North Woods

It's Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory. A collection of connected short stories, spanning 3 centuries, centred around a yellow house deep in the woods of Massachusetts incorporating diary entries, letters, songs, poems, medical notes and more, written by young lovers escaping puritanical judgement, a Loyalist soldier struck with pomomania, a buxom fortune teller, a slave hunter, a schizophrenic, twin spinsters, a disgraced amateur historian, a closeted painter and plenty of ghosts beside. Throw in the smutty goings on of a horny scolytid beetle, the thwarted efforts of an industrious squirrel preparing for winter, a spore shaken from the coat of a dog, and various mountain lions. Not to mention various folks axed, eviscerated, and blown away. Each chapter is written in accordance to the time and narrator, from the prim prose of the late 18th century, the florid letters from a 19th century painter, to the lurid exclamations of a 70's true crime writer.

[Deep breath] It's a lot, and yet Mason somehow manages to pull it off and land this thing. It is pure storytelling magic where all that is asked of you is to revel in the magic of the words on the page. Not a bad side hustle when Mason isn't busy teaching psychiatry at Stanford. #showoff