Donald Carpenter has an eerie way of capturing the psychotic personality.

"Dueling Voices" is labeled a novel and reads like one. It sounds like the testimony of a survivor, one who's been through the fire. At 28, protagonist Perry Hawkins certainly doesn't consider himself a victim. It's true that he has some odd habits. He's employed in the advertising business, yet has no friends. He doesn't go to work when it's raining, and he dines each evening on a six-pack of beer. Perry believes that strangers look at him in an accusatory way; he only checks his mailbox once a week.

"I looked on the mail kind of like the way I looked on the telephone," Perry says. "Both usually brought, at best, unwelcome, and at worst, terrible, news...so I just kept my involvement with them to the minimum."

He was right to be wary about these intrusive devices. They bring him the most jolting information of his life. When Perry's father died in prison five years before, his personal effects were somehow mislaid. They've surfaced again, and they contain a manuscript the warden and the psychiatrist want Perry to see. What follows, fictionalized though it may be, is a chilling look into the mind of a child abuser - from the abuser's point of view.

Dad's "novel," we discover along with Perry, is a nasty piece of work. In the manuscript, the elder Hawkins's alter ego is a sneering sociopath who indulges himself in sadomasochistic sex and murder. Perry knows it to be a grotesquely exaggerated version of his own abuse as a young boy. "If he spoke in a deadpan tone in the manuscript," Perry notes, "it was because he was serious about what he was describing, not because he was being satirical....because that was the way he saw it."

Readers will have to decide whether the traumatic week Perry Hawkins spent dealing with his father's secrets made him a better person, made him "well." Most readers will agree, however, that "Dueling Voices" is a remarkably accomplished first novel. Donald Carpenter has an eerie way of capturing the psychotic personality. Psychotics think they're just fine - it's the rest of us who are peculiar.

Joyce Slater is a writer in Kennesaw.