Tinged with a taste of terror!"Collector's Items:" A lot of people want to get Augie Kolodney, the fattest, toughest racketeer in America; but no one wants to get and keep him the way Dr. Glendon, connoisseur of precious "one-of-a-kinds," does..."The Messiah on Mott Street:" As his grandfather lies dying, a little boy searches the ghetto for a miracle maker and finds a black mailman who is the true Messiah - or the Angel of Death..."The Different Ones:" Poor Victor, born helpless and deformed, tormented by children and adults alike... until he finds peace on a horror-filled planet."Lindemann's Catch:" The hardest fishing captain out of Boston ran his ship and his men with an iron hand; right up until the day he netted a monster..."Suggestion:" Harvey Hemple always wanted to be the life of the party - until he became the death of it...Tune in to more great tales of terror on Rod Serling's Night Gallery!

    It's really an avoidable mistake." Mentius is a character in The Methuselah Enzyme (1970), one of a score of novels by Fred Mustard Stewart (9/17/32-2/7/07) who, dead at 75, did not avail himself of the DNA modifications plausibly set out in that brisk shocker. Stewart came to be best known for his intercontinental sagas. Year in, year out, the 600-page mark didn't daunt him, a far cry as this was from early hopes as life as a concert pianist, something which had inspired his 1st novel The Mephisto Waltz (1968) which also began his lucrative connection with the film industry. Born in Anderson, IN, he was the son of a banker &, after the Lawrenceville school, near Princeton, NJ, he studied history at Princeton University & later piano at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. By the 1960s, he realised he wasn't going to succeed as a pianist & with marriage to a literary agent, Joan Richardson, in 1967, he began to write, & found immediate success with The Mephisto Waltz. With The Methuselah Enzyme, Stewart showed wit, but it was clear that it wasn't Henry James. There was, however, a certain charm to Six Weeks (1976), told by a married aspirant for a Democratic senatorial nomination who becomes infatuated with a cold-cream heiress, largely at the behest of her 11-year-old, would-be nymphet daughter who, beset by cancer, has less than two months to live. Nabokov it isn't, but certainly better than the 1982 film with Dudley Moore & Mary Tyler Moore.--Christopher Hawtree, The Guardian (edited)