Shivers

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In literature, quantity is supposed to be the enemy of quality. Slow writers find themselves hailed as painstaking artists; prolific ones are dismissed as hacks, particularly if they work within the confines of the thriller, the sci-fi adventure, the western or the like. There are very few exceptions: Georges Simenon and Isaac Asimov have each written more than 300 well-received volumes, and William F. Buckley Jr. gets good reviews for spy novels that he claims to churn out in as few as 150 hours per caper.

Another name should be added to their ranks: British Mystery Writer Ruth Rendell, who since 1964 has published 26 novels and four volumes of short stories, all of them intelligent, trenchant and graceful. This summer she will introduce an additional byline, Barbara Vine, which will accommodate her high productivity and, she says, give voice to a more feminine, less dispassionate side of her personality. Rendell plots deftly, and she brings comprehension if not compassion to even the kinkiest of characters. Until now, the author has been something of a secret indulgence, enjoyed primarily by mystery buffs. Within the genre, she has been awarded three major British prizes and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America. But The New Girl Friend, a collection of chilling, remorseless short stories, is beginning to bring her the mainstream recognition she deserves.

These eleven tales blend the domestic pity of Raymond Carver with the macabre comedy and rough justice of Roald Dahl. They nearly all turn, as most of Rendell's novels do, on two inward-looking impulses: revenge and the desire to hide. The characters are conventional middle-class Britons. Their behavior, however, is high gothic. The ironic Loopy, for example, becomes increasingly credible as events move toward the horrific. A middle-aged man, cast as the wolf in a Red Riding Hood playlet, discovers that he likes to wear a furry skin and romp in predatory games. His mother, who displayed such sport to him during his childhood, indulgently calls this business "going all loopy." The narrative works simultaneously as a send-up of werewolf legends and as a disquieting portrait of a suffocating mama and a son with arrested emotional development.

Obsession, often subliminally sexual, is Rendell's favorite terrain. The title story evokes an eerie and doomed romance between a timid woman and her friend's too pretty husband, a closet transvestite. The Orchard Walls tells of adultery and long-concealed vengeance from the viewpoint of a bystander, a girl on the brink of puberty, in whose mind daydreams and overheard dalliances fatally mingle. Rendell sketches a close-knit, gossipy group of old women in The Convolvulus Clock. One of them impulsively steals an artist-designed timepiece. Guilt and fear of disapproval from her friends slowly drive her cuckoo. Father's Day presents a possessive father gripped by an unfounded and ultimately lunatic fear of losing his children through divorce.

Only one story ventures into the supernatural. The endpiece, The Green Road to Quephanda, speaks directly of the plight of the genre writer who cannot get himself taken seriously. The central character is a fantasist who keeps publishing to small sales and critical silence. Unable to bear the inattention any longer, he commits suicide, and in that moment his fantasy world is transferred to the mind of one previously condescending friend. Or, as Rendell puts it in the story's poignant final lines, which perhaps should be read as her own cri de coeur, "He reached his audience, he reached his audience at last." --By William A. Henry III