Best of all, Laurel’s sister has experience with virtually any frightening situation, from time-outs to tornadoes. When my husband was taken by ambulance in the middle of the night, my daughter and I rode behind, my tense odyssey accompanied by a back-seat soliloquy. “My sister was in a truck like that one time,” I hear over my shoulder. “It had those big red numbers, I mean, letters, on the back and a bed inside and it was loud!” When Laurel saw her dad return home safely the next day, she couldn’t wait to tell him what her sister said.

I would find this make-believe sibling nothing but heartwarming and developmentally appropriate if only my mother hadn’t talked to imaginary people, too. I never heard Mom say their names, so I don’t who they were — age, sex, hobbies, nothing. I say “they,” but I’m not sure if it was a crowd or one frequent companion.

My mother’s monologues were more like the drone in a Gregorian chant, a continuous muttering, sort of a background hum to my childhood. If I asked her to look at my book report from school, she would fix her eyes on the page without seeing it. “Oh really? I know what you mean,” she would say, eyes glassy as she slumped in her chair, its rust slipcover stylish for 1974. “Uh huh. Uh huh. He won’t get away with it.” She would hand the paper back to me, her lips still moving.

These discussions with the nonexistent started before I was born, when Mom was in her mid-20s and single. The story goes that my grandmother heard my mother alone and chatting in the living room. “Who are you talking to?” Grandma asked. My mother motioned to an empty velvet wing chair. “It’s Dad. Can’t you see him? He’s right there,” she answered. Her father had died in his sleep a week earlier at 59.

Family members tell me that exchange led to Mom’s first stay in a psych unit. There is much I don’t know about my mother’s early life, and most relatives who would know have died or are reluctant to discuss it. For me, the family stories narrow to one stark question: What is the difference between the raving mother talking to her imaginary dad and the creative daughter talking to her imaginary sister? Where does inventiveness end and madness begin?

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You don’t need to haul out Van Gogh to get into slippery terrain here. I once interviewed a famous novelist for a live radio program, starting with a fail-safe question: “How do you get ideas for your characters and what happens to them?” She described how her characters came to her. They whispered in her ear while she sat at the computer, or approached her while she washed the dishes. They told her what would happen next. Sometimes she wanted to quarrel with them. No, this is what we’re going to do, she wanted to say. But usually, she acquiesced. They typically knew best.

That’s how I remember the conversation, anyway. After the whispering in the ear part, I was blown right back into the suburban split-level where I grew up, when I glanced into my mother’s bedroom to find her naked, alone and murmuring, “I see what you mean. They are all in on it.”

I tried focusing on the sparkles of the author’s suit, the clock indicating 45 seconds left in the interview, 44, 43. But I couldn’t shake my panic as I brightly asked how she became a writer. I half expected her to start stripping right there, as my mother often did with no warning. I wanted to bolt out the studio door. Since then, I’ve heard similar descriptions of creating fiction by other writers. They talk to me.

Sure, I know what scientists and theorists would say about the differences among kids, artists and madmen. “Children have a very lush fantasy life. Most of that is a playful imagining. As children understand what’s real and what isn’t, that fades normally,” Mark Bryan, co-author of “The Artist’s Way at Work,” once told me.

As for novelists talking to their characters, “It’s a controlled fantasy,” Bryan said. “Those voices are working toward a goal. There’s an organizing ego. If I wake up and hear the voice of a killer in my head, I don’t believe I’m channeling that killer. That voice is a culmination of my experiences. The question for a writer is how I continue to contact that voice, visit it again, drop down the creative well.”

This sounds plausible. I’ve felt inspired moments when the writing seems to come through me, not from me. I can also be coldly intellectual, brandishing psychiatric jargon with the best of them. I can describe how schizophrenia is often caused by unhealthy enmeshment with a parent, how there’s a difference between the realm of the unconscious, where imagination lies, and the realm of madness.

