DOLORES CLAIBORNE, by Stephen King; Viking ($23.50)

“Dolores Claiborne” is the second Stephen King novel to be released this year. “Gerald’s Game” was a horrific tale, “Dolores Claiborne” far less so, but both tell the story of a woman who settles her domestic hash violently.

In fact, “Dolores Claiborne” refers to “Gerald’s Game” when the eponymous heroine, Dolores, “visions” the other novel as an apparition to the young girl who is its protagonist at a pivotal mement in her life. She has just been molested by her father. Dolores has just murdered her husband for “interfering” with their teen-age daughter. Incest, it seems, is very much on King’s mind, of late.

This novel is given to us in the form of a monologue delivered by the 66-year-old dolores to the local police by way of explaining that she didn’t murder her elderly employer, Vera Donovan. True to her island roots (the island is off the coast of Maine), she speaks in coloquialisms – “I c’n read you easier’n an underwear ad in the Sears catalogue,” she tells one officer – which, as pages turn, truly works the nerves.

Still and by, Dolores has a story to tell. Although Donovan’s body was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs too far a reach from her bedroom for the crippled woman to have navigated on her own, Dolores explains this was one sudden death she did not have a hand in even if she was discovered by the body grasping a rolling pin. To exponerate herself, Dolores must explain the relationship she had with Donovan, and that, although the woman was bitch, what was between them went deep. It was Donovan who suggested to Dolores that afternoon when, quite uncharacteristically, the housekeeper confided her troubles to her boss that a husband can have an “accident.” Why her own husband died of just such an accident.

If ever there was a candidate to fall down and not get up, it’s Joe St. George (Delores reverted to her maiden name after his death). His idea of a love tap is to take a stovepipe to the small of Dolores’ back. And that after she comes home from one of her four jobs. But it isn’t until she discovers he is sexually menacing their daughter and, as well, has stolen money saved for the three kid’s college education, that she lures him to the abandoned well.

St. George, with the tenacity of Cujo, keeps scrabbling up the wall of the well, and his prolonged death scene unleashes the fright writer in King. But this isn’t the King of yore. This year, his social conscience is his guide, his horror reality-based reflecting the evil that men do – to women. After all this time, King is showing us the bogeyman’s face and it’s the guy next door.