NIGHT PEOPLE

The author of Sailor's Holiday, Wild at Heart, etc., has long since proven himself the king of fast-food surrealism. So here's more of his wit and wisdom, his baloney and chicken fried steak, in the form of four novellas. Gifford begins with his version of Thelma and Louise, though of course his women aren't just around the bend; they apparently never had a bend to go around. Big Betty Stalcup and Miss Cutie Early are two ex-con lesbians with a mission: ``Miss Jesus ordered them to rid the world of the male species.'' So the two hit the road, both as cute as Betty Boop, nuzzling and smooching until they find a nice black lawyer who recently had a quintuple bypass to tattoo with a razor. But are they the serial killers who've done all the decapitations, or is it Wapiti Touche, the Irish-Seminole-French Canadian-Dutch hooker in Egypt City, Florida? Gifford's not saying. Instead, he moves on to the tale of Brother Dallas Salt, a Pro-Life preacher in New Orleans who likes skinny black girls and ends up buckshot in a barber's chair; thence to unintentional cop-killer Easy Earl Blakey; and, finally, to Marble Lesson, 14, who defends herself against rape by a South American drug-dealer. It's vivid. It makes great copy. David Lynch (who put Wild at Heart on the screen and hired Gifford to write his forthcoming HBO pilot) is one of the faithful. But what more can be said of Gifford? Nothing. Except that many might wish he'd stop quoting Faulkner.