Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel

If you spliced Gualtiero Jacopetti's shockumentary Mondo films with the surreal clippings from the ""Cruiskeen Lawn"" newspaper column of Myles na Gopaleen (aka Flann O'Brien), the comic result might be this ""serial novel"" of short stories, shaggy dog tales and spoofs from the fictitious pen of McCabe's authorial desperado, Phildy Hackball, set in his crazy village of Barntrosna. Even stranger and campier than McCabe's recent Booker-shortlisted Breakfast on Pluto, these 10 intertwined stories mix loony subject matter culled from trashy paperbacks with Hibernian stereotypes and cliches. Like an Irish bull in a china shop, McCabe hilariously charges through yarns about genetically engineered winged donkeys (""The Valley of the Flying Jennets""), yokel farmers picked up in discotheques (""The Boils of Thomas Gully"") and a pious schoolboy blown up not with a bomb but a tire pump (""The Bursted Priest""). The maniac citizens of Barntrosna somehow believe their wives are secret go-go dancers (""Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge""); the local Chinese takeaway is Bruce Lee's secret hangout (""My Friend Bruce Lee""); and the bishop's clerical protege was really Lucifer stirring up the swinging '60s (""I Ordained the Devil""). In a satire on McCabe's own career (""The Big Prize""), Barntrosna's unlikeliest novelist takes the mickey out of contemporary Irish writers and the award-lavishing British literary establishment. Only in the last, lengthy story, ""The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan,"" does this pulp fiction gag almost run aground, when Barntrosna's nicest student nurse goes to London, where she discovers lesbian love and drug racketeering before she is safely returned to the picturesque, demented town of McCabe's berserk imagination. 8-city author tour; 15-city NPR radio campaign. (Mar.)