Dead Drunk: Tales of Intoxication and Demon Drinks: 41 (British Library Tales of the Weird)

Suddenly 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-fueled 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.

Pam Lock is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Bristol. Her monograph, based on her thesis, ‘Low Spirits: The Habitual Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture’ (2019) will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Pam is a co-Director of the Drinking Studies Network and co-Lead with Dr Dorota Dias-Lewandowska for the NCN funded project, ‘Between the drunken “mother of destruction” and the sober “angel of the house”’.