BOOK REVIEW: FICTION : Imagine a Boss Programmed for Terror : THE VIRTUAL BOSS <i> by Floyd Kemske</i> , Catbird Press, $19.95, 237 pages

One of the more dubious pleasures of visiting a bookstore is that you can check out the latest books on management. You don’t read them, exactly. It’s too depressing. But you pick them up gingerly and rifle through the pages in hopes that something will jump out at you--some clue about what your boss (in his glass cubicle or her walnut-paneled office) is doing. To you.

These are strange books. Hard-nosed and fuzzy-feely alike, they view management as purely constructive and benign, not as a necessary evil: the degree of compulsion or manipulation required to carry out any collective task.

The dark side--when compulsion takes on a momentum of its own--is glossed over or left out completely. Serious denial is at work here.

Floyd Kemske has no such illusions. A veteran trade-magazine editor, he is writing a series of novels called “corporate nightmares”--the first was “Lifetime Employment”--in which malign or ludicrous trends in the workplace are taken a step beyond reality.

“The Virtual Boss” is a grimly funny parable about a high-tech company in Boston that is run totally by software--a computer program nicknamed Chuck.

Chuck is designed to scope out each employee’s needs and weaknesses. To maximize output, he provides reinforcement that ranges from gentle hints to round-the-clock terror. Employees are discouraged from talking to one another; they relate only to the software. And each, depending on job performance and the signals unwittingly sent to Chuck, creates a custom-tailored hell.

The world of the novel is like ours, only worse. Not just cars but coffee makers and shower heads bark out computerized commands. Urban decay and violence have spread. High unemployment chains the few “gainfuls” to their jobs--in fact, their jobs are all they think about. Groups of “guilters” feebly protest the triumph of brute economic values.

To Donald F. Jones, CEO of the company, the guilters are “simply people who don’t want the world to be the way it is.” He compares them to Luddites and Communists and scoffs at their insistence on “investing history with moral significance.”

Yet Jones, an intelligent and perceptive man, is no stranger to guilt. He has Chuck installed to eliminate the human factor from management--a factor he blames for his having left behind “a path strewn with the wreckage of broken dreams and misguided careers. He was better than most, of course, which meant that the sum of supervisor-induced human misery must be unimaginable.”

Kemske asks us to believe that a CEO this aware--a man capable of looking at his autistic son and thinking: “People are by nature so cruel that a truly perceptive child would withdraw from human society”--would be blind to the cruelty of the inhuman system he creates. But he is. One purpose of any management system, after all, is to shield the boss from the consequences of his acts. Jones’ system, so long as it serves the bottom line, absolves him from responsibility altogether.

Chuck, however, begins to exceed his mandate. Like computers in science fiction--think of Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey”--he encroaches on human territory. He tries to fire Linda, his original programmer and Jones’ ex-mistress. She suffers panic attacks, and grows dependent on Chuck to relieve them.

Meanwhile, something happens to Arthur, an employee conditioned by his father’s suicide to accept the worst abuse that Chuck can dish out. He gets mugged (by a mugger just as coolly professional, in his way, as Jones) and contacts Linda for help. The two compare notes on the system. A kernel of resistance forms.

That the resistance is futile, or that characters in a parable tend to be thinly drawn, doesn’t matter much. This is a timely novel--and not just because somebody is no doubt tinkering with the technology to create a Chuck. Labor relations today are more vicious and one-sided than America has seen since the 1930s--a fact you can read in those management books only between the euphemisms.