Bad Girls

In this first collection of eight stories, the lavishly named Amaryllis in ""A View of Manhattan'' is one of the ``bad girls'' in a loose assembly running from plain to naughty to really quite wicked. She is involved in a short-lived resumption of an affair begun nearly 20 years earlier. In Sheldon's expensive high-rise, they couple in myriad ways, including one episode while she is basting the roasting pheasant for Thanksgiving Day dinner. Airborne for London, Amaryllis gazes earthward to see in a scene of surreal phantasmagoria the city in flames, the Chrysler Building split in two, the final torrent of poisonous brimstone rendering a terrible judgment. Among the more complex ``pleasures'' of the story ``Simple Pleasures'' are gin and reefer, champagne and cocaine, raunchy disco and assorted drugs, freewheeling sex, murder and madnessas well as Vivaldi and a nice cup of tea. Despite a weakness for the lurid and discursive, for excessive detail and a slackness of narrative form, Flanagan, an American living in London, brings a lively imagination to highly charged writing in an interesting debut. November 21