The Madness

A Novel

Dawn Kurtagich

This modern retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula asks (and answers) the questions, what if we gender-flipped Dracula, set it in North Wales, fortified it with Welsh folklore, and the vampires faced a well-deserved reckoning?!

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of Dawn Kurtagich.

When we meet Mina Murray at the beginning of the book, she’s living in London and working as a psychiatrist on Harley Street — a real street in London famous since the mid-19th century for its prestigious doctors. This lucrative practice allows Mina to also take on special cases at Brookfields, a government-funded psychiatric facility.

We also learn two other crucial facts about Mina: She’s survived an as-yet-unnamed trauma that haunts her. In its aftermath, she fled her hometown without a word to anyone who loved her. And since The Thing That Happened, she’s had OCD.

Her morning ritual is heartbreaking: Exactly nine steps from her bed to the bathroom. Three squirts of handwash. Three minutes to brush her teeth. A shower — precisely 30 minutes and 30 seconds — followed by an intense scouring of the bathroom with three capfuls of bleach.

Her Brookfield patient is a mystery. A young woman named Renee has been found walking the docks, naked and raving about how Master is coming. She has amnesia, is sensitive to light, smells a bit like rot, and, if you remember Renfield from Stoker’s Dracula this won’t be a surprise: She eats the flies and spiders she finds in her room.

Later, Mina receives an email from her old friend Lucy. Although the two were in separable as girls, when Mina ran away from their small town in North Wales she abandoned Lucy, and the two haven’t spoke since. But now Lucy needs Mina’s help. She’s ill with symptoms that sound eerily like the ones plaguing the bug-eating Renee. ‘I still think you’re a shit person,’ she writes, ‘but I need your help. The doctors don’t know what this is.’

So Mina does the thing she never thought she’d do: She returns to her hometown and, swallowing her pride, asks to stay at her mom’s house. Now is probably a good time to mention that Mina’s mom is a witch, a believer in folklore, superstition, and the power of herbs with a healthy distrust of modern trappings. Mina’s sense of homecoming is mingled with disdain: ‘Willful ignorance was always a difficult vice for me to swallow, and here, in this last forgotten place, so backwards that the locals speak of dragons and giants and the fair folk of Wales — as though they merely vanished from their shores instead of having never existed at all — ignorance is rote.’

But soon, unusual circumstances force Mina to reconsider her belief system.

She and a ragtag bunch of amateur investigators — the cowboy and Van Helsing of the original recast as badass women — team up to discover the truth behind Renee and Lucy’s mysterious symptoms. And they place themselves directly in the path of danger to stop a force that’s both supernatural and all-too-mundane.

Dawn Kurtagish hews close to the beats of Dracula while writing a new story that’s fresh with astute connections between vampires and human monsters. You can read this page-turner as a straight-up, ghoul-fighting escapade. But it’s also an examination of mother-daughter bonds and forgiveness — of others and of ourselves.

The Madness also honors the travelogue tradition of Dracula with a vivid sense of place. It’s grounded in real destinations, including Wrexham, the seaside town of Conwy, and the blustery valleys of Snowdonia National Park.

I follow Mum in through the open conservatory doors, noting that her step is still whitewashed to keep the Devil from entering. The smell hits me like a nostalgia brick thrown full force at my face, scents tripping over themselves to reach my nostrils, where they rip deeply buried memories from the mothballed linen closet of my mind’s attic. Evergreen jasmine, peppermint, tea tree, and lavender roll through the house in waves. And of course, verbena. The only thing I took with me when I left. — Dawn Kurtagish

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