The turn of the screwy

I came to ''Pharos" expecting either a genteel ghost story in the 19th-century style, or a 21st-century exercise in ambivalence and ambiguity (a great many smart young authors seem to feel it necessary to do one of these before moving on to the three Ds: drugs, depression, and divorce).

What I got was a gaudy gothic music video of a novella that whirls with weirdness and doesn't make a lick of sense. The only thing I'm absolutely sure of after reading the book twice is that Pharos was a large lighthouse built on an island near Alexandria, Egypt, and destroyed by an earthquake in the 14th century. I know this interesting factoid thanks to Google; Alice Thompson doesn't bother passing it on.

The lighthouse in Thompson's madly energetic little book is 27 miles off the coast of Scotland, on an island called Jacob's Rock. The time is the early 19th century rather than the 14th, and the lighthouse, we are told, is a modern construction that sways in storms rather than trying to stand up to them, more a thing of nature than a thing of man. In ''Pharos" a great deal is made of the difference between things of nature and things of man; I have no idea why, and I imagine I am not supposed to know. I doubt if Thompson knows either. But it gives the book a sense of being about something, which it almost certainly is not.

The principal lighthouse keeper is Cameron, a brooding fellow with a preternatural sensitivity to light, and the ability, it seems, to read the temperature with the lighthouse's barometer. Near the end of the book, and for no reason I could understand, Cameron blinds himself in a voodoo ritual and then starts rewriting the Book of Revelations.

He also begins making apocalyptic pronouncements: ''I am one of the elect. I am not doomed to darkness like the others, nor destined to live in a world of ignorance and uncertainty. For error is empty and has nothing inside."

Ri-iight. And a wet bird never flies at night.

Cameron is unmarried (only unmarried men are eligible for lighthouse duty), but he has a sister named Charlotte who turns up on Jacob's Rock. Or maybe Charlotte's ghost. It's hard to tell.

There's also an assistant lightkeeper, a fellow named Simon. Thompson introduces him this way: ''There was a strange stillness about [his] features as if thoughts were the last thing on his mind." Got that? No? Me either.

In addition to being a lightkeeper, Simon is an acrobat, a puppeteer, and an animist who seems to have the ability to turn objects into living things. We find all of this out about halfway through the book, with no foreshadowing or preparation of any kind; Thompson gives us the info in an offhand manner and then strides briskly onward, dropping peculiar character insights like this one along the way: ''Charlotte's pragmatism reinforced the sense of her own dubiousness."

Ri-iight.

There's a crypt on Jacob's Rock, which may (or may not) be inhabited by the ghost of a 10-year-old mulatto girl who was killed many years before, when a slave ship ran aground on the reef near the island. Grace the ghost girl is not to be confused with Lucia, our heroine, who might (or might not) have once been the figurehead of yet another wrecked ship, changed from wood to flesh by Simon's magic touch. Lucia doesn't remember how she got to the island because she has amnesia. Which makes perfect sense, I think you'd have to agree, for a lady who made her debut as a wooden figurehead.

It is impossible to fully convey the nutty improvisational quality of this book. Ships -- some real, some figments of Lucia's imagination -- come and go out of the mist. We have ghosts, voodoo, animism, buried treasure (only sometimes the chest beneath the sand is filled with glass beads instead of gold), religious mania, and prophecy. We have Lucia proclaiming ''There is evil here!" and fainting dead away, like a character in a Lemony Snicket story or perhaps one from Edward Gorey's ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies." What we don't have is anything approaching an actual story, which is what makes ''Pharos" so hard to deconstruct.

In a longer book, all these peculiarities -- the lack of explanation for the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't buried treasure, for example, or the unanswered question of just whom Grace is haunting (and why) -- would drive me crazy. But because ''Pharos" is as short as it is, and as energetic as it is (it may not make a lick of sense, but Thompson keeps the pedal to the metal, by God), I sort of liked it. Admired it, even.

There is a touch of Cameron's mania in Thompson's writing as she winds her tale up with a couple of genuinely scary scenes. In one of them, the blind head lightkeeper fills an entire room with scribbled sheets of revised Scripture. (Just where on this barren rib of rock Cameron finds enough paper to fill an entire room is a question Thompson wisely makes no effort to address.) And, in what could be a summation of the novel itself, he muses: ''It was a depiction of . . . life with the meaning taken out: no narrative, no analysis, no thought. Just excerpts."

Yep, that's ''Pharos": mostly excerpts with the meaning taken out. And a few ghosts on the side.