San Francisco. The mid 1960s. A cosmic light strikes those in its path, quickening their DNA, leaving them smarter, stronger, more understanding. These are The Blues. And then there is Horace LaFontaine, an ordinary man, a decent man, struck at the very moment of his death, cast now as Gray Man, the living embodiment of death itself, sustained by literally sucking electricity from out of the walls. Our story is narrated by Chance, The Blues' half-caste chronicler.

In interviews Mosley talks up a debt to both Ballard and Moorcock (recreating himself as Jim Sallis?), but this novel has neither the former's forensic precision nor the latter's imaginative satire. Blue Light is too earnest, too purposefully weighty to take to the wing. It really seems to believe that "there was a purpose to each light that began these creatures." It's a victim of it's own propaganda, the kind of book that young men in State-issue spectacles take an unhealthy interest in.

No, what this book really feels like, god forbid, is a particularly rotten - though mercifully short - retake of Stephen King's soul-sapping, The Stand. Except that even King would have thrown in a recognisable character or two. That's the central flaw, even above and beyond featherweight plotting. These are ciphers, content to enact Mosley's tortuous narrative, mouth his leaden dialogue: "Your heat is tepid tea. Your life a short gust across stagnant water." What makes his Easy Rawlins books so good is what made RL's Dream such a dog. Blue Light is worse. The sort of half-baked work that talks about "a congress of outcasts sitting on the precipice of infinity" with no sense of absurdity in its bones. As an examination of race and identity it fails miserably. Mosley does not want to be pinned as just another mystery writer, but when it comes to this book, the mystery is why he wrote the damn thing at all.