Pecs Vobiscum : BODY <i> By Harry Crews (Poseidon Press: $18.95; 240 pp.; 0-671-69576-2) </i>

You might have thought that rock ‘n’ roll groups had run out of appellations with the The, a British ensemble that surfaced in the mid-1980s. Apparently not, as at least one group of musicians has adopted the name of--horrors!--a novelist: Harry Crews.

The music itself is virtually unlistenable: raving recitations from the writer’s books by performance artist Lydia Lunch, punctuated by bashing cymbals, crunching guitars and curses aimed at the audience. But the choice of namesake and source material is entirely appropriate.

With 11 novels written (over 22 years) with the contained ferocity that marks the best of rock ‘n’ roll, Crews, 55, has sculpted many Passion Plays in which colorfully grotesque characters struggle to overcome spiritual and physical deficiencies, find love and avoid anonymous futures filled with despair and boredom.

In “Car,” a young idealist literally eats a 1971 Ford Maverick as a form of Communion, to express his devotion to the American automobile and all it represents; “The Gospel Singer” offers a tortured tent-shop evangelist whose too-beautiful singing voice promises salvation to vicious redneck hordes; and in “The Knockout Artist,” a failed prizefighter with a glass jaw knocks himself out to amuse decadent crowds hungry for a cheap thrill.

In “Body,” muscular freaks starve themselves to the point of hysteria for the chance to achieve perfection and excel in a world obsessed with gluttonous consumption.

Crews, raised in poverty in rural Georgia and now a fiction teacher at the University of Florida, is a delightful storyteller in the Southern Gothic tradition, with a keen ear for exotic dialogue and a raptorial eye for abnormal behavior. His writings--both fictional and journalistic--have examined the fanatical extremes in such activities as martial arts, dog and cock fights, boxing, evangelism, falconry, rattlesnake hunting and now, in his latest novel, body building.

All of these tales employ comedy to camouflage the strong underlying currents of menace, rage and desperation among the rustic characters. “Body,” labeled a tragicomedy, is a bit more tender than previous Crews novels, but all of the trademark elements are there in spades--and it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

Imagine the documentaries “Pumping Iron” and “Pumping Iron II: The Women” re-created by the cast of “Hee Haw” or “Twin Peaks,” and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what transpires in “Body.”

The setting is a convention hotel in south Florida where the international Mr. and Ms. Cosmos body-building competition is being staged: “In the pool, in chaise lounges, were enormously muscled men, their bodies veined and hairless--and women without body fat, their skin diaphanous, their movements languid and deliberate, abdominal walls ridged with rows of muscle so sharply defined as to seem unreal, the mad imaginings of a mad artist.”

Inside, Shereel Dupont, formerly Dorothy Turnipseed of Waycross, Ga., is preparing to do battle with Marvella Washington (“brutally and beautifully monstrous in size”), of Detroit’s Black Magic Gymnasium, in a series of pose-downs. “Emporium of Pain” owner Russell (Muscle) Morgan and Wallace (The Wall) Wilson are their single-minded trainers, for whom a championship would mean life itself.

The fun begins when, unannounced and unexpected, the Turnipseed clan (Alphonse, Ernestine, Earline, Motor and Turner, plus Shereel’s onetime fiance “Nail Head” Barnes) and the Washington siblings (Jabella, Vanella, Shavella and Starvella) arrive at the hotel to cheer on their respective kin. What they actually end up doing is hilariously tossing the pageant up for grabs and unnerving nearly everyone.

Still, Shereel understands her purpose here and pretty much represents all of Crews’ protagonists in her desire to be “special”: “She didn’t exactly know why she left, but she had known since she was a little girl that she didn’t want to live out her life in Waycross. She knew she didn’t want to be just another Turnipseed in south Georgia.”

This echoes the imperative desire expressed in Crews’ beautifully written memoirs, “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” to escape his native Bacon County, Ga., and the mutual need to return much later, if only in his books, to the type of people who influenced him as a youth.

The fact that “Body” ends tragically will come as no surprise to regular readers of Crews. Still, it is mostly uproarious, and even the most outrageous encounters are drawn with love and compassion. It stands with his best works.