SOURCE: Marcus, James. “Behind Blue Eyes.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (18 January 2004): 3.

In the following review, Marcus offers a mixed assessment of The Man in My Basement, faulting the novel for lacking the “colloquial zing” of Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries.

More than a dozen books into his career, Walter Mosley still is best known as the inventor of Easy Rawlins, whose color-coded adventures began with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. Yet the author has persistently pushed the envelope since then, venturing into sci-fi (Blue Light), polemic (Workin' on the Chain Gang) and such free-standing fictional creations as R. L.'s Dream. His newest, The Man in My Basement, falls into the latter category. It also represents Mosley's first excursion into what might be called the Gutbucket Novel of Ideas—the kind of thing Thomas Mann would have written had he ever thought to set a story in...