THE ANIMAL HOUR

THE ANIMAL HOUR Andrew Klavan (Pocket Books, $21) Using Halloween in New York City as the setting for a psychological thriller feels cheap-the prefab craziness circumvents the task of evoking real fear. Andrew Klavan (Don't Say - a Word) does scrape the veneer of Ominous Atmosphere from that urban carnival, tracing the slowly converging paths of a disoriented young woman who has lost her identity and a boozy poet implicated in a West Village decapitation. But as an internal mirror to the city's madness, the pair's italicized mental noodlings prove less suspenseful than just plain insipid. C -Nisid Hajari