Not recommended for readers who like their fiction served with character development, general coherence, or a twist of plot, The Mud Game (Mercury, 80 pages, $12.50 paper) comes billed as a "charming, surreal, entertaining novel about the way television took over our lives one strange day but left us still singing." The joint authors, Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross, have strung together a series of very short "scenes" to form a surreal tale involving two high school students, a talking dog named Roadside, and an extended vegetation metaphor. What does it all mean? Beats me.