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

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.

More information can be found on the British Library Publishing website.