No one at the government psychiatric hospital would guess that the rigid, professional Dr. Mina Murray grew up a witch’s daughter in a cottage on the coast of Wales. That is how she prefers it. The life that she has created for herself in London is perfect for her; controlled, predictable, safe. No superstitions, no herbs, no moon rituals.
Mina’s passion is to help women with complex trauma and a new patient found wandering the streets in a state of amnesia is the personification of this with her whispers of “Master” and her diet of insects. When a message arrives via Mina’s in-box, from her former best friend Lucy back in Wales seeking her professional help, Mina is called back to her childhood home and forced to face everything she left behind.
Wales is both familiar and unsettling to Mina. Her efforts to focus on helping Lucy are complicated when she encounters her friend and teen love interest Jonathan, who took her sudden absence hardest. As Lucy fades before her eyes, unmistakable similarities between her patient in London and Lucy develop and Mina finds herself forced to confront the same evil that drove her away so many years ago.
Mina’s mother and a collection of other tenacious women help her using the very ancient ways that she had previously abandoned to fight the monster preying upon them.
“The Madness,” by Dawn Kurtagich, is a timely reimaging of the classic Dracula, infused with Welsh folklore, set in modern day. Gender flipping some of the original characters in Stoker’s “Dracula” book will entice fans and adds depth to the female perspective in this tale. While the supernatural element remains intact, this story does more than create a singular villain because a monster cannot exist without a system in place to protect and enable it: Mina and her friends are prepared to take that system down.
The Madness is a deliciously fresh take on a classic horror theme, and a must read for this spooky season.
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