(FORTUNE Magazine) – Maybe it's the six bad quarters of vertically challenged growth. Maybe it's the knowledge that Europe 1992 will probably not come down in exactly the big way we'd hoped. Maybe it's the threat of global warming in the midst of the coolest U.S. summer in memory. Whatever the cause, this year, as the August sun burns a new tonsure on the top of my head (where none is truly needed), as the cicadas sing their merry, seductive tune, I shake off my customary seasonal indolence. The time has passed for frothy mysteries, jazzy as-told- tos, and inspirational managerial effluvia. Business has gotten to the point where it's sort of beyond management anyway, hasn't it? So why not read? But not just any read. As the weeks before Labor Day approach, with their broad, unpopulated deserts of empty time and shifting contemplation, I have been struck without warning with the desire to plunge into printed material that is authentic, substantial, loaded with . . . weight. Emotional density. So bring on the huge, fibrous dollops of intellectual calories, the well- marbled servings of spiritual bulk, the slabs of literary iron that will help build a sound mind in a healthy body, possibly because, at least in a couple of cases, you'll need a healthy body simply to lift them. Let's begin with this summer's annual offering from that hound of hell, Stephen King. I must admit that for the first 100 or so pages I was a little worried about my man Steve's latest, Gerald's Game (Viking, $23.50). Sure, it was horrible, and that's swell. But for a while I thought that this repulsive new work was going to be all premise, a malignant timepiece that, once wound, would simply tick its way to its own disgusting, inexorable conclusion. I shouldn't have worried. The old creepazoid still has the power to take a story by the throat and shake it until it dances. He has always been a fundamentally realistic writer -- how else could he scare people so badly in the privacy of their own minds? But this is reality with a vengeance, so real it drops right off the cliff into fantasy. And who can tell the difference these days? This time around we encounter no phosphorescent Saint Bernards, mutating citizens sprouting tails, or gurgling clowns pumping noxious gases from the sewers -- nothing more horrible, in fact, than the specter of a pompous, narcissistic attorney about to have sex with his wife. He's Gerald! He's overweight! And he . . . smokes! Aieeeeeeeee! Turns out Gerald's game is bondage. We're in that familiar country where, as Sartre observed, hell is other people. Having started with scarves not too long before the book begins, our hero has graduated to police-grade handcuffs. As we join Gerald and his lovely spouse, Jessie, they are in their country home in -- where else? -- the Maine woods, and she is asking him to unlock her restraints. Asking is perhaps not the right word. Screeching would be better. She asks once, twice, and yet again, her temper percolating. Gerald, on the other hand, doesn't mind her pique a bit. Kind of . . . likes it, truth be told. ''Let me up!'' she screams as he climbs on top of her, laughing. Declining to be raped by her atrocious husband, Jessie takes action. ''She drew back her legs, her rising right knee barely missing the promontory of his chin, and then drove her bare feet out again like pistons.'' This is King at his most dryly scientific. ''The sole and instep of her right drove deep into the bowl of his belly. The heel of her left smashed into the stiff root of . . .'' Ahem. Okay, well, you get the picture. Gerald does not recover. Within half a minute, his heart popped open like an aged pomegranate, the big dufus emits a squeak, falls off the bed and -- that's right -- dies, leaving his immobilized wife 100 miles from the nearest chance of rescue. Did I mention that a very hungry dog is waiting in the woods outside? Within the hour, the pooch has entered the house, attracted by the smell of . . . lawyer.

