BOOK REVIEW : Gory, Overwrought Novel of Evil : THE LIVES OF THE DEAD <i> by Charlie Smith</i> Linden Press $19.95, 366 pages

Again, and violently: the contemporary literary style of subordinating reality to the words used in presenting.

Buddy, narrator of “The Lives of the Dead,” is a filmmaker whose sadistic noir spectacles depict such atrocities as a man hanging a woman by piano wire or burning his children to death in a field.

Buddy tells us about these films. Mostly, though, he tells us about a new film for which he is trying to raise money. Its protagonist is D’Nel, a figure of pure evil, who goes around the country killing families with the help of Molly, a zombielike beauty, and Banty, a pallid character who trains dolphins and is dragged in because he hopes to rescue Molly.

These films are Buddy’s fictions. When he tells us about making them, when he tells us about his money troubles, his ex-wife Bess, his second (and future ex-) wife Celest, he seems to be telling us about his life. Except that he isn’t. Is a first-person narrative an account of reality, or is it, itself, a more or less arbitrary fiction? Arbitrarily, for example, Celest lacks her final “e.”

In his garish, gory and chokingly overwrought novel, Charlie Smith melts down the distinctions to create an airless world of helpless evil. It is the oddly theological evil that consists of absence--traditionally, an absence of good; here, an absence of reality.

Smith is evoking the oozy, phantasmagoric mentality that some believe is created by constant high-powered doses of television and pop culture--children who feel that killing is no more or less real than what happens in the movies, and just might act accordingly. His filmmaker fuses bit by bit with his film.

“The Lives of the Dead” starts out more or less conventionally, with Buddy telling us about scouting sites for his film along the Gulf Coast. But the narration is oddly fevered and hyped-up. “You’re going to love this,” he tells his producer over the phone, and proceeds to relate the entirely unlovable story of how D’Nel and his party massacre an old couple.

And his own encounters along the way seem to take place in a gangrenous lighting worthy of David Lynch. Stopping at a diner, he gets whacked in the face by a spatula; he drops the whacker--the cook--with a blow to his chest. On the road, he sees one man beat another with an ax handle, possibly to death.

He delivers a lofty, posturing tirade about his love for ordinary people: “I have never been offended by the antics and enthusiasm of tourists; on the contrary, I enjoy their dumb questions, their amazed or worn-out faces, their relentless adventurism. They are a comfort to one who has felt always, outside of the studio or the movie house, that the world was a baffling, glorious, terrifying place.”

Music-video speech; speech used not to say something but to strike an attitude that sabotages itself as soon as struck. Already, Buddy is fabricating himself as he fabricates one of his movies. He is turning into his horror-film hero.

Buddy is on his way to try to raise money from Bess, who runs a flourishing vegetable and tobacco farm. She is an Earth-mother figure--forthright, energetic, real. Except that her reality is excessive; the family dinner she gives, with uncles, cousins, lots of gristly down-home talk, and acres of pork chops and banana pudding, is as overdone as a Deep South movie scene.

Reality and film bleed into each other. When Buddy recalls caressing his daughter, he thinks of himself as a camera scanning her face. He is so de-natured that instead of having sex with Celest, they conduct detailed masturbatory talks over the telephone.

And bit by bit, the awful adventures of D’Nel, Molly and Banty become Buddy’s own life. When Bess left him years before, he had slashed her arm in an attempt to kill her; later, the scar on her arm serves to excite him and draw him back. And as D’Nel begins a climactic orgy of murder--he even kills Banty’s dolphins, the symbols of innocence--Buddy himself turns into a serial killer.

It was not, he tells us at the end, “to press the silly point that the possibility of D’Nel Boyd lives in all of us that I had thrown my life away for a movie, it was simply to make it possible, or to show it possible, that such a one could exist, that such a one--this frank murderer--does breathe, here on earth . . . “

Film and fiction do not exist to distill the reality of life, in other words. Life exists to distill fictions. Buddy’s film is not there to show us how to believe in evil. Buddy becomes evil to make us believe his film.

Paradoxically, “The Lives of the Dead” does provide in the traditional way a vivid statement about contemporary reality: We have sacrificed it to our pop images. But with its sabotaged characters impaled upon Smith’s symbolic exclamation points, it manages to do more or less what Buddy does. It throws away its life to make its fictional statement.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “A Bottle in the Smoke” by A.N. Wilson (Viking).