Ghost Town

MOON GAP (254 pp.)--Ann Chidester --Doubleday ($2.75).

Ghostly Moon Gap (pop. 4) was another of those golden mushrooms that sprouted up in the western mining fields, nourished briefly and died again. But crabbed old Prospector Miles King refused to believe that the gold had been worked out. He went on living there with his three kids, determined to sacrifice their lives and his own, if necessary, to his gilded obsession.

Surly son Eddie played the accordion and dreamed: "I'm going to Hollywood to be in movies." When he went over to Gold City to play at the casino, he took his teen-age sister Rose along. "Sometimes," she explained, "I stand with the men for luck, see? . . .1 like pop. Strawberry pop." They were all the despair of Cassie, old man King's oldest child.

Rattlesnakes & Ruins. Among the rattlesnakes and ruins of Moon Gap, Cassie yearned for the itchy-footed husband who had deserted her, and brooded over her knowledge of her father's dreadful secrets. In a desk drawer she had come across her mother's faded will; it gave Moon Gap, for whatever it was worth, to the children, not to old man King. And up in a mountain pass she had found the wreck of an airliner; her father had looted it and left the bodies there to rot.

Shivering with disgust over her father's plan to sell his loot, Cassie spilled the beans about the will. Her brother & sister were delighted. They quickly sold their share of the town to a uranium prospector and took off on their own, leaving papa King to his fading dreams and Cassie to her tormented heart.

Hangman's Tree. Minnesota-born Author Ann (Mama Maria's) Chidester knows her ghost town, all right, with its "kind of living, creeping rust" and its "fine, square buildings . . . crumbling into little pieces that dropped and made loud sounds in the severe quiet of day." Her supple, evocative prose roams passionately over the Sierra Nevada landscape, picking out "the bears, dark and clumsy clowns, moving in the woods where the berries grew" and the "Hangman's Tree with its huge, scarred, rotting base, as if in performing its rites it had ... tasted poisonously of its own dead."

But this authentic, weather-worked frame is largely wasted on Cassie's brief, pastel-hued heartaches. When Cassie finally spots her errant husband coming up the road "the winds . . . seemed to die down. The whisperings in the empty rooms faded too ... her arms spread apart . . . 'Well, then,' she thought, 'we will have a garden here.' " Readers may wonder why Author Chidester sticks to literary placer mining in this sentimental vein when she seems to have the talent to go after deeper, more rewarding lodes.

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