Bringing together the work of international scholars, this book investigates the well-known conceptualization of poison as connected to seemingly contrasting ideas of 'deviousness', 'insidiousness' and 'usefulness', and how this emerges in a variety of culturally informed discourses and narrative contexts across popular culture.

Taking an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, the chapters in the book expose poison as a powerful metaphorical entity that recurrently appears across narrative platforms, from film to television, from comics to video games, from children's literature to board games. Through both historical and fictional accounts – which are explored in equal terms as part of the same cultural narrative – the book assesses the place occupied by poison in the popular imagination, and how, although inevitably viewed as a nefarious presence, it is also, and strangely, culturally romanticized. The chapters in the volume demonstrate how discourses of poison in popular culture are often interconnected with representations of gender, ethnicity, class, cultural identity, and environmental discourses.

Ultimately, the book re-assesses the place occupied by poison in our histories, our cultures, and our popular narratives, establishing how in the process of recounting tales of poison and poisoners, we are also uncovering some of the deepest truths about our societies: what we fear, what we desire, and our we see ourselves at a specific moment in time.