THE GRAVE LISTENERS

Two men vie for the job of detecting people who’ve been buried alive in Frank’s gonzo fantasy tale.

This yarn unfolds in a vaguely Eastern European village where a Grave Listener named Volushka plies his trade: camping out next to fresh graves and listening, by way of a tube poked into a buried coffin, for sounds that indicate that an apparently deceased person has revived. Volushka spends solitary, uneventful days boozing and sleeping in the cemetery, but at night he must fend off the ghosts, witches, and vampires who frequent the area. He’s also vehemently disliked by the local villagers. He’s a large, imposing man with a room-emptying odor and a propensity for nasty jibes: “was she prone to lunatic, farting rampages?” he queries a bereaved family. He’s also regularly beaten by everyone from a brothel proprietor to an old woman at a well to a 5-year-old boy named Benzi with whom he endlessly trades juvenile barbs. Volushka’s life is disrupted when a stranger named Marcabrusa appears and decides to take over his cushy gig. Swayed by the new arrival’s silver tongue, the townsfolk beat Volushka unconscious and give the listening job to Marcabrusa, who promptly unearths nine buried-alive villagers felled by a mysterious epidemic. Volushka repairs to the swampy lair of the Witch of Gore Mal Gore and, after a horrifying sexual encounter, obtains a magic powder that temporarily makes a person appear to be dead. He then hatches a plot to stage a listening showdown between himself and Marcabrusa over the graves of two twin girls.

Frank’s novel has the grotesquerie of a Tim Burton movie, the droll corruption of a Mark Twain story (camouflaged by pompous oratory), and the cheerful brutality of a Punch and Judy show. The characters have few redeeming qualities; Volushka is a loathsome tangle of grandiosity, cowardice, and hypocrisy; he has a conniving intellect, but is also profoundly stupid. However, he’s humanized by his inability to dissemble and scheme just as well as his adversaries. The narrative is certainly over the top, but Frank manages to mine comedic gold in scenes that combine verbal fireworks with clever slapstick. In one hilarious bit, Volushka and Benzi are forced to translate their usual screaming match into silent pantomime beside the bed of two slumbering villagers. For all its farcical elements, the novel also gets at themes of belonging, loneliness, and the paranoia of small, insular groups panicked by superstition and sudden disaster. Frank’s prose is elegant and vivid, but the more pungent details are always at the service of character and meaning, as in a sketch of the witch, who likes Volushka’s looks: “The form of a body slowly emerged from a flickering mist, surrounded by a poisonous corona. A croaking, ancient, hollow voice pulled itself out of a raspy echo and shivered in its loneliness, wroth and infernal grief. ‘You’re a plump one.’ ” The result is an inventive, mordantly funny story with a blighted but yearning soul.

A creepy and entertaining tale about a misbegotten quest to cheat death.