And yet.

And yet I became a journalist instead of a novelist because I’m afraid of characters I can’t interview on the phone. I love storytelling, but I’ve reluctantly left invention to others. When Laurel talks about her sister, there are moments I drink in this beautiful, happy, imaginative child, but underneath my pride feel the unspeakable. Will she get the family disease? Or if she doesn’t, will I, under the stress of parenting? Will the uninvited voices catch up with me?

I tell myself family abuse and violence, not genetics, were the catalyst for my mother’s condition. Still, before deciding to get pregnant, I worried. In college, someone I thought was a friend heard my history and remarked, “I’d never have children with you. Bad genes.” He recoiled a little at my snappy comeback — “You weren’t invited” — but we both knew what he was saying. Given the possibility, I wasn’t sure I would have had children with me.

I try to reassure myself by contrasting my husband and me to my mother’s parents. They were straight out of an abnormal psychology textbook, producing my mother and a son who stuttered badly. Matriarch: Domineering, humorless, possibly prone to violence. Patriarch: Loving but weak. Accrues heart attacks like baseball cards. Rescues his daughter from challenge, whether she needs help or not. But I’m not like any of that. My child’s household ain’t perfect, but at least it’s sane.

I compare the amount of time my mother and my child spend in their fantasies. My mother’s life as a parent was one long psychotic episode with varying degrees of intensity. She never left the trance. My daughter’s visits with her sister usually last a few joyful minutes. If those interludes are something akin to an altered state, they don’t replace normal consciousness, they expand upon it. Sounds like creativity, right?

And I remind myself of their widely different attitudes. My mother never admitted she talked to oxygen atoms. When challenged, she denied anything was wrong with her. It was the people around her who were nuts. My daughter revels in her preschool magic, turning herself into a mom, a frog and a lawn mower within the space of five minutes.

We recently read a bedtime story about a girl named Ruthie and her imaginary friend, Jessica. They eat, sleep and pal around together until Ruthie meets a real girl named Jessica. The real child replaces the illusion. Ruthie and Jessica become best friends.

“Do you know someone like that?” I asked, expecting Laurel to name her best friend. “Yes!” she offered, giggling. “My sister!” My daughter’s eyes were mischievous, as if she had been found out.

I might never be sure Laurel has escaped the family legacy. I might never be sure I have. My mother was not formally diagnosed with schizophrenia or any other brain disease. Technically speaking, I don’t know what’s wrong with her.

Maybe it’s simply denial of the possibilities, but when I look at my exuberant child, I feel in my gut she will stay mentally well. As for my own sanity, I’ll always have a flicker of doubt about what might happen tomorrow. I imagine myself a 100-year-old on my deathbed, surrounded by family, only then finally able to cheer, “I made it! I didn’t crack up!”

Amid all this, something remarkable has happened. The child whose favorite game is pretend, who can imagine a truck out of a cookie and devise a new song every hour, is teaching me how to feel safe with invisible people, and even be their friends. I talked to an empty chair at an outdoor tea party this morning and saw the sister that Laurel loves. “What a sparkly morning!” my daughter said, dancing a little under lacy clouds. If this is madness, count me in.

Event Horizon’s creators, Ellen Datlow, Rob Killheffer and Pam Weintraub, proudly describe it as a professional venture. To Datlow, a critically acclaimed editor, this means, “We pay professional rates and we have editors who know what they’re doing, who have some experience in editing, who have an editorial voice, who work with authors on stories, and who are not afraid to turn stories down.” This distinction is particularly significant in two mediums whose culture is dominated by fan efforts.

Yet professionalism has proved no hedge against declining circulation in the traditional science-fiction magazine market, as subscriptions to the big three — Asimov’s, Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction — continue to plummet. And professionalism in electronic publishing has yet to prove it can fuel a profitable business.

