“The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure.”

On the night of June 26, 1957, Malcolm Lowry pitched forward and died, and his body lay on the floor all night amid a gin bottle’s broken splinters. His big novel, Under the Volcano, had been published ten years before, and somebody called him a genius then, but after the inquest “death by misadventure" only eight people attended his country church funeral. The Brighton Argus ran a few paragraphs under the headline, ’’She Broke Gin Bottle.” The Times did not cover it.

The themes of Lunar Caustic, like unreliable demons, pursued Malcolm Lowry for most of his writing life. He first undertook the story in 1934, during his particularly black discovery of New York in his youth. The city, he once wrote a friend, “favours brief and furious outbursts, but not the long haul. Moreover for all its drama and existential fury, or perhaps because of it, it’s a city where it can be remarkably hard—or so it seems to me—to get on the right side of one’s despair...”