Walter Mosley’s talent knows no bounds. Merge and
Disciple are but two 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?
Merge
Raleigh Redman loved Nicci
Charbon until she left him heartbroken. Then he hit the
lotto for twenty-four million dollars, quit his minimum
wage job and set his sights on one goal: reading the entire
collection of lectures in the Popular Educator Library, the
only thing his father left behind after he died. As Raleigh
is trudging through the eighth volume, he notices something
in his apartment that at first seems ordinary but quickly
reveals itself to be from a world very different from our
own. This entity shows Raleigh joy beyond the comforts of
twenty-four million dollars….and merges our world with those
that live beyond.
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.