King's Oak

At the heart of this intriguing but flawed, apocalyptic novel are Diana ``Andy'' Calhoun and her troubled young daughter. A refugee from a violently abusive marriage, Andy joins her stodgy college pal Tish in Pemberton, an exclusive, blue-blood, Southern community where everyone talks nonstop about guns, dogs, horses and hunting, but almost no one mentions the looming presence of Big Silver, the nuclear arms plant tucked into the woods. Despite her initial distaste for this lifestyle, Andy, ``a squatty little Greek'' who stands out like a sore thumb at patrician gatherings, is drawn into the polo-playing elite. She falls from grace when her overwhelming attraction to Tom Dabney, Pemberton's wild-eyed native son who has made the forest primeval his home, speculacularly ignites. When the arcane rites Tom practices can't save his beloved woodland from the nuclear destruction leaching from Big Silver, he wages war against his neighbors. Passion, dark atmosphere and vivid imagination color this dramatic narrative, but Siddons's ( Peachtree Road ) poetic prose is often overblown and it's hard to care about many of her wealthy, self-absorbed, essentially dull characters. 125,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; BOMC alternate; author tour. (Oct.)