Alan Ryker is an up and coming writer in the dark fiction genre. If you haven’t read him and you are a fan of the genre then you have some catching up to do and you are going to have fun doing it.

Nightmare Man is the most recent of several very good novellas and novels of Ryker that have been published by Darkfuse with several more on the way. This is not my favorite Ryker work. My personal favorites are the Vampires of the Plains series and The Hoard. Still, it was very good.

Characters drive Ryker’s work. Sure, horrific things happen. The baddies are up there with the best of them. His powers of description will bring a shudder (as in the case of the marvelous Vampires of the Plains series) or squeamish hives (in the case of The Hoard). But it is the characters that stand out for me. You really feel that you know them and there is a certain truth to them that comes from a sensitivity and empathy for his subject matter, whether it is the relative of a hoarder trapped in their obsessions, or in this case a man plagued by night terrors that not only destroy his peace of mind but, it seems, have the danger of crossing the bridge from the inner dreamscape to the outer real world.

In all of his works, you feel that Ryker understands and feels for his characters and knows what makes them act the way that they do. What drives the Hoarder? What are "night terrors" like and where do they come from? This adds a sense of realism to the fantastic, brings a whole deeper emotional level to the narration, and makes the stories so much more unsettling.

I gave this one somewhere between 3 1//2 to 4 stars because we have read stories like this before and I felt that I was on familiar ground. It is better than the usual story of this type because Ryker gets into what "night terrors" really are---the source and their effect of the sufferer. He really set the "originality" bar pretty high with The Hoard though, otherwise I probably would have rated higher.
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4.5 stars!

Night terrors. I didn't know much about them until I read this book. Apparently, they can be hereditary and/or influenced by stress. They can also be flat out horrific. But what happens when your night terrors spread out to other people? Has your dream become real or has it been transferred like some kind of deadly disease? You will need to read this fine horror novella to find out.

I have been a fan of Alan Ryker for a couple of years now, and he hasn't disappointed me yet. In this story,(and every Ryker story, really), you feel for the characters and what they're going through. In this novella, the main character has what has to be one of the worst jobs to ever exist, and Mr. Ryker made me FEEL the distress this character was experiencing. Like this character, I had to do some deep breathing to calm myself down!

Overall, this was an excellent read. The pacing was good and the tension ran high. If you have a spare hour or two and this story sounds good to you, I highly recommend it! ( )