Dream Ghoul

By R. Z. Sheppard

THE LATE GREAT CREATURE

by BROCK BROWER

300 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.

Anyone who doubts the extent to which terror has been trivialized has only to plot the limp trajectory from Frankenstein to The Munsters. Or they can read Brock Brower's remarkable comic novel which, among other things, demonstrates just how difficult it has become to be a monster.

Popular tastes, inflationary economics, the scissors and blue pencils of outrageous editorial fortune, all conspire against topnotch depravity. In addition, journalism brings more actual horror into the home than gothic tales could ever manage. The threshold of shock keeps rising, and with it that numbness characteristic of the saddest of all monsters, the zombie.

Against such living death, Brower thrusts Simon Moro, an aging horror-film actor and cinema-cult figure. His old films, Ghoulgantua, Gila Man, etc., are classics. Many have been severely cut, or shelved, for reasons of taste. A Moro film in which the monster gets the girl is as unacceptable to the public as a cartoon cat who catches and lustily devours the mouse.

Moro is a genius of the erotically macabre. Next to him, Lugosi is as benign as a bishop. "Bela," says Moro, "had the mannerisms, the Transylvanian suavity, the cape work, all that, but I don't think he ever really felt the urges." Moro feels them down to his hairy gray toes, because he understands the truth about monsters. They are not something else, but projections of ourselves turned inside out.

The first part of the novel is narrated by a freelance named Warner Williams, whose article on Simon Moro has been rejected by a magazine. To make it acceptable, Williams then undertakes a paper chase through notes and memory. The result is the novel, the whole (though not necessarily verifiable) truth about Simon Moro, whose own identity is a holism of flackery and confused truths. His accent is Central European, his interests are Hapsburgian kinky. He began his career in Austria but was actually born in Vienna, N.J. A nice touch. Fittingly, one of Moro's last attempts to reawaken America to the majesty of terror occurs on the Tonight show. A great touch. With their open-ended banalities, incessant commercials and non-climaxes, such shows can come absurdly close to those modern visions of hell where the damned wait endlessly for something to happen.

Moro does not disappoint the sleepy viewers. He appears in a black bird suit, his "Ravenswear," ostensibly to plug a new film. Suddenly he is doing stunts with a severed finger, which has a history of putrefaction, that is in itself a small comic masterpiece. Moro's ultimate public outrage is a staging of his own funeral, a new high for that truly American form of expression, the synthesis of art and advertising.

If this were all Brower had done, The Late Great Creature would be only one of the funniest tours de force of the past few years. But he has done more. With few illusions of ever returning to the great days of Saturday matinee catharsis, he illustrates the salutary nature of terror--its ability to exorcise fears of evil and death. He also toys gracefully with the paradox that fiction is capable of more truth than journalism. The truth about Brock Brower, an experienced freelance journalist, is that he must now be reckoned with as an extraordinarily capable novelist.

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