Characters struck by a bolt from the blue

BLUE LIGHT;

By Walter Mosley. Little, Brown. 296 pp. $24.

By Jodi Daynard

Many writers have tried their hands at the supernatural tale. For some, the goal has been to explore, imaginatively, worlds beyond our own. Others have chosen to journey into an even more daunting place, the unknown regions of the human psyche. But whatever their stripe, the best supernatural tales are like any other fiction: They reintroduce us to our own humanity. Indeed, it's only when we cease connecting to fictional characters as human beings - replete with tender frailties, tragic limitations - that we cease connecting to the story that bore them.

Walter Mosley's latest novel, "Blue Light," is meant to be an exploration of human potential. But from the outset everything in this book rings false. Rather than making his characters more interesting or moving, Mosley's supernatural device - a strange cosmic light that hits Earth - manages to do quite the opposite: It leaches the humanity from their bones, rendering them pseudo-human, drivel-spewing bores.

The novel's narrator, Chance, is one of the worst offenders. Recalling the night in 1965 when the blue light hit, he says: "Our entrance into the solar band of energies caused friction, squeals of false consciousness. Many lights drew away toward barren celestial bodies. Most of us died in the ecstasy you call the sun. . . . Nearly ten thousand blue needles were destined to break the skin of air, their divine messages still intact." Four years later, Chance has become a devoted cult-follower of a man named Orde, who burbles the same kind of pseudo-sagacities. Orde tells his eager acolyte, "You are neither worm nor butterfly, but only the dry husk left after the metamorphosis. If you die, it is of no consequence. Your life is only the blind bumbling of an abandoned newborn. Your pleasure is salt and sand. Your heat is tepid tea."

Of course, we're ready to make certain allowances for flakiness, given the novel's psychedelic milieu. Before the blue light hit, Chance had been a suicidally depressed graduate student named Lester Foote, and Orde was a homeless philosophy school dropout named William T. Portman. By their own accounts, no doubt, they've found Nirvana. But in these characters' voices there's no trace of authorial tongue-in-cheek; for reasons I confess I fail to grasp, Mosley means for us to take their story seriously.

Then again, maybe not: Hope swells in the breast as police detective Miles Barber - the kind of hard-boiled detective we've seen before in Mosley's fiction, which includes the Easy Rawlins series of detective novels - comes on the scene. At last, we think, a breath of reality - or at least, reality as one enjoys it in a mystery novel: literal-mindedness bordering on idiocy; dogged pursuit of bad guys; insane, testosterone-induced risk-taking. . . . But it is not to be. Barber turns out to be only a minor character amid many.

Another slender hope comes and goes in the character of Horace LaFontaine. Horace is also a familiar Mosley character - a scrappy old black man who's seen it all; no saint, but at least sentient. But Horace has had the misfortune to become possessed by the novel's antihero, Gray Man (a.k.a. "Death"). Gray Man is a violent, undead ghoul whose job is to terrorize all the other characters, thus providing narrative tension. Unfortunately, each time Gray Man's consciousness awakens, Horace's fades back. Waking up and dying again, waking up and dying without being able to truly die, Horace LaFontaine is an existential gem of a character who is literally, alas, overshadowed by a mental construct.

"Blue Light" might have been salvaged had it been told from one of these points of view. Either one might have grounded an otherwise silly story in a consciousness that, if narrow, would at least have been human. For as the great horror writers have shown, no story can thrive without a sentient human heart at its core. The supernatural "other" can be terrible, awesome, or even beautiful. But it must never be us.

Without such heart, "Blue Light" predictably devolves into farce. In the end, everyone finds himself in Treaty, a forest filled with magic, singing trees. Here, Chance and the others grow happy, whiling away utopian days nurturing the trees and awaiting an apocalyptic confrontation with Gray Man. While waiting, they take spiritual lessons from a man named Juan Thrombone. Just when we thought the perennially tedious cult-leader figure, Orde, had been laid in his grave, up rises another from his ashes, spouting the same pap. At one point, Chance asks Thrombone if the people's job is to tend the trees that roar as opposed to the ones that sing (yes, there are two kinds of magical trees in Treaty), and Thrombone shakes his head no: "The puppy trees, the deep rumblers, might mistake you for dinner and suck the life from your bones. Stay away from them. You were summoned here to tend the special white firs, the high singers, the maskers of blue. The ones that called you. They called and you came."

How is one to engage a book whose main voices speak words we can neither believe nor respect? How to navigate a plot that not only fails to establish verisimilitude but, worse, leaves us no moral compass with which to do so? Not in order to judge good from evil (Mosley's urban ethos would never recognize such quaint concepts), but at least to gain some notion of who and what are worth saving. By the end of "Blue Light" I cared for no one. I just wanted everyone finished off so I could close the book and get on with my life. Which just goes to prove that a human life, however dull, will always outshine even the brightest - or bluest - abstraction.

Oh yes: It seems we haven't heard the end of "Blue Light." It is, apparently, a "prelude" to a projected trilogy. Now that's scary.