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CAIN
by James Byron Huggins
(Simon & Schuster, 398 pages, hc, $23.00, 1997)

Here's another of those big-budget horror novels, a BOMC Alternate Selection, that publishers say they're not interested in. Maybe it all depends on scope, since this particular exception answers that nagging question "What if the Terminator were possessed by the Devil?" If you suspect that the results might play better on the screen than the page, you and Bruce Willis' checkbook agree, but Huggins still gives it a hell of a try.

The titular Cain was, in life, the CIA's deadliest assassin, electrocuted in an accident. Given how the Pentagon loathes waste, it naturally follows that they retrofit him with enough body modifications to create a prototype of an unkillable supersoldier. Enter Satan, stage left, yielding to the temptation of all the havoc he can wreak by claiming squatter's rights to this formidable - and soulless - body.

All of which is backstory for a novel that literally hits the ground running and never lets up. The pacing is faultless, in a chase-cum-chess-match pitting the escaped Cain against a trio sworn to stop him: the scientist who created him, the military's best antiterrorist commando, and a Jesuit exorcist. The second string is rounded out by oodles of soldiers for Cain to massacre, as traps are planned, set, and thwarted in a series of cataclysmic clashes across the U.S. and England. Behind the scenes, validating all those hysterical Satanic conspiracy theorists, political chicanery is afoot to keep Cain ticking until he can perform a bloody Samhain ritual that will grant his body immortality.

So far, so good. But Cain is one of those books begging you to take the good with the sloppy, the overly silly, and the just plain bad. First, there's Cain himself, way over the top as a caricature of evil rather than one plausible face. He laughs, he roars, he spews volumes of comic supervillain trash-talk. He sports huge fangs so he can replenish his blood supply - why, you may wonder, since he can punch through steel? Maybe because fangs look so bitchin'. Also, the young daughter of Cain's creator just happens to be the perfect genetic match for a massive DNA infusion he needs, pushing the coincidence envelope miles too far.

Then there's the research. I'm growing wary of authors who make a point (ala Meg author Steve Alten) of boasting upfront how much research they did. Huggins knows his weapons and tactics, remaining safe while in Tom Clancy territory, but still riddles his tale with error and inconsistencies of logic.

How about a Jesuit who misnames the Book of Revelation? Or a King David who's out of sync with Jewish history by 2000 years?

Science? Frustratingly, we know nearly nothing about Cain's mortal existence, only that he was lethal, brilliant, and a double-Y chromosomal "supermale." Huggins, then, seems unaware that the supermale hypothesis was discredited decades ago, and that double-Y's are of subnormal intelligence.

Occult? Cain's pivotal acts revolve around his attempts to acquire the Grimorium Verum . an ultrarare, ancient tome containing a Black Mass required for his Samhain ritual. In actuality, this grimoire is a badly edited 16th-century knockoff of The Lesser Key of Solomon (available at any respectable occult shop), and has itself been reprinted as recently as 1994. Even accepting Huggins' version as poetic license, it's still anachronistic: At 2000 years old, it originated centuries before the Church even had a Mass to blacken.

Momentum, then, is everything to Cain: The more quickly it's read, the better it reads. The action scenes really are spectacular, and frequent. Huggins does include a couple of intriguing discussions on the nature of evil, reconciling metaphysics with quantum physics, but beyond that, there's nothing to get in the way of switching off the brain and watching the dumb fun and fireworks.

Meaning Bruce Willis shouldn't find it a stretch either.