An anatomically perfect human jaw made of diamond-hard quartz crystal is uncovered at a Hopewell burial mound in central Ohio. Soon after it is offered for sale on the underground antiquities market, its prospective vendors are found dead.

A drug suspected of South American origin surfaces in Buffalo, N.Y. Most commonly called savvy, its unprecedented psychotropic effects include the momentary activation of ESP.

Blind, speechless, tattered street people begin to be reported in many parts of the world. An urban legend-cycle – and the name of a murderous old cult, “the Whistlers” – attaches to them.

An archaeological team reports finding a new Crystal Skull at an overgrown Mayan city, then vanishes.

A schoolteacher’s book of upstate New York legends and folklore foreshadows these developments and more, and its author begins a series of cat-and-mouse conferences with representatives of the FBI and DEA.

These are the threads – plus his affair with a maddening woman – that draw narrator Ward Courier into the five-year international adventure of espionage, occultism, Native American spirituality, onrushing prophecy, and outright horror that is “The Whistlers.”

Get used to uncertainty with “The Whistlers.” A riveting prologue traces occult developments from prehistory to the present. The stealthy, sidewinding plot advances in a variety of formats: adventures of teams of American agents in pursuit of the mystery drug and the antiquities ring; the narrator’s interviews with law enforcement personnel; the narrator’s dialogues with a down-to-earth Seneca mystic; the narrator’s episodes and reflections, and even passages of his own published and unpublished literature. The text is utterly steeped in cutting-edge paranormal philosophy and Native American mysticism.

As “The Whistlers” hurtles to its frenetic conclusion, we are ready to believe in an apocalyptic conspiracy that could predate Atlantis and even hail from another world.