BRIEFLY NOTED.(Kornwolf, Tristan Egolf's new novel)(Book review)

Kornwolf, by Tristan Egolf (Black Cat; $14). In the third novel by Egolf, who took his own life last year, a rough beast is slouching through the hills of rural Pennsylvania, with glowing eyes, a pompadour, and a strong resemblance to Richard Nixon. This is good news for Owen Brynmor, a reporter who has recently returned to his hated home town, which he recalls as a soulless place where public schooling was "a daily incentive to go on a shooting spree." He gleefully concocts a shaggy-werewolf story for the local paper, hoping to disrupt the peace, and little suspecting that the lycanthrope really does exist. By day, he's a mute Amish boy; by night, an avenging spirit out of German myth. Egolf's frantic novel reads as if it had been written all at once, in a white heat, and its coherence suffers accordingly. Still, the voice is unforgettable, at times attaining the incantatory power of Whitman's "barbaric yawp."

Slipping Into Darkness, by Peter Blauner (Little, Brown; $24.95). Francis X. Loughlin is an aging police detective haunted by a twenty-year-old homicide involving a young female doctor. A man named Julian Vega was put away for that crime, possibly without sufficient evidence, when he was seventeen. As Blauner's novel opens, Vega has just been released from prison, on a technicality, when Loughlin is called to investigate a crime that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the earlier murder. Though the book sometimes takes the easy way out (the climactic twist feels both generic and arbitrary), it is elevated by Blauner's surefooted characterization of Julian. Newly free, struggling to find his way, dependent on the (somewhat tenuous) kindness of strangers, he is both sympathetic and tough; his portrait has a complexity that few authors could achieve.

A Godly Hero, by Michael Kazin (Knopf; $30). In American memory, the image of ...