He has Robert Coover's wicked sense of the flimsiness of our received cultural representations of goodness and virtue. And then there are the parodies, which have as their usual M.O. the collision of the canon with the mingy, statureless aspects of contemporary culture. The Overcoat II'' puts a Soviet spin on the travails of Gogol's hapless protagonist. We Are Norsemen'' posits a Woody Allen type as a warrior bard singing of mayhem and plunder. The plane is nosing for the ground at a 45-degree angle, engines wheezing, spewing smoke and feathers.
Lights flash, breathing apparatus drops and dangles.
In a world divided into predators and a kind of evolutionary backwash that constitutes their prey, the socioeconomic group that can be described as ''the end product of psychosomatic dieting and the tanning salon'' is singled out for repeated scourging. A nether ring of Boyle's Inferno seems reserved for real estate developers. There's a continuing preoccupation with the approaching apocalypse, as well as the thematic motif of yuppie fecklessness and complicity in the face of disaster. In its sequel, ''The Ape Lady in Retirement,'' Konrad returns to enact, with a different woman, one of the collection's most explicit versions of a thumb-wrestling match between Eros and Thanatos. The Devil and Irv Cherniske,'' in which a yuppie sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for more material goods.