Heroes and Villains

Bumpus (Things in Place, Anaconda) is drawn irresistibly to the weird and the strange. One story in this new collection features a starlet who grows a horn and cat's whiskers. What to do? She moves back to her hometown and marries a local boy. That combination of the bizarre and the ordinary runs through the book. Another pattern involves fame feeding off the madness that common people repress. In other tales, Jerzy Kosinski, Richard Nixon and Charlie Starkweather are seen to play out their problems on a public stage. Conversely, the best story, ""Shame,'' concerns a woman's slow realization that her roommate's detailed descriptions of everyday persecution derive from neurosis, not a conspiracy. Deliberately unsettling, these stories are a mixed bag, with the tales of private desperation more effective than those of public satire. January