If you had a really important job that you needed done, a critical mission that the entire fate of your life's work depended on, would you send a 40 year-old ex-heroin junkie with a bad leg out to take care of it? No? Neither would I. Ricky Rice might have saved himself some serious trouble if he simply asked, "Why me?" 
 As a child Ricky's family had been part of a cult led by three women in Queens, and he later grew up to be an addict. Now clean he has been working as a janitor in a bus station when gets a letter referencing an event from his past and a bus ticket to Vermont. When Ricky gets there he finds that he has been recruited to the Washburn Library to be one of their Unlikely Scholars. 
 The Library is isolated in a rural area, and each of the new Unlikely Scholars gets their own cabin stocked with groceries and a new, if slightly dated, wardrobe. They are all black men and women with shady backgrounds of one kind or another that hit rock bottom at some point in their lives. Their new job is to go through newspapers, looking for odd stories that indicate some kind of supernatural happenings and reporting them to the Dean. 
 Grateful for the new life, Ricky dedicates himself to the work, even if he doesn't really understand why they're doing it. Of course, like most former addicts, he still has a desire to shoot up some of the old smackity-smack and has some heroin hidden in his cabin. Eventually, The Dean explains the history and purpose of the Library and sends Ricky out on a critical mission to stop a former Unlikely Scholar who has gone rogue. 
 Victor LaValle was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award for his previous novel so what we have here is a serious writer of capital-L Literature doing a sci-fi/ supernatural genre novel, and the results are mixed. 
 I loved the overall concept of the novel, and LaValle is a very good writer. However, he chose to tell the story as a combo of Ricky's present and flashbacks to his history as a child in a cult and as a junkie. If done well, this can be used to deliver big twists late in the book as a character's current behavior and circumstances are explained via big reveals in their pasts. 
 However, by keeping the circumstances and mission of even the Library vague until we're well into the book, and by having Ricky be a clueless bystander who is just going along with everything, we don't really know the stakes or the full scope of what's going on until we're well into the action. That's the problem with doing a story like this and withholding information until later. If we don't know what the ground rules are, how can we be shocked or surprised at what follows? 
 The whole thing seemed kind of like something that would happen if Chuck Palahniuk wrote up a story idea from Neil Gaimen. Good idea and some solid writing here, but saving the big reveals until very late in the book kept me uninvolved and puzzled by the plot. 
 Random Thoughts 
 *I liked that the Washburn Library has resources, but they aren't infinite. Their computers are refurbished, office supplies are in short supply, and they have to use the bus or fly coach, etc. It added a different twist on the idea we usually get when some kind of mysterious large organization is introduced. 
 *It seemed odd that even though the story is set around 2005, that the Unlikely Scholars use print newspapers and never even mention Google in their work. They're supposed to have a tight budget, but considering how little reporting is done on minor local stories by print journalism these days, and the cost of newspaper subscriptions, you'd think it'd be cheaper and more efficient for them to troll the net for news. 
 *Despite all evil crap that happens, living in a remote fully-stocked cabin next to a large library while trolling news for odd stories seems like a dream job to me. 
 *I got a good chuckle when one character refers to the Unlikely Scholars as 'spiritual X-Men'.