Scared to Death? : A fiction based on the life of a Hollywood filmmaker : FATHER OF FRANKENSTEIN, <i> By Christopher Bram (Dutton: $19.95; 276 pp.)</i>

Don’t be fooled by the somewhat lurid, lumbering title of Christopher Bram’s fifth novel. “Father of Frankenstein” is actually a subtle, psychologically shrewd portrait of an artist’s last days, highlighted by masterful touches of the most entertaining wit and suspense. The title’s father refers to filmmaker James Whale, the director not only of “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein,” but also of the little-known anti-war film “Journey’s End” and the superb 1936 adaptation of “Show Boat.”

Using the basic facts of Whale’s life, Christopher Bram speculates about the events leading up to Whale’s death in 1957, when the retired director was found floating in the swimming pool of his Santa Monica Canyon house. This melding of fact with fiction has its troubling aspects and, in the hands of a less accomplished writer, could seem to exploit the suffering of a minor celebrity who valued his privacy. But even though Bram does not hold back in depicting the less savory and deluded aspects of his fictionalized James Whale, what emerges is an entirely unsentimental, hard-won respect for what the man was able to accomplish against considerable odds in his professional life.

With a bracing cynicism that suggests a hidden vein of courage and integrity, Bram’s Whale confronts his doctor in a chilling, clinical scene where Whale probes for the truth about his condition following a stroke. Here a scientific analysis of a stroke’s effects is presented with care so that the pay-off, an almost philosophical reflection on pain, can resonate throughout the novel. “How could pain not be real? Whale is stunned by the idea, and fascinated. . . . As if pain were just an idea, and like all ideas could be either believed or disbelieved.”

The wavering line between real and unreal--confusing enough for anyone working in Hollywood, much less for a stroke victim--becomes embodied in the drama when the muscular ex-Marine who has been mowing Whale’s yard agrees to let the elderly Whale sketch him. Clayton Boone, acknowledged by Bram as a wholly imaginary character, seems at first an updated, homophobic version of Boris Karloff’s Monster. Whale “had to be a fairy,” Clay surmises, “only with Englishmen you can’t be sure where English leaves off and fairy begins. . . . He knows homosexuals only by their reputation, the same way he knows Communists and flying saucers.”

But Bram is always one step ahead of the reader. With nimble twists and turns of plot he gradually transforms Clay into a complex, three-dimensional character who belies Whale’s own simplistic version of him. Clay is eager to hear more of the memories that, ever since the stroke, have become so painfully vivid for Whale. Indeed, past and present often become indistinguishable, which provides Bram with an opportunity to fill us in on Hollywood lore.

During the filming of “The Bride of Frankenstein,” for instance, Elsa Lanchester makes her first appearance on the set with her electrocuted hairdo. “My God,” the actor Ernest Thesiger comments. “Is the audience to presume that Colin and I have done her hair? I thought we were mad scientists. Not hairdressers.”

Whale, of course, is aware that horror movies are, essentially, “a beautiful joke.” (This attitude might have made the equally bizarre Mary Shelley novel somewhat less pretentious, though we should keep in mind that she herself considered “Frankenstein” to be “the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart.”) Bram’s James Whale is not the only character to sense a curious relation between horror and comedy. Clay himself has some dim notion of this when he recalls seeing Whale’s classic films as a child: “Back before alcohol and sex, getting scared at the movies had been the keenest physical pleasure, the most thrilling confusion the human body could experience.”

The punch line of all horror movies, no matter how grim the ending, is that the audience remains safe. And this security lets us laugh at our own terror, subduing it with mockery. In real life our monsters tend to be somewhat more presentable than Karloff’s, as Whale discovers at a garden party for English and Hollywood royalty. How Bram can take such a familiar situation--the bitterness of a has-been in a setting where today’s success means everything--and describe it so freshly and vividly betrays the hand of a truly brilliant novelist. One deft touch after another, barely noticeable, redeems the party for the careful reader and prepares for the moment when the confused, beleaguered Whale can finally release the monster he himself has created.