Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Aspect (1999), Mass Market Paperback, 400 pages
Description
Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML: A cosmic blue light shines down on Earth creating a race of gods�and demons�whose battle for supremacy will determine the fate of the planetIt is the mid 1960s, and the people of San Francisco are ready for transcendence. One night, beams of blue light streak down from space, killing some, driving others mad, and lifting a lucky few to a state of blissful brilliance. For the surviving, newly evolved super race of blues, the powers of the universe are within reach. Under their guidance, Earth will either be raised to heaven or dragged to hell. Horace LaFontaine is also touched by the light�but instead of advancing to a higher state, he finds his body inhabited by a vicious intergalactic visitor known as Gray Man. Horace must watch, helpless, as Gray Man turns his body into a weapon and uses it to target the blues, who will need every ounce of their immense power just to survive..… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member bragan
In 1960s California, a number of people are struck by bolts of sentient, alien blue light. Some of them die instantly. Others find their consciousness somehow integrated with that of the light and develop enhanced perceptions and strange mystical abilities. One of them does both, and becomes a
It's hard to quite know where to start with this one. On the plus side, it's well written, with prose that's thoughtful, readable, and smooth. And some of the individual story elements are pretty good; I thought the undead antagonist was quite nicely done. On the other hand, the mysticism is vague and not very insightful, and some of its manifestations seem faintly silly. The most interesting plot thread gets all but abandoned for most of the second half of the book. And ultimately the whole thing seems, well, pointless. I honestly never felt like I had any reason to care one way or another whether these blue light people succeeded or failed in whatever the hell it was they were trying to do. If I'm feeling charitable and inclined to focus on the positive, I might say that Mosely does far too good a job of trying to portray something distant, incomprehensible and alien to the point where it has little to do with humanity. If not, I might suggest that he's just thrown a bunch of fantastical elements together hoping they'll add up to something profound and failed. In either case, it's kind of frustrating, because there's clearly some writing talent behind it all, and it was impossible to escape the expectation that there just ought to be something more.
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vicious killer.It's hard to quite know where to start with this one. On the plus side, it's well written, with prose that's thoughtful, readable, and smooth. And some of the individual story elements are pretty good; I thought the undead antagonist was quite nicely done. On the other hand, the mysticism is vague and not very insightful, and some of its manifestations seem faintly silly. The most interesting plot thread gets all but abandoned for most of the second half of the book. And ultimately the whole thing seems, well, pointless. I honestly never felt like I had any reason to care one way or another whether these blue light people succeeded or failed in whatever the hell it was they were trying to do. If I'm feeling charitable and inclined to focus on the positive, I might say that Mosely does far too good a job of trying to portray something distant, incomprehensible and alien to the point where it has little to do with humanity. If not, I might suggest that he's just thrown a bunch of fantastical elements together hoping they'll add up to something profound and failed. In either case, it's kind of frustrating, because there's clearly some writing talent behind it all, and it was impossible to escape the expectation that there just ought to be something more.
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LibraryThing member seldombites
I gave up on this book. It was just too strange and confusing for my taste.
LibraryThing member wyvernfriend
The story of a group of people changed by a mysterious light from space and they become more than human. However there is one who was near death and he is hunting the changed, the Blues. Finding a place in the world and a future for themselves while surviving the attacks of the one who is hunting
This is almost a vampire novel, as ordinary humans can gain some of the powers of the powerful others by drinking their blood when it's prepared in a special way. But it's also a superhero story, but taken at that level it fails. As a more literary science fiction story that's where it's audience is, and that's where it failed to impress me. I'm not really one of the literary fiction fans. In ways for me it tried too hard to be clever and really all it did was read like some of the new-age inspirational fiction like The Tenth Insight.
Yes it was readable but no I didn't care for any of the characters, what happened to them passed over me and just didn't engage me in any meaningful way. I can see that many people would like it but I can also see that many people would dislike it. Which is reflected in many of the reviews I have found online.
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them.This is almost a vampire novel, as ordinary humans can gain some of the powers of the powerful others by drinking their blood when it's prepared in a special way. But it's also a superhero story, but taken at that level it fails. As a more literary science fiction story that's where it's audience is, and that's where it failed to impress me. I'm not really one of the literary fiction fans. In ways for me it tried too hard to be clever and really all it did was read like some of the new-age inspirational fiction like The Tenth Insight.
