Fear of Fantasy : Why wait for the Serious Literature Police to bless your fiction? Enjoy it! : FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS, <i> By Jonathan Carroll (Doubleday: $22; 212 pp.)</i>

I tend to like prose at its most crystalline--Nabokov, say, Colette, Calvino. What am I doing, then, loving the harum-scarum roller coaster of high imagination and lowdown manipulation built by Jonathan Carroll? He is not always in control of his materials, his novels of the supernatural have well-worn “Twilight Zone” elements. And yet I read them with a panicky thrill, too excited to keep reading, too excited to stop.

His books treat otherworldly themes, but you enter willingly because his characters remind you of your best, most creative friends from college--they have somehow miraculously made it, become the actors, poets, scientists or journalists that you hoped they would be. Even at his scariest, Carroll treats his characters with a generosity and tenderness that makes you want to protect them.

“From the Teeth of Angels” offers its enormously appealing people the opportunity to talk to Death, to ask it questions, to reason with it. We would all like a word or two with Death, we need to revenge ourselves on it. Carroll’s audacity is high-wire and brave; I finished the book with a crazy feeling of revelation. I needed debriefing, reorientation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggests you should take precautions against a man who has witnessed powerful visions:

...All should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Every time I finish one of Jonathan Carroll’s books (there are eight of them), I try to detach myself from the experience. His best books rearrange me, and as I make my way back to daily consciousness I start to rationalize and criticize. Until the realization comes: The pleasure and vertigo of Carroll’s writing induces uncomfortable, childish feelings. I want to protect myself from the scary, silly thrills in his books, and I use the imperial yardstick of Serious Literature to distance myself from pleasure.

I think this is the worst thing criticism can do, overlook the ecstasy of reading and back away from intensity. Great readers are connoisseurs of pleasure. If you have loved George Macdonald’s “The Princess and Curdie,” or the Oz books, or even “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” you might want to deepen or elaborate their mysteries rather than dismiss them. Jonathan Carroll’s fiction seduces you into creepy places, and it flabbergasts you and leaves you there feeling stupid and holding an empty bag. That is his gift--why should the solemn part of you that hates to be afraid and hates to be fooled win in the end? You stay true to the original delirium, and you embrace Jonathan Carroll.

Great reading experiences frequently come from the unsettling confusion of high seriousness and low cunning. When Edgar Allan Poe self-righteously declared that his Gothic horrors were from the Soul and not imported from Germany, he was only telling a half-truth. Melville, too, investigating “the blackness ten times black,” was not above low jokes and burlesque turns. Jonathan Carroll’s mixture of metaphysics and television is his best invention--you think you’re on the high road to Revealed Truth, and suddenly it’s time for a soul-abrading commercial.

Though Carroll’s stories have been appearing in places like Weird Tales, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Omni, you mustn’t wince, but, rather, remember that Jorge Luis Borges’ first publication in America, the story “Death and the Compass,” appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Some of our best and weirdest writers make their way to us through the thickets of science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy. Salman Rushdie’s first novel “Grimus” was considered science fiction; much of early Angela Carter was taken to be sword and sorcery stuff. J. G. Ballard lived for years between lurid lunar apocalypse covers, and Alisdair Gray, that bizarre Scot, scuttles from publisher to publisher while he awaits classification.

The category question is a real stickler. Despite the popularity of South American magic realism, and the delights of Canadian Gothic (Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood), educated readers are afraid of fantasy. They wait until it has been dubbed Literature by the experts, by which time a good part of the original thrill of discovery has been eroded. A book that disturbs and pushes buttons--take, for instance, Geoff Ryman’s “Was”--waits for discovery while safer, more organized, manicured books find their ways onto the front covers of the book reviews. For those who cannot wait to find themselves lost in the unknown, look for Wendy Walker’s “The Sea-Rabbit and Other Stories,” any of Rikki Ducornet’s novels or Tom LaFarge’s “The Crimson Bears.” But start with Jonathan Carroll.

“From the Teeth of Angels” begins with a letter from a man named Jesse who tells about someone he has met who has sinister dreams. In the dreams, a dead friend appears, offering to answer questions about death. The difficulty is that the answers must be understood. If the dreamer awakens in the morning with wounds and scars, he has been punished, he has not understood the answers, and he must ask better questions in the next night’s dreams.

Death appears and reappears in unpredictable disguises; he changes from a figure in a travel agent’s nightmare to a living lover of a reclusive movie star. Death meets the host of a popular children’s show, a Pee-wee Herman type, and they get along well: They like each other’s jokes. Death is capable of surrealism, and romance; he can bring you your mother’s lost diaries or show you the birth and death of your cells.

Because he is so plasmatic, Death shifts the narrative’s possibilities almost as quickly as the changes of perspective in a John Ashbery poem. The reader feels the effects of the supernatural give way to the bombardments and overload that are the hallmarks of postmodern fiction. In England and Germany, where Carroll is popular, his kind of writing has been named “hyperfiction.”

The blur of the popular and the postmodern in Jonathan Carroll’s work may be traced to his background. He is the son of a screenwriter (Sidney Carroll, who wrote the screenplay for “The Hustler”) and a writer and performer of musical comedies (June Carroll, who starred in “New Faces of 1952” and wrote the lyrics for the hit “Love Is a Simple Thing”). His half brother, Steve Reich, is a well-known avant-garde composer. There is an obvious tug-o’-war in Jonathan Carroll’s work between the crowd-pleasing and the private, the commercial and the mystical, with the result that you never know where you stand, as if the toy makers who design Masters of the Universe had taken to mass-marketing Joseph Cornell boxes.

The three books of Carroll’s that I particularly recommend are his first, “The Land of Laughs,” his third, “Bones of the Moon,” and this most recent, “From the Teeth of Angels.” The others vary in their quality from the almost great (“Sleeping in Flame”) to the too theoretical (“A Child Across the Sky”). Once you’re hooked, though, you have to read all of them because characters and incidents recur--as in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy--and these characters are as delightful as any I’ve found since the early Truman Capote (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”) or J. D. Salinger (the Glass family).

It’s the blatant commercialism of Carroll’s imagination that makes these novels new and different. Without it, they might be quaint and forlorn, but because of his naked desire to amaze, to take you on a fast, bumpy ride, the books are wild and disturbing. Carroll loves film director Tim Burton (“Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” “Beetlejuice,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman”), but he also loves the highly intellectual Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje, James Salter and John Ashbery. He’s a movie-generation virtuoso with the literary sensibility of a metaphysical eccentric.