A Deadly Shade of Green

Despite the foreboding history of a fabled, long-abandoned mission near the California coast, pragmatic Peter Riley and his dreamy-eyed wife, Miranda, move in, and find that the once luxurious grounds are dominated by a gigantic tree of unknown origin that bears seductive flowers and exotic fruit. Newly pregnant Miranda, poisoned by the fruit, starts to roam the bleak neighborhood at night and is suspected of several murders. There is a Poe-like motif of skeletons buried alive, a surfeit of drowsy gazing at the rain, a cartoonish Indian shaman, ritual dancing, an uprising of zombies and much more supernatural activity before the dull-witted Rileys realize that the tree is the evil force behind all the spookiness. Though Willis-Pitts, in his debut novel, has apparently carefully researched tree physiology and Indian legends, he mixes the fruits of his research into a litany of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo broken up by melodramatic exposition. The sheer excess of the narrative lends the novel a spark of vitality, but the corny, amorphous plot does very little to move the otherwise sluggish tale along. (Mar.)