Emotional Arson

BLADE OF LIGHT by Don Carpenter. 181 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.50.

Dealing with an inarticulate character complicates a novelist's job. In his second book, Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling) takes on two such men and manages to turn them into believable antagonists. The first is Semple, a near-idiot high school boy. Words have little meaning for him; he misreads reality and then forgets it anyway. His attempts at speech are usually glottal grunts. His writing is chicken tracks. There is only one coherent current in his life: his destructive fascination with Harold Hunt, "the ringleader of the hard gang" at school.

Hunt is an emotional arsonist who starts fires in others simply to watch them burn. Semple becomes his natural prey. Hunt constantly involves him in schoolyard beatings without ever fighting himself. He goads Semple into cramming a billiard ball into his mouth, dislocating his jaw. Finally Hunt taunts him into a shed where Hunt's own girl lies, ready to seduce him. Semple finds the confrontation so frightening that he loses all hold on rationality, murders the girl, and is committed as criminally insane.

From that point, the novel jumps forward 18 years to Semple's recovery and his release from the state asylum. Shortly afterwards, he has a chance meeting with Hunt. In the inevitable, violent conclusion, Hunt dies a fitting voyeur's death by defenestration.

Carpenter's success lies in the percussive force with which he pits his antagonists against each other; as he records the radical shifts in their emotional climate, the changes can be felt like heat or sleet. Blade of Light is both more powerful and more controlled than Hard Rain Falling. A calculated, mood-ridden shocker, it is that relatively rare product in contemporary fiction: a strong second novel.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.