Folks Who Go Bump in the Night : NIGHT PEOPLE, <i> By Barry Gifford (Grove Weidenfeld: $17.95; 192 pp.)</i>

Barry Gifford’s not so tough. The author or editor of more than 30 books, the best known of which is “Wild at Heart,” Gifford has been skirting around the edge of “major” status for years with virtually no help from fashionable academic circles.

Now, given an unexpected boost into near-best-sellerdom by David Lynch’s misguided film version of “Wild at Heart,” Gifford is finally starting to acquire a rep, and it’s the wrong one. This is partially Gifford’s fault: As an editor for Black Lizard Press, Gifford was almost solely responsible for reviving the lurid romans noirs of Jim Thompson and David Goodis as well as the more sophisticated thrillers of Charles Willeford, a revival that spilled over into films. Which brings us to another area of interest for Gifford: His collection of essays on his favorite thrillers and B-movies, “Devil Thumbs a Ride,” has also helped foster the image of Gifford as some kind of Elmore Leonard for those raised on Jack Kerouac (still another of Gifford’s interests, by the way: Along with Laurence Lee, he co-wrote “Jack’s Book,” an oral biography that’s essential reading for Kerouac fans).

But leaving Gifford’s tastes as an editor aside, his connections to the tough-guy school are tenuous at best. Gifford’s “Post Tropique” is described as a thriller mostly by those who haven’t read it; the short novel, about a man who unwisely gets involved in a smuggling scheme and whose reflex is to emulate characters in thriller novels, is what was referred to a few years back as a “deconstruction” of the genre. Gifford has tackled the subject of gangsters twice, once in fiction (“An Unfortunate Woman,” about a woman married to a Chicago wiseguy) and in the oddly intriguing “A Good Man to Know,” published last year and now listed as fiction, though the author’s claim to have written a kind of fictional memoir might be closer to the truth. Both books are semi-autobiographical, since Gifford’s father was a small-time Chicago hood, but neither book has so much as a whiff of melodrama.

“Night People” sounds like the title of one of Gifford’s beloved B-thrillers, but the stories in it are much too unsettling to be herded into the category of pulp. The people in “Night People,” like those in “Wild at Heart” and Gifford’s other Sailor and Lula stories, seem like the kinds of people you got glimpses of once, briefly, when you were stuck in that bus station, or when the subway train you were on stalled and let you off in a part of town you’d never seen before. Or when your tire blew and left you stranded in a border town. Gifford writes about the kinds of people about whom you ask, “Where do they go during the day?” And the answer is that those are the kinds of people who always seem to show up at night because they carry their own private night with them.

“Night People” is populated by Paisley Marie, Malo Suerte, Twya Puhl, Drifton Fark, Beatifica Brown, DeSoto Sturgis, Dogstyle Lou, Willie (Call Me Israel) Slocumb, and my own personal favorite, Bowlegs Linda, the cupcake girl. The temptation is to say that Gifford has a cartoonist’s knack for names--and if I did say that, I’d mean it as a compliment--but Gifford’s characters’ names are more than just colorful. They’re brilliantly evocative bits of colorful sounds that crystallize the characters and flash images of them in your mind.

Easy Earl Blakey, for instance. Say the name and it’s easy to conjure up images of him cruising New Orleans on a Saturday night in his 1978 Mercury Monarch “with all four windows down, his left arm hanging out to catch a breeze and his right hand on the steering wheel.” Earl has no idea how, a couple of hours later, he has been deposited back in his car with a .38 on the seat beside him, a bullet wound in his cheek and two cops left shot in a night spot. Or Marble Lesson, age 14, of Bayou Goula, La., the only survivor of a lightning-struck bus (a bus in which Easy Earl Blakey was fleeing from the law). “I don’t know why I was spared, except perhaps the Lord has something special planned for me to accomplish in life.”

I don’t know about life or the Lord, but Gifford spares her to tell her own story--the last in the book, which sees Marble saving her father in Alabama by killing a Gulf drug smuggler he was about to go to work for. But that may not be her only mission in life because “More are out there Jesus and I am ready for them.” Don’t be surprised to see Marble’s story continued in future Gifford fictions.

Gifford manages to straddle the forces of literary categories and to make technique serve the interests of content. “Night People” might be described as “road” fiction--that’s American for “picturesque”--but it sits squarely in the middle of the road between the novel and the short story. Like Evan Connell’s “Bridges” novels, “Night People” is a series of connected stories that form a story without the creaking framework of a plot; the difference is that Gifford’s stories (or novellas, really) use characters from each preceding episode as a means of making connections and keeping the story moving down the road. By the end of the book, the reader has traversed the underbelly of the South and seen the events as a panorama in a way that each character, with his or her limited vision, couldn’t. The characters see the extraordinary events occurring around them as coincidence; we’re permitted to see it all as fate.

If I haven’t said anything about Gifford’s trademark dialogue, it’s because I don’t think he should be lumped together with second-rate genre writers like George V. Higgins who are praised endlessly for their “ear.” Gifford’s people don’t sound like real people. They talk in hilariously convoluted sentences that sound as if someone had pushed the “play” button on their subconscious. Here’s Breezy Pemberton, “this year’s Miss Egypt City,” making her acceptance speech:

“I’m honored to have won but equally entirely horrified that my beauty might have caused the death of such a prominent citizen as Judge Lamar. I want the Lamar family to know that it never was any intention of my own to upset the Judge by wearin’ a zebra two-piece. . . . I am sixteen-and-one-half years old and Judge Lamar was much, much older, I know, and seein’ a young lady, namely me, like that caused a shock to his tired-out system he was no longer capable of standin’, and it’s too bad. I’m sorry for the Lamars that is left, but I’m also thrilled to’ve won the title of Miss Egypt City on my first try, and I just want to say I’m dedicatin’ my reign to the mem’ry of the dead judge. Thank you all, you’re very sweet.”

If you can understand that Ms. Pemberton is entirely sincere about everything she has said there--if you can see that she’s incapable of telling an untruth because that speech came from the collective unconscious of her sex, class, region and time, as well as from her heart--then you’re on Barry Gifford’s wavelength and ready to go on the road with “Night People.” Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.