BOOK REVIEW : All About Evil--and Anger Within : MEETING EVIL, <i> by Thomas Berger,</i> Little, Brown, $19.95; 256 pages

“Meeting Evil” is a neat, clipped thriller that might better have been named “Meeting Someone Truly Nuts.” Little does family man John Felton know that when he opens the front door of his jerry-built house on an ordinary Monday morning--John works weekends, being a real estate broker, and stays home on Mondays to give Joanie, his frumpy wife, some time away from the kids--that he’s opening the door to “Evil.”

Richie, who is skinny and wears a baseball cap, reports that his car has stalled. He’s run out of gas, and will John please give his car a shove over the next rise, so that he can get the car to the closest gas station? In giving Richie the required, polite push, John gets his shirt caught in the car door and is literally pulled into a sort of looking-glass universe; that world where Bad Disposition reigns supreme, the world that we are afraid of if it is after us (that crazed man in a pickup truck behind you making obscene gestures, his face contorted like a rabid gorilla’s) but a world that all of us also marginally inhabit some of the time. (When the driver in front of us won’t turn off the left-turn signal, the urge to kill and be done with it can be terribly, terribly strong.)

John Felton is not desperately bright. Richie commits murder and mayhem right under his nose--slashing the throat of a gas station attendant when she won’t take his credit card, bashing a woman who won’t call a cab at a taxi stand. But even though another woman who has been inadvertently drawn into this contretemps is terrified of Richie, dull family man John Felton finds himself docilely going along on what turns out to be a crime jamboree, running over police officers, terrifying old ladies in their shabby homes, attempting arson and so on.

And it’s not even noon yet! Every time John phones his wife to try and fill her in on what’s happened, she blabs on in a standard, discontented way about how she never gets to have this one day off from the kids. Every time John tries to explain to a cop that he really never did anything, the cop, in essence, yawns, oh, yeah, sure and slaps the cuffs on him. Every time John stops by a house to make an honest phone call, the citizen at home, be he child or man, pulls a gun on poor old John. Besides that, passing strangers begin to make snide, uncalled-for remarks about John’s weight problem, or his sagging career, or his tacky little house, or his dumpy little wife, or his lack of character and direction in general.

In fact, even though Richie has escaped just this morning from the local mental hospital, he seems to be the only one who makes any sense or has any fun. He gleefully slits throats, and two seconds later delivers a boring homily about the degeneration of society; how children aren’t well brought up anymore; how junk food is bad for the system. After he burns up a passing stranger in a motel, just to keep his hand in, he delivers an eloquent ethical lecture as to why he has performed this ignominious act.

Of course the plot is preposterous from Page 1. (But it is tremendously engaging.) There is not a moment when dull John Felton couldn’t put a stop to this spontaneous crime spree. And when the nut case and the wife get together--as you know they must--there is not a moment when John couldn’t, at least, clue in his wife as to the real nature of their guest.

But the plot, as such, is superfluous ornamentation here. The real subject of this novel is anger, that blazing anger that threatens to ignite all of us from time to time, and the pudding-headed stupidity that sets the anger in motion. These are the symbiotic phenomena that make up this thoughtful fictional essay.

Yes, Richie is “crazy,” totally nuts. But don’t most of us in our willful blindness to what’s going on around us contribute to that communal, generalized rage, which for lack of a better word, we sloppily define as “evil”?