Pricksongs & Descants

In his carnivalesque and riotously inventive Pricksongs & Descants Robert Coover remakes old stories: of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Beauty (who married her Beast and spends a lifetime suffering his doggy stink). And he reshapes his own: a man makes repeating, re-imagined journeys in an office elevator (while his fellow riders taunt and tempt him), and in the seminal, fractal ''The Babysitter'' every moment in a single night is played and replayed, every hope and threat of sex and violence done and undone. Coover''s dark, wilfil, comic imagination revels brilliantly in contradictions, a master of chaos.