The Year You Went Away

A darkly comic literary novel set in the fluorescent purgatory of a psychiatric hospital tucked somewhere between the Delaware Valley and oblivion. After a humiliating reassignment from a clinical post in Chicago, Dr. Limpwick expects a quiet bureaucratic exile. Instead, he finds himself entangled in a maddening therapeutic loop with Mr. Otto, a patient whose cryptic insights and staged regressions may hold the key to Limpwick's own unraveling. As ward routines descend into stylized madness, complete with interpretive group therapy, equine-trigger experiments, and a musical pageant about residual shell shock, Limpwick must confront the very impulses he once repressed: guilt, desire, and the seductive possibility of total collapse. Originally written during the author's so-called "lost years" and revised decades later, The Year You Went Away is a psychological satire about systems that diagnose the mind while quietly erasing it. A blend of institutional absurdity and spiritual ache, it evokes the surreal humor of Catch-22 with the interior excavation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, although the cuckoos here are better dressed, better medicated, and deeply invested in their own demise.