BOOK REVIEW: NOVEL : Horrific Enlargement of Small, Ugly Truths : BILLY <i> by Albert French</i> , Viking, $20, 214 pages

“Billy” is a horror set to music--a gritty, sawing fiddle tune that scrapes away our defenses.

During most of Albert French’s novel about the legal lynching of a 10-year-old black boy in the Deep South in the 1930s, our attention knots around the questions: What is happening and what will happen to the child?

In the final pages, believing and disbelieving, we wonder: What is happening and what will happen to us?

French’s first novel has its share of awkwardness in the writing. Its poetic diction sometimes aspires to more than it achieves, and can entangle the narrative and the characters.

But “Billy’s” strength is not strictly as a novel. In all but formal respects--and these are initially troublesome--it lives as theater. It is a folk opera which, like most stage works, takes a while to shift us from our reality to the heightened conventions of stage reality. Once there, though, it moves with unfaltering pace to its shattering climax.

Billy is the hot-tempered illegitimate child of Cinder, herself the illegitimate daughter of a black mother and a white farm boy. They live in the Patch, the dusty black section of Banes, a cotton-country county seat.

Billy and Gumpy, his older sidekick, wander the woods and swamplands, skirt big kinds of trouble and get into little kinds.

One day, they swim in a pond near the farm of the Paskos, a red-headed, clannish white family. Lori Pasko, a steamy, rebellious 15-year-old, and her own sidekick, Jenny, catch them there and beat them up. When Billy breaks free she goes for him again; he pulls out a little pocket knife and stabs her in a breast. The knife-point freakishly nicks her aorta and she bleeds to death.

Billy and Gumpy are arrested and Billy is charged with murder, despite the efforts of his court-appointed lawyer to get the charge reduced. He is tried, convicted and executed in an electric chair whose straps have to be specially fitted to hold his 10-year-old body.

“Billy” was inspired, the author told an interviewer, by a documentary about the Mississippi execution of a black minor in the 1930s. To make his fictional Billy only 10 is a much longer stretch, of course, yet French manages to achieve an enlargement of the truth, not a distortion.

Evoking the fears and angry self-righteousness of a small Southern town, and a social and legal system that treated the blacks as a different and inferior species--you don’t kick a dog, perhaps, but you might drown a dog, or even a puppy, if you feel he’s vicious or dangerous--he sets up a sufficient fictional or, at least, allegorical plausibility.

The only gap, even allowing for fiction, is that word would have gotten out. The Associated Press, after all, had a bureau in Jackson. There would have been a national scandal and statewide, if not local, controversy.

There are many well-worn roles in “Billy”: the sensual, self-willed Cinder who dreams that Billy’s father will come back from Chicago in a big car and rescue them both. Her Aunt Kate who follows her around preaching caution and patience.

There is Shorty, a Stepin Fetchit type who does errands for the white folk and breaks down in shock when those same whites turn into a mob and beat him up.

There is the newspaper editor, anxious for a scoop but submissive to the town’s mores, and his horrible blond secretary who wants to see the black boy burn.

There is the chorus of old men who sit on a porch downtown and call for lynchings. There is the patrician defense lawyer, well-meaning but ineffective.

Others are more complicated. The sheriff is big, mean and relentless. Yet he can be gentle, even tactful, questioning Billy. French is not suggesting a kind heart; he is suggesting that in a monstrous system it is not necessary to be a monster to do monstrous things.

More than that, he has the artistic skill to go beyond ideas, to make the sheriff something of a mystery, to convey the heat and growing tension on the white side of town and the immeasurably greater tension in The Patch, waiting for the white mob. Thanks to the sheriff’s ferocity, it does limited damage.

In the musically heightened nightmare--some of the dialogue is all but sung--Billy is a tiny burning ember. He is a miniature swaggerer at the start; the girl he killed was also a child, after all, though nasty and coldly in command of the power of whiteness.

But Billy weeps and weeps--in jail and on Death Row’s foul Nighttown. He cannot believe his mother won’t come for him; he screams in the electric chair. We hear the scream turn to a sizzle. He can’t believe what is happening to him. And it happens. And we can’t believe it either and French gets us to believe it.