TALES FROM THE NIGHTSIDE

Fifteen undistinguished short stores from the author of the ""Oxrun"" horror novels and the editor of the Shadows horror/fantasy anthology series. In ""Coin of the Realm"" some tollbooth operators keep getting stuck with false quarters that are actually Egyptian coins engraved with pyramids and jackal-headed men--leading to one operator's leap into an Egyptian dimension. In ""Needle Song,"" a blind old granny moves onto the block, begins sewing figures onto a dark cloth, and brings on fatal disasters for the neighbors. And other tales feature: a crippled army officer who adopts a Vietnamese boy and finds that the boy is capable of taking fiendish revenge; a college full of androids; and Mars and Venus, a married couple with a pair of dumb sons, who find that their new neighbors are a pair of white Czechoslovakian wolves who appear only when someone is about to die. Some atmospheric touches, but mostly hackneyed.