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