Why Did God Make the Tree?

"A mystifying but endlessly absorbing tale blending surreality and issues of mental health . . . surprisingly cohesive, thanks in large part to the author's deliberate pacing and unambiguous transitions." —Kirkus Reviews In the seemingly quaint New England town of Waylingbrooke, former horror novelist Dr. Patrick Denny has returned to his long-abandoned profession of psychiatry. Years spent writing about the darkness within the human mind brought him no closer to understanding it. Now he seeks in his patients what eluded him in his fiction and finds himself compelled by three disturbing cases: an insomniac haunted by her parents' deaths; a young man who believes he's trapped inside one of Patrick's stories; and a catatonic woman lost in the dark forest of her psyche. But as he attempts to untangle the mysteries of their troubled minds, Patrick finds his own tormented past bleeding into his present and the macabre storyteller within threatening to emerge. In this triptych of Gothic tales where stories birth stories and reality loses its edges, Patrick must question whether his return to psychiatry offers enlightenment or signals his final descent into madness.