Tales of Manic Light on the Brink of Darkness : THE COMING TRIUMPH OF THE FREE WORLD <i> by Rick DeMarinis (Viking: $16.95; 175 pp.)</i>

The writer, with a cheerful lack of fastidiousness, sweeps everything into a heap--the grim bits, the ironies, hilariousness and shock, the more dismal human passages of illness, insanity, fakery and remorse, and presto!, Rick DeMarinis has written the 14 stories in “The Coming Triumph of the Free World.”

By a certain lack of discrimination and an avid willingness to pounce, comedy, like a magpie’s nest, is enriched: Oddities are allowed that would never survive a more miserly parsing of America. Thus an ominous Disneyland crops up in these stories, dirty Polaroids, a South Sea Islander who discourses on “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the deleterious effects of “profound Big B Boredom Himself” on housewives, a farcical range called the Y Bar Y, and a vivid witch out of Grimms’ by way of Donald Barthelme, and you get first sentences like these: “The grizzled psychotic entered Safeway laughing,” or “I lie on the nail-bed of my life still believing I am a good-hearted, sensitive man who would never beat his wife”--sentences bristling with bitter possibilities.

Possibilities, in the stories DeMarinis writes, are made to be enlarged upon, exaggerated, unrolled so that every minute ridiculousness may be examined. Here, a narrator contemplates Hopper’s paintings: “I’m looking for Edward Hopper’s sense of the thing. How the thing exists for itself and itself alone. How it produces instant feelings of irrelevance in the viewer. A world of unmoving solids has no place in it for that drifter, the soul. Hopper is one of the dangerous ones. (Countertop cafe pie can leave you feeling abandoned. Curtains blowing in a dark hotel window will give you bad dreams. A gas station in Iowa can stun you to your knees.)” The reader, guessing that DeMarinis would like himself considered another of the dangerous ones, does suffer acute feelings of irrelevance as the narrative torrent pours over her head.

In the collection’s weaker stories, the momentum is purely verbal and only slenderly coupled to plot, while in the stronger tales it’s all one thing, the voice revving a flattish story into startling verve. “Your Story,” narrated--intermittently and subversively--by the Grimms’ witch, is a frightening thing, a fairy tale about abandoned children with elements of “In Cold Blood,” the nightly news and that post-modernist fiction that reflects on its own devices, and it works with an eerie unsettlingness on the reader’s peace of mind, disquiet being a quality DeMarinis prizes in a reader. A nervous reader is a thinking reader, he implies.

A satisfied reader is a witless one, he further insinuates, in “Romance: A Prose Villanelle,” which adroitly parodies those paper romances containing sentences the clones of these: “If this was not meant to be, then nothing was meant to be. Sometimes when two strangers meet they feel they’ve known each other forever. The tall man in cowboy regalia was such a person to Marianna. She quivered involuntarily, like the delicate needle of a compass, before the quiet magnetism of his male presence.”

This story, too--a villanelle in its repetitive, back-tracking formality, by which entire annoying paragraphs are simply repeated, the funnily seductive plot bumps and grinds along, and Marianna realizes that “No Man Can Provide My Identity”--pauses to reflect on itself: “ . . . you pick up the latest Silhouette or Harlequin Romance and try to read, but the words blur together, passion links arms with despair . . . and the whole enterprise coasts to a dismal stop. . . . The silence you have contrived all your life to hold at bay slips in between the lines of bloated prose, it invades each preposterous scene or trumped-up emotion. . . .”

Entropy, the silence lying in wait, “Big B Boredom Himself,” the gray that is the color of the walls, the desks and the carpeting in the offices of a minor defense contractor, are the enemies here. DeMarinis takes them on with panache. He’s especially good at eliciting the intolerant intimacy of groups, the way the odd individual suffers as eccentricity and privacy are abraded by the group’s vigilance. “The Flowers of Boredom” is a psychological portrait, not of its main character Lamar, but of the vast industry that employs him:

“Lamar’s Reliability Section is the arm of Locust Airframes that devotes itself to the creation of documents. . . . Reliability achieved through redundant components is costly, but as the number of additional backup systems increases on a given piece of equipment, the theoretical failure-rate dwindles steadily toward the infinitesimal. It’s as if men were equipped with one or two extra hearts, or had fresh, supple arteries ready to back up their old, cholesterol-choked ones should they fail. Reliability is the dream of immortality transferred to electronics, hydraulics, and structural mechanics.”

“The Flowers of Boredom” ends with a memory of missiles on huge transport vehicles slipping out of a black building into a rainy night. The mechanical-malevolent is in evidence in other stories, as well. In “The Handgun,” the gun has “a tight, self-satisfied sheen, like a deceptively well-groomed relative from a disgraced branch of the family,” having infiltrated the home of a jobless narrator who is rapidly losing his hold on life and over his remote wife, who, despite having “the long-muscled legs of a Zulu princess” and lovely eyes, is an increasingly menacing figure: “ . . . the gun had summoned . . . real changes in Raquel.”

In “Red Chair,” an old woman is tormented into disorientation by the intrusion of an enormous, hellishly red recliner into her pastorally brown-and-green private room in a nursing home for the elderly. While the old woman’s disturbance is painstakingly detailed, she is so eminently dislikable and petty that the reader, in order fully to collude with the writer, must condescend to her bewilderment.

If the collection’s lesser stories seem more vehement message than complex interpretation, the problem seems to be that the writer, while hyperalert to the ludicrousness of the world, shows little actual fondness for anything about it except a splattering of brand names and the occasional reifying dose of sex, and so his indignation, even when it flares most incandescent, seems cold, cannily cerebral, disinterested. “The business of art is not beauty,” observes the painter-narrator of “The Swimmer in Hard Light.” “The business of art is to butcher whatever coddles the mind.” In 1900, the critic, Henri Bergson, wrote in “Le Rire,” “(Art) has no other object than to brush aside the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality--from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.” The reality one is left facing in “The Coming Triumph of the Free World” is unconvincing; perhaps the depths cannot prosper when the surface is so manic. When Raquel, the Zulu-legged wife, is informed by her husband, “Love is not harmless,” the claim is interesting; given the story’s unfolding context, it is at once confession and threat. But her answer, “Jesus, listen to what you are saying for once” remains meaningless, except as callously casual rejection. In these stories, emotion is casually rejected, brutalized, or allowed to degenerate into slapstick. Taken together, these tales imply a chilly, brilliantly lit world on the brink of absolute darkness, chronicled with speedy, black-hearted elan.