THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson turns out to be like the shock endings of so many creepy movie thrillers. After endless, escalating rounds of terror, the Awful Thing is finally finished off. Its remains, repellent yet fascinating, lie cold in the basement. Everyone sighs with relief. Then the Thing, with one last ghastly burst of life, leaps up and—oh, no, this movie's not over after all! Everyone resumes screaming.

Go ahead and scream. A year and a half after they concluded their five-year marriage with an uncommonly vicious divorce fight, Anderson, 50, has shot the couple back into the headlines with her autobiography, My Life in High Heels (see excerpt, page 46). The book was suggested by Anderson's friend, actor Ricardo Montalban—though he stopped short of recommending that it be bound in rich Corinthian leather.

The book dwells at length on the dozen years of abuse Anderson allegedly suffered as Reynolds' lover and, later, his wife. "Why," she asks now, "should the only record be the tabloid version and what Burt said?" In fact, Anderson remained relatively reticent during the divorce proceedings, while Burt was anything but. He flaunted his affair with cocktail-lounge manager Pam Seals in the National Enquirer. Dressed in garish purple, he appeared on ABC's Good Morning America: Evening Edition ("the Barney episode," Anderson's manager called it), where he informed audiences that Anderson was a lousy mother to their son Quinton, now 7, whom they adopted in 1988. In his autobiography, 1994's My Story, coauthored by PEOPLE correspondent Todd Gold, Reynolds claimed he started fooling around with Seals only after catching Anderson flirting poolside at home with Terry Warren, 27, one of the star's acting proteges at his Institute for Theatre Training in Jupiter, Fla.

In High Heels, Anderson tries to even the score. The onetime WKRP in Cincinnati star says Reynolds was nothing like the smooth, flippant charmer she first fell in love with during their 1982 romance (they'd met four years earlier on The Merv Griffin Show). Reynolds, 59, has previously admitted his addiction to Valium, Percodan and Halcion. The actor, according to Anderson, terrified her with his violent mood swings, crying jags, panic attacks and, by her count, repeated incidents of physical abuse. When she once threatened to go to the police, she has said, he scoffed, "Go ahead. The police love me. America loves me. They'll never believe you."

If Reynolds has been stung by Anderson's latest charges, he isn't letting on. Reached in Miami, where he's filming Striptease with Demi Moore, he had no comment on the book. "Demi's in her trailer counting her money," was what he told PEOPLE, "and I'm in here counting my liver spots." Publicist Joe Sutton says Reynolds "wishes [Anderson] nothing but the best from this day forward." So far, Anderson's book tour has indeed been successful. When she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show Nov. 2, the show enjoyed its highest ratings of the season.

Reynolds' friends, not surprisingly, say the book should be classified as fiction. "If these charges are true," says one longtime associate, "she would've brought them up in her divorce. She would've used them to get even more money." (Under the divorce settlement, Anderson received a $1.9 million Beverly Hills home and a $500,000 vacation home in North Carolina, plus $15,000 monthly in child support.)

Well, why did Anderson hold back? "I waited until I was no longer angry, bitter, hurt or anguished in any way," she explains. She is now "at peace," she says, thanks to phone therapy with a New York counselor recommended by Marilu Henner. All along, friends, including Montalban and actress Deidre Hall, urged her to counter Reynolds' story. "Ricardo told me, 'You must write a book—a book from you, it will come from love.' "

None of her friends, though, knew exactly how rocky life with Reynolds had become. Her pain "was something she kept private," says Deidra Hoffman, 30, Anderson's daughter by her first marriage, to salesman Bruce Hasselberg. (A married high school history teacher in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Hoffman is currently pregnant with Anderson's second grandchild.) Even so, Hoffman grew to dislike Reynolds a few years after he began dating her mother. He was, she says, "very cold, distant." When Reynolds gave her a Mercedes as a present in 1983, when she was 18, she returned it. "I would rather have had him call on the phone and talk," she says. "Never did we spend time together, the two of us."

Anderson says she has not spoken with Reynolds face-to-face since Dec. 5, 1994, when they hammered out child-support issues in court. All communication now is through lawyers, and none of it is friendly. "Child support," Anderson says, "does not come on a regular basis." Reynolds is behind several months, she says, and six months late in mortgage payments he's required to make on her home. (For now they've agreed that she'll handle the payments; he'll reimburse her later.)

Her home is a happy one, says Anderson, because she is sharing it with L.A. attorney Geoff Brown, 46. "We're attuned in just about everything we do and think and say," says the divorced Brown, who started dating her seven months after they met in February 1993. He represented her in an FBI investigation of a telemarketing operation that had misused her name. "Geoff is strong," says Anderson, "not dangerous."

Her wrenchingly public divorce, she suspects, was the result of spin control gone berserk as Reynolds tried to stage-manage the revelation of his affair with Seals. "It's as simple as a man falling in love with another woman," she says, "and not wanting the public to dislike him for it."

But in the end, says Anderson, "if I hadn't married Burt, I wouldn't have Quinton." She describes their son as "an honest, open little boy who loves his mommy and daddy." And, she notes, "he has a fabulous relationship with Geoff." (Reynolds' visitation schedule varies. When he's in L.A., he sees Quinton every other weekend; when he's in Florida, the boy stays with him during school vacations.)

Anderson says she doesn't allow her son to watch TV shows on which she is discussing Reynolds. "I don't think he needs to know anything about this book until later in life," says Anderson. And then? "He can look at it with a grown-up eye, hopefully with self-esteem. It's going to be tough."

TOM GLIATTO
MARIA EFTIMIADES in New York City, LOIS ARMSTRONG and TODD GOLD in Los Angeles and DON SIDER in Palm Beach