ISBN: 979-8-950930-22-5
Orbiting Chaos: A Spiritual Romance Novel by Gary Marks
Novel. Author: Gary Marks. 2007
Genre: Literary fiction
Sub-Genre: Spiritual romance / metaphysical realism
A relationship between Laney and Gabriel, two emotionally orphaned wanderers, opens them to feelings they never thought possible, and never quite wanted—forcing an internal reckoning that could cost them everything.
Read Orbiting Chaos:
Harper Collins: “Review of the novel Orbiting Chaos by Gary Marks”
“Fascinating story and characters with so much heart.”
Orbiting Chaos is a novel that explores the relationship between Laney and Gabriel, two emotionally orphaned wanderers who meet on the island of Maui. They open themselves up to feelings they never thought they had, and never quite wanted—forcing an internal reckoning that could cost them everything they'd hoped to escape from.
What Reviewers Say
But intimacy can also force the heart, through pain and abandonment, to define love in broader terms, or not believe in it at all.
Why Maui in 2007
Orbiting Chaos arrived in 2007, the same year Marks privately released the album A Whisper Can Change the World. It was a stretch of his career spent entirely outside commercial music, touring, and publishing channels alike. Setting the novel in Maui, rather than the Bay Area, where many of his other novels take place, lets the book treat isolation and escape as literal geography as well as emotional states. Laney and Gabriel's relationship forms on an island they both came to in order to get away from something else. They never meant to find each other, or to need each other.
A Spiritual Romance
Published many years before David Jackson's review, Orbiting Chaos belongs in the same metaphysical-romance register as Marks's novella Beyond Henry. Both use a central relationship to ask a much larger question about what love can, and often must, evolve into before its true nature is revealed.
All Day London Magazine, London Culture Corner: “Love and Escape, Alone and Together — Orbiting Chaos by Gary Marks,” January 2026
“Gary Marks’s Orbiting Chaos is a beautiful, timeless novel that resists melodrama, choosing instead far more difficult territory, where love and spiritual freedom find ways to both heal and destroy each other.
[Gabriel and Laney’s] relationship begins in shared solitude, deepened by music, the enormous beauty of Maui, and the fragile hope that intimacy might offer a form of rescue.
Marks is careful not to romanticize this hope. The bond between them grows slowly, sensually, and joyously. But it is a love formed on the margins of ordinary life, where two people recognize in each other their need to escape from the world and from themselves.
What lingers after the beautiful final pages and its surprise ending is the understanding that once love is internalized, new doorways can appear. And someone someday just may knock softly on one of those doors.”