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In this update of Bram Stoker's DRACULA, London-based psychologist Mina Murray returns to West Wales to investigate a strange sickness that has affected first the sectioned psychiatric patient Renee Fields (Stoker's Renfield as a modern woman), then her childhood friend Lucy Westenra, now, post-marriage, Lucy Holmswood. To find out who, or what, is making women "mad," then sick, Murray calls on Lucy's ex, police sheriff Quincey Jones--another kick-ass woman with agency.
Yes, nearly every character in THE MADNESS is a feminized replica of a character from DRACULA. This idea has potential. While Stoker's characters record their thoughts using the typewriter and phonograph, Kurtagich's use email and text messaging, which she transcribes. The execution is disappointing, though. The electronic communications lack detail and nuance, and so read like generic examples of the various media rather than missives from real people. Kutagich's women are modern in the sense that they have jobs, phones, and moisturizer, but they still believe in outdated concepts like the "lady doctor" and marrying undesirable men for their money and status.
Mina never convincingly reads as a science-educated professional, but maybe that's because she's trapped in the shell of a Victorian heroine. Kurtagich's representation of a younger Mina's friendships and romantic entanglements are more believable.
What suspense there is consists largely in waiting for the vampire to reveal himself, which, thankfully, he does not do until nearly the end of the book.
West Wales, where Kurtagich ("the daughter of a British globe-trotter and single mother, who grew up all over the place, mainly "Africa") lives now, features as a dominant, evocative setting. In Kurtagich's poetic geography, Wales is genuinely, unironically, Britain's Wild West. It is the home of the mythological Gwyllgi, the Black Hound, which "craves living blood above all." There is "cold Welsh rain" somehow different from London rain. "Most medical leeches are Welsh." Vampires prey on girls who go bowling in Wrexham. Wales is an "ancient" land where the supernatural persists. And of course, Dracula's castle is on the Welsh side of the border: Cysgod ("Shadow") Castle.
Transforming Wales into the magical, irrational, quasi-feminine, exotic doppelganger of England is a very tired old strategy, and one that Welsh writing in English has for some time endeavored to correct.
For Kutagich, the United States, conversely, is the land of logic and reason. Mina tells us that Quincey, "despite having spent her formative years in" Wales, has a "logical, American brain [that] makes gaining her belief" in the supernatural "an uphill battle." I'm not so sure. A majority of Americans today believe in "the supernatural."
In the end, this DRACULA update delivers little in the way of surprise and discovery. Revisions of classic novels work when they have something new to say. THE MADNESS adds nothing to the neo-Victorian vampire tradition. It suffers from too much recycling: not only of Stoker's plot but of creaky generalizations and stereotypes, too. As an intervention in a powerful myth, it is disappointingly bloodless.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, August 2024
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