Idol Threat The Barrier Between Sports Superstar And Rabid Fan Is Breached In Baseball Thriller That Shuns Formulas, Cliches

“The Fan” By Peter Abrahams (Warner, $22.95, 338 pp.)

Peter Abrahams’ “The Fan” may be the only book this year that will pop up in both the sports and the mystery-thriller sections of bookstores. It really doesn’t belong in either. Thrillers, even when they’re a cut above average (say, Thomas Harris’ “Silence of the Lambs”), tend toward the formulaic; we know most of the conventions, but for fun we pretend not to. We say we want to be surprised, but what we want is what we know. Sports fiction, even when it’s a cut above average (say, Mark Harris’ “Bang the Drum Slowly”), tends toward the melodramatic; it almost always comes down to the big play in the big game.

“The Fan” is a terrifying new breed that skirts along the conventions of both genres, laying off the readers’ expectations of what’s to follow with such nasty skill that you can almost hear the author’s laughter in the background when we’re jolted by the unexpected.

Abrahams, who pushed the envelope of thriller fiction with such novels as “Lights Out” and “Pressure Drop,” is a writer who plays off cliches like a jazz pianist riffing around an old standard. Bobby Rayburn, the 32-year-old slugger fighting to extend his peak years, knows that “all that mattered was to keep seeing the ball with coffeetable-book clarity.” Gil Renard, onetime Little League star turned knife salesman, works himself up to an act of reckless courage with words that “reminded him of legends he had learned, of songs he had heard, of Steve McQueen movies. It was the kind of simple, daring statement that made America great.”

Bobby and Gil are two men who were once on a parallel course as teenage baseball stars. Since then, their lives have taken slightly different courses. Rayburn is a season or two away from a Hall of Fame career with a contract a rock star would envy and an ex-cheerleader for a wife. Gil scrambles to hold on to a job he hates, battles his ex-wife for time with their son and hustles for the cash to buy scalper’s tickets to see his favorite player, Bobby Rayburn. As Gil’s fortunes drop, he develops an obsession that puts the pair on a course destined to converge.

Gil is light years from the flashy monster murderers of much current popular fiction. He is a monster, but a banal one; his dreams (mostly flashbacks of Little League glory that could have come out of a Springsteen song) seem commonplace.

For his part, Bobby is altogether unworthy of anything so pure as a fan’s love, which he doesn’t particularly want in any event. Abrahams touches a real nerve here: Nothing seems to anger the modern sports fan so much as the athlete’s refusal to understand how important his dreams are. Drugs, sex scandals, gambling - all can be forgiven, but hell hath no fury like a fan ignored.

Abrahams uses humor to keep you off balance like a veteran pitcher uses a breaking ball to set you up for a high hard one.