Fear

The painful psychological complexity of adolescence drives Spanidou's gripping second novel. Anna Karystinou, the heroine of Spanidou's hailed God's Snake (1986), raised by her martinet military father to repress her emotions, has been denied emotional sustenance. An angry, willful girl growing up in late 1950s Greece, she is a harsh judge of her narcissistic parents. Her cold, self-pitying mother looks to Anna ""like the pupil of a single, horrifying eye,"" and her iron-willed, demanding father, who has tried to make Anna into ""a real man,"" now realizes that his daughter hates him. At 13, Anna is bewildered by the emotional swings of adolescence and miserable that the family must move every year when her father is reassigned. When Anna finds temporary refuge with a new friend, Vera, Spanidou fluidly evokes the sexually charged friendship of teenage girls, the frisson of tension as they try to interpret the signals from their bodies and from the outside world. Their normal adolescent impulses are complicated by the fear that grips the city of Thessaloniki as a killer nicknamed the Dragon murders a string of young women. Anna has been trained not to acknowledge fear, but fear of her father, of her sexuality and of the elusive killer permeates her consciousness. Reading Dostoyevski, she perceives the relationship between fear, hatred and love. Surrounded by people who seem to her like enemies but happen to be her parents, her teachers and her friends, it's no wonder that she yearns to know the Dragon. Spanidou's unflinching portrait of a troubled young girl who is developing the steely strength to be a survivor has a brutal honesty. Though there is some overwriting, her impeccable pacing and the pressure of inevitability move the novel to a heart-thumping finale. (Jan.)