The Dancing Plague
by Gareth Brookes
(SelfMadeHero, £15.99)

THERE may be several reasons for the growing popularity of graphic novels, among them the speed and ease of accessing a narrative, society’s ever-shortening concentration span or simply that our filmic world has inhibited the flexibility of our imaginations.

In Gareth Brookes’s The Dancing Plague, which engages as much as graphic non-fiction as novel,
the focus is on the dancing plague that broke out in late mediaeval Strasbourg, when one woman’s uncontrollable dancing developed into a kind of mass epidemic.

Not the first, but seemingly the last of its kind — various cases of mass hysteria are far from unknown following that period — the year 1518 sits roughly on the cusp of the emergence of modernity, when science began untangling itself from magic and religious superstitions.