FICTION

THOSE GIANTS LET THEM RISE! by Erika Duncan; (Schocken: $14.95). Not only is “Those Giants Let Them Rise!” a book that haunts, it is itself haunted. Real demons reside here--demons that lurk in the nether regions of the mind’s most scabrous corners. This novel is a collage of suffering, a bricolage of nightmares.

Reminiscent in its form of some of the greatest modern novels, “Those Giants” takes place in one day. Crucially, it is Halloween--All Hallow’s Eve--the most primal and pagan of our celebrations--that Erika Duncan chooses as the setting for her exotic fable.

Melanie, the heroine, takes a trip from Bohemian Lower Manhattan to her family home in Queens. Duncan’s gift is to strip away the trappings of the daily. She makes the familiar eerie; the domestic becomes uncivilized, untethered, untamed.

The house in Forest Hills is a residence of ghosts. Melanie’s father, now dead, was the untalented heir to a long line of musical prodigies. Victim to mediocrity, Theodore grew fat and asthmatic, alcoholic and withdrawn. Laura, Melanie’s mother, is a genius of suffering, a psychoanalyst famous for healing the sick through love. Her failure to cure her husband becomes the burden she passes on to her daughter. Despite Laura’s efforts to turn her daughter into a version of herself--a healer--Melanie becomes, initially, the reincarnation of her father. In flight from all things beautiful, she turns herself into a bloated, wheezing grotesquerie.

Nonetheless the Giant finds her beautiful. Gabriel, the Giant, is an artist busy preparing himself for death. Melanie’s love affair with the Giant provides the novel’s most realized moments. Like all giants, Gabriel is impotent and doomed to early death. His human-size heart is inadequate to transmit blood to his extremities. He builds a coffin large enough to hold his outsize body. In the meantime, he uses it as a bookcase.

When she first meets the Giant, Melanie notices that “his face was like something she dreamed . . . an oversized child’s drawing. . . .” This description of Gabriel’s face serves as an evocation of the novel itself: As much dream as story, it has about it the febrile quality of a child’s exaggerated dream.

Duncan is interested in the relations with art and suffering, art and psychoanalysis, art and the forms of love.

The novel’s greatest difficulty is its glorification of suffering. Perhaps exaggeration is requisite to the language of pain. Yet, sometimes the reader feels Duncan is pulling the same skin off the same fresh wound and watching it bleed.