Scare Care

Proceeds from this anthology benefit the Scare Care Trust, a charity set up to fund organizations that help abused and endangered children, which is administered by children's attorney and detective novelist Andrew Vachss. The authors represented here have donated 38 horror stories--all but seven original to the collection--many of which concern children. The best include Ramsey Campbell's atmospheric ``Ferries,'' about a Flying Dutchman who comes for a very landlocked book editor; Bruce Boston's ``Mammy and the Flies,'' in which a young boy's grandmother becomes as physically monstrous as she is cruel; James Herbert's ``Breakfast,'' a story of a housewife's madness in a post-holocaust world; ``The Wish,'' Roald Dahl's tale of a game of make-believe that gets out of hand; and William Relling Jr.'s ``Table for None,'' in which a middle-aged bachelor discovers a diner that serves food as delicious as mother's, and learns that there can be too much of a good thing. There are also excellent stories by Ruth Rendell, Marc Laidlaw and Harlan Ellison, among others. (Aug.)