Before this book I'd have told you I worshipped at the altar of Mosley, loved all things Mosley. The story: Black man living in a large family home in the Hamptons, broke, unemployable, drinks too much with only two friends and pretty much no prospects is approached by a thin balding little white man who offers to pay him more than enough money to pay off his mortgage and keep him comfortable for a good long while--if he can live in the basement for a set amount of time. Well, not actually live,...

In each of us there is a dormant power waiting to be released. For some of us, the power is evil. For others, the power is more closely attuned to charity or love. If your power were to be unleashed upon humankind today, would it be good or evil?That is the question you have to ask yourself before reading this book. If a person stumbled upon your doorstep and offered you an immense amount of money to imprison them, without giving you a clue as to why they want to be imprisoned in your basement,

Reading Rush: A book that starts with THE This is gonna be a quick one because I have no clue how to talk about this book. The Man in My Basement is about the confrontation between a Black man and the White stranger who rents his basement cellar for the summer. This is such an odd little book. I'm not sure I completely understand what I just read but I'm almost positive that I won't be able to stop thinking about this book for a very long time. The Man in My Basement is a meditation on race, Bla...

The last fifty pages of this book was hugely frustrating reading. I just wanted the book to end. The idea for the story is a good one but there wasn't enough suspense or building of the plot. A mysterious, white man rents a basement for the summer from a black man in Easthamptons. He stays in the basement in a cage, a self-imposed prisoner, as punishement for his many "crimes," which he does not consider crimes. He knows secrets about governments, the wealthy and world systems - yet, to me, he n...

I'm beginning to enjoy Mosley books more and more.

(The following is less a review and more of an essay).Which came first, civilization or inequality? At the risk of sounding like a pundit, I’d like humbly suggest that the conservative point of view is: civilization requires inequality. There needs to be a class system, a hierarchy which creates a scaffold on which civilization is maintained. And because this is intrinsically unfair, all kinds of (irrational) justifications are used to maintain these hierarchies, and the most pervasive of this i...

What does an unmotivated, poor black man and a highly educated, mysterious white man have in common? At first glance, nothing at all, but as the story progresses it becomes clear that they were destined to meet and learn both empowering and weakening lessons from one another.Charles Blakey was content to sleep walk through life; blaming his failures and misfortunes on anyone but himself. Anniston Bennet carried the burden of the failures of governments, the ultimate cost of power and wealth, and...

Wow. What a good, different story. I don't want to give anything away. I never figured out what the goals of the "Man in the basement" were until the author revealed them.I will be looking into Walter Moseley's other works.

What a fabulous book. Completely different from anything else I've read by Walter Mosely.It tells the story of a last of the line original black family that came to America, Massachusetts, as free people. This book is about journeys to find oneself both for the Narrator, and the man who pays him a ton of money to imprison him.It is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.

The story and characters are engaging, especially once you buy into the main premise. The characters change, but the changes are logical and well put together. Much of the book is more complicated than it seems. While there is no explosive climax, the book is well-written to the point that after the story comes to a resolution, you are still hooked into the falling action as the story winds down in the last chapter. Even the racial currents of the book turn out to be more complicated than they s...

A very powerful book. Charles is not a likable character, he is actually quite awful, but he is so real that I couldn't help but feel for him. There is no murder to solve, but the tension is higher than many novels. Maybe because crime and human nature, are at the center of this book. It's one of those stories that will keep rattling in my head for a long time to come.

Rich writing and complex characters. Flawless dialogue and descriptions. Only flaw I can see is character plausibility but it wasn’t distracting enough to take away from the joy of a fantastic read. I’ll be thinking about this character for a long time.

Walter Mosley was one of the keynote authors at last week's NCIBA conference for independent book stores. I grabbed this book because I wanted to read something by him before the conference. Wow - what an amazing author! Although Mosley is best known as a creator of the Easy Rawlins mystery series, a story like The Man in My Basement really falls into the literary fiction category. We tend to judge mystery authors differently than other authors. Usually, we're looking for a good plot with lots o...

I heard the synopsis of this book and instantly had to get it to find out what happened! "Why" did the white man pay the black man to be caged up in his basement?! I had to know! I heard it was one you couldn't put down, that it was intense and gripping! For me, this book fell so short from my expectations. First off, and this is my personal preference, there was far too much sexual content in this book. Most seem irrelevant. It's only 250 pages! That amount of content was not needed for the sto...

My friend Don gave me this book to read several years ago, and it still affects me when I think about it. The story begins with a strange request: a wealthy white man named Bennet asks to rent out the basement of the home of Charles Blakey, who is black. Bennet builds a cage in the basement, and eventually locks himself inside it. Blakey is confused by the man's actions, and after some philosophical discussions, learns that Bennet is trying to atone for something.I was totally absorbed in the bo...

I started this book this morning and finished it a little while ago. Needless to say, I don't give 2 stars to many books that keep my attention throughout the whole day, but when a character just doesn't seem 'right', it really gets to me. What I mean is, believe-ability:*Say you have no job, that you have no ambition, and you don't own up to any of your mistakes, yet you attract women from all facets of life and they think you're the bees knees.*You scrape up money any way you can think of and

I've read this book twice now and didn't really like it either time. In general, I like Mosley-- at least when he's writing as a crime writer. With this book, he abandons the crime genre to create a more philosophical book, which, unfortunately, failed to satisfy me. What I like about Mosley's other books are his characters and dialog. Easy Rawlins, Fearless Jones and the characters from his other books are likable enough to give you a reason to pull for them. Charles Blakey, the main character

Has this ever occurred for you: You begin a book and two paragraphs in you realize you've been reading poorly written books for ages? This is what happened when I picked up this one. The story was OK, the characters were mostly unlikable or indifferent to me, but the writing was marvelous. Mr. Mosley writes so clearly and succinctly that it felt like I'd been previously breathing with a stuffed nose and didn't realize it.

This is a bizarre novel with intrigue. A novel with the purpose of absolution for your life sins as the center piece. Anniston Bennet, a white man wants to live in a cage in the basement of a black man's home, Charles Blakey, for absolution. Only Charles can be his warden because he knows what atrocities on human kind Anniston has committed and the extent of the damage. But, Charles has never met the man. Charles is unemployed, attempting not to loss the family house, and dealing with his own at...

Mosley does it again, using speculative fiction to really challenge our concepts of morality on a much larger scale. It’s not a simple thing to do, questioning some of the most simplistic and pragmatic things in life. Surely, it seems quite obvious that a title such as 'The Man in My Basement' doesn't sound at all like an action-packed trip to the circus. However, Mosley doesn't exactly make the novel feel as if it is a boring stroll in the park either.The story line certainly may not be as thri...