A Fantastic View of the Third Reich : TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK : S<i> teve Erickson (Poseidon Press: $18.95; 320 pp.) </i>

“I build my own house that defies architecture,” declares Steve Erickson’s monster-hero at one point in “Tours of the Black Clock.” “I’ve compelled the landscape of history to readjust to my visions.”

Big claims. But does the construction live up to that confident billing?

In his third novel, following on critical successes with “Days Between Stations” (1985) and “Rubicon Beach” (1986), Los Angeles writer Erickson offers a challenging, provocative, maddeningly flawed fractured-funhouse-mirror edifice of language, a wild Gaudi-esque structure of phantasmagoric glitter and glass blown from the debris of this century’s history.

His creative mortar is the nightmarish imagination of that rough beast of a protagonist-narrator, whose psychic projections--violent and sexually obsessive--have the power to alter world events, distorting reality intensely enough to actually (it says here) tip the course of history.

Historical cornerstone of this precarious fantasy structure is a passage from William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” quoted by the novelist in an extended epigraph. From Shirer’s allusion to Adolf Hitler’s alleged only true love, his young niece Geli Raubal (a mysterious suicide in 1931), this chaotic, symbol-laden tale of fratricide, sexual compulsion, revenge, and redemption through love is built.

The Frankensteinian manifestation at the center of things is one Banning Jainlight, hulking illegitimate son of a Pennsylvania farmer and a half-breed domestic. After witnessing the rape of his mother, murdering one of his half-brothers, tossing his father out a window and burning down the family homestead (no wonder he has a few fantasies!), Jainlight flees to New York City, where he picks up work as a pornographer, churning out customized sex dreams by the page for the titillation of an anonymous foreign client.

Early in 1937, a step ahead of lawmen pursuing him for his crimes back home, our hero escapes to Vienna. There he discovers the identity of his mystery client--none other than the Fuhrer himself. It turns out that Jainlight’s masturbatory erotic prose has enabled Hitler to revive his lost love for his niece. The young ogre has meanwhile become powerfully enamored of an elusive 15-year-old Russian girl he has seen only once, and that through her window. In his zonked-out imagination, however, time and space are no obstacles, and he quickly closes the gap.

Hitler’s voyeurism and Jainlight’s deranged preoccupation with the girl in the window bind the two men in a sort of fateful symbiosis that lasts until Hitler dies--not in that Berlin bunker in 1945, but, by the Jainlight/Erickson revision of history, 25 years later in a seedy New York City detective’s office.

Working the same experimental terrain as John Hawkes, Thomas Pyncheon and William Burroughs, Erickson attempts to subvert daylight normalcy. The disturbing nighttime dreamscapes of compulsive alienation that he proposes as his alternative do hold a certain fascination. He effectively creates a brooding, self-enclosed world of driven sensuality. His effort to engage history on a cosmic scale, though, is affected negatively by a serious case of overreaching. While over the myth dimension, this book may indeed provide billboard outlines for a profound parable of man’s fall, that ambitious bid for profundity becomes itself a terrible burden for the novelist, and of its weight, “Tours” too often slides off the deep end into the bathetic and the ridiculous.