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.