TWELVE RAVENS by Howard Rose. 405 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

being at all spectacular, manages to steer clear of bathos, canned rage and the peculiar, subliminal blurriness that so often afflicts stories about musicians. Al Young's hero is MC Moore, a guitarist and songwriter for a teen-age group called the Masters of Ceremony. The Masters are one of countless Detroit combos manned by young blacks, hungrily looking for gigs and chances to record. In his peak year MC writes 75 songs. One of them, Snakes, becomes a modest local hit, earning the Masters a few hundred dollars as well as some small sense of accomplishment. One by one, though, MC's friends lose sight of their musical dream, and in the end he goes alone to New York to try to crack the big time. The book is at its factual best when it peers into the frenetic world of amateur hours and musical competitions, and follows the trials of children trying to make tapes and master the techniques of professional recording.

Young, who grew up in Detroit writing blues songs, treats MC and his friends with a kind of reverence. At 31, he plainly agrees with Celebrated Jazzman Jo Jones, whom he quotes: "Music is not only a God-given talent; it is a God-given privilege to play music."

Among first novelists, Howard Rose, even at 48, is the rookie whose natural talent may be exceeded only by his brashness. An art dealer in New York, Rose comes on like a man forging a masterpiece on a dare.

He has written a tale of witchcraft, then set it in the least likely locale in the world for witches' sabbaths: a Midwestern suburb. Twelve Ravens is that most difficult of storytellers' tricks, on-again, off-again realism. Night falls, and the mamas and papas of the bored middle class race to the town's hill like nude nymphs and satyrs to worship their resident Mephistopheles, Gypsy, the neighborhood handyman.

Rosemary's Baby Comes to Main Street? Not quite. There is plenty of mumbo jumbo and even a climactic cannibal dinner. But Author Rose is playing for more than easy goose bumps and the thrills of chic Satanism. One of the hill-bound families has a son named Alan, and the novel comes to revolve around Gypsy's struggle for Alan's soul.

Rose is in earnest about his good and evil. Taking Alan as his instance, he persuades the reader to see demonology as a metaphor of adolescence. At the turning of the teens, Rose suggests, a child is taken over by conflicting identities--opposing demons fighting for dominance. Furthermore, Rose hints, pointing at the papas and mamas, the middle-aged American, too, is still waiting for a demon to put a blaze in his heart and a fever in his imagination and lead him through some mind-blowing rites of passage.

In his bad moments, Rose falls under his own spells. He can be seduced by the imps of cute ambiguity. The relationship between Alan and Gypsy, which is central to the book, is impenetrably complex. Yet Rose produces dialogue like a witty tape recorder and invents caricatures just as effortlessly: a marvelously dirty-minded Jewish grandmother; a gentle, handsome racketeer who wants only to be liked. At his best Rose writes with sonorous richness that manages to suggest a blend of Nabokov and Edwin Arlington Robinson. One can hope that wit, style and moral imagination will save him from the truant temptations of fluency.

JEREMIAH: 8:20 by Carol Hill. 371 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Getting into this book is about as easy as getting into the Oval Office of the White House. It has no footnotes, but that is about the only literary bar rier it lacks. The plot proceeds with the authority of a three-year-old dress ing himself. Its sentences often run to 30 lines with no time off for good be havior. It is studded with minor ty pographical sports: parentheses without partners and passages that are coyly printed like this.

Most of it, moreover, is seen through the eyes of a near idiot named Jere miah Francis Scanlon.

Yet for all its faults, the complex story is original in a particularly dis quieting way -- in part because Jeremiah is haunted by the notion that there is a specific secret to life known to at least some of his fellow New Yorkers. To dis cover it, he uses a tape recorder to eaves drop on likely conversations. When someone remarks that Negroes have "Soul," he decides that the elusive se cret must lie among the blacks. So he starts taking his tape recorder to Har lem and eventually meets disaster there.

The author, 30, who began the novel while working for a New York pub lisher, is at her best in the thick of crowd situations that many more ex perienced writers avoid -- or simply flub.

Riots, nightclub scenes, eight-way con versations around a boardinghouse din ner table bring out her gift for or chestrating many elements without Josing the tone or clarity of individual voices. Jeremiah would be a better book if the characters were onstage more and less time were lavished on clumsy internal monologues. But the author's reach--and grasp--are courageous and commendable.

LUMINOUS NIGHT by George Lewis. 263 pages. Dial. $5.95.

"She had learned to live almost lovingly with him while he was at work and to support the crass oversimplification of him when he was at home." The lady in question is Louise, the remote, forbearing, scrupulous, intensely abstracted wife of a muscular and confused small-town druggist. Louise is the major creation of a curious book that should be absolutely dreadful. Instead, it slowly begins to haunt the reader's consciousness like the remembered sounds and smells, the petty cruelties and private joys of some unforgettable, bizarre childhood.

George Lewis' characters include a hallucinating young Jewish student named Luvwinkel, a satanic but very funny Lebanese professor of English, and a grandmother who coaches Little League baseball. There is almost no plot. Instead, as an experiment in contrapuntal fiction, the author tries to lace his scenes of domestic disarray with excerpts from the professor's surreal film script about programmed inhumanity in a Graustarkian Europe. No matter. For at 29, Author Lewis, a Texan who now teaches English in California, already possesses rare skill and rarer wisdom. He can create characters, viewing them unsentimentally but with great affection. He can turn them loose to survive in those clumsy social groupings--known as families--that seem designed for punishment but are also capable of achieving a certain rumpled blessedness.

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