Martin Jeppesen, a down-to-earth, savvy marketing executive, deals with stress by imagining things - a bat wafting around a boardroom, for example, or molten ink enveloping the head of a garrulous luncheon companion. As his life becomes more and more stressful, his imaginings begin to run wild and hallucinations eventually dominate his life, to the point where the only thing he thinks is a hallucination is reality. How he deals with this, and how it affects the people in his life, is the subject of The Madman's Kiss.