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SURRENDER THE PINK, by Carrie Fisher (Simon & Schuster; 286 pages; $18.95), is the sort of novel writers write between novels, about the sort of love affair a young woman might have between affairs. It has the odd quality of being funny and well written, despite an occasional outbreak of coupling adverbs ("passionately, tenderly"). But it is utterly unmemorable. The author can't seem to care much about her heroine, a pretty but underexposed young woman named Dinah Kaufman who writes soap operas in Los Angeles. Although Dinah likes sex and wants to be in love, the men she meets are either too strong or too weak, never just right. In fact, the reader decides, the men are handsome fakes, big-jawed 42 regulars snipped from a Ralph Lauren ad to act out Dinah's problem. They meet Dinah in a fake world, where no one has money troubles and there's nothing between Los Angeles and East Hampton.
THE POWER, by James Mills (Warner; 406 pages; $21.95), is a brave and probably foolhardy try at combining the structure of a conventional spy thriller with what spy fans are likely to consider a lot of annoying nonsense about occult forces and psychic phenomena. Jack Hammond is a U.S. spy who gets caught between two beautiful Soviet witches. Evil, gorgeous Darya can dematerialize herself and drive men mad with multiple orgasms. She can also fox computer memories and detonate nuclear warheads. Good, gorgeous Valentina uses the power of Jesus for psychic healing. Hammond's problem is to keep sickly General Secretary Yuri Andropov alive until Mikhail Gorbachev is able to take over. This reader's problem is that he doesn't believe a word of it.
FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, by Stephen King (Viking; 763 pages; $22.95), offers a quartet of horror novellas that show this vexing and engaging storyteller at close to his best. What has always charmed and exasperated about King's enormous run of books is a quality not exactly childlike -- James Thurber could be childlike, and so could E.B. White -- but rather teenager-like. The early teens, at that; King is stuck permanently at about 13 1/2. He bops through these stories with the mischievous imagination of a young adolescent, and also the wearying energy, sloppiness, ignorance and complete lack of subtlety and taste. At the length of a good ghost story, he is amusing and enjoyable with spooky stuff about, for example, an airliner, most of whose passengers disappear as it flies, leaving behind (wow!) their tooth fillings and pacemakers; and a well-sketched village miser who steals a Polaroid camera that obstinately produces shots of (eek!) a savage dog.