Yes it was readable but no I didn't care for any of the characters, what happened to them passed over me and just didn't engage me in any meaningful way. I can see that many people would like it but I can also see that many people would dislike it. Which is reflected in many of the reviews I have found online.
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LibraryThing member chrock
The weirdest thing about this weird book is that it ought to have filled me with the kind of horror that lots of violence and Death stalking the world as an all-powerful zombie, but instead it seemed essentially good-humoured.
LibraryThing member BillyBobHolland
I think Walter Mosley was simultaneously channeling the ideas and thoughts of James Redfield, Bram Stoker, Fred Hoyle and John Russo when he wrote this rather pointless book. What a pity Walter didn't write this novel in the mid fifties because it would have made a great Ed Wood movie. Given some
It's rumored that George A. Romero bought the film rights to Blue Light the day after it was published so perhaps we will still be privileged to see a wide-screen rendition of this story sometime soon. Hopefully Dennis Hopper and Denzel Washington will be available when George does eventually raise enough capital to be able to shoot it.
It has been argued that this novel is really the sixth novel in the Easy Rawlings series (while Bad Boy Brawly Brown is, in actuality, the seventh) because the main protagonist narrator in Blue Light speaks and behaves exactly like Easy does in all the previous novels, but he simply goes by the name of Last Chance in this one instead. I'm not sure why, but hey, we all know it ain't easy being Easy! Anyway, despite his pseudonymous facade in this outing, Easy is still wandering around the streets of San Francisco as well as in other more rural locations of his home state of California, not to mention hanging out with characters that go by such unlikely names as Lythe, Nesta and Horace.
There are also lots of mutilated corpses in this novel. However, there is no mystery about who killed any of them as they are all the result of the dastardly actions of either Death (as personified by the zombie Grey Redstar) or Evil (as personified by psychopathic killer Winch Fargo) rather than the work of the usual crop of seedy underworld scoundrels, miscreants and culprits one normally encounters in an Easy Rawlings mystery. *** Spoiler Warning *** The pseudo-superhero battle between Death and Evil on the steps of the Sacramento state building is worthy of anything that has ever appeared in the pages of DC Comics, and although this bizarre novel's coup de grâce finally occurs inside tree Number One, most of the important and substantial action in the latter part of the story occurs behind tree Number Seven.
To Mosley's credit, he does let us all know at the end of the book that this whole story was just one of Easy's "bad trips" or flashbacks, most likely brought on by Rawlins' propensity for too much hard liquor consumption (and in this particular instance, I suspect, almost definitely combined with a bad dose of hallucinogenic drugs). Despite the fact they cart him off to the Camarillo state mental hospital at the end of this novel you just kinda know that our favorite gutsy hero Easy is not only going to recover from his most recent psychedelic recollections but that he will also ultimately shrug off this latest bout of manic depression (not to mention his stupid alias) and be back pluckier than ever in the next official Easy Rawlins mystery - which, in fact, if you read Bad Boy Brawly Brown, is what indeed happens.
I'm a very big Walter Mosley fan and believe he is one of the world's most talented literary authors - not just writing today, but period. However, while this is the worst effort of his that I've read to date, I'm also glad (as I'm sure the editors over at his publisher Little, Brown & Co. were too) that he got this novel out of his system so that he was able to get back on track again and continue going from strength to strength with each of his subsequent works. I like Mosley enough that I'm committed to reading pretty much his whole body of work, but I had to force myself to finish reading this novel. If you haven't read anything in the Mosley canon do NOT start here; this one is only for completists (masochists?) such as me. If you want to read a book full of Blues by Mosley, avoid Blue Light and read RL's Dream instead, because IMO that is still the best effort I've read by him to date.
