BOOK REVIEW : Yet Another Paean to Society’s Unloved : HER MONSTER, <i> by Jeff Collignon</i> , Soho Press, $18.95; 230 pages

Here is a curiously timely fantasy novel about how men dehumanize each other, in order to make their own cruelty and barbarism OK. The “Monster” in question in “Her Monster” answers the physical description perfectly. He’s furry, he growls and howls, he drools, he has a hump on his back, and so on.

But--maybe like every “Monster”--he has bought, early on, into his own monstrosity. He, having seen himself in the eyes of his parents, knows himself, by definition, to be hideous, to be unloved.

Eddie is the son of Ted and Annie. The doctor who delivers this hairy child is so taken by his monstrousness that he looks to make his own medical reputation by writing a learned monograph on this unlucky infant. Ted puts a stop to this by murdering the doctor. But then that bad father spends the next decade or so looking at his son with loathing, trying to get up the courage to murder the kid too. Ted comes to a bad end.

Annie and her monster-son move to a rural area where Eddie can live alone in a cabin in the mountains (in something like the precarious safety of Humphrey Bogart in “High Sierra”). Eddie’s mother brings him food, and Eddie--like many “monsters” before him--becomes a writer of fiction, trying to make sense of a world which has spurned him by creating another alternative world where he can call the shots.

He writes science fiction and creates an alter image named Almovar who lives in a post-war Wasteland. That Wasteland looks a lot like our own world now. There are Marauders--big and barbaric--who prey on the Mutants, who are small and sad. Locked safely away from them are the few lucky people who rule everything and get to live in “The Realm.”

Almovar gets kicked out of The Realm because he is too beautiful--he makes the others look bad. Exiled, he travels the length and breadth of The Wasteland tearing into the Marauders and defending the Mutants, trying to make the Wrong World somehow Right.

Yes, of course, this is all a lot like the Lone Ranger, and the Phantom of the Opera, and Tarzan, and Beauty and the Beast, but so what? Stories like this get told so often because they’re so deeply rooted in truth. Eddie, the monster who writes science fiction, is deeply mean to his mother because he can’t believe anyone could love him, ever. To that extent, he really is monstrous.

The Beauty, Katherine, who comes into this story to redeem him, is a bit of a “beast” herself; she’s a rebellious little punker with orange and yellow hair. She’s been kicked out of her own parents’ Realm but she spurns them as well--scandalized that they voted for President Reagan not once but twice .

Katherine strikes up a friendship with Eddie, though for most of the novel he won’t let her see him. When she does finally lay eyes on his furry hulk, she allows matter-of-factly that yes, he’s “ugly” but then takes a second appraising look and reminds him that he’s beautiful too.

Neither this novel or the novel-within-the-novel has a happy ending. How could they? Few, few of us are able to allow full humanity to people who do not mirror us. We can either look at that fact and despair, or, like Katherine eyeing her monster, take a second look and marvel that there are always people willing to see the beauty in others, allow for the difference in others; those who eternally try to fly up and out of the sociological triangle of the persecutors, the persecuted, and those few who live safely within the confines of their Realm, the ones who take refuge in ignorance, and manage to say nothing at all.

Three other things: (1) This is probably a story for readers under 30. Those over that age will have read it, in other forms, too many times before. (2) The author has an unusual last name. Might Mr. Collignon be related in some way to Raymonde Collignon, Ezra Pound’s friend and confidante? (3) Why must so many writers feel themselves so lonely, so disregarded, that they are--again and again--impelled to rewrite this sad parable?

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Cooler By the Lake” by Larry Heinemann (Farrar Straus Giroux).