BRIEFLY NOTED.(13 Steps Down)(Pigtopia)(Storm Chasers)(Defining the World)(Melville)(A Man with No Talents)(Book Review)

13 Steps Down, by Ruth Rendell (Crown; $25). The British crime novelist Ruth Rendell is the author of fifty-odd books in which things go horribly, intricately wrong. (Her creepiest, most disturbing novels are written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.) In her latest, a fitness-machine repairman's dual fixations--on a famous Notting Hill serial killer, hanged half a century before, and on a young black model in thrall to a soothsayer--collide. The novel lacks the modifying, likable intelligence that Rendell's recurrent character, Chief Inspector Wexford, brings to other of her works, and the result is a wan puzzler painted in broad strokes. However, her portrait of the repairman's landlady--a Miss Havisham among her scruffy bits and bobs, who reads Darwin and seems to take a dim view of the evolution of man post-1900--has the zany, wry touch of a master.

Pigtopia, by Kitty Fitzgerald (Miramax; $22.95). The center of this novel is Jack Plum, a thirty-something suffering from macrocephaly, which leaves him isolated and feeling like a monster. His alcoholic mother, with whom he lives, blames him for her troubles and for his father's departure. To escape from the insults and abuse heaped on him by his mother and the townspeople--he's particularly persecuted by a group of young boys--Jack spends most of his time in a "pig palace" in his basement, where he keeps a herd of the animals that his father taught him to love. The narration alternates between Jack and his friend Holly, a girl struggling with puberty and her mother's new boyfriend. Holly has a conventional voice that tends to point up the more trite and facile elements of the plot, but Jack's wisely naive insights give the story a fairy-tale charm.

Storm Chasers, by Paul Quarrington (St. Martin's; $23.95). In this swift, tightly plotted novel, a fictional splinter of land in the Caribbean acts as a magnet for storm-obsessed weather chasers when it appears that the island will be the epicenter of a hurricane. Each arrives independently, with emotional baggage so weighty that it tips the scales toward black comedy: the father of one eviscerated her mother with a kitchen knife; the family of another was wiped out in a road accident the day he won the lottery. Quarrington is interested in how extreme emotional storms seek out congruent atmospheric disturbance, and it's a relief, in these chaotic pages, to encounter Maywell Hope, a character whose pirate ancestors discovered the island, whose reading matter consists solely of antique travelogues, and who, having left the island only twice, stays almost completely still.

Defining the World, by Henry Hitchings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $24). James Boswell's biography has preserved for the ages the reputation of Samuel Johnson, but the dictionary for which Johnson was known in his own time receives little attention therein, because Boswell did not meet Johnson ...