STRAUB'S NEW HORROR THRILLER OFFERS NOVEL FANTASY BLEND.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

In Peter Straub's latest horror novel, "The Hellfire Club," Nora Chancel, the story's heroine, suffers in a hellfire of masculine patronization. Like her namesake in Ibsen's play "A Doll's House," Nora is treated by the men around her as an object of little consequence.

Her husband, Davey, cheats on her with other women and even neglects her for his obsession with Hugo Driver's "Night Journey," a "wildly successful" fantasy novel that supports his family's publishing business, Chancel House.

Her father-in-law, Alden Chancel, treats her with disdain and clearly would prefer that she were not married to Davey. Even Dick Dart, the dissolute son of Chancel House's lawyer, makes Nora feel bad by eyeing her seductively when they meet in a restaurant and, in behavior reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter in "Silence of the Lambs," telling her that he adores her "scent," even though she isn't wearing any perfume.

By night, while Davey studies a botched film version of "Night Journey," Nora has terrible nightmares caused in part by her having been raped "by two dumbbell grunts" while serving as a nurse in Vietnam. By day, while Davey is in New York City working at Chancel House, Nora has to worry about the serial murderer of lonely women who is terrorizing the Connecticut bedroom community where she and Davey live.

Then, to top everything off, Nora is summoned to the local police station as the suspect in a kidnapping. There she's grabbed and taken hostage at gunpoint by the escaping serial killer, who turns out to be Dart, arrested after being knocked unconscious by Ophelia "Popsie" Jennings, the owner of a clothing store called the Unfettered Woman. Off on the road go Dart and Nora; and the story has still barely begun.

Now this may seem a lot for the reader to swallow, but Straub is the veteran of a dozen or so horror thrillers, among them "Ghost Story," "Floating Dragon" and the three books composing the "Blue Rose" trilogy: "Koko," "Mystery" and "The Throat." He has a number of surprising twists working for him in his wildly inventive plot. For one thing, Dart turns out to be a highly entertaining villain as fiendish monsters go.

He's an authority on women's clothes and cosmetics, and he proceeds to make Nora over before doing the beastly things he has planned for her. He also has a photographic mind, and he manages to trick people into believing he's a poet by quoting every third word of "The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and every second word of Thomas Nashe's "In Time of Pestilence" ("Farewell, bliss - world is, are,/lustful death them but none").

For another thing, Straub makes extremely clever use of the novel within the novel, "Night Journey," which turns out to be about the fantastic quest of "a lost boy named Pippin Little," and which has attracted a fanatic following that includes convicted killers who "justify their crimes with complex, laborious references to the novel."

From hints of plot and character correspondences between the main story and the novel within, we become aware that "Night Journey" is no casual prop. At first, Pippin the Boy appears to be Nora's husband, Davey, who has been told by his parents that he was adopted when their real son, also named Davey, died as a baby. But soon, it becomes clear that poor Nora herself is really Pippin, and that to find herself she must go to a mysterious place called Mountain Glade.

Mercifully, Straub never goes further than hinting at these underlying correspondences. Except in the chapter titles, which are taken from "Night Journey," the focus remains on the framing story throughout. Yet awareness of the novel's fantastic foundation makes one willing to accept as plausible what normally might seem unreal. As a result, the story lifts off the page with Nora's abduction by Dick and soars irresistibly for the next few hundred pages.

What brings it eventually back to earth is that Straub asks the reader to swallow greater and greater doses of implausibility. For reasons that are never entirely clear, everything comes to depend on whatever happened one night in 1938 at a Berkshire writers colony called Shorelands.

The colony was presided over by Georgina Weatherall and attended at the time by the writers Austryn Fain, Merrick Favor, Creeley Monk, Bill Tidy, Hugo Driver and Katherine Mannheim, and the publisher Lincoln Chancel. If these jokily suggestive names are part of the story's hidden code, the solution escaped this reader, as did any hidden references in the titles of their books, among them Bill Tidy's working-class memoir, called "Our Skillets."

Later in the story, Straub plants more clues than he can harvest and explains events faster than he can make them happen. As "The Hellfire Club" careens to its implausible conclusion, his plot becomes so rickety that the rubber bands snap and the chewing gum comes unstuck. You race to the end hoping to get there before the contraption falls apart completely.

This, too, creates a form of suspense, and if it can be considered artistically legitimate, then "The Hellfire Club," in all its roller-coaster unevenness, can be said to have a little of everything.

What remains impressive even after the last nut and bolt bounce to rest is the way Straub has worked the fantastic elements of his story into a largely realistic plot, thereby allowing him to avoid a literal descent into the hellfire of his title. This technique is promising, and one hopes he will exploit it even more successfully in future works.

Title: "The Hellfire Club"

Author: Peter Straub

Data: 463 pages, Random House; $25.95

Our rating: three stars

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Peter Straub's "The Hellfire Club" includes myriad plot twists, an entertaining villain and heavy use of a novel within the novel.