SONG OF THE SOUTH

''It will feel like you're driving to the end of the world,'' says the innkeeper in Beaufort, S.C., as she gives directions to Pat Conroy's house on neighboring Fripp Island. ''Just keep going.''

Past battered, hand-painted wooden signs advertising fresh peaches and ''po' folks corn,'' over what seems like an endless procession of bridges, the forests slowly cede to flatter terrain choked by oat grass, and finally, like Oz, your destination comes into sight. But what should be an Edenic spot, given the sweltering heat and the miles you've traveled, is instead a Donald Trump vision of paradise: When you alight on the island that Conroy, contemporary voice of the South and chronicler of passions gone awry, has chosen to call home, you hear the swooning soundtrack to Gone With the Wind that's been playing in your head come to a screeching halt. Oaks have been uprooted for golf courses, alligators' nesting grounds overturned by playgrounds for Jet Skis, antebellum mansions replaced by do-it-yourself modern homes with skylights.

So by the time you arrive on the doorstep of Conroy's single-story, gray wood-frame cottage, by the time you realize he wasn't told to expect you and the house is a mess and he doesn't even have a Southern accent, for God's sake, a glass of lemonade on the front porch just isn't going to cut it.

But leave it to Conroy, 49, to take what seems like an unpleasant situation and make you glad you came. After all, this is a man who has seduced millions of readers with tales of his life, disguised as fiction and entitled The Boo (1970), The Water Is Wide (1972), The Great Santini (1976), The Lords of Discipline (1980), The Prince of Tides (1986), and now Beach Music, which landed squarely in the No. 1 spot of the best-seller lists the week it came out. But sales figures alone don't reflect just how revered Conroy is. Readers by the hundreds flock to his book signings; more than a thousand recently showed up to greet him at a little store in Atlanta called Oxford Books. It takes more than a stranger suddenly appearing on his doorstep to throw the author.

Judging from his novels, Conroy is intimately acquainted with depression, heartache, insanity, suicide, alcoholism, and emotions that have no respect for the constraining rules of civility. ''I've had a complicated and badly lived-in life,'' he says congenially, settling into a chair in his wall-to-wall carpeted living room. And with that, Conroy, who loves nothing more than a good story, offers his own for the taking.

He's already laid much of the groundwork in his books: The Boo, which he self-published, is about his years at the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C.; The Water Is Wide recounts the disastrous year he spent teaching in an integrated school; The Great Santini brings the wrath of his Marine father to life, only to kill him off; and The Prince of Tides, which made him famous and exposed his family with such fidelity that his sister, a once-suicidal poet in New York with close ties to her psychiatrist, stopped speaking to him. Then Barbra Streisand made the novel into a movie, editor Nan Talese (with her own imprint at Doubleday) offered him $3 million for his next two books, and Hollywood scrambled to up the ante -- Beach Music was sold to Paramount in a deal that could total more than $5 million.

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