rrol Porter is an average fellow of the year 2005. He's been downsized from his cushy IT job and now serves as a handyman at a pottery firm while perfecting his own skills with ceramics. He's building a relationship with Nella, a Jamaican woman who also works at the studio. Errol's father has been dead some nine years, but Errol's mother's still around, as are a sister and an ex-wife. Although Errol's currently living in a converted garage in L.A., he's sanguine about his future.
Until he starts getting some disquieting crank phone calls, all originating from the same unknown person. At first, the caller just repeats the words "naked" and "cold." But then the voice on the other end of the line identifies itself: The voice belongs to Errol's dead father, it claims. And Arthur Porter then asks his son Errol to meet him at Dad's gravesite.
Errol complies with much trepidation. There he finds a confused, naked young man who resembles the Arthur Porter of decades gone by. Errol brings the strange man home and nicknames him GT. GT seems to know intimate details of the Porter family history, including the answer to an unsolved murder. Errol (and his mother and sister and Nella) are eventually forced to accept GT's identity. But how was he resurrected?
Therein lies the rest of the tale: GT is a creation of Arthur Porter's DNA and a subterranean group-mind micro-organism that has been working its way toward the surface for billions of years. The creature calls itself the Wave, and it's busy resurrecting scores of humans in preparation for a cosmic destiny. But not everyone is as accepting of this tale as Errol. The U.S. government in particular, led by a general named David Wheeler, is intent on killing the Wave in all its manifestations.
And that means Errol and his dad have to run for their lives.
A welcome sci-fi visitor
General readers will of course be familiar with Mosley's name from his detective series starring Easy Rawlins. But SF fans know him from his previous two books in our field, Blue Light (1998) and Futureland (2001). Those two volumes proved that Mosley was no overconfident, unaware mainstream interloper, but rather a savvy aficionado (and creator) of SF tropes and history. The current book upholds that estimation.
Mosley's central conceit—that billions of years ago the various deep strata of the planet were seeded with a life form that has since evolved intelligence—is both bold and probable. (It's been scientifically estimated that the subterranean biomass of our planet outweighs all the surface biomass by several orders of magnitude.) He handles the eruption of this creature, and its essentially alien mental configuration, in a highly entertaining and believable way. At the same time, he's not snooty enough to foreswear campy echoes of such classics as The Blob (1958) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). A zillion zombie movies get a nod as well, since that's how the government chooses to categorize the Wave-reanimated humans.
Mosley's trippy cosmic consciousness riffs are cousin to the angle of attack often used by Lucius Shepard: How our limited perspective on reality blinds us to greater truths and visions. Mosley also delivers a weird uncanny ambiance akin to that of a Jonathan Carroll novel.
The story is told in Errol's own first-person voice, and it's a quick, seductive and easy read. Errol is a likable guy whose mixed Anglo/African-American heritage has left him symbolically a gateway between two worlds already, before his troubles even start and he becomes ambassador to (and from) the Wave. But Errol's voice does produce some off-kilter constructions, reminiscent of the (unconscious?) stylings of the great Chester Himes. For instance, at one point Errol attempts to "glean a postulation." In another instance, he detects "a unitude of perfectly balanced ideas that was now seeking to breathe its life into another." Perhaps these solecisms are deliberate on Mosley's part; after all, Errol is not a professional writer. But whatever the rationale, these clunky lines jump out awkwardly.
One final unfortunate piece of business is the notion that the story we are reading is Errol's own written account of his adventure, just as in an H.P. Lovecraft tale where the protagonist is still scribbling as Cthulhu drags him out the door. This mars the suspension of disbelief somewhat.
But such trivial quibbles aside, Mosley's novel still delivers a slam-bang weird adventure with lots of tasty philosophical and speculative underpinnings. You should definitely ride this Wave!
