Books: Double Time Hawksmoor

by Peter Ackroyd Harper & Row; 217 pages; $16.95

Terror, insists the protagonist of this ingeniously macabre novel, is the % lodestone of the architect's art. It is a bizarre aesthetic, but then, Nicholas Dyer is hardly your everyday architect. A brooding protege of the great Christopher Wren's, he is carrying out a commission to design seven new churches in the London of the early 18th century. Despite this service to Christianity, Dyer's true, secret faith is satanism. In his crazed vision, those seven churches are temples built to appease the demons of hell, and he sees to it that their stones are washed by the blood of human sacrifice.

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