Survival Games

""It was slaughter weekend."" So begins this taut thriller by Gaines (Pumping Iron). Over the Columbus Day holiday, Bill and Clair Joyce and their best friends, Drayton and Portia Hurley, all in their late 30s, travel from Boston to the Joyces' summer house in New Hampshire. Friends since college, Bill and Drayton go hunting while the women visit a local festival and lounge around the pool. Their perfect yuppie contentment is shattered, however, when Red Sizemore, a handyman who has come to butcher the Joyces' sheep, abducts both women with the help of a brain-damaged cohort. A huge, wild local legend, Red has been obsessed with Clair since the year before when she impulsively seduced him during a separation from Bill. Red takes both women to a cabin in the woods, planning to spirit Clair away to the wilds of Canada. The husbands pursue Red, using skills they honed in ""Survival!"", a stalking game they co-created and sold nationally. The story vaults to a predictably bloody conclusion. Gaines's intriguing tale is hampered by sketchy character development and an unsavory fear of the rural working class. His educated city dwellers must descend to a kind of primal intelligence to survive, yet they seem strangely unaffected by their ordeal, from which they emerge with their middle-class values and cozy superiority intact. Indeed, Red's shattered Abenaki wife proclaims: ""I went to Vassar College. I graduated with honors in 1987."" Superficiality notwithstanding, this woodsy page-turner is enhanced by Gaines's device of telling the story in a chain of alternating and slightly overlapping viewpoints, so that the tension rises to a gripping finale.(Aug.)