Black Mad Wheel

March 20, 2017
At the start of Malerman’s deeply weird second novel (after 2014’s Bird Box), Philip Tonka awakens from a six-month coma, with his memory in disarray, to the news that every single bone in his body has been broken. Flashback to a day in 1957, when Philip and his fellow WWII vet bandmates in the Darlings of Detroit (aka the Danes) are approached by Secretary Mull, a government man who has a job for them. Military radio operators have intercepted a sound that causes violent illness and that disables weapons from nuclear warheads to side arms. Mull hires the Danes to go to the Namib Desert to locate the sound’s source. The action alternates between Philip’s recovery at the secretive Macy Mercy Hospital outside Des Moines, Iowa, where mad Dr. Szands administers a strange drug that speeds his healing, and the Danes’ expedition to the Namib, where they discover bizarrely misshapen corpses. In the end, this creepy supernatural thriller delivers only a partial explanation for the odd phenomena. Some readers are apt to feel befuddled. Agent: Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary Agency.

March 15, 2017
In 1957, faded Detroit rockers the Danes were hired by the U.S. government to investigate a malevolent sound emanating from Africa's Namib Desert. Having had every bone in his body shattered by the sound, or something, Danes leader Philip Tonka lies in an Iowa hospital making a rapid recovery--too rapid, thinks his devoted nurse.The elusive, vaguely musical tones, which seem to emanate from below the desert sand, make people sick to their stomachs. More significantly, they seem to have neutralized one of the U.S.'s nuclear warheads. Having had two regular platoons fail to crack the mystery, the military turns to musicians--ones who served in World War II--to record and analyze the sound. Nothing is as it seems in the coastal desert, where, in due course, the mystically inclined Philip experiences visions involving goats, Civil War ghosts, and shipwrecks. One of the band members disappears. An actual dead body is discovered. Back home, where he initially can't so much as move a finger, Philip is given a series of injections that have him back on his feet so quickly, his nurse concludes, -This mystery, this healing, is not for his sake.- Malerman, who charted similarly strange territory in his exceptional debut, Bird Box (2014), in which a young woman blindfolds herself in an attempt to survive creatures who cause people who look at them to go mad, affirms his mastery of paranoid suspense. Ultimately, the book's payoff is less inspired than the oddly unsettling setup, but Malerman's striking originality can't be denied. As a bonus, drawing on his real-life experience as leader of the rock band The High Strung, he brings fresh musical insight to the story, in which a song plays a significant role. Dark, brooding, and slightly unhinged, Malerman's unusually compelling second novel is certifiably unlike any you'll read this year.

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Starred review from March 15, 2017

Members of the fading 1950s rock band The Danes are approached by an agent of army intelligence to help trace an uncanny, apparently malign (causing vomiting and extreme emotional upset), sound recorded in North Africa. Later, lead singer Philip Tonka wakes from a coma in an anonymous clinic, with nearly every bone in his body broken, cared for by Ellen--a nurse who is more forthcoming than the secretive doctors and military types. As Philip's healing mysteriously speeds up, he struggles to untangle his confusing memories of what happened in the desert. The prevailing icy paranoia beneath the fractured time line builds tension and creates a very real feel of fear and falling into suffocating existential traps (here a genuine danger). Malerman (Bird Box) explores--and tests--the limits of psychological horror. In a genre not known for restraint, his uncluttered prose evokes awe and terror rather than horror and revulsion, and resonates with the chilling strangeness encountered in the fiction of 20th-century writers Robert Aickman and Shirley Jackson. VERDICT Readers of weird, atmospheric fiction with a conspiratorial bent will enjoy Malerman's latest offering. [See Prepub Alert, 11/27/16.]--William Grabowski, McMechen, WV

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2017
Before tearing up the charts as the rock band the Danes, Philip Tonka and his bandmates were in the U.S. Army. The Danes' first gig was as an army band, traveling across Europe entertaining their fellow WWII servicemen. Back in Detroit, just as the band settles into their lives as rock darlings, the army comes back to them. There's a sound coming out of the desert in Africa, and as musicians, could they investigate it? This sound, though, has the power to disarm weapons and turn men into quivering blobs. Aware that they may not return, or at least that they may not return as the men they once were, the Danes begin their investigation into a mind-bending phenomenon with no seemingly obvious explanation. Philip eventually returns and, through flashbacks, starts to piece together what happened to him in the desert and what it might mean for the world. Malerman's follow-up to Bird Box (2014) is completely unpredictable and utterly bizarre in all the best ways. Fans of off-the-wall fiction will enjoy this, and horror fans would do well to pick it up for some truly terrifying moments.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)