Hammers

Seattle geneticist Nico begins to morph into a hammerhead shark after accidentally injecting herself with a potent batch of DNA home-brew in Dakron's over-the-top parody of The Fly. Her brother, narrator Zave, watches in perplexed horror as Nico's transformation starts with a craving for fish, then erupts into more dangerous appetites. An odd attraction between Nico and Zave's girlfriend complicates matters, as do the group of junkies who inadvertently inject themselves with a supply of Nico's genetic potion. Dakron keeps the story moving along at a sprightly (not to say manic) clip, hindered only by a stream of juvenile, self-referential verbiage about the plot. Like his fellow shark-fancier (and epigraph-source) the Comte de Lautreamont, Dakron tends to exclaim rather than narrate (""She yanks out a molar! Without even an ouch--yeek!""), but patient readers of his third novel (after infra and Newt) will discover a writer with a fine ear and plenty of gusto whose worst enemy is his own experimentalist affectations. (Oct.)