the shadow boys are breaking all the laws

So I'm reading Light by M John Harrison at the moment. There's a lot of authors I read and I think they're great. There's a smaller group, a few with such a grip on the language they can make it dance grimly, that I wish I could emulate. Peter Goldsworthy is one of them, so's China Miéville. And there's Michael John Harrison. He's knows exactly what the reader wants to know about each time, place and scene and ekes the details carefully without a hint of exposition. It's a difficult but rewarding read. Then Tom Waits appears. In an earlier book by the author, Signs of Life, the main character loved the Tom Waits album Rain Dogs. So when a few Waits references turned up in this book I wasn't surprised but intrigued. For a start a race of supposed aliens are called 'Shadow Boys'. They live inside circuitry, any kind, claiming to be able to run of valves at one point, taking to the world in specially grown bodies they abuse and discard once the day's over. There's three stories in the book. That of Kearney, a haunted, serial killing physicist; that of Ed Chianese, a junky in the future on the run for who knows why; and Seria Mau Genlicher, the pilot of a ship that can bend physics through mathematics. And each story is bleak as hell. The name of the novel, Light, has to be irony. There's been at least two handfuls of murders by the main characters, a race of aliens that can't do anything but ape humankind, and a spirit or delusion that follows Kearney in the form of a horse's skull, echoing Harrison's earlier Viriconim works. At one point Kearney's ex-wife gleefully remarks they're in a Tom Waits song when smoke's pouring from underground. In Ed Chianese's drug dream he notices his enemy's shot sixteen shells from a thirty-ought-six and should be out of bullets soon. Kearney listens to the radio and 'Downtown Train' comes on and he thinks of how much he hates that damned song. I dunno if there's any point to it all, but it does make an interesting texture.