Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader

Night Gallery was Rod Serling's follow-up to The Twilight Zone. Though not as successful, it did run for three years (1970-1973) and contained a number of memorable episodes. This collection reprints 18 stories that served as source material for some of those programs. The first entry, a novella, is by Serling himself: entitled ""Escape Route,'' it concerns a fugitive Nazi war criminal who flees into a painting in an art gallery. Particularly good are Fritz Leiber's ``The Girl with the Hungry Eyes'' and ``The Dead Man,'' the latter a fascinating extrapolation of the theory of psychosomatic illness; David Ely's ``The Academy,'' which craftily pinpoints the eternal adolescence of the military mentality; C. M. Kornbluth's ``The Little Black Bag,'' about a medical kit from the future that falls into the wrong hands, and ``Brenda'' by Margaret St. Clair, in which a young girl is propelled into sexual maturity through an encounter with a walking dead man. (January)