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Chilling, disturbing, gripping. . . and that’s just page 36, on which Dwight Gooden and a friend pay an unannounced visit to Kevin Mitchell’s house in 1986 and are startled to find Mitchell drunk, arguing with his girlfriend, wielding a 12-inch knife and soon holding all three hostage as Mitchell, swiping a gruesome scene from Stephen King, decapitates his girlfriend’s cat.

How about those New York Mets?

But hey, let Mitchell write his own creepy memoir, this is Doc Gooden’s book, a pretty honest around-the-horn, look-in-the-mirror account at the rise and fall of a baseball star in the rip-roarin’, coke-snortin’ 1980s.

This isn’t virgin turf here, but the moral, as always, is that if you’re going to fall on your face, and get back up again, make sure you do it in New York, New York, that publishing town.

Gooden’s story in a nutshell: phenom pitcher wins Cy Young at age 20, helps party-party New York Mets to World Series title in 1986, but is too hung over to attend team’s victory parade.

Booze leads to cocaine, which leads to destruction of a certain Hall of Fame career that sinks so low that Gooden, after receiving word he’d been suspended for the 1995 season because of another dirty drug test, finds himself at bed’s edge with a nine-millimeter automatic pointed at his head.

In his decade-long battle with drugs, Gooden makes the requisite rehab stops--Smithers Institute, Betty Ford Center--but not until the pistol incident does he fully accept his addiction and turn the corner toward recovery.

Veteran scribe and co-author Bob Klapisch nicely interweaves Gooden’s up-and-down career with the comeback moment of the pitcher’s life in 1996, when Gooden pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees as his father awaited an operation in Tampa, Fla.

This is moving stuff and, we suspect, a movie of the week.