ELVIS: In the Twilight of Memory.<i>...

The other day, I crashed my grocery cart smack dab into the cardboard face of Elvis. A special display of the video of the “ ’68 Comeback Special” was blocking an aisle next to the pancake mix, and since I’d never owned it, I tossed a tape on top of the bananas, thinking the whole Mr. Presley-Mrs. Butterworth’s convergence made perfect sense. Because Elvis, like the supermarket, is all about inspiring hunger and desire and bodily want. And of all the Elvises, the nervous, leather-clad rocker inside the “Comeback” box has always been my favorite, offering his sweaty flesh and blood to his fans in a kind of lewd communion. Has there ever been a more physical performance? All those women crammed around the tiny stage don’t look like they want just to touch him; they look like they want his skin in their mouths so badly that they’ll rip it off with their teeth.

One of the best songs Elvis did that night in ’68 is the devastating “Tryin’ to Get to You.” His fans seem to have adopted it as their anthem, singing it right back at him. The trying-to-get-to-Elvis impulse hasn’t slowed down a bit since his death two decades ago. More than any other singer, he has inspired a cult of proximity. Four new books are devoted to the nearness of him.

“Trying not to fall in love with Elvis was next to impossible,” writes June Juanico in her memoir, “Elvis: In the Twilight of Memory.” She was 17 when they met at one of his concerts in 1955, a pretty citizen of Biloxi, Miss., whom he took out for a Coke after the show. There are lots of Cokes and cheeseburgers and parents in this story. Its ordinary, first-love sweetness is part of its charm but also one of its shortcomings. Can we really trust a woman who often slept in the same bed with the sexiest man of the 20th century and didn’t, well, have sex with him? “I was a responsible young lady, capable of controlling my emotions,” she points out. Good for her; no fun for us.

Once you get used to the fact that Little Elvis won’t be making an appearance in Juanico’s story, you can cozy up to her realness. It’s obvious why Elvis fell for her; she’s genuine, she sticks up for herself and, most important, she gets along with his beloved mother. While she’s no blazing literary talent, she’s a forthright narrator. There’s a lot of teenage dialogue along the lines of, “Be my girl, June!” and “Okay, Elvis, I’ll be your girl. Will you be my boy?” She does have a healthy sense of humor about being the dream date’s regular date: When he worries that he obsesses too much over his hair, she teases him, “If my hair was as pretty as yours, I’d be combing it all the time too.”

Their lovey-dovey world starts to fizzle out with the momentum of 1956. Television and movies, “Heartbreak Hotel” and Col. Tom Parker--It happened so fast. Once the King starts neglecting his heartbroken Mississippi queen, she dumps him and marries a stand-up local guy named . . . Fabian! She has two children, takes up bowling and loves her husband, thankyouverymuch. No regrets, really, but the sense of mourning that shadows her story will be meaningful to any fan: Like us, she still isn’t over Elvis. It’s just that she had to lose him twice.

Scotty Moore also knows what it’s like to sit by the phone waiting for Elvis to call. His as-told-to biography, by James Dickerson, has an air of forgiveness, clearly indicated by the title, “That’s Alright, Elvis.” Presley’s first (and best) guitarist, Moore’s the cool genius behind all those gripping Sun Sessions licks as well as the unassuming shy guy on the “Comeback” stage. If Elvis was the pelvis, then Moore and bassist Bill Black were his first great kick in the pants. “In the beginning, they were a group,” Dickerson points out. The story’s so famous, it’s practically one of the founding myths of America. Moore and Black were members of a Memphis country ensemble called the Starlite Wranglers in 1954. Itching for a new direction, they got Elvis’ phone number from Sam Phillips, played some songs in Moore’s living room on the Fourth of July and went into Phillips’ Sun Studios the next day. And as everyone knows, the miracle happened after hours and hours of nothing much happening; horsing around, they found their sound lurking in Arthur “‘Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s Alright.” They changed the world. Eventually, Elvis went solo, forsaking his old friends.

Dickerson faithfully reproduces Moore’s voice, which is modest, point-blank and disdainful of myth. But the most compelling thing about Moore--his guitar playing--is at odds with his character, and thus the entire straightforward book can’t match the intensity of even one bar of “Mystery Train.” Dickerson writes, “When he played songs the way they were written, they somehow came out different--faster, more energetic. On the outside, Scotty was cool and collected, a shy country boy. On the inside, he was bubbling with emotion. Music was his release.”