Although Event Horizon was partly designed as bait to draw attention to its successful parent Web production company of the same name, producer Killheffer stresses, “We don’t want to be a vanity project. ” And the site has drawn between 15,000 and 20,000 unique users per month since its inception in August. But is that enough to survive?

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Science fiction, of course, is ubiquitous on the Net: Multitudes jam the local area networks to download their very own personal copy of the newest “Star Wars” trailer, while TV-oriented sites like The Sci-Fi Channel’s Dominion host three-day electronic sci-fi conventions. Since its earliest days, science-fiction fandom has had a community sensibility, and it has flourished online since the first cyberspace pioneers — programmers by day, speculative dreamers by night — colonized the distributed bulletin board system that would become Usenet in order to have a place to talk about their favorite “Star Trek” episodes.

But the army of people interested in science fiction spun off from movies and TV far outnumbers those interested in the genre’s written words. “We’re not growing a bunch of new readers,” Killheffer admits. “The barrier that written science fiction has always had is the willingness of the reader to encounter unfamiliar concepts and do a little bit of work in reading. That barrier is as high as it ever was. ‘Star Wars’ is evidence that the imagery of science fiction has become familiar to people. They’ll buy stories in a familiar world with familiar characters, but there’s little evidence that they’ll pick up a new world — even when the book is aimed directly at that audience, telling a similar story of high adventure and using the imagery of science fiction in a similar way. They’re not looking for science fiction, they’re looking for ‘Star Wars.’”

Event Horizon includes few of the bells and whistles that mark other science fiction-oriented sites. “We try and make a story online look the same as a print story generally,” allows Datlow. “Although I’ve seen stories on a black background, I think it’s a really bad idea. You want to make it as easy on the eyes as you can.” And there are some advantages that virtual publishing has over print: Length is not a limiting factor, so novellas — a format science-fiction writers favor — can be more easily accommodated. Although the site does host a section called Superstrings — round-robin exercises in collaborative fiction among teams of up-and-coming talent — it eschews more elaborate hypertext experimentation. Datlow says: “I think the brain is still wired to read a certain way, and I don’t think it’s easy to get involved with fiction if it’s not written in a traditional structure, or one that the brain is used to following.”

The question remains: Can Event Horizon succeed where an established brand name like Omni — supported by the deep pockets of Penthouse publisher General Media — failed? Notes Gardner Dozois, editor of the venerable Asimov’s and a well-regarded author in his own right: “The problems with publishing fiction on the Net are two-fold: You need seed money to pay for editorial material — you have to be able to buy stories from authors. You need start-up money, pockets deep enough to allow you to buy stories until your site earns a profit. Which brings us to the second problem: How do you make money reliably by publishing on the Internet? The track record is not good.”

Was the Omni model that Event Horizon has adopted — a Web publication supported by ad revenues — simply ahead of its time? “In my opinion,” says Event Horizon’s Weintraub, “Omni was in step with its time. It had a tremendously recognizable brand name, it was linked ubiquitously throughout the Internet at many thousands of junctures, and it had a level of traffic” — approximately a million page views a day when the plug was pulled in April 1998 — “that other companies who spent far more are making a profit on today.”

Gerard Van Der Leun — a senior editor at Penthouse who is also an online veteran and co-author of “Rules of the Net,” a sardonic survey of Net manners — disagrees. “The site was not making any money because it was an ad-driven site and the ads weren’t supporting it at the level it needed to be supported — through no fault of the editorial staff. It was a great team and they all worked hard. But if you add up all of the Web sites that are free to users and what it costs to maintain them and then add up all the ads, the amount needed to support those sites is vastly larger than the amount generated from those ads. Especially when those advertisers figure out that they’re paying $5,000 a month for a tiny banner with two click-throughs. The model works better in the print world, when you don’t know for sure your advertising isn’t working.”

Event Horizon believes the secret to success is attracting the right kind of advertisers. The site has aimed to cultivate advertisers who specifically want to target a literate audience — book clubs, book publishers, publishers of interactive CD-ROMs.

