Book 3 of my 26 books for 2024 goal!

Some books look so appealing that I grab them off the shelf at the bookstore without hesitation, but somehow take forever to get around to reading. That is the case with Black Mad Wheel (2017), by Josh Malerman, which has been on my home shelf for probably at least two years and which I finally finished reading this past week.

Malerman has been a very successful horror author in recent years, as evidenced by the sub-caption on the title, “Author of Bird Box,” referring to his 2014 novel that became a movie in 2018 and resulted in a gif that produced a thousand jokes:

Black Mad Wheel is less apocalyptic and far stranger than Bird Box, and uses Malerman’s own experiences as a singer-songwriter for a Detroit rock band as inspiration. The novel centers around a mysterious sound that has been detected coming from a remote part of the world… a sound that could be the most powerful weapon ever created.

The novel begins in a hospital. Philip Tonka wakes up in a hospital bed in an unknown location. He cannot move, and is soon told that every single bone in his body has been broken in some sort of unprecedented event. But the doctors and officials that come to see him aren’t particularly concerned with his well-being as much as they are concerned with the answer to the question: what happened to Philip and his fellow band members of The Danes, and where is the point of origin of the sound?

We then flashback to months earlier, in post-WWII Detroit. Philip and his bandmates had served in the war, though mainly as musical entertainment for the troops, and now that they’re home they’ve opened up a recording studio to help other upcoming musicians record their albums. There is a healthy amount of drinking and partying that goes along with the job, as well.

Their latest reverie is interrupted by a visit from a military intelligence officer, who has a job for them. Somewhere, in the remote and desolate deserts of Namibia, a sound is being broadcast to the world on radio frequencies. This sound is toxic to human beings, and can even possibly kill them with prolonged exposure. More worrying, the sound can neutralize weapons, making guns unable to fire. It is an unparalleled phenomenon, and the military is convinced that it is a new sort of weapon undergoing trial runs. The task for The Danes, with their acoustic expertise: travel to Namibia and track down the origin of the sound. Two previous groups, consisting of soldiers, had tried and failed to locate the source, and it is hoped that the musicians will succeed where ordinary grunts had failed. Regardless of their skills and their preparation, however, none of them are prepared for what they will find waiting for them out in the middle of nowhere.

This premise is enough for a novel in and of itself, but the book goes further and alternates between Philip recovering in the hospital in the present day and flashback to the expedition. You might wonder how the story of a man with every bone in his body broken could possibly be interesting, but there are strange things afoot in the hospital that make Philip’s convalescence just as strange and compelling as his wanderings through the desert.

The description of the book on Malerman’s page refers to it as “Part Heart of Darkness, part Lost,” and this description isn’t inaccurate but personally I find it does the book a bit of a disservice, considering my feelings towards Lost. Lost, like Black Mad Wheel, introduces a lot of inexplicable and supernatural events throughout its telling, and in both cases the story gets stranger and stranger as it goes.

I was a big fan of Lost when it first aired, and it definitely has some of the best character writing one can find on television anywhere, but I’ve soured on the shows in the years since because it has been largely admitted that the writers really just made up strange shit randomly as they went along and didn’t have a plan or explanation for all the mysteries they introduced. This to me always felt like cheating the audience — not everything in a story has to be explained perfectly (and horror to a large extent relies on things remaining unknown), but I personally feel like the author themselves should have at least some overall point or purpose to the twisted mysteries they introduce.

A perfect example of this being done well is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, a story about an area of wild coastal area of the United States that became isolated from the rest of the world some thirty years earlier by some mysterious force. Numerous expeditions into the region, called Area X, but more often than not they fail to return and come no closer to discovering what, exactly, is causing the phenomenon. This is a problem because Area X is slowly and inexorably growing in size.

By the end of the trilogy, the story comes to a definite resolution, and one that can seem abrupt and confusing to the casual reader. Further reflection and rereads, however, give a clearer idea of what all of it was about, and it is a fascinating and mind-boggling story indeed. As I said, you never get a full explanation of everything that happens, but you do get a sense of closure in your explanations.

The same can be said of Black Mad Wheel. It has a definite resolution, but no easy answers, but you get a general sense of what Malerman has in mind and at the very least feel like he was not simply making stuff up with no meaning. I came away from the novel a little bewildered but ultimately satisfied.

Overall, Black Mad Wheel is a fun and very bizarre horror novel, and one that I found well worth reading.