D. Keith Mano, whose teeming, rollicking novels explored the problems and passions of Christianity in the modern world, to remarkable effect in the capacious, Rabelaisian black comedy “Take Five,” died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 74.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, the actress Laurie Kennedy, said.

Mr. Mano (pronounced MAN-o) was an unpredictable, idiosyncratic figure on the literary scene. A conservative Christian with a deep interest in human sexuality, he made an immediate splash with his first novel, “Bishop’s Progress” (1968), in which the Episcopal bishop of Queens enters the hospital and engages in moral struggle with his surgeon, who turns out to be Beelzebub.

More novels followed in rapid succession, one a year.

“‘Bishop’s Progress’ dealt with progress and the Christian,” Mr. Mano told the reference work World Authors in 1991. “‘Horn’ with civil rights and the Christian. ‘War Is Heaven!’ with the Christian and war. ‘The Death and Life of Harry Goth’ with the Christian and death. ‘The Proselytizer’ with the Christian and sexuality. ‘The Bridge’ with the Christian and environmentalism. And ‘Take Five’ presents a man who loses his five senses one after another, until he is left a shimmering spot in absolute nothingness — at which point one either finds God or goes mad. Or both.”

“Take Five” (1982) was Mr. Mano’s tour de force, nearly 600 backward-numbered pages that traced the terminal decline of Simon Lynxx, a New York filmmaker of outsize dimensions. “Everything’s big in me,” Lynxx announces. “Lust, hunger, thirst, greed, gratitude, they’re all the same size: eighteen triple E.”