Malevolence in a Coffeepot

CARNIVAL BY THE SEA (327 pp. Si grid de Lima--Scribner ($3.50).

Ever since storytelling began, the mean old stepmother has played the heavy; nowadays, stepmother has to have a batch of certifiable complexes.

In Carnival by the Sea, the heavy is Mrs. Albany, an aging invalid whose home, an abandoned coffee shop shaped like a huge coffeepot, stands on the barren dunes of the California coast. In two days' action, well padded with flashbacks, Mrs. Albany racks up a high score in pure malevolence. Among other things, she drives her stepson to alcoholism and her stepdaughter to an early death. She also pushes her only daughter across the brink into insanity. Her husband, a doctor, leaves home and dies in the shack of a friendly doxy.

In short, Carnival by the Sea would be downright unbearable, not merely morbid, if 31-year-old Author Sigrid de Lima had not fashioned it with a sensitive mind and a good writing hand. Mrs. Albany's troubled character and Author de Lima's basic theorem become clearer with the turning pages. In effect, it is that love is a current, and that stagnant love turns to hate. As a new bride, Mrs. Albany had been shocked to discover that her husband had married her only to give his first wife's children a mother; the springs of her love clogged. Her home became a barracks, her children malingering recruits, herself a drill sergeant.

Like a doctor catching too late a set of cancer cases, Author de Lima charts the pain without holding out any fresh hope for the patients. And as she paces up and down her characters' doomed and twisted minds, she sometimes seems to mistake all of life for an. enormous sick ward.

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