The Madness: A Novel

“a well-constructed take on Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula with a gender-switching twist, making the story a thinly veiled allegory for the mistreatment and subjugation of women by men.”

For 20 years, Mina Murray has been away from her home, since the night, returning from a tryst with her boyfriend, Jonathan Harker, she was assaulted by an unknown assailant. Unable to face family and friends, Mina leaves the small village in Wales for what she expects to be forever.

Then she receives an email from her best friend, Lucy Westenra.

Lucy is ill and so far no one has been able to diagnose her condition. Mina is hesitant about leaving her current patient, a frail young woman named Renée, at last responding to treatment, though she still utters strange pronouncements while nibbling on the occasional insect.

“‘No one listens. But Master is coming and he will make them pay.’ Her voice drops an octave. ‘In blood.’”

Mina will regret leaving Renée in another’s care, for the young woman soon finds herself being treated by Dr. John Seward, Mina’s rival and someone with less than a sympathetic nature for those with mental illness. In fact, Renee dies while Seward is treating her.

When Mina confronts him, Seward’s reaction is typical of the man himself: “‘People die sometimes under our care. It’s a reality in our profession.’”

Never mind that Renée and Lucy had the same symptoms—fatigue, anemia, insomnia, and a horrible pitted rash spreading over neck and body—and that Mina has discovered that Renée and a number of other girls had been frequenting a nightclub in London, a club with no name where entry is gained only through a black calling card with an unusual logo. Each girl is picked up in a black limo by the same man and never comes back.

Mina’s attempts to get Dr. Seward or the authorities to take her investigations seriously are dismissed as mere “conspiracy theories,” the babblings of a hysterical woman. When she is again called to Lucy’s home, it is to witness Lucy’s death.

In Tylluan, she is also reunited with other old friends, Quincey Morris, Lucy’s ex-girlfriend who is now a police officer; and Mina’s former boyfriend Jonathan, but it’s a changed Jonathan, for on the night Mina herself was attacked, he was mauled by a large, vicious dog. Disfigured, Jonathan is wary of reopening his relationship with Mina.

“‘You left. Without a word, Mina. You left. So you lost your right to do . . . whatever this is.’”

Abruptly, Mina finds an ally in Helen Singer, a woman who has lost her daughter to the unnamed nightclub. Helen has been doing her own investigating.

“A location kept cropping up in the research—a private nightclub in London.’

‘The club with no name,’ I supply . . . ‘This group operates outside of London as well,’ I add. ‘There’s a tie to Cysgood Castle. Right here in Tylluan.’”

With the help of Quincey, Singer, Mina’s mother, Vanessa—"Call me ‘Van,’”—who is considered the town witch, and an ancient ritual to protect her from the Sugnwr Swaed, the creature called Fampir, Mina must find a way to get into Cysgod Castle, face the monster who owns it, and destroy him.

“It’s time for me to jump into the lion’s den.”

The Madness is a well-constructed take on Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula with a gender-switching twist, making the story a thinly veiled allegory for the mistreatment and subjugation of women by men. All of Stoker’s characters are here, and though changed, are easily recognizable, either by their names or their actions. The women are determined, brave, and loyal to each other while the male characters are—with the exception of Jonathan Harker—misogynistic, dismissively scornful of women’s actions, and generally altogether evil. Jonathan is more or less a minor character, barely essential to this particular plot, coming across as a bit player, mere window-dressing to his and Mina’s thwarted romance.

It’s also to be noted that nowhere is the name of Stoker’s creation mentioned, giving a mere suggestion that perhaps this particular monster isn’t he but actually another of his brood, taking up where the Master left off.

In a form similar to the original novel, the narrative follows a many-sided approach to the story, related through Mina’s first-person present point of view; the omniscient but unknown narrator’s account; and various emails, correspondence, and excerpts from Van’s ancient texts.

The Madness is a clever, up-to-date approach to a plot that occasionally has grown tired in its retelling. It can be expected that whenever Dracula the novel is mentioned, some reader may bring up The Madness for comparison.