FICTION

ZOD WALLOP by William Browning Spencer (St. Martin’s Press: $21.95; 278 pp.). The bestseller lists don’t lie. Most people like to know what they’re reading before they read it. Hence the appeal of Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy, John Grisham. The more adventurous, though, might give William Browning Spencer a try. “Zod Wallop” is that rarity: A novel that surprises us on every page and hurries us toward an unguessable destination. The title actually refers to three novels, telescoped inside one another like Chinese boxes: the black comedy we hold in our hands, a best-selling children’s book written by Harry Gainsborough and a despairing, corrosive first draft of Gainsborough’s book that he wrote in a mental institution after his daughter’s death. Because an experimental drug linked Gainsborough telepathically with several other patients, the draft contains portraits of them all. After his release, they escape and follow him to live out the so-called fantasy of “Zod Wallop” III in the so-called reality of “Zod Wallop” I.

Spencer (“Maybe I’ll Call Anna,” “Resume With Monsters”) satirizes the pharmaceutical industry, literary agents, smoking, S&M;, psychotherapy, automated teller machines, the sword-and-sorcery genre, roadside convenience stores, weddings, parenthood, geezers, monkeys and espionage. He has a way with metaphor. One man’s voice “was flat and seemed to shift around in his chest, like a bored tour guide in a cathedral.” Another “ran with his arms out and waving frantically, as though the air were underbrush.” Spencer is funniest, wisest and most poignant in the beginning, before the fantasy takes over, a hotel in St. Petersburg, Fla., becomes blood-drenched Castle Grimfast and the sea turns to stone, but he’s never less than entertaining.