• Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic uncovers neglected Gothic texts of the nineteenth century which are crucial in understanding working-class popular culture. • The approach of this study of penny dreadfuls is vast and eclectic, ranging from data-driven publication data to close textual analysis of these texts to adaptations of penny fiction. • This title covers a broad range of penny texts, some of which have never before been written on.
Blood, gore, murder, and sin—Victorian literature’s darkest horrors await you. The penny dreadfuls were cheap nineteenth-century English stories that featured gothic, lurid, disturbing, and tantalizing content. These horror serials cost a penny per issue, hence their name: penny dreadfuls. The penny dreadfuls often paid homage to—and even inspired—many of the more famous narratives of the horror genre. This book unites three of the most notorious literary giants of the nineteenth century, all born of the penny dreadful tradition: Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, all in one authentic collection of the best Victorian gothic horror ever written. Originally published at a time when dramatic scientific discoveries sparked a cultural fixation on the paranormal, these stories remain timeless in their uncanny ability to prey upon our primal fear of that which is strange, violent, and unknown. This book contains three haunting tales and a bonus story: • Dracula by Bram Stoker • Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker (Dracula’s original first chapter, not published until after Stoker’s death) • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Curl up with The Penny Dreadfuls on a dark, moonless night and rediscover these chilling classics. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
666 pages of shocking sensational stories from the Victorian era, twenty in all including such classics as James Malcolm Rymer's The String of Pearls or Sweeny Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet-Street, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, Guy De Maupassant's The Diary of a Madman or Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The original penny dreadfuls were cheaply printed, inexpensive publications written to titillate the masses with shocking thrills and lurid horrors. Over time, penny dreadful became a catch-phrase for any story steeped in gothic horror that pushed the limits of what was acceptable in popular fiction. In the stories compiled here, werewolves, ghouls, vampires, made doctor, carnivorous highwaymen, ancient Egyptian curses and reanimated corpses are just some of the horrors that the victims contend with.
The grotesque - the exagggerated, the deformed, the monstrous - has been a well-considered subject for students of comparative literature and art. In a major addition to the literature of art, cultural criticism and feminist studies, Mary Russo re-examines the grotesque in the light of gender, exploring the works of Angela Carter David Cronenberg Bahktin Kristeva Freud Zizek. Mary Russo looks at the portrayal of the grotesque in Western culture and by combining the iconographic and the historical, locates the role of the woman's body in the discourse of the grotesque.
Varney the Vampire Or the Feast of Blood is a horror story by Thomas Peckett Prest. Structured in different episodes, these are classic tales of blood sucking horrors at midnights, for fans of the genre.
Arranged in chronological order, the novelist's lives are opinionated, informative, frequently funny and often shocking. Professor Sutherland's authors come from all over the world; their writings illustrate every kind of fiction from gothic, penny dreadfuls and pornography to fantasy, romance and high literature. The book shows the changing forms of the genre, and how the aspirations of authors to divert and sometimes to educate their readers, has in some respects radically changed over the centuries, and in others - such as their interest in sex and relationships - remained remarkably constant.
A spooky history of the American Midwest—from grave robbers to ghost sightings and more—by the author of Creepy California. Most people think of the American Midwest as a place of wheat fields and family farms; cozy small towns and wholesome communities. But there’s more to the story of America’s Heartland—a dark history of strange tales and unsettling facts hidden just beneath its quaint pastoral image. In Horror in the Heartland, historian Keven McQueen offers a guided tour of terrible crimes and eccentric characters; haunted houses and murder-suicides; mad doctors, body snatchers, and pranks gone comically—and tragically—wrong. From tales of the booming grave-robbing industry of late 19th-century Indiana to the story of a Michigan physician who left his estate to his pet monkeys, McQueen investigates a spooky and twisted side of Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exploring burial customs, unexplained deaths, ghost stories, premature burials, bizarre murders, peculiar wills and much more, this creepy collection reveals the region’s untold stories and offers intriguing, if sometimes macabre, insights into human nature.
