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By John Skow

TITLE: ONE ON ONE

AUTHOR: TABITHA KING

PUBLISHER: DUTTON; 485 PAGES; $23

% THE BOTTOM LINE: A sad, touching, losers' love affair winds through a solid basketball novel.

Never read a line by Tabitha King? Don't care if you ever read another by her husband Stephen? Fine. But Tabitha's One on One is a surprise, a good, tough, raunchy pop novel about a couple of high school basketball stars. Its realism may be a bit rough-edged for parents, but it's about right for their older children. Sam Styles is a huge, self-apologetic, marvelously coordinated fellow who can't make a wrong move on a basketball court but struggles with dyslexia. Because his father and stepmother are loving and decent, and because a sharp-eyed teacher has worked to bring Sam's reading and self-respect up to where they should be, the boy has a good shot at steadying down to adulthood.

Deanie Gauthier, who calls herself the Mutant, is in far worse shape. She's a foul-mouthed outcast a couple of years younger than Sam; her response to sexual abuse by her mother's boyfriend is self-abasement in several directions. She shaves her head and wears a nose ring and chains, shrugs at kindness and buys drugs with sex. But she plays ball with amazing ferocity, and she and Sam lead their respective teams to the Maine championships, falling into a sad, touching losers' love affair along the way.

Basketball is too fluid a game to make artistic sense in long prose doses, and novelist King generally benches herself after a hyperbolic airball or two. Wisely she sidesteps the artificiality (author's choice, after all) of pivoting her story on winning or losing the big games. Her teenagers of both sexes are believably psychotic, and both locker rooms have the edgy, acrid smell of a zoo just before feeding time.