Any novel that starts at a decrepit meteorological station named Sorrow Hill and progresses deeper into the dark heart of the Guyanese rainforest and whose characters rejoice in names like Hope, Butterfly, Christopher D'eath and Doctor Daemon, invites classification as "magic realism." But Wilson ( The Carnival Trilogy ) doesn't deliver the expected revelatory metamorphoses of individual into archetype, history into myth, the everyday into the numinous. Wilson's personal and often esoteric mythology overwhelms the reality to which he applies his transformative magic. The narrative content, involving an asylum, a fateful love triangle, madness and redemption, is barely visible through language that pulses with abstractions, neologisms and kaleidoscopically shifting points of view. Time and place become purely phenomenal, occasional to Wilson's "creation of a song of beauty that tingles like fire in a mutual Shadow of minds." Uncompromisingly visionary, often inscrutable, Sorrow Hill makes daunting demands of even the most alert and sensitive reader: those who accompany Wilson to the end of his trek upriver may be touched with the fervor of the converted, but they are likely to be a select and hardy bunch. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.