Authors of books about carnival freaks have their work cut out for them. They rightly recoil at inviting their audience to gawk at human deformity, and yet that’s precisely what’s for sale. Tod ...

“I’d love to kill you sometime,” murmurs a character in “One of Us,” all but announcing the quiet, matter-of-fact evil that will drive him to pursue the book’s protagonists over the next 200 pages.