The Hunting Season

Rather than the expected frisson of horror fiction, Coyne gives fans a novel with artificial crises and characters about whom he seems ambivalent, judging by their inconsistent behavior. The locale is a remote place in the Catskills where the natives are monstrously deformed after centuries of incestuous mating. They are the objects of research by anthropologist April Benard, who arrives from Manhattan with her husband Marshall and their offspring from earlier marriages. Supposedly the husband and wife are deeply in love but Marshall goes after women among the other estivating New Yorkers. As for April, she competes with her adolescent stepdaughter for attention from the Benards' handyman, lusty Luke. Switching among scenes of attempted rape, mutilation and murder, the story limps to a finale where April fights attacking ""inbreds,'' led by their newly discovered kinsman. (October 22)