EVERYONE'S BURNING

The disaffected 20-somethings of nonplace Bayside, Queens, are the subjects of this debut slice-of-life novel, in which the search for the next high is the primary goal. Leon Koch, 23, is at loose ends when his two best friends, Ortiz and Rahmer, get out of prison. In college on and off, and occasionally working, Leon spends most of his time hanging with a loose, shifting posse of friends, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends. Downing scotch in Big Gulp cups and snorting lines of coke, they watch TV, go to bars, eat junk food, throw up, get the shakes, hallucinate. Resigned to their lives, they call law-abiding, wage-earning citizens "normals" without envy. Romance and love are suspect, and sex is kinky and abusive. Leon's friends are all aware of the precariousness of their lives, and suicide is the answer for more than one. One girlfriend says, " 'The difference between having a nice quiet dinner and everything being looted and raped and burned to the ground is this much.' She pushed that little space between her fingers at me." At one point, they toast a girl for never having been raped by her father. Flat and jarring in equal parts, Leon's first-person narration conveys the particular brand of anomie experienced by perpetual adolescents marooned in the bleakest stretches of urban sprawl. Sometimes the lack of plot and character growth give the reader an itching desire to get off Spiegelman's merry-go-round, but Leon, despite his drink- and drug-fueled numbness, has an authenticity that makes him worth knowing. Agent, Joseph Regal. (June)

Forecast:Spiegelman's debut falls somewhere between Daniel Clowes's Ghost World and the harder-core fiction of J.T. LeRoy (Sarah; The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things), and should attract the right readership with its striking goth-comic jacket.