Murphy's fiction tends to reflect what he likes to read and what he remembers liking to read as a youngster, which in the case of his short stories, means horror fiction. In his collection Night Terrors, the stories vary from straightforward ones such as "Just Say Yes," about a girl's having to choose whether or not to become a vampire, to complex ones such as "The Cat's-Eye" (please see separate entry). Throughout Night Terrors, the Digger stories act to link the other stories by having Digger introduce them as tales he heard while working in graveyards. The book opens with "Digger's Promise," where Digger explains that he began grave digging when fourteen years old, sixty-three years ago, in Garrison, New York. He remarks in the story, "I will say that if you hang around cemeteries long enough you hear about a lot of strange things and...