THE EDGE OF THE CHAIR

...and up all night with this splendid collection fulfilling its intent, a ""constant change of pace, impact and taste"" throughout its 690 pages. There are true crime accounts--Edmund Pearson's poisoning at a select New York girls' boarding school at the turn of the century, Andre Castelot's historical episode, de Saint-Exupery, among others; but the distinctive short stories dominate and are almost all startlers of one kind or another--Stanley Ellin's Fool's Mate in which an imaginary antagonist pinions the emptiness of a marriage; Harold Pinter's opaque Tea Party (his only short story) about what a man tries not to see through bandaged eyes; John Collier's Sleeping Beauty; Ambrose Bierce's sick hoax, A Watcher by the Dead: Kipling, Chesterton, Buchan, de Maupassant, Faulkner, Pushkin, Jack London, Bradbury, etc. Need we say more--who could say more--a galaxy.