The Rhythm is Going to Get You

Paradise fit in a van; the apocalypse fit in eight bars.

Charlie has been deaf since he was nine. He's spent his whole life watching the world happen to other people — reading lips, carrying a laminated card, living out of a converted van he named Mrs. Driscoll because she always demanded to be treated like a lady.

Then a Scottish madman with a V6 engine crammed into a child's toy car hands him a map to a hidden canyon in the Arizona backcountry — water, shade, a pool so clear you can count the stones on the bottom, a secret the desert has been keeping from everyone who wasn't desperate enough to find it. Charlie finds this Valhalla. Along comes Anna, a British van-lifer and YouTube influencer, desperate to hear all she can before her progressive hearing loss takes it away. She climbs into Charlie's camp chair and into his life.

Then the towns go wrong. The same song on every radio station, playing on a loop. People standing in diners, not blinking, not eating, not leaving. Eyes that track without seeing. Something in the music is doing something to everyone who can hear it.

Charlie can't hear any of it. But Anna can.

What follows is one man crossing a breaking world — on foot, on a bent bicycle, through flooded desert and infected towns — to bring back the woman who finally saw him. And one woman fighting to stay herself long enough to be worth saving.

For readers who suspected the quiet ones were paying closest attention all along.

For fans of Station Eleven, Bird Box, and A Quiet Place who want both in the same book — and the love story neither of them quite had the courage to tell.