a big theme in my work and in my life; I was adopted as an infant, and eventually met my birth family. So that idea of what makes you who you are—what you draw from genetics and what you draw from your life experience—was always interesting.

As I got older, I was also struck by the ways in which American culture has dealt with children who don’t have parents. There are a lot of ways in which those children are treated as property. And the Orphan Train is maybe the most extreme version of it. They weren’t literally being sold, but they were put on display and chosen like puppies or goats. As we’ve moved into private adoption, it has all continued to have a certain level of commerce and consumerism attached to it. You don’t want a drug addict to be the parent of your baby. You don’t want somebody in prison to be the parent of your baby. You want some innocent teenager who just wants to go on with her life—she was really smart in school; so was her boyfriend, he was athletic. They just couldn’t raise a baby on their own. And you know that’s as much of a fairy tale as anything, right? Because no one gives away a baby in a good situation. My obsession with the Orphan Train is how much it represents the practice of adoption in this country.

Why 1915?

It’s so hard to write about contemporary life because you don’t know if what’s happening this year is even going to be recognizable next year. This state of extreme chaos worldwide makes it hard to write a contemporary domestic novel.

Your last novel, Sleepwalk (2022), was technically a science-fictional dystopia, but it felt like it was of our era. I think about what Ursula Le Guin wrote: science fiction is always about the present, not the future. Sleepwalk felt like a good example of that. I wondered if you were overdosed on the present, or if you think that writing historical fiction is another way of writing about the present?

A lot of the things that are part of 1915 are also big issues today. The income equality was enormous at that time, and the anti-immigrant sentiment was insane—I wrote a little bit about the anti-Chinese laws that were in effect at the time. Labor and socialism were in upheaval, and law enforcement was out of control; a lot of police were private security forces like the Pinkertons and the “railroad men,” who were known for murdering hobos on trains. I read this great personal account of being a tramp. If you were in a refrigerated car, they might lock you in so that you froze to death. There was a lot of homelessness—it wasn’t called that, but the way in which we dehumanized people who were poor was very similar to the present.

I think people who don’t read a lot of historical fiction sometimes think that it can feel like homework. But the book is fun and funny. And you seemed to really enjoy, for instance, writing the slang of the era. What was fun about entering this period for you?

Definitely the language. When I was in grad school, people were against using slang and accents. But that was a huge part of that of early 20th-century writing—like in any Mark Twain and, you know, Ring Lardner and even Willa Cather, everybody has some kind of weird accent. It’s playful, vaudevillian. I was really interested in that technique and looking at Sherwood Anderson, and these various American writers who all were crazy about vernacular. I spent a lot of time with these dictionaries of slang, really finding great words that I could pull out, and also finding a voice for Uncle Charlie in particular. Once he started talking, he kind of ran away with the novel.

Uncle Charlie does steal the show. In Joshua Ferris’s review of Sleepwalk, he said that you like your characters, even the killers—especially the killers.

There’s nothing better than a good villain.

We have a dearth of good villains in contemporary literature.

And in contemporary life—they’re all just boring and stupid.

Is there one word of 1915 slang that you would like to use more in your daily life?

Blambustercated.

I want to talk a bit about genre. When I describe your work to other people, I often find myself talking about the real and the unreal. In your early work—the first novel and the story collections—strangeness is often a metaphor or an uncanny sensation. Then, in Await Your Reply (2009) and Ill Will, you start to literalize and heighten strangeness, drawing on thriller and horror. In your last two novels, you push the boundaries of realism. How would you describe your literary relationship to the concepts of the real and the strange?

When I was getting my MFA in the 1990s, you didn’t want to be identified as a genre writer. And I had started as a genre writer. So I had to find a way to recast genre elements and make them palatable to small literary journals. Then that started to feel like a prison for me as a writer, and it had started to feel like a prison for a lot of people. People like Michael Chabon and George Saunders and Kelly Link were starting to emerge.

With Among the Missing, I felt like I was starting to become more myself as a writer, less constrained by what my MFA teachers wanted me to do. Do you know what I mean? Part of the reason you become a writer is because of the praise, right? People keep giving you As and patting you on the head and saying you’re really talented, and you want that to keep going. And you forget that the reason you started to do it in the first place was because you love telling stories. Part of my journey as a writer was the pathway back to the stuff that I loved as a kid.