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of the S&M elements in the novel a good working title for the movie would have been Plan 9 1/2 from Outer Space! Or perhaps, given Mosley's penchant for color-coding all the titles of his Easy Rawlings mysteries (à la John D. MacDonald's earlier Travis McGee series), perhaps a better title for the hypothetical Wood movie might be Gray Zombie? And surely there would have been a role somewhere in Ed's film that would have been ideal for a cameo appearance by Bela Lugosi? It's rumored that George A. Romero bought the film rights to Blue Light the day after it was published so perhaps we will still be privileged to see a wide-screen rendition of this story sometime soon. Hopefully Dennis Hopper and Denzel Washington will be available when George does eventually raise enough capital to be able to shoot it.
It has been argued that this novel is really the sixth novel in the Easy Rawlings series (while Bad Boy Brawly Brown is, in actuality, the seventh) because the main protagonist narrator in Blue Light speaks and behaves exactly like Easy does in all the previous novels, but he simply goes by the name of Last Chance in this one instead. I'm not sure why, but hey, we all know it ain't easy being Easy! Anyway, despite his pseudonymous facade in this outing, Easy is still wandering around the streets of San Francisco as well as in other more rural locations of his home state of California, not to mention hanging out with characters that go by such unlikely names as Lythe, Nesta and Horace.
There are also lots of mutilated corpses in this novel. However, there is no mystery about who killed any of them as they are all the result of the dastardly actions of either Death (as personified by the zombie Grey Redstar) or Evil (as personified by psychopathic killer Winch Fargo) rather than the work of the usual crop of seedy underworld scoundrels, miscreants and culprits one normally encounters in an Easy Rawlings mystery. *** Spoiler Warning *** The pseudo-superhero battle between Death and Evil on the steps of the Sacramento state building is worthy of anything that has ever appeared in the pages of DC Comics, and although this bizarre novel's coup de grâce finally occurs inside tree Number One, most of the important and substantial action in the latter part of the story occurs behind tree Number Seven.
To Mosley's credit, he does let us all know at the end of the book that this whole story was just one of Easy's "bad trips" or flashbacks, most likely brought on by Rawlins' propensity for too much hard liquor consumption (and in this particular instance, I suspect, almost definitely combined with a bad dose of hallucinogenic drugs). Despite the fact they cart him off to the Camarillo state mental hospital at the end of this novel you just kinda know that our favorite gutsy hero Easy is not only going to recover from his most recent psychedelic recollections but that he will also ultimately shrug off this latest bout of manic depression (not to mention his stupid alias) and be back pluckier than ever in the next official Easy Rawlins mystery - which, in fact, if you read Bad Boy Brawly Brown, is what indeed happens.
I'm a very big Walter Mosley fan and believe he is one of the world's most talented literary authors - not just writing today, but period. However, while this is the worst effort of his that I've read to date, I'm also glad (as I'm sure the editors over at his publisher Little, Brown & Co. were too) that he got this novel out of his system so that he was able to get back on track again and continue going from strength to strength with each of his subsequent works. I like Mosley enough that I'm committed to reading pretty much his whole body of work, but I had to force myself to finish reading this novel. If you haven't read anything in the Mosley canon do NOT start here; this one is only for completists (masochists?) such as me. If you want to read a book full of Blues by Mosley, avoid Blue Light and read RL's Dream instead, because IMO that is still the best effort I've read by him to date.
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LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
Be forewarned: the first 15 pages of Blue Light are intense. Mosley is merely setting the scene and gathering characters for the center of the plot, but he does it with the finesse of swinging a two by four and guess what, reader? You're the one getting hit. People start dying in droves and Mosley
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doesn't hold anything in the way of sex or violence back. It's a hell of a way to start a story. But, wait. There's more. As the story progresses things go from intense to insane. Be prepared for a lot of violence and weird sex. What exactly is the story about? I'm not really sure. It's San Francisco, California in the mid 1960s. There is the weird blue light and a cult of people who have been affected (infected?) with it. The main character is Chance, a suicidal grad student who becomes a half blue light after he gets half involved with Orde, the cult's leader, prophet and former scam artist. Things get really strange when Juan Thrombone enters the picture and goes to war with Grey Redstar, also known as the Gray Man, in a forest of redwoods. Show Less
LibraryThing member wordsampersand
I get what Mosley was going for with this, but man—this is one of the worst books I've ever read.
Subjects
Physical description
400 p.; 4.57 inches
ISBN
0446606928 / 9780446606929