Forked Tongues : RATTLESNAKE FARMING, By Kathryn Kramer (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 545 pp.)

Kathryn Kramer belongs to the P.T. Barnum school of storytelling. Taking every opportunity to be sensational, mysterious or just plain disgusting in her second novel, “Rattlesnake Farming,” she aspires to deliver as many carnival-style thrills as its pages will hold.

The book begins as 26-year-old Zoe Carver arrives in a southwestern city (unnamed, though it resembles Santa Fe) to celebrate Christmas with her brother, Nick, a biochemist with a passion for snakes. Nick and his wife Ellie have recently bought a house in a rattlesnake-infested area outside of town so that Nick can fulfill his childhood dream: to raise and study his beloved reptiles. Kramer indulges in many long, loving descriptions of snakes, complete with portentous allusions to the biblical serpent that was the source of evil in the Garden of Eden.

Ignoring all portents, Nick is an enthusiastic host, showing Zoe around the rattlesnake farm and presenting her to his landlord, a wealthy local figure named Stewart Beauregard who exudes hospitality and charisma. Nick also introduces Zoe to some of the town’s more picturesque Christmas customs, including a secret penitential march through the nearby hills that culminates in a mock crucifixion.

Throughout Nick’s tour Zoe is speechless--but not because she is overwhelmed by what she sees. It seems that she suffers from hysterical muteness, brought on during a trauma 10 years earlier when her high-school boyfriend, a brilliant one-legged eccentric named Rob Went, ran over his own father in a car. Since that time, Zoe has refused to communicate with anyone except through sign language.

As the book proceeds, darting back and forth between past and present, it becomes clear that Zoe’s troubles began long before high school--began, in fact, long before she was born. She is descended from the last witch to be burned in America, in 1776, and has inherited from that ancestress a gift of second sight. Her inheritance also includes a closetful of guilty family secrets, including some spectacular cases of incest, suicide, ghostly visitation and insanity. Zoe’s grandmother Charlotte, in only one example, may have been married to her own brother, and firmly believed throughout her married life that she was raising four nonexistent sons.

Small wonder, then, that Zoe, the latest product of this multi-generational Addams Family, is a little warped. During a secular childhood in the Maryland university town of Sparta--a fictional place modeled after Annapolis, Kramer’s hometown--Zoe fantasized longingly about “the fancy, violent things that happened in the Bible.” With her friend Bridget, she wrote notes to her grade-school teachers begging them to “boil them in pots and eat them, hang them naked from clotheslines with giant clothespins, beat them with spatulas. . . . They signed the letters, ‘Your evil slaves’.”

Zoe’s childish masochistic urges continue into her adulthood. She is fatally attracted to unstable, murderous men. First she succumbed to the charms of the vengeful Rob Went, whose father’s death was most likely not an accident. Now she is entranced by Stewart Beauregard, who, along with his charm, displays some vaguely satanic characteristics. Like Rob, Stewart is rumored to be guilty of patricide. His malevolent seduction of Zoe leads to the book’s bizarre, violent climax.

“Rattlesnake Farming” is a very busy novel indeed, and it is hard not to admire the unflagging energy with which the author has mounted her festival of abnormality. But in a production this elaborate there are bound to be flaws. One involves Zoe’s muteness. Because large portions of the book are related from Zoe’s point of view, the reader is more than familiar with her voice--so the effect of her refusal to speak, which ought to be significant, is completely lost.

Another of the book’s problems is Kramer’s fondness for biblical references. It is not enough that all those snakes are around to represent trouble in Paradise. There are the ritual crucifixions in the southwestern hills, and the fact that Zoe’s name means “Eve” in Greek. There are several apparently immaculate conceptions, lots of talk about sacrifice and redemption, and far more allusions to original sin than are surely necessary.

Since the religious imagery does little more than impose a highbrow philosophical tone, it comes off as more than a little phony. One of the 10 commandments of novel writing ought to be that borrowing from the Good Book does not instantly elevate the quality of one’s own book to an equivalent goodness.

The novel’s main shortcoming, however, is that the pageant of pathological oddballs Kramer has staged is not nearly as humorous as it needs to be. What one expects from a roadside attraction is above all else to be amused and entertained. “Rattlesnake Farming” does neither. This carnival proceeds with such plodding seriousness that all its freak-show thrills seem stale. After an investment of nearly 600 pages, an older but wiser reader might recall P.T. Barnum’s old line about the steady proliferation of suckers.