“Art Black wears his middle-aged rage against a crazy world that has failed and screwed him over on his shirtsleeves.  Nothing is hidden.  Here, writ large, are his angst, his failures and his half-successes, and underneath it all, and underpinning his anti-philosophy, lies a tacit love of some vague and half-formed sense of humanity.  Black, with all the essence of his being, rails against the injustice that is our daily bread, and his contempt for all that serves to send us into apoplexy.

Despite its flaws, its grittiness and its overwhelming sense of immediacy, and never even mention the fact that there's no obvious plot, Rat on the Wheel shows us the empty futility of life in twenty-first century capitalism.  If life is a post-modernist nightmare, Art Black can guide us through the terrors.

Black's existential nightmare is, in the final analysis, our own nightmare.  In his work of flawed genius he has highlighted (almost) every social ill that plagues us.  We are left with a profound feeling of misery about our place in the Universe, and yet towards the end of his lengthy attack on life, and how it cannot be but a debilitating process, we see a faint glimmer of something that might get into the Night Club of Hope with some ingenious fake ID”

Jonathon Chambers, the Offices of Guru Divvy

“It demands participation from the reader… it is very fast-paced. This is not necessarily a bad thing - on the contrary, that's what keeps many readers reading.”

Rachel Ferguson, poet and author