In laying out these archetypes, Mr. Booker -- a British newspaper columnist and the founding editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye -- does a nimble job of collating dozens of stories, using the 34 years he says it took him to write this volume to identify and explicate all sorts of parallels and analogies that might not occur to the casual reader. He shows us how "The Terminator" and its sequel "Judgment Day" adhere to traditional narrative tropes, moving inexorably if violently toward the ideas of rebirth and redemption. And he reminds us how the movie "E.T." embodies classic coming-of-age-story patterns: the boy hero Elliott's encounter with E.T., his alien alter ego, helps him to grow up, forces him to demonstrate leadership, and enables him to bring new harmony to his fragmented family.

Mr. Booker suggests that five of the seven basic plots (Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, and Rebirth) can really be placed under the larger umbrella of Comedy: in their purest form, all have happy endings, all trace a hero's journey from immaturity to self-realization, and all end with the restoration of order or the promise of renewal.

In a sense, these plots all represent variations on Freud's family romance -- the process whereby a young person comes to terms with parental authority, ventures out into the wider world, faces assorted tests and eventually achieves independence. Along the way, confusion (be it a case of mismatched couples or a community in disarray) is dispelled, and alienation gives way to a new sense of wholeness and well-being. This is often symbolized, Mr. Booker argues, by a marriage that represents the coming together of masculine and feminine values and the achievement of balance among the four virtues of "strength, order, feeling and understanding."

Only in the seventh plot type, Tragedy, he observes, is there a deviation from this fundamental pattern. Here, the hero or heroine also goes on a journey, but is "held back by some fatal flaw or weakness from reaching that state of perfect balance," he writes. "They are doomed to fall short of the goal because in some way they are stuck in a state of incompleteness or immaturity." Despair, destruction or death is often the end result.

The problem is that most of Mr. Booker's theories -- from his belief that archetypal stories are rooted in the human unconscious to his arguments about Tragedy and Comedy -- are highly familiar, lifted in part or whole from a wide spectrum of influential, even canonical works by writers and thinkers as varied as Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell, Bruno Bettelheim, Sir James George Frazer, the Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley and the folklore experts Peter and Iona Opie.

Not only is Mr. Booker a voracious magpie (who does not always acknowledge the sources of his ideas), but he also turns out to be an annoyingly biased and didactic one. As "The Seven Basic Plots" progresses, it grows increasingly tendentious. Mr. Booker evaluates works of art on the basis of how closely they adhere to the archetypes he has so laboriously described; the ones that deviate from those classic patterns are dismissed as flawed or perverse -- symptoms of what has gone wrong with modern art and the modern world.

In the past two centuries, Mr. Booker complains, "a fundamental shift has taken place in the psychological 'center of gravity' from which" stories have been told; as a result, "they have become detached from their underlying archetypal purpose."