Gabino Iglesias Reviews Touched by Walter Mosley

Touched, Walter Mosley (Atlantic Monthly Press 978-0-80216-184-0, $29.99, 176pp, hc) October 2023.

Walter Mosley is one of the best-known crime writers out there. However, he’s a great story­teller whose skills aren’t tied to a single genre. In Touched, Mosley writes speculative fiction with the same aplomb he shows when delivering crime narratives. A strange tale of good versus evil with plenty of action, some big ideas, and Mosley’s ever-present commentary on race, Touched is a fast, fascinating addition to the authors already fantastic oeuvre.

Martin Just is a normal man with a wife and two kids. Then, he wakes up one morning after having a strange dream and he doesn’t feel the same. In fact, Martin feels like he has been sleep­ing for a very long time and like he’s somehow not himself. He also has some new knowledge though he has no idea where it came from: humanity is a virus that affects everything, and thus it must be destroyed. He also knows something else, even if he doesn’t understand it: He is the ‘‘Cure.’’ Martin soon finds himself in prison for a little accident he has in public. He gets locked up with a racist who tries to murder him for being Black. During the ensuing mayhem, which Martin survives thanks to the new being that lives inside him, he learns a bit more about the change he’s gone through, and that knowledge sets Martin on a new path. With a new consciousness, a holy mission, incredible physical strength and agility, and the ability to let the other entity inside him take over, Martin and Temple, which is what he names the one inside him, set out to accomplish the ultimate goal: sav­ing humanity from extermination.

Touched is the story of a Black family living in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles who un­dergo a huge change and become aware of truths that would crush a normal person. It is also an engaging narrative about the battle between good and evil, truth and lies, life and death. Mosley is known for seamlessly introducing social commen­tary into his stories, and he does that here. Just like in all his other work, he does it in a nonobstructive way that feels organic and fits the story.

The pacing and dialogue make this read like a shorter work, but the ideas are as strong as they are in any of Mosley’s longer novels. The nature of humanity, racism, the need to live in harmony with all the other species, and the importance of family and love are some of the themes the novel touches on, all while delivering some very violent passages and having Martin on the tail of the embodiment of death.

Mosley has been delivering superb crime fic­tion for decades, so it comes as no surprise that this detour into speculative fiction would also be great. Hopefully it will entice those who only read speculative fiction to check out some of his other work.

This review and more like it in the November 2023 issue of Locus.

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