Set in the 1970s, Date Certain is pathologically spooky. The story’s full of gruesomely fascinating details, with misidentified body parts on display like so much inventory. At the heart is Benjamin Stone, a well-meaning physician who’s been given knowledge he doesn’t know how to deal with, from a source he doesn’t trust or understand. He finds himself in unsettling company: a know-it-all medical examiner, a bullying detective, an unidentified corpse, and a mysterious Middle-Easterner who might know what this is all about but isn’t telling. This is a tale of dreams and nightmares, a fantastic voyage inside the human body and brain, and an exploration of what we might make of the certainty of death