Next Door to Hell : ALL-BRIGHT COURT, <i> By Connie Porter (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 224 pp.)</i>

All-Bright Court, the setting of Connie Porter’s first novel, consists of two tenement blocks. Built to house immigrant steelworkers in Buffalo during World War I, it is still home to them in 1960. Only two things have changed: The immigrants are now black, and the steel company has painted the buildings garish colors. The paint may not have slowed the makeshift houses’ crumbling, but it has given the court its new name.

The new residents are just glad to be earning a paycheck up North. These country people--who “had claimed to be from Birmingham, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, Jackson, New Orleans but were really from Plain Dealing, Zenith, Goshen, Acme, Gopher”--are still simple enough to half-believe in spells and conjure women, yet too sophisticated to realize they live next door to hell.

The mill’s flame and heat alter physical states. Metals liquefy and fumes solidify. The work rots men’s lungs--it rots their lives--and they take it home to their families, whether as the threat of strike or layoff or accident.

Coke ovens and peeling walls shape the lives of the people in “All-Bright Court,” but they do not determine them. Connie Porter’s characters live inward, otherly lives. It’s how they survive, and how her novel progresses.

“To these people who had followed the highways from the South, who had come from the cotton fields, the cane fields, the fields of rivers of rice, dreams were powerful. To them, waking life did not inform dream life. Dream life informed waking life. Dream life was filled with winged harbingers that swooped into waking life carrying messages that should not be ignored. Daytime dreams, waking dreams, were especially filled with harbingers. During the day, one was trespassing in dream life and was liable to be chased into wakefulness by something that was better left unknown.”

Chasing dreams and eluding nightmares, the inhabitants of All-Bright Court spend their time doing what most people do: rearing families, worrying about the future, trying to make ends meet. Yet they also must deal with things many people never know: racism, street violence, irruptions of the supernatural.

Like such other contemporary black novelists as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Charles Johnson, Porter imbues her novel with magic. Steeped in the mundane (diner breakfasts, trips to the market, cooking dinner), “All-Bright Court” cherishes the inexplicable.

There’s something shadowy about Porter’s people: stoic Samuel, his shrewd wife Mary Kate, their son Mikey who earns a scholarship to a white prep school, their childless friend Venita, the criminal Isaac and the rest. Each is subsumed by the larger collectivity. The individual parts defer to the whole--whether in the form of family, neighborhood or society.

“All-Bright Court” is an episodic novel, one in which texture matters more than narrative. This is, ultimately, a work of small gestures, one in which even intense events (crime, sudden death) seem distanced. Moving from 1960 to the mid-’70s, we hear of elections, a war, riots; but their impact is subdued, as if heard from afar. Mutedness, in keeping with Porter’s fascination with the dreamlike, is a constant. “A man,” she writes, “can spin silences around himself like eggshells, each silence an opaque, perfect, elliptical world.”

An author can do that, too. Porter isn’t yet good enough to create a world perfectly --how many novelists are?--but her spun silences and careful ellipses make the exotic seem familiar and the familiar exotic. That is no small thing for a novelist to achieve--let alone a first novelist. With its easy grasp of the impalpable, “All-Bright Court” is a solid debut.