Echoes of The Road Warrior, mentioned in the text, are here, but this is a richer work. (Over 120 names and descriptions are listed in an appendix and except for five or six main characters, referral is necessary.) The escape from New York, the journey across America, and the climax in Arizona are filled with adventure, pop dialog, and philosophical speculations on life, race, religion, law, and survival.

Each of the Skulls has been given a new name to forget the past. Breathing and sight problems afflict the Skulls, and Mister Touch decides they should migrate to a better climate-Arizona. The Skulls are trying to maintain a semblance of civilization, but there are a few other survivors, too-drug-crazed sex fiends, wild dogs. Mister Touch is blind, white, a former Wall Street crook, and the leader of the Skulls, the New York survivors of an apocalyptic virus that has killed most of the human race. But overall Mister Touch is a big, supremely vital and exhilarating vision of human endurance.Ĭopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. There are lapses: the assassination attempt, in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, by a spurned lover of Touch, is somewhat overdone, and there is some graphic violence. And the jive dialogue of many of the Skulls seems note-perfect. The novel, though it focuses on Touch, his leadership anxieties and his moving love affair with Spirit of the Dark, is full of stories: ribald, exciting, touching, absurd. Bosse's skill in keeping his huge cast in action (there are more than 120 characters, many of them prominently featured, most of them deftly sketched) is extraordinary. The epic journey, full of adventures and encounters in a superbly imagined country given over to the dead, eventually succeeds, but at enormous cost. The Skulls survive a raid by a rival gang seeking their only medical person (professional expertise is at a premium), but Mister Touch decides that life in the city is impossible and leads his raggle-taggle army in a caravan of cars and trucks to Arizona, where they can breathe better and, perhaps, settle down and start over. Skull rules are simple: no drugs, weapons only for self-defense against the roaming packs of savage dogs-and no memories: everyone is named anew, with the kinds of jazzy sobriquets once written as subway graffiti: Fierce Rabbit, Cola Face, Boo Bang, Queen Sexy, Adidas. In New York a group of survivors-many of them poor blacks and Latinos, but also a smattering of white middle-class-has banded together, calling themselves the Skulls, under the leadership of a blind former Wall Street wheeler-dealer, Mister Touch. A viral disease, V-70, has decimated the population of the earth, leaving only a handful of survivors, many of them with failing eyesight and feeble lungs.

The author of The Warlord seems likely to have another bestseller on his hands with this sweeping novel, a sort of postapocalyptic Canterbury Tales.

Mister Touch by Malcolm Bosse