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...”