WHEN NOBODY'S HOME

Despite the subtitle—``Fifteen Baby-Sitting Tales of Terror''—most of the stories in this surprisingly uneven collection from Gorog (Please Do Not Touch, 1993, etc.) have a lot more baby-sitting than terror; one, ``The Three Brothers,'' is more silly than scary, and another, ``Sit,'' has nothing to do with baby-sitting. A few do rise above mediocrity, however. ``The Snooping Sitter'' is done in by her nosiness when she opens a closet door to find out a family's secrets. Sasha, in ``Doglicks,'' is scared of baby-sitting until she gets a job at the home of a family with a wonderful golden retriever. In ``A Small Child and a Large Sitter,'' little Caroline Louise Emily Beth gets a wonderful (and slimy) revenge on her unpleasant sitter. The best story of the lot is ``Toads and Slime,'' a humorous parody of all those fairy tales in which someone is cursed before finding true love. The rest of the tales are either weak or, in some cases, incomplete; the book's striking cover art will pull in the unsuspecting. (Fiction. 12+)