Don’t Dream of Going to Manderley Again : MRS. DE WINTER, <i> By Susan Hill (William Morrow; $20; 350 pp.)</i>

And it had seemed like such a good idea.

This reviewer, of all reviewers, is not about to cast stones at other writers of sequels; and Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” of all novels, seemed ripe to have its sequel written. The gorgeously overblown tale of Maxim De Winter, brooding English landowner; his first wife, Rebecca, beautiful, charming, and rotten to the core; and her dowdy (but implicitly sterling of character) unnamed successor, would seem to hold out to its lucky sequellist a veritable cornucopia of opportunities. You could be as funny, or as solemn, as you chose. You could be revisionist, deconstructionist, or parodic; you could discuss sin, or female anger, or the English class system; you could write a love story, or a thriller, a social satire, or a feminist polemic. The scope, it seemed, would be limitless.

Which is why “Mrs. De Winter” by the usually excellent English novelist Susan Hill, comes as such a disappointment. Hill has chosen, quite inexplicably, to ignore any of the myriad possible twists on the original book and play it completely straight, subjecting the unfortunate reader to 349 pages of du Maurieresque overwriting in the unrelieved, and frankly appalling, company of the second Mr. and Mrs. De Winter, now returned to England 12 years after the burning of Manderley.

Maxim De Winter and his second wife (does anyone really care what her first name is?) must rank as two of the most unpleasant characters ever to be cast as romantic hero and heroine. She is relentlessly whiny and dull; he is a moody boor on a good day, and on a bad, a wife murderer. Neither has improved in the intervening years. He spends much of the new book rigid with the terror that someone in England will Recognize Him From The Past; it has apparently not occurred to him that for just a couple of the years between 1938 and 1950, the people of England--and of most of the Western world--had had something other on their minds than society scandals. She divides her energy between informing us triumphantly that she still dresses as badly as she ever did, and acting as a buffer between Maxim and the vulgar hordes he is so convinced are striving to engage him in conversation: she might save herself some trouble, since any sane person, faced with Maxim De Winter, would move quite hastily to another part of the room.

Yes, yes, but what happens to these people? Well, that--despite a number of drumroll announcements throughout the text that “the blow had not yet fallen,” or “the nightmare had not yet truly begun”--is a good question. There’s quite a lot of tight-lipped wandering between parts of the British Isles which Hold No Memories and various good European hotels (Manderley apparently had excellent fire insurance coverage). Every so often, Mrs. De Winter looks at her husband, thinks, “That man killed his wife,” and then promptly returns to more pressing ruminations. There is what can most kindly be called an unusual sub-plot involving whether or not the De Winters will or can have children that sends the reader flicking a little anxiously to the dust jacket to check that, yes, the author has indeed borne two daughters, and does presumably know the workings of the human body. By the time, well into the second half of the book, Rebecca’s evil cousin and the fanatical Mrs. Danvers come into the action, with a most confusing and lazily conceived mishmash of blackmail plots and psychological intimidation, you’re so irritated by the whole tiresome business that you simply want to box everyone’s ears and send them all upstairs to the schoolroom until they can come up with a decent storyline.

And yet, in Susan Hill’s own books, her writing is both taut and lively; and there is a marvelous sequel--sadly still waiting--to be written to the original “Rebecca.”

We are told that Hill was especially commissioned to write this work by the Du Maurier estate; and that, too, must have seemed like a good idea at the time. It is unfortunate that this particular marriage of author and material proved, in the end, no more successful than that of the first Mr. and Mrs. De Winter.