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Summary
Summary
From the author of the hit literary horror debut Bird Box ("Hitchcockian." --USA Today) comes a chilling novel about a group of musicians conscripted by the US government to track down the source of a strange and debilitating sound
The Danes--the band known as the "Darlings of Detroit"--are washed up and desperate for inspiration, eager to once again have a number one hit. That is, until an agent from the US Army approaches them. Will they travel to an African desert and track down the source of a mysterious and malevolent sound? Under the guidance of their front man, Philip Tonka, the Danes embark on a harrowing journey through the scorching desert--a trip that takes Tonka into the heart of an ominous and twisted conspiracy.
Meanwhile, in a nondescript Midwestern hospital, a nurse named Ellen tends to a patient recovering from a near-fatal accident. The circumstances that led to his injuries are mysterious--and his body heals at a remarkable rate. Ellen will do the impossible for this enigmatic patient, who reveals more about his accident with each passing day.
Part Heart of Darkness, part Lost, Josh Malerman's breathtaking new novel plunges us into the depths of psychological horror, where you can't always believe everything you hear.
Author Notes
Josh Malerman is an author from Britain who was short listed for the James Herbert Award for Horror writing for his title Bird Box. This title has also made the bestseller list in 2019.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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 recoverytoo 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 musiciansones who served in World War IIto 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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.--Ciesla, Carolyn Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. (Penguin, $18.) MacLean sketches out the six-decade push to protect the wealthy elite from the will of the majority. The architect of this plan was James McGill Buchanan, a political economist who, starting in the mid-1900s, devoted his career to paving the way for a right-wing social movement. BLACK MAD WHEEL, by Josh Malerman. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) A rock 'n' roll band, the Danes, is approached by a top military official to help identify a mysterious, but potent, noise: The sound seems able to neutralize any kind of weapon, and even make people disappear. As the story goes to the African desert and beyond, the novel "takes flight in some head-splitting metaphysical directions," Terrence Rafferty wrote here. THE WORLD BROKE IN TWO: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature, by Bill Goldstein. (Picador, $18.) The year 1922 was pivotal for these modernists. Goldstein makes good use of their correspondence and published material to outline each writer's development and creative blocks, and how their work fit into a broader postwar movement. MOVING KINGS, by Joshua Cohen. (Random House, $17.) David King is a heavyweight in the moving industry in New York, the patriotic, Republican and wealthy owner of a well-known storage company. In a moment of nostalgia, he invites his distant cousin Yoav, fresh from service in Israel's military, to work for him, carrying out the business's ugly side - evicting delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. The novel and its tensions promise some thematic heft, touching on race, occupation, gentrification and who deserves the right to a home. THE LONG HAUL: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, by Finn Murphy. (Norton, $16.95.) Murphy has logged hundreds of thousands of miles and decades on the road, but may be an unlikely representative: He falls asleep reading Jane Austen in motels and nurtures a crush on Terry Gross, "probably because I've spent more time with her than anyone else in my life." SUNBURN, by Laura Lippman. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) In a sleepy Delaware town, two newcomers - a waitress running from her past and a short-order cook - fall in love, though the two are not what they claim to be. Set in 1995, this novel has an undertow of 1940s noir, but with more heart than you might expect. As our reviewer, Harriet Lane, wrote: "You see the huge red sun sinking into the cornfields; you feel the dew underfoot."
Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.