Across your many different novels, you turn over certain obsessions: identity, adoption, the self, twins. I’ve also noticed that you treat magic—real magic, something that alters the consensus reality of your characters—similarly to how you treat magical thinking. It’s like you believe that if your characters believe something, that alters their reality. In other books, you have hypnotists, working magicians, conspiracy theorists, Satanic panics—things that may or may not be real, but which matter to your characters. In this new one, you have Theosophists and Swedenborgians and astral planes and tulpas and eugenicists and phrenologists and these belief systems that may or may not be actual magic but certainly alter the reality of their characters. What for you is the difference between actual magic and magical belief in your work?

In 1915, those things were a big part of American life. They still are, of course. But at the time, there were people holding séances in every small town in America. People believed in it. I grew up in a really small town in Nebraska, where Evangelical born-agains had a lot of power to create the reality of our daily lives. It’s not magic to them! In the 1980s, they really believed that teenage Satanists were holding rituals in the graveyard. They really believed that if you listened to Ozzy Osbourne, you were going to hell. They believed in demonic possession. Is that magic? Yeah, but it’s also just a part of people’s daily lives.

I was super excited reading about the crazy quackery that was going on in 1915, and how many really smart people were totally taken in by spirit writing and bizarre and exoticized reincarnation fantasies: believing that, say, Oh, I was once Cleopatra. It seems like a fantasy novel, right? They were plumbing archetypal characters that are part of your basic Dungeons & Dragons party.

In the book, you almost divide credulity and skepticism between the twins. Bolt wants to belong in the circus, and he does belong very naturally. Eleanor often doubts magic. They can read each other’s minds, but she’s often the one who says “it only works because we think it works.” Do you feel like you, the author, had to be more aligned with the believer or the skeptic?

I really am writing about two parts of myself. One is the slightly misanthropic person who really wants to be alone and write and play video games. The other one wants to have lots of friends and be a part of things. They’re not super compatible! I wanted to give Eleanor a very specific trait of mine, which is a fear of not knowing what is normal behavior. That stems from growing up in a small, very weird place, and then going to Northwestern, where everybody was so slick and so normal and so polished. I just felt like I was the most alien creature. So I had Eleanor study Pollyanna and try to figure out, How does she work? Did you know Pollyanna?

I did read it as a child, and it deeply disturbed me. She forces herself to be happy about every situation, even as they get shittier and shittier. And it has some weird things to say about how disabled people should be noble and cheery, right?

It’s so disturbing.

Why did you put it in your book?

It was huge at the time. And it’s such an oppressive cultural document, so indoctrinating. It’s like the Instagram voice, right? This constant thing of, I want to be nice and optimistic.

Pollyanna is about how incredibly hard life was, but it offers a kind of a weirdly religious solution: always look on the bright side! I lost my legs, but at least I was able to walk once! Pollyanna herself is a particularly American avatar of almost sitcom niceness.

Since we’re talking about Pollyanna, and since you mentioned being in conversation with other texts, I want to know about the other voices in this novel. I know The Other (1971) by Thomas Tryon, a horror novel about twins, is important to you, and you wrote the foreword to the reissue. And David Lynch felt everywhere; he loved consciousness and the astral plane and tulpas and freak shows. What else was important in crafting this book?

Sherwood Anderson, for the world and the sense of language. The Charles Laughton film Night of the Hunter (1955). I wanted to get that chiaroscuro quality; there were a lot of silhouettes in the book, a lot of drippy darkness. I was also really affected by children’s picture books from that time. In The Little Engine That Could (1930), he was pulling a circus. And many comics from that period have a real mood. Also, [the Disney films] Dumbo (1941) and Pinocchio (1940), both of which have circus sideshow elements to them, and they’re both just brutal.

There’s a lot of darkness to choose from!

Well, kids’ lives had a lot of scary stuff in them. We were ways away from child labor laws, so a lot of children were working six or seven days a week in factories. Most children had a sibling or a cousin who had died of a childhood disease, and there weren’t a lot of social protections for children. If your parents beat you, there wasn’t somebody from the government who was going to come take you away.

In some ways, this book offers an answer to some of the questions that characters in your other books have asked, like What is the alternative to this lonely, atomized life that I’m living? And here, an answer is this chosen family, but that has its own complications. You briefly entertain the idea that this is an unlikely utopia. That’s really interesting, given that your last book was a dystopia.

If I keep going like this, maybe I’ll write a novel with a happy ending before I die.

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Dan Chaon is an American writer. He is the author of three short story collections and four novels.