Werewolves in the Organ

TIME OUT by David Ely. 209 pages. Delacorte. $4.95.

Man's inhumanity to man was once so limited by primitive technology that horror-story writers had to resort to ghosts, devils and other creaky props. Today's shapers of fictional barbarity have merely to invoke, with suitable exaggeration, the modern world. Computers, spaceships, nuclear weapons--these are the devices summoned in this fine first collection of 15 stories by

"David Ely," the pen name of David Lilienthal Jr., son of the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Atomic Energy Commission.

In one story, cold-warring Russia and the U.S., after inadvertently eradicating all life from the British Isles, join in recreating Merry England with fake issues of the London Times and fond memories of Robin Hood. In another, a cuckolded space scientist packages his wife as condensed food for a Mars-bound astronaut, who has already enjoyed her in other ways.

Then there is the story of the church congregation that installs a computerized organ, which plays by punch card and robs the organist of his job. Man gets even with machine by feeding the organ a card punched with all the hymns at once. The result is a deafening rattle that all but shakes the church to ruins.

Ely's excellence does not He in gimmickry. It is in the nuanced truthfulness with which his stories reflect the foibles of society, or reveal the inner feelings that release cruelty and indifference. What chills most in The Academy, for example, is not the slowly revealed, slightly ho-hum fact that a boys' military school is actually a prison from which the students never graduate. Rather it is Ely's subtly conveyed perception that most parents of prospective students do not really want to know what they are letting their children in for.

The author of three brief and bizarre novels (Trot, Seconds, The Tour), Ely commands a novelist's range of skillful settings. What he lacks is the final power to shake and shock the reader by suddenly opening a pit of darkness beneath him, or by fleetingly convincing him that things like werewolves do exist. Ely's style is too smoothly controlled for that, and perhaps the age is too secular.

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