“Oracle Night” by Paul Auster; Henry Holt and Co. ($23)

After a 34-year-old writer buys a blue notebook in a New York stationery store, a reader of Paul Auster’s “Oracle Night” could be forgiven for wondering whether a dark-suited Rod Serling wasn’t lurking amid the paper clips and leather-bound pads.

No, the monsters aren’t due on this particular Brooklyn street – no strange beasts on airplane wings or hypochrondriacs selling their own souls to the devil. Nothing that macabre. But “something” odd is going on in Sidney Orr’s life.

“We sometimes know things before they happen, even if we don’t know that we know,” he recalls later.

“I blundered through those nine days in September 1982 like someone trapped inside a cloud. … At certain moments during those days, I felt as if my body had become transparent, a porous membrane through which all the invisible forces of the world could pass.”

Sidney, smitten husband of Grace, is recovering from a serious illness. He ventures out of the apartment, buys the notebook – and begins to outline, effortlessly, a story about a thirtysomething book editor who receives an unexpected manuscript by a well-known author and suddenly deserts his wife and his life.

Then the zone of Sidney’s life begins to go faintly twilight.

“Oracle Night” is occasionally coarse and certainly not tidy.

As with life itself, one is left with certain loose ends – and don’t think that that’s an accident. In other words, “Oracle Night” is playing with our heads – and rather cunningly.

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-02-11-04 0625EST