The Star Pit has many fine descriptive passages that make scenes and characters come alive, as when Vyme enters a darkened warehouse: "I was held from plummeting into nothing only by my own footsteps, as black swerved around me." Such short descriptions make even small events vivid. Longer descriptions are also startlingly dramatic: First: I was standing at the railing of the East River—runs past this New York I was telling you about—at midnight, looking at the illuminated dragon of the Manhattan Bridge that spanned the water, then at the industrial fires flickering in bright, smoky Brooklyn, and then at the template of mercury street lamps behind me bleaching out the playground and most of Houston Street; then, at the reflections in the water, here like crinkled foil, there like glistening rubber . . .

Delany creates a charged and resonant sense of location&mdash...