First fantasy novel a passport to another world> Writer Lynn Flewelling leaves her hometown of Bangor behind to create an entire new geography

LUCK IN THE SHADOWS, by Lynn Flewelling, Bantam Books, New York, 479 pages, $5.99.

When life gets a bit ordinary, have you ever wondered what it might feel like to look a centaur in the eye, escape pursuers through a secret passageway, or assume the shape of a bird? For those whose imaginations light up over these and other standards of myth and legend — and that includes all of us at one time or another — Bangor writer Lynn Flewelling’s first novel, “Luck in the Shadows,” is the next best thing to being there.

But there’s more.

While fans of Dungeons and Dragons-style lore will find enough wizardry, necromancy, swords, daggers, and devilishly clever traps here to satisfy the most avid, this book also provides entry to a complete and richly realized world that will please more mainstream readers.

Flewelling not only creates an entire geography — the Three Lands of Mycena, Skala, and Plenimar with their adjacent territories and oceans — complete with religion, history, and politics: She brings it alive with sensuous details. There’s unfamiliar food made so vivid that you’ll hope for a future cookbook spinoff. The silky nap of exotic carpets, or the gritty chill of deepest dungeon floors will make your toes twitch as you read. And inhabiting this world is a gallery of major and minor characters so convincing, and so timelessly motivated, that they’ll engage your sympathy or — in some instances — your aversion.

For instance, there’s the elite spy Seregil, a would-be wizard with a lopsided smile whose simplest incantations end in household disasters and who gets nauseous (a magical equivalent of motion sickness?) during the most ordinary shape-changing. There’s his new but fast-learning apprentice Alec, a freshly orphaned 16-year-old from a simple woodsman’s background whose excessive modesty and reluctance to bathe threaten his social progress. There’s Seregil’s mentor Nysander, a wizard who understands that “magic without knowledge is worse than useless; it is dangerous,” and whose hundreds of years of magical practice haven’t dimmed his appreciation for a pretty face.

And on a less likeable but equally real note there’s ruthless Lord Mardus. He kicks off the novel’s headlong plot in a prologue where we meet him dispassionately ordering the murder of an entire village for reasons of security. No fantasy here: Modern news stories have made this kind of horror all too familiar.

As Flewelling’s story widens and deepens from this grabby beginning, personal struggle and political intrigue play out in the foreground while a titanic conflict between Good and Evil gathers in the background. The link between the big picture and the immediate action is an innocuous-looking carved and pierced wooden disk with a frightening power to focus evil intent — and to drive its wearer horribly insane.

The disk’s real identity and full import are not the only mystery in a complicated plot where things and people are often not what they seem. Magic spells make a windowed wall appear blank to an outside observer, or create doors where none exists. Seregil moves through life in a series of masterful disguises. There are even suggestions that straightforward Alec may have connections and origins of which he isn’t aware.

The identity game peaks in one of the book’s most imaginative and amusing episodes, when Seregil — who is in prison — temporarily switches bodies with Nysander’s stuffy apprentice wizard Thero in order to get the evidence he needs to free himself.

What’s it really like to inhabit someone else’s skin? “Rather obscene,” Seregil decides, bothered because “… he couldn’t scratch without feeling he was taking liberties, and trips to the privy were definitely disquieting.”

Such flashes of insight and humor keep the story from relying too heavily on magic and weaponry, though the action is plentiful, fast-moving, and — thanks to Flewelling’s impressive technical knowledge of swordplay and archery — realistic.

It’s still possible to feel a little weighed down sometimes, though, by the detail with which the author documents her world’s royal dynasties and historic conflicts — as much as such details are needed to give logical structure to the action. In the same vein, an interested reader who tries to trace the travels of Seregil and Alec on the tiny map in the front of the book will wish this illustration could be big enough to decipher without a magnifier.

“Luck in the Shadows” is the first of two volumes. Flewelling wraps up several immediate loose ends here with a hummer of a chase, complete with a lethal trick stairway and a mummified corpse in a hidden chamber. But the bigger question raised in this novel — whether an ancient evil that was vanquished once at great cost will return to prevail — remains tantalizingly open.

A frightening vision that comes to Nysander in the final pages foreshadows what will be at stake in the clash ahead. The role of the peculiar and powerful wooden disk (and seven others like it already in evil Mardus’ possession) will finally become clear as well. But the biggest concern of readers who are waiting, after enjoying this book, for the early 1997 release of Flewelling’s sequel “Stalking Darkness” will be to find out what happens to Seregil, Alec, and the other characters who’ve already started to feel like friends.