Where These Angels Go, Trouble Follows : RAPTURE by David Sosnowski; Villard; $23, 295 pages

What movie people call a “high concept” can give a novel wings, but it takes something both humbler and loftier than that--good writing--to make it fly.

David Sosnowski’s first novel, “Rapture,” has a concept so high you could pitch it to a publisher or a studio with a single word: Angels. What could be trendier?

A mysterious, Ebola-like virus starts popping up in contemporary America. The victims don’t die, but their skin turns green and hardens into a crust; their insides “melt down”; their chest and back muscles become like piano wire. They grow wings, like angels, though otherwise there’s nothing immortal or divine about them.

Among the first of the afflicted is Alexander “Zander” Wiles, once a fairly ordinary Catholic kid in Detroit, now a small-time drug dealer who catches the virus from a junkie girlfriend and initially thinks he has AIDS.

Zander tries to cash in on the talk show circuit, but the contrast between the sacred connotations of his new appendages and the sordid reality of his life triggers a backlash. As angels become more numerous, all the problems of being different in America swirl around them--problems already familiar to gays and the disabled and members of ethnic minorities.

Anti-angel “Vampires” attack the “coops” where fledgling angels try out their wings. In return, angels look down--literally--on what used to be standard-issue human beings, now called “Pedestrians.”

Complicating the picture, not all angels can fly. Some, including Zander’s former mentor in the drug trade, Thom, are “Penguins,” lacking a sense of balance and unable even to walk. Zander himself should be able to fly but can’t, crippled by guilt over provoking the anti-Angel backlash.

Enter Cassandra “Cassie” O’Connor, a therapist for dysfunctional angels, who has always felt different, even before she had feathers. Formerly an artist’s daughter on a Midwestern farm, a rape victim and a dabbler in lesbianism, she is now a “fraud” who knows she wrote her best-selling self-help book not to “save the world” but to “meet Oprah.”

The two meet as Zander--trying to fly? trying to commit suicide?--leaps from the smokestack of an abandoned steel mill into the Detroit River.

Even if Cassie saves his life, can her bogus therapies solve the problems that keep Zander’s soul earthbound? What about her own problems? Is it possible for two creatures so street-wary and wounded to fall in love?

Think of how little such a summary tells us.

“Rapture” could be goofy fantasy, sappy romance or heavy-handed satire, or all three. That it’s something better isn’t a result of the “concept” but of how imaginatively Sosnowski has worked out the details and of how almost every paragraph of his prose offers us something to enjoy: a flash of wit, a felicitous piece of description, a line or two of dead-on dialogue.

Cassie’s “full flying togs,” for example, include “a headband and tennis shoes, a water bottle, those Claude Rains-as-the-Invisible-Man sunglasses (with that dorky security strap), salt pills, a mentholated cough drop in her mouth all the way to prevent dry throat, a Tums to nix the acid indigestion from all that swallowed air . . . .”

Church officials realize that “there were no points to be gained by claiming angels as proof of any particular brand of religion--not with angels out there like Zander Wiles. Not with homeless angels pissing against walls in the Vatican. . . . It was one thing to debate how many angels could pass through the eye of a needle, but it was quite another to talk about angels passing out with needles in their arms.”

“Rapture” isn’t perfect. Zander’s guilt--a key to the plot--strikes him when he’s inconveniently offstage. The constant sparkle of the language finally cloys a little. Romance, in the end, does shove the other issues aside. But for most of its trajectory, this is a tall tale well worth reading, often thought-provoking and consistently good entertainment.