The Night Doctor and Other Tales

Author James Sallis has written this about the short stories of Steve Rasnic Tem: “Never programmatic or reductive, Tem’s stories are as dense with meaning as they are with finely wrought language and emotion. They’re in the best sense about things.” Dan Simmons has called him “One of the finest and most productive writers of imaginative literature in North America.”

This new collection of 25 stories (including two appearing here for the first time) collects the best of his 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.

Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. His most recent collections are The Harvest Child and Other Fantasies (Crossroads) and Everything Is Fine Now (Omnium Gatherum). He lives in Colorado.