Penny Bloods

I have been looking for a good reference book or collection of Penny Dreadful publications for eons and I am so glad to have found this one. Not only is it comprehensive and authentic, but each story has an epigraph explaining the history of each story

If you are a lover of history and have tried to research penny dreadfuls online, you will know just how difficult it is, so to have a great collection of stories at my fingertips from the British Library is a real treat to be treasured! The text is authentic, the illustrations original and a wonderful edition to preserve the earliest commercially mass-printed entertainment. I will certainly be buying this one for the "Keeper" shelf

Absolutely fantastic and a must-read for lovers of turn of the century history and gothic horrors

This copy was kindly given by NetGalley and my review left voluntarily

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Independent Publishers Group, British Library Publishing for an advance copy of this new collection of Victorian stories of bad woman, blood, revenge, magic, and life beyond the grave.

I am older than a lot of my workmates, grew up on getting lots of books from book sales and tag sales, and remember when trade books start appearing in stories. I think that is one of the reasons why I love dealing with the mass market books that come in weekly to the store. I love the garish covers, the huge author names, the puns in the titles, the series names. I grew up on this, learned to read with mass markets. This is why I love the penny dreadfuls or the penny bloods. They were the mass market of their time. Genre stories for people who had learned to read, and wanted a little shock to the system, or a glimpse of stocking in stories. These stories had an audience who wanted them, could go on and on based on popularity, or end if the story wasn't catching on. This collection Penny Bloods: Gothic Tales of Dangerous Women edited by Nicole C. Dittmer, and feature old-timey tales of things no good woman should do, but that many longed to try.

There are ten stories in the collection, each with a brief introduction that tells about the writers, when possible, translation history, popularity, and anything else that can be told about the stories. There is a lot of missing information as so many stories were copied, stolen, or just lost to time. The foreward is also a very good primer to Penny Bloods, explaining the history, there rise and eventually adaption to other forms of fiction. The stories range from vampires, to women getting revenge for slights or real crimes. Some have magic, some are very bloody. Standouts include the first story The Skeleton Count or The Vampire Mistress which might be one of the first vampire stories in the English language, and one of the first with a woman vampire. Also The Female Bluebeard, was quite odd, quite bloody, and had a few characters that are quite memorable.

Cherchez la femme is the theme here. Some of this women deserve that label, some don't. One has to have an expectation going into these stories. There are a little over-the-top, a bit overwritten, and what once was scary to readers in the 1800's, might seem like an episode of Darkwing Duck, today. However a few, the previously mentioned stories still have a power to make one uncomfortable, even turn another light on kind of reading. Some seem really dated, but the collection on a whole is very good. I really enjoyed the historical information. The idea that stories might go on based on reader responses, or just end without a trace is fascinating. The fact that so much about these authors will never be known, or even how wrote what is sad, and yet encourages one to create art. The creator might be forgotten but the art lives on in collections like this.