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A DRY SPELL
by Susie Moloney
(Delacorte, 385 pages, hc, $23.95, 1997)

Maybe you've already smelled the storm of hype in the air. Maybe you've heard how this novel backed into a major publishing deal after Tom Cruise bought the film rights. Maybe you've noticed its ubiquitous distribution, or seen the TV ads. It's a freak of nature, all right, for a novel whose audience would seem to be those who've never read a Stephen King book but always meant to, yet fear he might be too confusing, and those who thought The Bridges of Madison County was too short.

A Dry Spell is set exclusively around the farming town of Goodlands, North Dakota, now in its fourth year of drought. Local bank manager Karen Grange has become the village ogre after foreclosing on several farms. But salvation arrives in the itinerant and frequently soggy guise of Tom Keatley, who makes rain by getting psychically cuddly with nearby clouds, and shows up more than a year after being summoned by Karen, drifting into town so archetypally you can almost hear the slide guitar. But Tom has his work cut out for him - this isn't just any old drought. Nope, there's a curse on this here town. And it's evil!

Ironically, A Dry Spell suffers from its own titular malady - a drought of anything of much interest. Aside from an unconvincing spirit possession that sends a delinquent girl on a vandalism spree, with inner dialogue that wouldn't tax a reader still at the Dick and Jane level ("Find him." "You shut up."), the novel's hinted-at malevolence doesn't rear its head until the last 60 pages. Moloney sidesteps the plotting headaches of having characters smart enough to figure things out for themselves, and instead furnishes, with godlike omniscience, a dashed-off explanation about the vengeful spirit of a woman murdered a century ago, who sponged up the local rainfall after Karen built a gazebo over her grave. Why wait a century before taking her wrath out on a town that has no clue who she is? Apparently she needed all that time to read some much better novels for inspiration.

Unlike the ground around Goodlands, Moloney's recycled story ideas are only half-baked. In the prologue, she invests several pages in introducing the ghosts of two teenage car crash victims . then never does a single thing with them. Equally undeveloped is Tom's convenient ability to conjure solid objects out of thin air, which he fails to employ to save himself a bar beating. Goodlands is populated by undifferentiated residents, most of whom tend to muddle into one giant collective hick, equating long hair with communism, and mobbing together when riled, brandishing ball bats and rifles while declaring, "Nobody's going to get hurt, we just want to talk!" The one paranoid goofball who threatens to supply a little diverting fun, skulking about cooking up conspiracy theories, suffocates alone in a dust storm before he can actually do anything. Even Karen Grange can't stay on a logical track: After discovering her living room being vandalized, she dawdles around and doesn't report it to the sheriff even though she expects her insurance claim to cover the $5000 rainmaking fee that she's embezzled from her own bank. Of course Tom waives the fee in the end - by now he and Karen have virtually destroyed her bedroom in their narratively summarized lust.

Without the prior film deal, it's difficult to imagine a novel this insubstantial doing anything other than vanishing like a mirage. The greatest irony, then, is that Dell has undoubtedly spent more promoting this single exercise in tepid derivation than it did the entire Abyss line a few years ago.

A Dry Spell might play all right with post-pubescent graduates of R.L. Stine, but for those with a lower piffle tolerance . when it rains, it snores.