Black Mad Wheel has a lot of silliness at its core, but Josh Malerman knows how to tell a compelling story, and it's an entertaining read. The book opens in mid-'50s Detroit, where a band called the Danes - few years removed from their #1 hit - are trying to get a teenage band, which has bought recording time in the Danes' studio, drunk so that they'll loosen up their sound. As they're passing around shots, a military man interrupts with a proposition: $100,000 each for them to travel to Africa and identify the source of a mysterious sound which causes illness and injury, and also disarms weapons. Meanwhile, in the later timeline which alternates chapters, Philip Tonka, band leader and piano player of the Danes, has just awoken from a six-month coma and is recovering in a military hospital near Des Moines from mysterious injuries that include basically every bone in his body being broken. The scene is now set! If that's intriguing, you should read it yourself, and I won't provide any more spoilers here.
This is a thriller, so I guess I shouldn't be upset about the lack of three-dimensional characters, but here I am, upset. And much like pretty much every TV show in the Lost vein, Black Mad Wheel does a much better job of presenting baffling events than it does in eventually revealing satisfying reasons for the baffling events. It's not a bad book, though.
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