The suburbs of hell.

GENRE-TYPING has docked the tail of serious fiction but good. So grossly dependent are publishers on some identifiable market that they have forgotten (if they ever knew) how to flog a unique and idiosyncratic book. Imagine the ad department at Instant Remainder & Co. dealing with, oh, Ulysses today. What? It isn't sci-fi, romance, espionage, horror, feminist, or detective fiction? Well, then it doesn't exist, but try to get a jacket quote from Stephen King anyhow. Novels are seldom novel now. Consequently, the serious writer must pre-shrink his imagination down to some recognizable form--and Randolph Stow, I suspect, did just that. The Suburbs of Hell has been shoehorned into a gothic/whodunit genre. It will essay more than that, but, foot-bound by convention, never really attain flank speed. And, as though gone spiteful from restraint, it also twits the expectation of your gothic/whodunit constituency. Yet, somehow, in between, Stow has managed to make a taut, gorgeous, swirling heat devil out of this bastard thing.

I know almost gar nichts about Randolph Stow. Australian: ex-anthropologist: wide traveler now located in England: eight novels and some poetry. Winner of the annual Patrick White Award for distinguished achievement in Australian literature. (That must be a hard prize to give out.) The Suburbs of Hell, I'd hazard, isn't typical Stow--more a genre-fit. He writes economically, yet he doesn't nickel-nurse his prose. First-chop dialogue, plotting tighter than a Denver boot. Somewhat overcute with assonance/alliteration--"trees . . . holding in their black coral boughs black shocks of rooks' nests"--but that isn't an actionable offense. Good, I mean to say.

Several inexplicable murders occur in Old Tornwich, your standard gothic soundstage-with-fog-machine English seaside town. Murder will ignite madness, suicide, and surplus murder. More plot the Miranda decision saves me from having to disclose. But there is something scandalous and chatty, fun even, about abrupt death in a small middle-class place: everyone suspects everyone else. Stow has meant to convey the village-wide degeneration of character and relationship. He is just half successful: genre requirements pressure him in turn. So the end of Sam--with personal background and present disquiet--will seem an intrusive meditation on the social predicament that native back Englishmen endure. Young Greg's madness is even more slipshod and unintegrated as fictional machine part. In general, the book has an ambivalent attack: neither time nor space enough for thorough psychological examination. And, when you foreshorten truth, it tends--good prose or not--to sound pretentious.

More vexing still is the inadequate presence of a first-person speaker that may be Death or Fate. Initially this dramatic figure serves to decoy attention. (I thought a killer was confiding in me. Maybe so--Death, by some intellectual stretch, is the ultimate murderer after all.) But this Death or Something soon decays into just another, not very informative, omniscient point of view. And at the end it will say, "He lies on the floor in his vomit. He stares up into my face. He sees me in my own likeness, without disguise. For flesh is a disguise. He cannot speak or breathe. Yet he speaks to me, with his blazing eyes. I can read his eyes. I have read many." Hum . . . You have to expect sententiousness, I suppose, from anyone or anything in so high an ambassadorial post. Myself, I do hope for some more engaging, wittier exchange at the end. Moreover, Stow's device is maddeningly inconsistent, often plain apathetic. The serious novelist trying, without much conviction, to impregnate a spayed genre.

Even more stagy and vain, though, is Stow's wrap-up. He has pasted together a headline collage: HEADLESS CORPSES IN EL SALVADOR. 1000 BENGALIS MASSACRED IN ASSAM. And so, grimly, on. This plus an engraving of the Tarot card for death. Throughout, too, there have been chapter-head quotes from mostly Jacobean literature, celebrating pure evil--the senseless, native force of it. As a human position this is both pessimistic and defeatist. I prefer to consider it Stow's retaliation against the genre. Whodunits should provide perpetrator and reasonable motive. Stow, maybe in pique, will withhold that informational courtesy. His title, note, has been lifted from John Webster: "Security some men call the suburbs of hell,/Only a dead wall between." No one is or should be secure: nor will the executioner of those headless Salvadoran corpses be found by Hercule Poirot. Intellectual haute couture all this: it paints on an acrylic coat of High Intention not really earned.

Yet the book is snap-rolling aerobatic entertainment. You need a G suit to read it. Climate-controlled, tense, bewildering, and ferocious. Stow's name should be on a Stephen King jacket. As for who dunit: the author isn't above suspicion. I'd have him detained for questioning.