Given that Tales of Ordinary Madness was early work by Mike Allred, I was expecting something quite trippy and weird, maybe some sort of examination of the nature of reality or otherworldly beings or something of that nature. Instead, I got a fairly realistic and somewhat disturbing look at mental illness and the institutions that seek to calm or cure victims of it, courtesy of writer Malcolm Bourne (a psychologist whose experience shows in the writing). To be sure, Tales of Ordinary Madness is an examination of the nature of reality, but it's more an examination of the infectiousness of madmen and women, the sad tales of what brain chemistry can do to people and a glimpse into a world that most of us would be afraid to enter into.
Bourne and Allred tell the stories of Tales of Ordinary Madness from the point of view of a psychiatrist working in a mental hospital, but they certainly don't keep the reader at a distance from the experiences of the patient either. Whether it's simulating the psychiatrist's empathy or shifting point of view to the patients when they tell their story, I'm not sure, but Bourne and Allred give readers a close-up of the crippling and dangerous effects that these mental patients suffer from their illnesses. We hear the voices and see the delusional view of the world, and the result is that it's easy to relate to the people suffering under these delusions.
Perhaps the most effective story for me was the one that opened the book, as Bourne and Allred take us into the head of a classic paranoid schizophrenic. One of the reasons it was so effective was that it did take place early on, and I wasn't sure whether the odd visions of the patient were in fact what he was seeing, and we were being treated to a Morrison-ian weird reality, and that uncertainty really mirrored what the narrator himself was going through. Which is not to say that the book gets less effective when you know the game, because Bourne steers more away from completely delusional patients after that and into the realm of those who recognize that they have problems but can't quite recognize what they are.
Tales of Ordinary Madness has a throughline in the story of the psychologist who starts out as something of an outside narrator and eventually sort of succumbs to being part of the story himself, but it is in many ways a book of short stories as well. Each tale builds on the overall picture of the institution and the life that the psychiatrist lives, but it also stands alone as an interesting examination of another life and another illness. Bourne spins tales of depression, phobia, dementia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and alcoholism, and each one is fascinating to read, even as it's a little too real and a little too disturbing. I don't know if Bourne is basing the work on real cases that he's seen or just on case studies or textbook definitions of these diseases, but there's a touch of horror to the proceedings not despite the reality of it but because of it. There's definitely a feeling of "There but for the grace of God" in reading Tales of Ordinary Madness.
This is early work from Mike Allred, which is really just saying that it's clear that Allred has been very talented even from the beginning. Allred does a great job of capturing the strict reality of Newtown Hospital, but what makes him ideal for the book is that he can also portray the weirdness that comes through in the patients' exploration of their problems. The unearthly, alien policemen that we see in Schneider's reality, the hyperactive and sexually-charged world that David Wolff sees, Mrs. Yogeswarren's obsessive map of all the dogs in her neighborhood and the route she takes to work or the flashes of OCD that plague two of the characters are all crucial to making these illnesses clear. Allred's gift for somewhat trippy, unusual scenarios serves him well in the pages of Tales of Ordinary Madness.
