Book Description

This new collection of 25 stories, including two appearing here for the first time, collects the best of Steve Rasnic Tem's dark fiction published since his landmark Centipede tome Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors. A number have appeared in various Year’s Best volumes. All represent the high quality of Tem’s prose and the wide range of his approaches to the horror genre. In The Night Doctor And Other Tales, you will encounter the most haunting figures ever to cross Tem’s imagination: a man obsessed with his own breath and the breathing he hears that is not his own; a husband waiting for his wife as new bodies appear at the bottom of his yard; a weekend fisherman and the unseen man sharing his fishing hut; a loyal husband dealing with the latest changes in his wife’s physical appearance; a strange widower in his house by the sea; a devoted mother trying to protect her son from the nightmares of the past; a son returning to a dreaded summer vacation spot; a grandfather protecting his grandchildren from a legacy of dark transformations; and, in the title story, an elderly man awaits the visit of a mysterious family physician. Stories included in this collection: Breathing Apartment B Red Rabbit The Hanged Man The Fishing Hut A Sudden Event Paula Breaks Lost in the Garden of Earthly Delights Blattidae Wine Half-Light Mister Ainsley The Long Fade into Evening Domestic Magic The Secret Laws of the Universe The Man in the Rose Bushes The Night Doctor The Enemy Within Stick Men Too Many Ghosts When You're Not Looking Between the Pilings The Erased The Wake The Weight Lost The Monster Makers