The Glass Mountain

The narrator, Prince Fat Klaus, leads us masterfully through an intensely imagined world in this surprising fable by poet and Gothic expert Wolf ( The Essential Dracula ). His quest is to retrieve Amalanthusa, a princess set on a glass mountaintop by her lustful father. This astounding tale begins and ends in a tower, where Klaus and his rival, hare-lip Fritz, wait out the night, their lives unfolding in stories replete with fairy-tale elements: a ``Witch of the Woods,'' an evil goat, a Persian soothsayer with a riddle. The interlocked stories, all organized around the search for the beautiful princess, are often told to us by other characters. Klaus's controlled irony makes the fable current and immediate: ``I was a huge, fat man who had failed to outwit disaster.'' Themes of passion and loss are authoritatively contained by this incisive narration. The prose moves quickly, hypnotically, Klaus's voice the engine behind it. His steed dies and he observes from the tower ``the sound of ravens busy with my horse. Their beaks made a distinct click . . . '' Wolf's characters try and fail, often overtaken by erotic longings: violent male characters battle for sleeping, sexualized women. The mechanism of interlocked tales serves the novel's compression: the glass mountain, the witch's woods, the Eastern bazaar--these worlds are superbly crafted in terse, bold, musical language. (Dec.)