FIRST FICTION

For Cassie Palmer, on the brink of teenagerhood in 1954, television is a magical new appliance with unexpected powers; when she touches the knob, she says, “my whole body freckles with electricity.” But the most intense thing about the new TV is found where no one else pays any attention: the test pattern, which, Cassie explains, “whirs like a pinwheel and sucks me into its eye.” Gazing into the test pattern, Cassie watches programs only she can see: the Dodgers moving to L.A., a sugar cube that cures polio, psychedelic dancers demanding that the audience “sock it to me,” an athlete named O.J. on trial. Cassie takes it all in stride, but it’s her mom, Lorena, who’s most affected by TV, tangoing with Arthur Murray and revisiting her dream of becoming a dancer and screen star. While Cassie’s oafish dad performs poorly down at the shipyard, critiques Lorena’s kitchen skills (she resorts, happily, to TV dinners) and is eventually taken over by black moods, Lorena channel-surfs hairstyles, works up a routine to “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and performs it--topless--for Binky Quisenberry, the hunky mailman. When Cassie accidentally catches this last act, she’s more freaked out than by anything she’s seen on test-pattern TV, even the show about the lady who cut off her husband’s thing and tossed it on somebody’s lawn. Marjorie Klein is, of course, making the familiar point that TV has failed on its promise to bring the family together. Even so, this surreal mid-century tale of a mom who feels like “Lucy gone bad” and the family left in her wake (she manages to get on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts) entertains as surely as a parallel-universe episode of Ozzie and Harriet.

AMERICAN BY BLOOD By Andrew Huebner; Simon & Schuster: 246 pp., $23

In Andrew Huebner’s impressionistic elegy of the events following Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn, U.S. Army troops crisscross the high plains in pursuit of scattered bands of Sioux, Cree and Nez Perce. Among the pursuers is the author’s own great-great-grandfather, August “Gus” Huebner, a taciturn German stonecutter from New Jersey who is steadfast in carrying out his scouting duties yet seems more interested in cataloging local wildflowers. Riding alongside Gus is Lt. Bradley, an honorable officer trying to hold himself and his men together in an alien landscape, and Gentle, an underage loose cannon from North Carolina who has the odd habit of killing critters and eating their eyeballs. Together, the three scouts encounter the fly-infested aftermath of Little Bighorn’s “open-air slaughterhouse” (family legend has Gus arriving on the scene a day late), then find themselves played as pawns in the army’s subsequent revenge campaign, riding from skirmish to massacre to skirmish, trying to keep from getting shot up--or scalped--in each bloody, indecisive encounter. When Gentle rides off to pursue his mad quest to gun down Crazy Horse, he’s replaced by Baker, a faith-seeking naif from “Pennsyl-tuckee”; Bradley, meanwhile, falls in love with a wounded Indian girl named Snow Melts; and Gus tries to square his loyalty to the Army with his humanity. As the battle lines become dangerously blurred, Huebner depicts the violence of the Old West--as picturesque as it is pointless--with unflinchingly sharp strokes.

RUN By Douglas E. Winter; Alfred A. Knopf: 244 pp., $23

For Burdon Lane, the vaguely heroic narrator of Douglas E. Winter’s rapid-fire novel about gunrunning along Interstate 95, firearms are more than a job, they’re a way of life. Here’s the ad he imagines taking out in the Personals section: “SWM, mid-40s, divorced, no kids, ISO guns. Big guns, little guns. Handguns, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and, yeah, okay, grenade launchers and antitank weapons.” Burdon is a foot soldier with UniArms of Alexandria, Va., (“the small arms capital of the free world”), and he’s got the act of waving pistols in terrified gun dealers’ faces down to a fine art. It’s no surprise, then, when he’s picked as point man to haul a load of illegal weapons to New York, along with his buddy Renny Two Hand and his UniArms superior, CK, a sketchy guy who packs a .44 Magnum named Elvis. But this run isn’t just business as usual: They’ve hooked up with D.C.’s U Street Crew, a posse of ultra violent, yet dangerously green, gangstas. Amidst this criminal culture clash, things are bound to go haywire, and they do, leaving Burdon to realize that he’s just a clueless man in the middle and to wonder if his U Street partner, Jinx, is really the thug-for-life he appears to be. Winter’s high-firepower thriller about schemes inside of schemes is all adrenaline and staggering body count; it’s a sprint to a blood-soaked finish, where, for Burdon, the only way to learn the important survival lesson of “walk, don’t run” is to keep on running.