GREEN RIDER by Kristen Britain, Daw Books Inc., 1998, 504 pages, hardbound, $23.95.

If you hold the view that women are on the whole equal to men in hand-to-hand combat, and your favorite movie is “The Never-Ending Story,” then “Green Rider,” the first novel of Kristen Britain of Bar Harbor, may be right up your trail.

The story of Karigan G’ladheon, a young woman struggling toward adulthood, is set mainly in a Middle-Earthlike forest overflowing with magic spells, otherworldly creatures, swordsmen and -women, lingering ghosts and powerful talismans. Because of troubles common among suburban adolescents, Karigan has fled to the forest. She plunges into danger when a man on horseback, dying from arrow wounds, charges her with delivering a secret message to the king.

Too innocent to do anything but the right thing, Karigan accepts the responsibility. She rides, fights and sneaks her way like an ethical picaro to King Zachary. The plot thickens after she reaches the castle, and an abundance of lords, ladies and hired swords swirl toward a showdown to see who will rule Sacoridia and environs.

There are abundances of everything in “Green Rider.” In one corner of the world, quaint-mannered characters live in Victorian houses; near the forest, “merchants” like Karigan’s father populate comfy middle-class (though unmechanized) burgs. A group of hapless Marxist revolutionaries — meant to seem like misguided poor people — are most likely straight off the college campus; and there is, indeed, a college campus. These suburban, Victorian and Middle-Earthlike worlds co-exist more or less separately, linked by Karigan’s needs and anxieties.

It’s not clear exactly what everyone’s beef with the king is, but enough characters appear and disappear — both by magic and as a plot device — to keep a cataloger busy for eons. Their names, derived from a bewildering linguistic welter, indicate the glut. Antique-sounding Anglo-Saxon names obligatory in fantasy (Aeryc, Mirwell) mix unabashedly with Hellenic and Latinate place names (Eletia, Selium) and invented names (D’Yer); Gaelic-, Scandinavian-, Italian-, Romanian-, Semitic-, East African- and Turkish-sounding names occur in the same breath, as it were, with startlingly commonplace names such as “Beryl Spencer.”

A name plethora might overwhelm such a book, except that the Dungeons and Dragons-style plot keeps the creatures coming, at least in the first 300 pages. Karigan defeats a brood of revolting spiderlike beasts. Authentically weird warriors called groundmites cause trouble along the way and as a bonus play a role in the story’s denouement. Mercenaries, minstrels, dotty sorceresses, threatening rapists and trusty friends, mostly female, abound. And there are the ubiquitous Green Riders, whose demands for help generate Karigan’s essential conflict: to be or not to be a Greenie.

The story rides wildly through a thicket of questions. Who can be trusted? Who will rule the land? Can Karigan’s dad track her down? What ordeal is next? “Green Rider’s” best passages appear in convincing descriptions of horseback riding and Maine-like sylvan landscapes, features appropriate for a forester living on Mount Desert Island. Even more interesting are the depictions of otherworld visions, but all of these are in smaller supply than the characters. Much of the rest of the book needed a good, kind, but stern, editor.

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s dust-jacket blurb compares “Green Rider” to J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, but this is an exaggeration. It’s safer to agree with Anne McCaffrey and say that Kristen Britain’s best fantasy fiction lies ahead of her.