Tasty? Not! But read on. This is a book about redemption and what it costs, which in this case is a lot, for to conquer the situation Jessie must ultimately face and subdue her own timid, bourgeois spirit. This descent into self-knowledge is excruciating, requiring a massive feat of emotional recall that dredges up all the monsters that lie within her psyche. And finally she must face the key question of existence: What is it worth? How close to the bone are you willing to strip yourself to escape the shackles of your own self-constructed prison? (And when I say strip to the bone, I am not speaking figuratively.) AT THE SAME TIME, just when you think you've mastered the emotional content of this work, something very strange happens. In the shadows of the room, as the delirious heroine looks on not knowing whether to believe her fevered eyes, King brings something new to the party. Primal, irrational, gut- crunching Fear. For those looking for Heavy, it's a welcome intrusion. ''Her eyes, which had been wandering aimlessly across the darkened room, locked on the far corner, where the wind-driven shadows of the pines danced wildly in the nacreous light falling through the skylight,'' King murmurs. ''There was a man standing there.'' A man? Or . . . something else . . . Before long, the creature opens a capacious bag to reveal a welter of . . . human bones. Is this real? A vampire? What? ''The high forehead bulged like a grotesque garden bulb,'' Jessie observes in her final encounter with It. ''The thing's eyes were simple black circles below the thin upside-down V's of its brows; its pudgy, liver-colored lips seemed to be simultaneously pouting and melting. No, not melting, she thought with the bright narrow lucidity that sometimes lives, like the glowing filament in a light bulb, within a sphere of complete terror. Not melting, smiling. It's trying to smile at me.'' Now that's the kind of heavy lifting that gives me an appetite. So did the gargantuan feast of brilliant excess that is Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes (Random House, $28), a 1,047-page Shakespearean drama that details the process by which frail, limited individuals, each with his own burden of ambition, desire, and dubious advisers, conceive, plan, and execute a run at the presidency of the United States. The campaign took place in 1988, and Cramer started on his quest two years earlier. The individuals whose lives he chose to inhabit (and one can only feel a certain pity for them, with this pit bull attached to their legs for more than six years) are two Republicans -- George Bush and Bob Dole -- and four Democrats -- Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, and Mike Dukakis. ''Who are these guys?'' Cramer asks. ''What are they like?'' In answering these questions, the author succeeds in illuminating the political process on virtually a Tolstoyan level -- measured by both the length and the wealth of incident. Cramer's characters seem no less fictional because they are real, and the book has the tang of authenticity throughout. There is a palpable sense that every line, every paragraph has been reported six ways to Sunday and back again. Maybe that's why the author feels free to couch his scenarios in the trappings of fiction -- because it's amply clear they are not. Never once, in spite of the You Are There format, did I doubt that what I was reading was how it actually came down. Be warned, however: Cramer's book is so darned big it's impossible to read on the move, or even lift with one hand while, say, munching on a sandwich with the other. So get inert, and be prepared to read and read and read, and still find yourself on, like, page 120. At times, too, the thing is a bit copiously detailed about matters that, at best, would otherwise have gone unremarked in the annals of history. I was reminded several times, for instance, while attempting to stay engaged by the saga of Dick Gephardt, of the long whale-blubber passages in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick -- the ones you kind of thumbed through in school and eventually moved past with a loud ''what the hell.'' Just because they could be ignored, however, didn't make those passages any less essential to the integrity of the project. Guys like Cramer and Melville want to tell you about the whole whale, not just the tender parts. THAT DEDICATION to completeness does, finally, succeed in making What It Takes one of the heaviest, juiciest reads in years. There's a lot to laugh at too. From Cramer you learn, for example, that on the Navy aircraft carrier where others were known as Skin and Butch and Milt, the future President was affectionately known as George Herbert Walker Bush. Bob Dole comes across as surprisingly charming and lacking in the usual political horse hockey. Cramer is least gentle with Dukakis, whom he views as a tiny titan of rectitude and mediocrity. He reserves special contempt for the pretentious, big-footed reporters who, while sucking up free booze and appetizers, believe that the political process reports to them. Of the way the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, went at candidate Gary Hart, Cramer writes, ''This was such standard Washington poop, so well known by people well known to be in the know, that they didn't even need to trot out the garbage source-codes ('political observers,' or 'campaign staffers,' or 'Capitol Hill sources,' or other lunch buddies) that pass for attribution in the daily political smegma. No, everybody knew Hart was weird.'' This attitude hasn't won Cramer any friends among the reviewing population, but who cares? If you start on it right now, you just might be finished by November 3, when we do it all over again. Those who find the panorama of cavorting politicians even more repulsive than Stephen King's grisly imaginings should turn straight to