BOOK REVIEW : A Bizarre Wild West Without Any Heroes : NEVER DIE <i> by Barry Hannah</i> ; Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence $19.95, 152 pages

“Never Die” is Barry Hannah’s ninth novel, and in it he perfects what might be called his Southern deadpan chaos.

Reading “Never Die” is like listening to jazz riffs: there are some brilliant moments, exciting and full of a puling energy. But the riffs become the piece--like a series of wild notes rimming the edges of a recognizable melody but never actually blending into it.

Hannah’s fiction is known for its extremes, and his new novel is a further excursion into the bizarre. “Never Die” is the story (loosely speaking) of dwarfs, whores, incest, corruption, power, decapitation and addiction. A nasty little tale, to be sure.

The time is 1910. A monomaniac named Judge Nitburg, founder of the town of Nitburg, Tex., is waging war against Fernando Mure, a gunfighter with a university education who returns to Nitburg, where his good-hearted prostitute, Stella, awaits him. He is intent on burning his corrupt hometown to the ground.

It’s all rather like an old rerun of “Gunsmoke’ where everyone’s on acid (Miss Kitty as a crack addict, Doc as a closet homosexual, and Chester as an evil midget psychopath). Nitburg’s minister, the Rev. McCorkindale, is growing paler, uglier and hairier by the day for no apparent reason, and there’s the matter of his perpetual five-year unrequited erection. Judge Nitburg engages in kissing with his daughter, Nandina, “right down to the teeth,” while his underling, Doc Fingo, keeps the townspeople happy by passing out morphine and opium.

“This is a foul town in all regards,” the Rev. McCorkindale notes. An “animal thing” is happening in Nitburg. The astute reader will recognize these observations for what they are--huge and hunkering understatements.

Edwin Smoot, a menacing Nitburg dwarf, is hired by Judge Nitburg to immobilize Fernando, and he does so by smashing Fernando’s knees. While recuperating, Fernando, thanks to Doc Fingo, gets hooked on morphine and dwells in drug-induced stupor, squatting in a dismal shack at the edge of town with his tubercular lover, Stella, who seems fairly close to death, while waiting for his chance to torch the town.

Enter Luther Nix, a nasty piece of work ( another nasty piece of work, I should say) and consummate killer who has been hired to get rid of Fernando. He shows up in Nitburg with a band of ruthless goons. What ensues is a riot of carnage and confrontation--gunfight at Nitburg, Sam Peckinpah-style, with more than a touch of “Twin Peaks” weirdness.

Toward the end of this novel, at about the fifth or sixth decapitation, a reader might begin to wonder: What is Hannah up to? Is this the first postmodern Western? One struggles to formulate meaning from all this.

“Never Die” seems at least in part a parody of the kind of Western that has fed our notions of what makes us so uniquely American--the lawless frontier in need of moral taming, the right for a man to bear arms, and to not just settle in a place but name the whole damned town after himself.

We’re talking American Gothic--a story of big-style, consolidated power within a culture consumed by drugs and violence. Hannah gives us a look at the frontier as a grotesque petri dish for growing aberrant organisms. “We have a land here, really, where no heroes are required,” says Judge Nitburg. No heroes, just lust, guns, and drugs.

Overlaying this parody of an old Western is a very contemporary consciousness. Herein lies one of the problems. The publisher of “Never Die” has promoted this book as a novel featuring “gays, money, the West, the South, and . . . most of modern America.”

One expects hyperbole on dust jackets, but it’s really stretching it to suggest that a barely significant bunch of lesbian opium addicts can in any sense represent “gay” characters. What era are we in? The book smudges the line, I suspect, intentionally.

In the end, one simply accepts Hannah’s fiction for what it is ribald, raucous, often brilliant and sometimes downright boring.

His work is a developed taste, maybe, or perhaps it comes closer to the cheapest line in the book, delivered by the ruthless Nix as he watches a lesbian opium addict dancing around a man she’s just shot in the ear and set on fire: “You don’t argue with art, man.”

Next: Carolyn See reviews “A Quick Kiss of Redemption,” stories by David Means (William Morrow).