 Steve Rasnic Tem is one of my favorite authors working today...and he's been working a long time. His brand of dark and often quiet fiction occupies the same continent (to me) as the works of Ray Bradbury and Stephen Graham Jones...lyrical shadowy spaces where emotions walks as strong and sturdy as tangible creatures. And with his most recent collection, Tem definitely parades these creatures. Every story in this collection is marvelous. All of them emotionally heavy and steeped in themes of loss, regret, grief (triple helpings on that one) and despair. All painted in lush realistically thick strokes and colors. All of them masterpieces. I'm only going to touch on a few stories that I found myself thinking on long after completion. Opening the door is "Breathing" where in a man struggles to escape the self-imposed confines of his grief only to discover that maybe that was the safest place to be. "Red Rabbit" is one of the most sinister in the collection. It harkens to the weird and unsettling stories of Aickman or Kersh. The less you know the better but this one is fantastic. It will haunt you. "The Hanged Man" is a terrific sliver of weird wherein a family exists under the cowl of suicide, perhaps. "The Fishing Hut" concerns a lonely older man seeking to fill his time by taking up an old pastime. He finds that he shares the old fishing hut he finds with a friendly man...and another unseen inhabitant. "Domestic Magic" brings us to a special woman and the lengths she goes to for her son. "The Man in The Rose Bushes" has a Shirley Jackson feel to it, grand and classic and creepy as hell. "The Night Doctor" is well-worthy of being the titular tale. In it a man who has been dogged by the specter of death all his life starts to realize he's due for a visit sooner rather than later. "The Enemy Within" introduces us to a man who becomes obsessed with a corpse found in a canal. "Stick Men" is dreary and terrifying with its wholly original premise. "Between The Pilings" is a stark slap in the face, it deals with nostalgia and recollection as well as moving on. "The Wake" is yet another unsettling foray into the metaphoric weird. It's unapologetically brilliant and I found myself thinking on it long after I finished reading it. The final story in the collection is "The Monster Makers" and it is another that I won't tell you anything about. Just read it. Tem is a master and you really are doing yourself a disservice if you've not been reading his work. This collection is a helluva starting point for those of you new to his voice. But I offer that you will find the voice warm and sometimes cracking with emotion. Loving and often lilting and poetic. His voice is singularly his. Let these stories simmer within you after reading. Don't just toss the book on a stack and forget about it. Live with it, with them. As he touches on so often in his work, you don't just let things go. The Night Doctor and Other Tales is available from Centipede Press    Comments are closed.
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