A behind-the-scenes look at how I created my harrowing new novel, Demon Drink
The genesis of Demon Drink goes all the way back to 2019. While I loved (and still love) my day job as a motoring and travel writer, I’d become frustrated with my fiction career. I’d sold more than forty short stories since 2005, a few to reasonable acclaim, but every published novel had been a candle flame in the wind. Ghost Kiss (2007), Hollywood Hearts Ablaze (2014) and Invasion at Bald Eagle (2015) came out through publishers long on enthusiasm but short on knowledge and the books sold a handful of copies each. Not one publisher is still trading today.
I’d spent most of 2019 shopping around a couple of mainstream manuscripts and received zero interest. I began to wonder, as artists often do, why I was bothering. It wasn’t like I needed to write fiction.
After some soul searching, I decided to take one last crack at it. I’d write the best damned book I could, put every ounce of creative energy into it. Since my most popular stories were horror, it seemed logical to write in that genre. If that manuscript didn’t sell, I’d retire from fiction and count my many other blessings in life.
While mulling over potential subjects, I landed on the idea of an Australian horror novel. What was the stereotypical Australian horror? Slim Dusty’s famous folk song ‘A Pub with No Beer’ came into my head (“There’s nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear”).
That got me thinking about Australia’s drinking culture. While it’s drying up these days thanks to changing attitudes and obscene prices, when I turned eighteen in 1995, alcohol and socialising went hand in hand and your ‘first legal drink’ remained a rite of passage for Australian men. As I reached my mid-twenties and my priorities changed, however, I began to understand the sardonic wit in that Simpsons quote, “Beer – the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” Most of the problems in my life were self-inflicted and could be traced back to alcohol consumption.
Looking back on some of my bigger regrets from that time – not least the hundreds of productive hours lost to hangovers – I immediately saw parallels between Australia’s drinking culture and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We drink to have fun and escape the humdrum strictures of our lives, yet it often brings out the monster inside and leads to remorse.
Moreover, I’ve always loved the ‘bad transformation’ trope that book spawned – everything from The Incredible Hulk and An American Werewolf in London to Demons. I believe it taps into the betrayal we feel when our traitorous bodies commence some involuntary and unpleasant action, such as bleeding or vomiting or diarrhoea. Marrying up the bad transformation with Australia’s drinking culture seemed like a potent engine for a horror novel.
The characters and plot grew organically from that core concept and I got to work on the book in early 2020. I was a few chapters in when the COVID pandemic hit and whatever the downsides, it was an author’s dream – endless lockdown hours in which to write. I completed the first draft, over 100,000 words, in about four months, and I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun writing a book.
Usually my working titles are terrible (Invasion at Bald Eagle, for example, was called Commune), but Demon Drink seemed perfect the moment I typed it. It works both figuratively (‘demon drink’ is an old phrase, used in more religious times, to refer to alcohol and its anti-social effects) and literally (as readers will find out). It’s also a book about bad choices and regrets, and finding a way to come to terms with them.
Kris Ashton 
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