Tammy Gregg
Tammy Gregg crafts literary Gothic fiction that explores the shifting boundaries between reality and the surreal in small-town New England. Her debut Why Did God Make the Tree? is the first of the Patrick Denny novels—interwoven narratives and nested stories within stories that confound imagination, madness, and truth. A lifelong New Englander with degrees in English from Boston University, Gregg draws from the psychological complexity of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, the uncanny dread of Arthur Machen, and the atmospheric menace of Daphne du Maurier.
Why Did God Make the Tree?
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Literary Fiction
In this literary Gothic tale, horror novelist Dr. Patrick Denny returns to psychiatry in the seemingly quaint New England town of Waylingbrooke. 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. As he attempts to untangle the mysteries of their troubled minds, his own tormented past bleeds into his present, and the macabre storyteller that still dwells within threatens to emerge. In this triptych of 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. 
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