Bookends

LAST OF THE BREED

by Louis L'Amour

Bantam; 358 pages; $17.95

Even John Wayne made a picture in modern dress every once in a while. Louis L'Amour, western man, has followed the Duke's example. In his 95th novel, Last of the Breed, he focuses on Joseph Makatozi, a major in the U.S. Air Force. But Joe is not quite the contemporary he seems. Sioux and Cheyenne blood flows in his arteries ("My people were warriors once"), and when his experimental aircraft is forced down over the Bering Sea, he becomes a Native American fugitive in a 20th century world, retracing the path his ancestors took across the strait to fresh hunting grounds. In pursuit are the current equivalent of bounty hunters: Soviet agents under the baton of the crafty Colonel Zamatev. The influence of Film Director John Ford soon seems to overshadow the action: "(Joe's) hair had grown long, and rather than try to cut it with his knife he had begun wearing it in two braids that hung down over his chest. All you need now, he told himself, is a necklace of bear claws." But this is more than a scenario, and L'Amour has not simply traded Remingtons for rockets: his - knowledge of the frozen North is well researched, his KGB men have enough dimension to throw a long shadow, and along the trek he even mentions straight shooters like Ivan Karamazov and Balzac's Pere Goriot. Those were mighty rare figures on the old prairie; the garrulous storyteller is not only moving on, he is trading up.

THE INHUMAN CONDITION

by Clive Barker

Poseidon; 220 pages; $12.95

Ever since the heyday of horror fiction, when Henry James and Edith Wharton tried their hands at the supernatural, aficionados have been awaiting a writer to transcend the genre and give it a new legitimacy. Clive Barker may be the man. He is as morbid as Stephen King, but unlike his American counterpart, this 33-year-old writer from Liverpool is witty, unpredictable and concise. In these five tales, an aphrodisiac turns the world into a monkey house; a vagrant with a mass of knotted material seems to be playing with nothing less than DNA; a palace is built to entice Satan up from hell; hands rebel against the minds that move them; the dead and the living couple in a Texas motel. Each story involves an uncanny mix of eroticism and terror; each is an instance of headlong narrative. Barker, already celebrated in Britain, is about to surface in the U.S. with demonic force. The world may be ready for a combination of playwright, illustrator, film director and writer, but can it accept his eerie resemblance to Paul McCartney?

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

by Z. Vance Wilson

Arbor House; 405 pages; $17.95

Southern literature tends to be stamped with the obsessions of William Faulkner: doomed and crazy families, legacies of guilt and grudges. The Quick and the Dead, a first novel by North Carolina Academic Z. Vance Wilson, maintains that tradition. Wilson chronicles tribal hatred in an Alabama hill- country clan headed by a self-taught itinerant preacher, Robert Treadwell, who speaks in earthy parables and commits self-mutilation. The book begins and ends with fireball confrontations between the evangelist and his firstborn son, recalled by another son, Luke. The rest, rich in incident, sounds the depths of sexual betrayal and despair. Treadwell calls himself a storyteller, a term that provides a sly, apt link between novelist and revivalist. Each, Wilson suggests, is trying in his way to explain the random nature of fate. In both the father's febrile sermons and the son's cool observation, there is no justice, no fairness. There is, however, the restless energy of a fine emerging writer.

THE PROFESSOR AND

THE PROSTITUTE

by Linda Wolfe

Houghton Mifflin; 228 pages; $16.95

William Douglas, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, tried to turn his appointments with Prostitute Robin Benedict into a love affair. The price to Douglas was his savings; the cost to Benedict was her life. This is the most sensitively rendered of nine crime tales of middle-class America. In each of them, Journalist Linda Wolfe sounds a persistent theme: warning signals usually precede "unpredictable" criminal acts. Her accounts are too brief for a true understanding of minds gone wrong, but she makes even the most absurd act -- and its subsequent explanation -- seem plausible. A carefully polished alibi is undone by an overlooked credit-card receipt. A medical researcher disappears, and the explanation lies in her $650 shopping spree at an A. & P. As Wolfe indicates, chance and coincidence were once the favorite devices of Victorian novelists; today they are the unseen weapons of policemen.