Black Mad Wheel: A Novel

Musicians know all about sound. They create it, they cultivate it, they use it to tell stories and evoke experiences. So when the US Army tracks a mysterious sound to a desert in Africa, who better to recruit to investigate it than musicians like The Danes? But what did The Danes find in that desert? And what did the sound have to do with the bizarre injuries inflicted on Philip Tonks, who wakes up in a hospital months later with every bone in his body broken?

Black Mad Wheel is a two-pronged story that ricochets between paranoia-inducing mystery and a weirdly funny — then suddenly terrifying — journey undertaken by a band of miscreants. The Danes feel like wonderfully genuine characters dropped into a Rod Serling fever dream and left to fend for themselves.

Not unlike when reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I always felt a step or two behind the characters, destined to never quite catch up. That feeling was magnified by the conclusion, which arrived very abruptly.

More than a mystery, more than a journey, more than a message for the ages, Black Mad Wheel is smart, challenging, and loaded with hard questions and events open to interpretation. It’s perplexing in more ways than one.