“Maybe 1 percent of users on a ‘Star Wars’ site will respond to an ad. But on our site, every single one of our people will be interested in a product,” says Killheffer. “We may have a smaller audience, but we have a focused audience. If people come to our site, they’re declaring a certain kind of passion and devotion that is unusual in a market today. They’re making a strong statement about how much they want it. There remains a very enthusiastic and deeply intellectual community that engages in conversation about the literature.”

The film follows this scheme scrupulously, departing from the novel only in the ways that film must: condensing long interior monologues into pithy sequences of action and dialogue, turning what’s inside out. Whale took up painting after retiring from his clashes with the Hollywood studios. He persuades his poor fetishized gardener to pose for him in his garden studio in various nervous states of undress. During the sittings the details of Whale’s rise and fall — from a Dickensian English childhood and fighting in the trenches of World War I through the Frankenstein films and his eventual rejection by Hollywood — emerge in a series of dialogues between McKellen and Fraser, alternately flirtatious, poignant and hostile.

It must have seemed an elegant solution to the problem of condensing a life story to the length of a feature film, and in many ways it is. By focusing on a brief, charged episode at the end of Whale’s life, director and screenwriter Bill Condon is freed from the usual stale methods of the biopic: a tour of high points and conflicts hurrying toward a pat resolution. Resolution, “Gods and Monsters” seems to say, is the whole question of a life like Whale’s — and the past, glimpsed here and there in flashback, is merely the stuff out of which resolution will or won’t be made.

The key element in the mixture is, of course, McKellen. The openly gay giant of British stage works infrequently in film — anyone want to guess why? He’s reported to have glimpsed a bit of himself in the proud, reticent Whale, and from the evidence on the screen, imaginative transference between actor and part was complete. McKellen is hypnotic in this part, lending an absolute authority and dignity to even the most absurd of Whale’s struttings and posturings. Among many priceless moments, my favorite may be when, at a garden party, Whale has an opportunity to show off his fish-out-of-water hunk to a European princess and to anxiously closeted gay director George Cukor. “He’s never met a princess before,” McKellen explains, seemingly polite. “Only queens.” When Cukor blanches at this bit of coded cattiness, McKellen glows with pleasure. Throughout this film he unearths bemusement, discord, loss and real eroticism from Whale’s attentions to his hunky gardener, often simultaneously. For moviegoers in search of greatness in screen performances, consider this recommendation enough.

Unfortunately, Fraser is awkwardly miscast as the object of Whale’s nostalgic obsession — and as the film moves toward its somewhat strained Gothic payoff that imbalance looms larger and larger. It’s not that Fraser’s a bad performer, though he does feel a little too contemporary for a film set in the ’50s. It’s merely that he’s too pretty, too sulky, too self-evidently harmless to be the trigger for the darker half of Whale’s fantasies. As a glance at the first chapter of Bram’s novel makes clear, the gardener figure, a former marine, should be scary as well as enticing to Whale. Fraser’s not dangerous enough. He’s not ugly enough. We ought to be frightened for the smaller, older man’s safety in the presence of this creature. Instead, McKellen runs rings around him.

The result is something like watching a marvelous one-man show on an off-Broadway stage. McKellen is truly superb, but the film is static, coming more to life in those all-too-brief flashbacks showing Whale on the set of “Bride of Frankenstein” or in the muddy wartime trenches. It sparks to life as well in scenes with other antagonists: young, gay social climber Edmond Kay, played by Jack Plotnick, or Whale’s severe but devoted housekeeper, played by a nearly unrecognizable Lynn Redgrave in an eccentric but effective performance. We yearn for more of these glimpses of Whale’s career, and more banter with his verbal equals. McKellen, nevertheless, provides plenty of electricity — even if the monster never quite gets off the table and walks. And somewhere, watching, James Whale is very, very happy.