Disciple
A Novel from Crosstown to Oblivion
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
Walter Mosley's talent knows no bounds. Disciple is one of six fragments in the Crosstown to Oblivion short novels in which Mosley entertainingly explores life's cosmic questions. From life's meaning to the nature of good and evil, these tales take us on speculative journeys beyond the reality we have come to know. In each tale someone in our world today is given insight into these long pondered mysteries. But how would the world really receive the answers?
Disciple
Hogarth "Trent" Tryman is a forty-two-year-old man working a dead-end data entry job. Though he lives alone and has no real friends besides his mother, he's grown quite content in his quiet life, burning away time with television, the internet, and video games. That all changes the night he receives a bizarre instant message on his computer from a man who calls himself Bron. At first he thinks it's a joke, but in just a matter of days Hogarth Tryman goes from a data-entry clerk to the head of a corporation. His fate is now in very powerful hands as he realizes he has become a pawn in a much larger game with unimaginable stakes—a battle that threatens the prime life force on Earth.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heavy-handed and often ponderous, Mosley's second volume of paired Crosstown to Oblivion novellas (after The Gift of Fire/On the Head of a Pin) doesn't hold a candle to his subtle and nuanced crime fiction. In "Merge," the Earth is invaded by beings that first manifest as dead branches; when one appears in the living room of Raleigh Redman in 2007, he begins a relationship with it. The creature, whom Redman unimaginatively dubs Wood, reveals that beings from its planet need to merge with non-human Earth life to survive. The leaden prose ("I was the dregs at the bottom of a coffee cup trying to imagine what it was like to be cream") adds little to a familiar trope. "Disciple" starts more promisingly, with its narrator trapped in a dreadful data-entry job before he is positioned to become "a hero to the peoples of infinity" by saving civilization. These tales are, alas, dull rather than thought provoking.
