Little Monsters : A modern novel about a bad child, a good child and a gun : SMITHEREENS, <i> By Susan Taylor Chehak (Doubleday: $21.95; 312 pp.)</i>

I remember several years ago reading Joyce Carol Oates’ story collection “Heat” and thinking: What terribly dark little tales these are! I wondered what it meant that so many of them featured rather evil children, spoiled and scary kids who seemed capable of almost anything. It was the beginning of a realization of how little monsters stories--the idea in fiction and film of the bad child--had begun to surface regularly in some of the most powerful contemporary tales.

From Doris Lessing’s “The Fifth Child,” to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “Poet and Dancer,” and Oates’ brilliant novel “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart,” the theme of dangerous, manipulative (even murderous) children is evident. And it’s an idea that once again gets played out in Susan Taylor Chehak’s fourth novel, “Smithereens.”

The story is set in Linwood, Iowa, in an almost archetypal middle American home, where Calvin and Vivienne Caldwell, second generation owners of a family furniture store, are living with their only child, 16-year-old May. Into the picture comes Frankie Crane, a girl just slightly older than May--an outsider but not exactly a stranger.

Frankie is one of those kids from an under-priviledged background who show up on TV ads, looking for a sponsor (“Only fifteen dollars a month, fifty cents a day--for the cost of a cup of coffee, a child’s life can be saved”)--a motherless orphan, in other words, being raised by an uncle in Appalachia.

Although the Caldwells have never actually met Frankie, they’ve been her sponsor since childhood--an arrangement most satisfying to Vivienne Caldwell who, through some skewed logic, feels that it was by agreeing to sponsor Frankie in the first place that she was finally able to conceive and bear a child of her own.

For years Frankie has been receiving Vivienne’s monthly support checks and sending back dutiful thank you notes for the little presents at holidays. But now, unexpectedly, she shows up at the door of their suburban house in Linwood, a street-wise and cunning girl who claims to be headed across country in her uncle’s borrowed convertible and just stopped by to say hello.

You know that Frankie’s a bad seed from the very beginning of the book, which is narrated in May’s plaintive voice--a voice full of deep sorrow and uncertainties. What you don’t know is just how bad Frankie really is, or exactly what sort of trouble she’s about to bring on once she ingratiates herself into the Caldwell household and settles in for the summer.

What is clear is that May Caldwell, a shy, plain girl has been waiting for somebody like Frankie to come into her life--attractive, bold Frankie, a girl who “didn’t have many scruples and no qualms at all.” You have to say, what a combination. To her, Frankie is both a “gift and a surprise,” and soon--with polished cunning--Frankie has begun to unlock all the latent longings and the unruly passions already present in May’s troubled psyche.

With little monster stories, there is often the need for an opposite--the good child to play foil to some dark other, and May fits the bill perfectly. She’s so insecure and introverted as to feel invisible. But then Frankie comes along. Confident, attractive, gregarious Frankie, and soon they are shop-lifting as a team, cruising the streets of Linwood in Frankie’s convertible, passing a pint of whiskey between them, and popping an assortment of Frankie’s pills. It’s only a short time before they’ve staked out a target for their unruly sexual urges--Paul Gerard, a middle-aged bachelor who works at the family furniture store.

There is a moment, early on in the story, when May discovers a gun in the glove compartment of Frankie’s car, and describes the sensations of taking it out and holding it: “It was so black against my palm that it seemed to create a space there, an emptiness, a hole, as if a part of me had somehow been removed.” It’s a beautiful metaphor for what begins to happen to May as her old personality and former innocence are slowly erased, supplanted by a rampant appetite for all kinds of transgressive pleasure, including above all the sadomasochistic thrills of fear. You know that gun’s going to figure into the story, but it’s to Chehak’s credit that when it does, you’re surprised.

Chehak is a very accomplished storyteller, always in control of her narrative, which moves ahead with grace and speed. But it’s not only the plot that matters to this writer: It’s the telling little details, particularly of teen-age angst and of domestic life, that make the novel rich, as well as the parallel stories of May’s grandparents Meems and Grand, her uncle Brodie who has been left brain-damaged after a failed suicide attempt, and her parents, who are increasingly at odds with each other over whether or not Frankie should be allowed to stay.

In a way it’s perfect that the Caldwells own a furniture store. What better metaphor for family stuffiness and confinement that the image of dinette sets and mirrored coffee tables? Childhood, placed at a tangent to such stultifying ordinariness, appears dangerously exciting. The cataclysmic act of violence that consumes the store at the novel’s end seems also to signal the destruction of the family, and the triumph of a brutal absence of pity on the part of the children. “Smithereens” is a novel fully worthy of the title thriller . It’s hard to put down. It has a kind of dark allure. Nobody’s saved. Nobody’s redeemed in the slightest. There are even a lot of questions that never get answered, like: What ever happens to Frankie? But these omissions appear as strengths, not weaknesses. They give the novel uncompromised power and leave a reader wondering if stories about bad children, as a symptom of modernity, won’t be with us for some time.