BOOK REVIEW : Offbeat Characters Enliven Town : THE HARD TO CATCH MERCY <i> by William Baldwin</i> ; Algonquin Books $19.95, 464 pages

Macondo lives, and not only for readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

The mythic hamlet in the Colombian back lands has migrated into the imaginations of writers in other parts of the world, a number of them in the United States and particularly in the South, where William Faulkner’s own hamlets are ready and waiting. It is a case, too, of what goes around coming around, since Garcia Marquez is partly a Faulknerian himself, though utterly transformed.

William Baldwin is a Marquezian, also in part but only partly transformed. His Cedar Point, moldering in Carolina tidewater in the year 1916, is in some measure as odd, comic and disastrous as Macondo; as removed from our brand of reality, and shading into the other, magical kind. It is not, despite its several attractive qualities, as memorable. It suffers from a kind of lack of necessity.

Necessity is the key to magical realism. Garcia Marquez has it and, when he practices in that vein, so does Mario Vargas Llosa. Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor have it. It requires a living reality so chaotically shaped that only a chaotically shaped line can encompass it.

The skewing of Western modernity on a redoubtable Third World meets the requirement; so does the heritage of black slavery in a democratic republic. The bent Bourbon whimsies, small-town hustles and swamp savageries that swirl together in “The Hard to Catch Mercy” don’t really qualify.

Willie Allson’s story of what happened in Cedar Point when he was in his mid-teens is a wild and colorful flood, in the midst of which several smaller and vividly appealing stories bob and turn until they are submerged.

The color and the flooding are accomplished by a collection of out-sized characters. There is Willie’s grandfather, William Thomas, a grandly fierce and incompetent rice planter for whom the Confederacy and slavery still live. There is his father, Captain Tom, the blind, amiable captain of the Redbird, a converted sloop that plies the coastal trade and supports the family.

There are Willie’s dreamy mother and Maum Anna, the old cook and shaman who is her closest ally and the family’s protector. There is Anna’s first husband, King David, a reformed killer who grinds knives for a living. And there is Hard to Catch Mercy, a primally evil creature from the swamps whose professional specialty is finding lost animals but whose real function in the book is to become Willie’s murderous nemesis.

The first part of Willie’s story is pungent and promising. What he regards as his placid small-town existence is disrupted by the arrival of his older cousin, known as Uncle Jimmy. Jimmy is a go-getter, a charmer, an activist, a disrupter. Before long, he has the grown-ups eating out of his hand and Willie as a simmeringly aggrieved side-kick. Meeting Amy, a swamp girl and one of Hard to Catch’s sisters, he moves her into town and boards her with the local minister, Mr. Friendly.

Amy is beautiful, original and a vital force. She is Jimmy’s girl, but Willie is besottedly in love with her, as are various others, including Mr. Friendly. The erotic tension she arouses is vividly portrayed, and she bestows upon Willie a generous if limited sexual initiation reminiscent of Rosacoke’s in Calder Willingham’s “Rambling Rose.”

She is gifted and sad; she starts a hat business that achieves mythical proportions. Hundreds of women clamor for Easter hats. Hats are their resurrection and Amy’s crucifixion. She dies of arsenic poisoning contracted from the dyed flowers.

It is a touch of the magical spookiness that will expand from this point on. Unfortunately, with the death of Amy, the book loses much of its human energies. From this point on, the characters and the action swell into fabulous proportions, but they seem anecdotal and arbitrary. Even the rivalry between Willie and his older cousin, though it goes on, seems to submerge.

There is the return of Lydia, an Allson grande dame who has lived many years in Paris. There is her feud with Grandpa Allson who, it turns out, had killed her lover, a Union officer. There is the mystery of the hidden Allson dowry. There is the conflagration that burns Cedar Point’s harbor after a turpentine boat owned by the enterprising Jimmy catches fire. There are the baleful reappearances of Hard to Catch Mercy, who abducts his sister’s corpse from her funeral, later abducts Jimmy’s bride at their wedding and finally engages in a grisly, part-supernatural duel to the end with a suddenly matured Willie.

Baldwin has filled his book with violent deaths. One man is disemboweled; another is eaten by a pig. A woman hangs herself; another is carried out to sea in a little boat and drowns. Jimmy’s younger brother--a visionary who rearranges clocks so they run backward--is shot dead.

None of the deaths, not even Amy’s, are human deaths. They are grandiloquent deaths. They are part of the novel’s imposed character. There is enough humor, color, engrossing anecdote and pungent dialogue in “The Hard to Catch Mercy” to carry it along on its own. Baldwin’s effort to raise it to magical realist myth-status makes it founder.