All Saints : SAINTS PRESERVE US! Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You’ll Ever Need, <i> By Sean Kelly and Rosemary Rogers (Random House: $10, paper; 343 pp.)</i>

I’ve never read a piece of hagiography I didn’t like, but, of course, there’s always a first time. “Saints Preserve Us!” tests credulity almost beyond belief. There’s the layman elected pope because a pigeon landed on top of his head. There’s the priest who had his tongue pulled out through the back of his head. There’s the bishop whose blood is supposed to liquefy when it’s placed near his martyred skull . . . and when it doesn’t bubble up, a group of excited women known as “the aunts of Saint Gennaro” have been known to shout “Boil, damn you, boil!”

There’s also a Christian deacon and schoolteacher, described in the book, who decided to remove himself to a cave, never to laugh again. That, I think, is the sort of decision a reader must make: whether to use this softcover book as a pillow whenever one wants to nap in the coolness of the cave, or to come out into the sunlight, unfold a deck chair amid the dunes and just sit back and read this book for its holy hilarity.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the compilers are wrong when they describe Fabius (Jan. 20) as having an avian visitation while the papal electors were casting their ballots; or Andrew Bobola (May 21) as undergoing anything but an excruciating martyrdom; or Januarius (Sept. 19) as surviving martyrdom by burning furnace and roaring lion, only to lose his head to the ax.

And I’m not unaware that saints have been treated in a humorous fashion in the past. Among the more memorable attempts have been “Saint-Watching” by Phyllis McGinley, who celebrated the eccentricities of the men and women who have been canonized; and “Van Rooten’s Book of Improbable Saints,” in which the author described such irresistible creatures as St. Dichotomy of Crete, St. Coleslaw of Lwow, St. Pickip the Czech, and Saints Preserve and Protectus.

And I myself am not without humor when it comes to hagiography. One All Saints’ Day not so long ago, my wife and I gave a party to which the guests had to come dressed as saints. At the end of the evening, the identity of each had to be guessed, and the winner would cart off a four-volume condensation of Butler’s 12-volume “Lives of the Saints.” The winner was a woman wearing a bishop’s miter and carrying a staff from which hung a mobile dangling some dazzling metallic fish: Saint Polycarp! Booby prize went to her husband, who came dressed as the Holy House of Loretto.

What I’m suggesting is that “Saints Preserve Us!” makes the saints sound like a bunch of wild ‘n’ crazy guys. In sound hagiographical volumes these saints have been described, perhaps too soberly, as something like brain surgeons, but in this book they’ve been reduced to something like zany purveyors of decorative bathroom fixtures.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad communion of saints, Rogers and Kelly seem to be saying, and the saints are running around like Jonathan Winters and Milton Berle; like Edie Adams and Ethel Merman. Selective detail on the part of Kelly and Rogers tells only part of the saints’ stories, the amusing part perhaps, but that part is often legend; they’ve left out the more interesting part of the saints’ lives, indeed the real part of their lives: how they managed to live each day without imploding.

Not only that, the saints here are “like enzymes, gravity, or the CIA--invisible, yes, but eternally present, and hard at work on your behalf, whether or not you know it--or like it. A Host of Heavenly Helpers is at this very moment looking out for your and yours.”

Granted, the saints that Rogers and Kelly describe are patron saints, the saints whose feast day corresponds to one’s birthday. Moses the Saracen falls on my birthday, and I hate to think--and indeed refuse to believe--that this 4th-Century monk inhabiting the Syrian-Palestinian desert on the eastern border of the Roman empire is trying to help me live my life. If indeed he is mucking about, I want to get him off my case.

Saints in the Kelly and Rogers collection seem to have been assigned as patrons only because something in their lives corresponds--or doesn’t correspond--to a profession. Joseph of Cupertino (Sept. 18), because he was subject to levitation, is described as patron of astronauts; and Zita (April 27), a 13th-Century domestic servant, is listed as patroness of housemaids and invoked in the search of lost keys. But Onuphrius (June 12), whose nakedness was covered for some 60 years only by his long hair and beard, has become patron of weavers?

Now I must admit that Rogers and Kelly, if one is to put any credence at all in their bibliography, have consulted all the best books. But I do think that they’ve reserved the right, open to the authors and compilers of lives of saints begun in previous centuries, to confabulate with a little fancy and fable from their own century . . . all in the interest of good communication.

When “Saints Preserve Us!” has been read from cover to cover, and whether one has liked it or not, one may conclude that it’s a sort of pop hagiography in which the saints are goofballs just like the rest of us, forked and farting creatures who are fumbling their way along the potholed road toward the heavenly Jerusalem.

Which may be another way of saying that if this book means anything--and I’m not quite sure it does--it surely makes a brief, in an MTV, late-night-talk-show, “Saturday Night Live” sort of way--that there is good and evil in the world, that men and women should strive toward the good and that, despite the hellishness of life, there just may be a reward in some sort of afterlife.

Margaret the Barefooted, Pelagia the Penitent, Christina the Astonishing--saints all--pray for us!