Richard Price's Clockers (Houghton Miflin, $27.95). This is a moving, unsentimental, truthful, daring, and wholly successful novel about the war between hope and despair in America's inner cities. The setting is dark -- the housing projects, police stations, hospitals, and shopping strips of a crumbling town somewhere near Newark, New Jersey. The book has all kinds of colors -- and ultimately delivers a raw bolt of pure hope. It will rank, I think, right up there with the great American novels like Babbitt, Catch-22, and The Naked and the Dead when the current best-seller lists -- which this book for some crazy reason is not on -- are in yesterday's cat box. THERE ARE two central characters whose lives intertwine, and the fact that Price succeeds in making them heroic is a measure of his achievement. Rocco Klein is a homicide detective in the fictional town of Dempsy. Ronald Dunham -- whom you'd best call by his street name, Strike, unless you're a cop -- is ^ a ''clocker,'' Price's word for someone who deals in $10 bottles of street cocaine. Both Strike and Rocco are very complex people, rich and variegated as real people always are, and both, ultimately, engage our loyalty, our sympathy, and somewhat incredibly, in the case of Strike, our love. Price researched this book for six years, living with the cops, criminals, addicts, and working people who became his characters. There are no cliches here, just a deep understanding of what makes this underworld move. ''He was a damn addict as sure as any other bug-eyed dope fiend out here, hooked on being the man,'' Price writes of Strike's boss, Rodney, a wild, flatulent, and ultimately malevolent father figure who controls the ''felony weight'' cocaine that comes in and out of their neighborhood. ''The man? Rodney was more like God because of those bottles. He couldn't drive twenty feet without causing someone to bubble over with hope and joy. He couldn't walk into a room without every lost child in there jerking his way like he was some kind of magnet. All that from bottles: the bottles were the beginning and the end of it.'' Clockers is about a whole lot more than milieu, though. It offers an intricate moral passion play that, as a pure crime thriller, keeps you turning the ample supply of pages, your tongue between your teeth. As the story moves into gear, Rodney offers Strike a promotion if Strike will murder an unruly fellow dealer. Strike, who has never killed before, is dubious and shares his problem with his brother, Victor, who is everything Strike is not: honest, thoughtful, working two jobs to support his family, never in trouble with the law. While Strike dawdles, the dealer is found murdered. Several days later Victor turns himself in for the crime. But who did it, really? Who is Victor protecting? Detective Klein is convinced that Strike is the miscreant, and he takes on the personal mission of clearing Victor and nabbing Strike instead. Never once in the tale can you anticipate what's going to happen next. The book is often funny too, and the dialogue is excellent. After a New York hood by the name of Papi is shot in Dempsy, he drags himself back into his car and then dies in the Holland Tunnel on the way back home. ''Do you realize what this guy had to do to die in the tunnel?'' Klein asks his partner, Mazilli. ''He went in there all shot up, right? That means he had to pay his toll. He had to wait on line, hand over three dollars, get the green light. Unbelievable.'' ''Maybe he went through the exact-change lane,'' Mazilli replies. PRICE'S WRITING is more than snappy. At times it's piercingly lyrical, even tragic. ''I don't want to be around her,'' says an AIDS-stricken junky about his infant daughter. ''Cause when I see her, you know like in the park? All I can think on is I ain't gonna see her for too much longer now. You know, like maybe a year from now she's gonna be playin' an' fall down hurt herself, start cryin' an' needin' help or whatnot? Where am I gonna be? I'm gonna be in the ground, so I don't wanna see her because it makes me think on that, an' I can't take it, man. I just can't take it.'' Don't miss this book. It will change the way you feel about our cities and the people in them. Whew . . . Horror. Politics. Crime. That's a lot of reality to take to the beach. Perhaps then, in closing, we ought to take a look at Crash Diet (Algonquin Books, $16.95), by Jill McCorkle. At 5 by 7 inches, weighing in at about eight ounces, this collection of deep, tender, uncompromising short stories will almost fit in your back pocket. McCorkle has written a perfect little book, with brief, clean, satisfying tales that open up vistas on lives no less intense because they are ordinary. Each gently probes the reality of loss and, once again, the possibility of redemption, of second chances. ''When you think about it, if your hipbones have been hidden for years and years, it's a real pleasure to have someone find them, grab hold, and hang on,'' says the protagonist of the title story, who has lost not only a lot of weight but also her husband, and is now doing very well indeed. ''You can do okay in this world if you can just find something worth holding on to.'' I don't know. As a philosophy, I think that will serve very well. At least until something heavier comes along.

BOX:

EXCERPT: ''She tried to clear her throat and found there was nothing to clear -- it was as dry as a desert and as smooth as a soapstone.''

EXCERPT: ''Bush had skittered every which way in the tracking polls, flopping and darting . . . like a beast of the veldt in fight-or-flight.''

EXCERPT: ''In order to survive, Strike went by three unbreakable rules: trust no one, don't get greedy, and never do product.''

EXCERPT: ''Kenneth left me on a Monday morning before I'd even had the chance to mousse my hair, and I just stood there . . . and watched him.''