Dead Drunk: Tales of Intoxication and Demon Drinks

"All I can tell you is that I think it was pig’s meat.” “You mean you’re not sure?” “One can never be sure.”

A brush with the mushroom devil whets the appetite. The meat at the werewolf’s table is a dish to relish. Dessert with London’s cannibal club may be the cherry on top.

From fairy tales and folklore focused on magical foods and strange eating came an enduring tradition of writers playing with food and the uncanny. In the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this tradition thrived, with themes of supernatural consumption, weird transformation and sensual euphoria as key ingredients.

Raiding this dark pantry of writing, this new collection presents a feast of sixteen classic tales, two poems and one essay, with choice morsels by masters of the macabre including Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and Roald Dahl.

Publication Date: 27/07/2023

Author: Edited by Zara-Louise Stubbs

Brand: British Library Publishing

Number of pages: 288

Binding: Paperback

Dimensions: 190 x 130 mmSuddenly he tripped and fell his length over a prostrate body... he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a groan out of the drunkard...

With a stiff measure of the supernatural, a dram of melodrama and a chaser of the cautionary kind, tales of drink and drunkenness can be found in a well- stocked cabinet of Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction, reflecting an anxiety about the impact of alcohol and intoxicants in society, as well as an acknowledgment of their influence on humans’ perception of reality.

Featuring drink-fuelled classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ alongside obscurities from periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, this new collection offers a (somewhat poisoned) chalice of dark and stormy short fiction, brimming with the weird, the grotesque, the entertaining and the outlandish.

Publication date: 28/09/2023

Author: Edited by Pam Lock

Brand: British Library Publishing

Number of pages: 288

Binding: Paperback

Dimensions: 190 x 130 mm