Johnny meets his eyes in a bold pretense of courage, and Doctor Unthank smiles.

Just like his mother, is how that sentence ought to end, or so he gathers from the oh-so-private letters he'd seen on the door to the other room, but Unthank doesn't especially care what trauma or abuse the boy may have suffered at the hands of a lunatic mother. Obviously it's given him... issues, but those are less interesting than the ones brought about by the manuscript.

'Now that is interesting. And how do you think it did that? What... gives a book that kind of ~power over men's minds?'