BOOK REVIEW : Splicing Together the Good and Evil : A CHILD ACROSS THE SKY<i> by Jonathan Carroll</i> Doubleday $18.95, 215 pages

“A Child Across the Sky” attempts several things. The first and most important is to conjure up a world. The novel is a story of two lifelong buddies: Weber Greston, who came to Hollywood, directed films, made a lot of money, won an Oscar and then bailed out, and Philip Strayhorn, who came to Hollywood, had trouble finding a job, wrote and starred in a series of very successful horror films, and then shot himself. Weber inherits a series of videos from his friend, Philip, and those taped messages send him on a quest.

The central thrust to this quest is the escape from the trudging and the mundane: “Strayhorn and I wanted to be in the movies; we wanted to live interesting lives. . . . Right or wrong, we came to expect as a part of our birthright to have at least a fighting chance at creating a personal environment that makes it possible to wake in the morning eager and curious about what the day will hold.”

Both Weber and Strayhorn have high expectations about art and life. They expect miracles--not necessarily in the conventional religious sense, but in the sense that they need to see beyond this world, to be lifted out of themselves. They need to amaze, and be amazed.

So when Weber plays Strayhorn’s first videotape, he is indeed amazed to see that Strayhorn is chatting, not just before his death but after it.

He includes a couple of other film clips--most notably, Weber’s mother who died in a plane crash when he was just a kid. Here are Home Movies From Beyond, filmed from Weber’s mom’s point of view, the takeoff: And then the stewardess passing out pieces of hard candy. Weber’s mother chokes on the candy, dying without the terrible knowledge of the crash itself. Far out!

The book is about the friendship of Strayhorn and Weber, their two characters, and how they make their art, and live their lives. Weber’s films have always been “good”--morally good as well as cinematically fine. Strayhorn, on the other hand, has made his living on the dark side. His “Midnight” horror films have regularly terrified their audiences.

His devilish hero, Bloodstone, does terrible things to his victims. Strayhorn has played the character of Bloodstone with great enthusiasm, so much that God has gotten griped about it and sent one of his angels (a pregnant 10-year-old girl named Pinsleepe) to tell Strayhorn to straighten up and not be so evil any more. But Strayhorn, on the track of a really scary movie this time, refuses. And ends up dead.

The premise of the novel is this: Strayhorn, from the land of the dead, asks Weber to finish his last “Midnight” picture for him. Pinsleepe, the bratty angel, is there to keep Weber on the right track. A very important theme here is the nature and boundaries of good and evil.

A couple of weeks back I reviewed a novel where an “evil” woman was identified by excessive reliance on computers and a lively interest in bondage sex. “A Child Across the Sky” is far more sophisticated in its examination of what “evil” might be. In this novel, evil envies the good; copies the good. While screening Strayhorn’s “Midnight” films, and then his own work, Weber realizes that his old buddy has copied scene after scene from him. Not only that, this last “Midnight” film can be made into a masterpiece if certain scenes from Weber’s own work are spliced into Strayhorn’s last rough cut.

It might even turn out that, as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were convinced, good and evil are inextricably combined. The very best men, even the kindly, idealistic Weber, are capable of making border crossings over into evil to serve their own ends.

There are a lot of other ideas here: the physical manifestation of childhood fantasies, the hypothesis that our younger, physical selves still wander the Earth, that life doesn’t just imitate art but springs directly from it. But all that is too much to handle here: Good and evil, life and art, the right to a miraculous life--that’s what this cluttered, interesting book is about.

Next: Margarita Nieto reviews “A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub and Our Times” by Gerald Marzorati (Viking).