The prolific Walter Mosley, author of the wildly popular Easy Rawlins series, returns to his crime noir roots in spectacular fashion with his latest novel, “Killing Johnny Fry,” published Dec. 2007, Bloomsbury USA. Mosley dubs this work a “sexistential novel,” and that it certainly is. Though deeply erotic and graphically disturbing in its frank depictions of sex and hedonistic delight, there is a profundity in the harrowing journey of self-discovery and redemption undertaken. Through the grit and grime of debauchery and human evil, the plight of the everyman as civilized beast is thoroughly explored and, for better or worse, laid bare for the reader to identify with.

The tale begins in Mosley’s familiar noir styling—“I decided to kill Johnny Fry on a Wednesday, but it was a week before that I was given the reason.” This is the voice of our protagonist, Cordell Carmel, a meek, middle-aged, mild-mannered black man working a thankless job for a thankless girlfriend. The aforementioned reason given for Cordell’s drastic change in character comes to him (and to readers) with all the subtlety of a freight train: he walks in unnoticed on his sweetheart of 8 years being gleefully sodomized by their mutual acquaintance, the hugely-endowed white man Johnny Fry.

Upon witnessing this, Cordell withdraws into himself and begins his descent into the abyss, undergoing a slow, complex transformation into a sexual creature of the basest order. He develops an obsession with a violent porn film and its charismatic, sadistic female star Sisypha. The scenes from this film become the vile tapestry into which Cordell’s life is slowly woven, having identified so closely with its events that he soon finds his identity inseparable from its cuckolded male star. He envisions the sneering, brash Sisypha in the many lovers he takes in the course of his wanderings—most especially in his renewed cat-and-mouse rompings with his unfaithful girlfriend, still unawares, tinged with violence and humiliation.

As Cordell’s path winds inexorably toward his fateful confrontation with the white man that battered his manhood, Mosley delves deeply into his psyche, laying bare the patchwork melding of howling emotions and calm lucidity, dominant machismo and pale-faced humility, with such subtlety and grace that these things go almost unnoticed in the maelstrom of sex and betrayal. This deft characterization is evident across the board, giving flesh and spirit to even the minor bit-players in Cordell’s journey.

Yet as this unflinching honesty rings true for Mosley’s characters, so it does for his sex scenes, and therein lies the main quibble readers may have with “Killing Johnny Fry.” The couplings here are utterly devoid of loving, vanilla consensuality. Cordell takes his lovers as a challenge unto himself, as pieces of a jigsaw, and this ensures that every sexual act in the book is tinged with some flavor of perverse manipulation, be it masochism, voyeurism, sadism, or humiliation. As such, characters can read as very unlikeable, despite the loving attention to their growth and development.

In spite of this inherent ugliness and discomfort, though, Mosley’s latest noir is a poignant, revelatory work that is as likely to transform the everyman as offend him, evident in Mosley’s solemn, intimate dedication: “for you.”