When Sex Becomes a Terrible Snare : GIRLS IN THE GRASS, <i> by Melanie Rae Thon,</i> Random House, $18, 272 pages

The world according to Melanie Rae Thon: Pregnant women whose bodies swell and swell until their very mouths become little holes and their eyes shrink to tiny slits. Old people who get soft and droolly. Boys whose hair is cut so close you can see the configurations of their scalps. Ears so big and strange they seem to live lives of their own. Feet, long, well-shaped, but not stuck on good and proper to the human beings they support. A general sense of spiritual, emotional, sexual dislocation. A God who keeps watching, while people on the margins of things get saved or un-saved. (Or, maybe God isn’t watching.) A string of young girls who would far rather be boys. A string of young women who learn, over and over, that their sexuality means degradation and shame: To be a female is to be taunted, humiliated, shunned.

Well! If this sort of thing rings a bell for you, “Girls in the Grass” should make some interesting summer reading.

About a year ago, the author published her first novel, “Meteors in August.” Set in Montana, as I remember, the story followed the life of an alienated young girl who was attracted--to her sorrow--to other young girls, stuck in compromising positions with callow boys she didn’t care a fig about and attracted mystifyingly to a fundamentalist sect that promised the second coming in the here-and-now.

In other words, the young heroine found herself pulled between a love of girls, a love of boys and a love of God. The novel was dominated by the impersonal weirdness of nature: snow, mountains, water seen unromantically with none of that save-the-glacier mentality that burdens so many of our current Western writers. Thon’s “nature” was there, but it didn’t shelter anybody. It reclined with magnificent disinterest, as its human beings struggled and strove.

“Girls in the Grass” is a collection of 11 earlier short stories, published here and there. (Various editors are acknowledged, but the periodicals are not.) Thon was a winner of the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Prize in 1980, and it’s possible that some of these stories date from that time.

The pieces are uneven, written in very different styles. Some of them seem literary to a fault; some carry the dry, laconic style that characterized “Meteors in August.” Some ride the fine line of so much student writing. It’s either just on the line of not being published, or over on the other side, where it can be.

So . . . this volume is for people who read “Meteors in August” and liked it. For students who are discouraged and think they may never get published. For writers who live in strange rural places and are still struggling to find the precise language to describe their own reality.

This is also for people--women--who are worried sick about their sexuality. These stories are a long, long way from “lesbian fiction.” The little girls who yearn to kiss other little girls and then feel desperately guilty and sad about it are just one part of the physical self-hatred that permeates these stories.

There are, in the “real” world, women who get pregnant and don’t swell quite so frighteningly. Women who have the kid and get on with it. But in all these stories, sex is a terrible snare and trap. Men generally learn to hate the women they have sex with. Women suffer that punishment through no fault of their own.

There’s truth in all this, of course. But there are other truths as well. Those who tap into some of these concerns might do well to buy “Girls in the Grass,” put it next to “Meteors in August” and stand by to see how Melanie Rae Thon charts her fictional course.

Next: Bettyanne Kevles reviews “Dolphin Societies: Discoveries and Puzzles,” edited by Karen Pryor and Kenneth S. Norris (University of California Press).