Dark Side of the Media Age : THE SPEED QUEEN by Stewart O’Nan; Doubleday $21.95, 212 pages

She and her boyfriend and another woman zipped around Oklahoma killing people. They incinerated an old couple alive after beating and tying them up. They killed a policeman. They stabbed and shot five workers in a fast-food restaurant. Marjorie Standiford insists, though, that this last was not in itself a massacre, as the newspapers had it. “That’s more than five people,” she argues. A stickler.

Marjorie is the protagonist and narrator of Stewart O’Nan’s novel about three young people’s deadly rampage through the American heartland, their inner rage masked and made more terrible by their lack of visible affect. The story is kin to the ice-cold Terence Malick movie “Badlands,” but it compounds the cold with a deliberate triviality.

Marjorie tells her story on the eve of her execution by lethal injection, after years of appeals, motions and stays of execution. The circumstance rouses no particular sense of drama in her.

For one thing, she has spent more time on death row than anywhere else in her life. She has adapted to it as passively as she adapted to her reasonably normal childhood, a series of boring jobs laced with vodka and pot, her life with Lamont, a souped-up car freak and petty drug dealer, three-way sex with Lamont and Natalie, the other woman, and a week or so of steady slaughter.

For another thing, her mind is on money, not death. She is dictating replies to a questionnaire from Stephen King, the formidably successful horror writer. The author has King (with his consent, I suppose) buying the rights to her story. It puts a zany postmodern twist on the book. Here and there, Marjorie suggests some bit of color or melodrama to King, a kibitzer at her own show. She consoles him for not selling quite as well as John Grisham and assures him he is a better writer.

At one level, O’Nan is writing a pastiche of that high-grade pulp genre, the true-life crime and passion story. He gets the details just right and, particularly once the killing spree begins, he imparts some finely worked tension. But he is doing other things as well.

His Marjorie is the outlaw as product of the Media Age. She has lived her story and its 15 minutes of celebrity; now, after years in jail, she is producing it. She sees the truth in terms of her own TV serial; she is writer, director, editor, makeup artist and PR person.

She keeps adjusting, concealing and improving. She was, her script goes, only passively there for the killings. Mostly, she was engaged in caring for Gainey, her and Lamont’s baby. It was Lamont and Natalie who did the work.

The book she intends King to write, besides earning money for the soon-to-be orphaned Gainey, rebuts Natalie’s assertion that it was Marjorie who was instigator and executioner. Natalie has also written a book. It is a war between two productions.

What makes “The Speed Queen” more than obvious social satire in the guise of melodrama is the way that the real Marjorie, despite her best efforts, peeps indistinctly through. There is her passionate lust for Natalie and her passionate hatred afterward, when she discovers that Lamont has been sleeping with her. She tells the kinky details as wholesomely as if she were retailing a cake recipe.

There are telltale, unintended evidences. In her lovingly upbeat accounts of her father, there is a shadow of something suspect. Her denial of any direct part in the violence is undermined by seemingly casual disclosures. She confesses to landing a few blows on the old man while Lamont was beating him. At the fast-food place, she may have done a little cutting herself, though certainly not the 89 stab wounds that Natalie testified to.

But O’Nan is not simply portraying an unsuccessful dissembler. The censored Marjorie is a real presence. She lacks many things, including, of course, a sense of right and wrong or, at least, of limits. Her greatest deprivation, though, is insight. The native human power of looking into oneself has been burned out--by drugs, abuse, the celebrity culture and much else. Her mind’s eye has been replaced by the camera’s eye.

“The Speed Queen” is scathing and intelligent. If it is not quite memorable, it may be because it seems more a display than an engagement of intelligence. It is chilly but not quite chilling. There are times when the hidden Marjorie seems to touch us, but in the end she makes the skin crawl without entirely getting under it.