By Howard G. Chua-Eoan/Reported by David E. Thigpen

Not long after publishing her phenomenal best seller, The Color Purple, author Alice Walker developed a monstrous case of writer's block. Her solution: to repaint her Mendocino, Calif., house. "My psyche was saying `turquoise and coral.'" And in her turquoise-and-coral bedroom, Walker dreamed up the vision that led to The Temple of My Familiar, a 480-page novel traversing 500,000 years in Africa, Europe and America. In her first book, says Walker, "I was rewriting history as I feel it was. Now I'm going back further in time." The new novel's title refers to "the natural, untamed spirit roaming the cosmos, its temple." Harcourt has scheduled the out-of-this-world epic for a 250,000 first printing in May. And Pocketbooks has forked over $2 million for the paperback rights. Walker could have called the book The Color of Money.