"Marie-Claire Blais seems to draw these characters from the indefinite, the imprecise, the non-existent. They are at the instant of birth. They are also incomplete, deformed, fragile, and powerless against fate. They are not yet born. The world does not exist. This is a universe of phantoms and shadows, nightmares translated into words"

These are the words that conclude Naim Kattan's introduction to my edition of this short novel, and which shaped my entire experience of this wonderfully wretched story.

Mad Shadows is a story about three 'phantoms' - as Kattan calls them. Louise is a single mother whose one and only priority is her appearance. She is frivolous as a doll, loving her son only as an ornament for herself. Patrice - her son - is a Narcissus of sorts. He is beautiful and he knows he is, seeking comfort in his reflection. His entire existence is hinged upon the adoration of his mother which, when absent, sends him into fits of despair. The tragedy is that he is too stupid to realise why. Isabelle-Marie, Louise's oldest daughter, is ugly and vehemently jealous of the affection her brother receives. Undesirable and ignored, she seeks solace in tilling the Earth, and in violent acts of jealousy. 

Blais presents to us a photograph of these three ghouls. They leave the story in the same spiritual state as they enter it, unable to learn or to grow - in other words, to be human - instead resigning themselves to the forceful passion of their inner desires. The three characters exist only as disembodied psychologies: Blais gives us no setting, no signs of life save for that which interacts directly with the three. These are true shadows: immutable, unchangeable souls, unable to develop into characters and enter into the real world. The world that exists outside their nondescript farm, a world that exists only as it would in relation to these three spirits, spirits who face only inwards, ruminating on their own convictions until it brings them each to ruin. 

Despite all the inhumanity of these characters and their actions, the foundations of each of their psychologies are unmistakably human. Blais describes exaggerated states of human envy, frivolity, and of narcissism, turning them from selfish instincts into formless masses that eat each other alive. I can almost imagine this book in a grotesque, Tim Burton style animation.