Moore never gets too mushy about his famous friend, especially since he repeatedly points out how he actually lost money working for Elvis over the years. Ironically, while there are a few Scotty-first fans out there (Keith Richards among them) who’ll be curious about his post-Elvis career as a producer, the audience for his no-nonsense book will probably be mostly mushy, nonsense-loving Elvis fetishists who want to know what it was like to be so close to him. But even the down-to-earth Moore has a clue about Elvis’s extra-musical allure: “Let’s face it, the man was damned near too pretty to be a man.”

Too bad Robert Mickey Maughon is damned near too prosaic to write prose. His sophomoric “Elvis Is Alive” is subtitled “A Novel of Love, Sacrifice, and Redemption” though “a novel of cliches, idiocy and boredom” is closer to the truth. His premise, that Elvis is alive and well and living as an Elvis impersonator in Paris--”Where else would you hide a turnip but in a turnip patch?”--is compelling. But Maughon lacks the smarts to pull it off. As they say in show biz, don’t quit your day job, Doc.

His protagonist, Memphis coroner Robert St. John, is living every Elvis fan’s dream. He tracks down Presley in Paris (though he never exactly says how), scores an invite to the singer’s vacation house in Marseille, and accompanies him to the handily identified “Venice, Italy.” He exclaims, “How lucky could a man be?” Lucky enough to hear Elvis’ new song, and since Maughon writes the words, it’s crap! Lucky enough to score a French babe named Brigitte, whose green eyes are like “emeralds.” The French have a word for Maughon’s point of view: naivete. His murky plot slops together everything from the cocaine overdose of an Italian playboy to a wacky twist involving a terrorist act “by some religious zealot who cared not one whit for human life.” But perhaps more annoying than the fact that the book reads like a ninth-grader’s English homework is that Maughon is so busy describing things like “superior” French food that he forgets to explore his book’s most interesting question; namely, what would it be like for the real Elvis to live within the world of his mimics? For these are Elvis fans who want to get so close to their hero, they actually try to become him.

Leslie Rubinkowski’s study of that subculture, “Impersonating Elvis,” is a surprise. Like Elvis, it’s respectful and irreverent all at once, telling the stories of how adults deal with a profession in which even 5-year-olds admonish them to “get a life.” Wonderfully complex, Rubinkowski’s examination digs deeper than just the impersonators she gets to know; she also peers into the lives of their fans, mapping out the ways in which “the death of Elvis meant the birth of something else.” This is the picture of another world, a place of contests and ambition and the kind of instant friends you keep for life. Plus, Rubinkowski has her Elvis priorities straight. “Hair,” she writes, “means everything.”

Rubinkowski can pack more suspense into a few paragraphs about how impersonator Dennis Stella forgot to bring his wig to a Vegas contest than Maughon pulls off in an entire novel. By the time Stella’s reunited with his fake pompadour, we’re already sucked into his life. Stella, an insurance salesman from suburban Chicago, is the real hero of Rubinkowski’s story, not Elvis. For more than a year, we watch him try to stuff a Scotty Moore disposition into an Elvis Presley jumpsuit. At first he fears losing his identity to that of a dead singer. By the end, he acknowledges that, to succeed as an impersonator, “he had to give up thinking of himself as just one man.”

Rubinkowski’s book isn’t just about Elvis impersonators any more than Juanico’s book merely tells the story of a summer of love or Dickerson’s illuminates only Moore’s resume. As Rubinkowski puts it, it’s about asking the question, “What do you do when a dream dies?” Juanico and Moore just got on with their lives. Maughon, however lamely, imagines it isn’t even dead. But Rubinkowski’s subjects have taken the most personal, even profound, approach. What do you do when your dream dies? “Certainly, you change. You adapt. And if you possess a certain kind of passion, you transform your grief so that it assumes the shape of the thing you have lost,” she writes. There will always be books written about Elvis Presley because people will always want to grab onto that shape. For some, it’s as small as “Do the Clam.” For others, it’s as huge as America itself.