Penny Dreadful is a vampire, of the little known Gemini tribe. She is from the small town of Browman, which is located near to the larger university city of Oxrow, home of Charity Michaels and Libby Hall (of Curse-Breaker fame)... Penny gets involved, often against her best interests, in a number of strange and mysterious events. She just wants to survive school, now a fancy academy, and get a few A levels... Penny's sisters, Alison and Catherine are also drawn into the terrors that inhabit the small English town, will they survive the horror... History seems to want her to play a role in the events to come as many different factions are drawn into the spiralling whirlpool of events that could be another end of the world, which is really awful if it happens on a Tuesday...

The final exciting instalment in the Miss Penny Dreadful series from acclaimed author Allison Rushby. Searching for a new story idea for her aunt’s famous penny dreadfuls, Penny and Aunt Harriet decide to follow up a newspaper article about a mysterious mermaid’s grotto. Hidden down a secret passageway on the banks of the River Thames, the only way to enter is through a tavern, aptly named The Mermaid’s Locks. In the glittering grotto, Penny and her aunt find a comb with some strands of the mermaid’s red-gold hair. Penny sets out to investigate - can the mermaid truly be real? Also, why doesn’t Mr Crowley, Aunt Harriet’s publisher, want her to write about it? Meanwhile, another cryptic postcard arrives from Penny’s missing parents. Nothing is as it seems in Penny’s world. Will Penny be able to finally piece together all the clues?

When Mr Stanroyd is found hanged in his own mill, his three young daughters are forced to realise that they are now mill-owners, a position quite unbecoming to a Victorian young lady. The eldest, the enchanting and redoubtable Severel, confides her hopes and fears - and the strange course of events - to her diary. Who killed whom? Which of the three girls married? Which of them was so shocked that she was deprived of speech? What happened to Uncle Eli and to raffish Cousin Bertie from Australia? Who was raped by whom? And who hanged dear Papa? 'Very rumbustious and buoyant' Scotsman

The author of more than 50 books--125 million copies in print--Clive Cussler is the current grandmaster of adventure literature. Dirk Pitt, the sea-loving protagonist of 22 of Cussler's novels, remains among the most popular and influential adventure series heroes of the past half-century. This first critical review of Cussler's work features an overview of Pitt and the supporting characters and other heroes, an examination of Cussler's themes and influences, a review of his most important adventures, such as Raise the Titanic! and Iceberg, and a look at adaptations of his work in other media. Cussler joins the pantheon of such as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming, and this overdue volume demonstrates that beneath Cussler's immense popularity lies a literary depth that well merits scholarly attention.

An enquiring mind - and mystical mysteries to solve - adds up to adventure in the first book of the new junior fiction series from acclaimed author Allison Rushby. “Now, Miss Pickering.” Miss Strickland turned to her pupil. “If you would be so kind as to close the door behind you, we will endeavour to discuss why your aunt, her publisher and her monkey have called upon us this afternoon.” 1872 Forever in trouble for sketching in her notebook, Penny Pickering dreams of her famous authoress aunt turning up at her boarding school and whisking her away. So when Aunt Harriet appears at Miss Strickland’s School for Girls of an Enquiring Mind and asks Penny if she would like to join her on an adventure, Penny knows exactly what to say – yes, please! Penny soon finds herself headed for Hampshire and a strange place called Mr Toddington’s Museum of the Curious and Absurd where bewitched kittens are said to have a tea party at midnight.

At last the sort-of semi-sequel to 'Refugees of the Raithaduine' and 'Orphans of the Raithaduine'. The Raithaduine are back and more nefarious than ever. Only Violet can stop them, which has everyone worried, as Violet was once voted droid most likely to be arrested for stealing everything not nailed down. Violet has two really good ideas, hide all the robots on the planet Hendrax at her friend Hannah's new castle there, and then take the war to the Raithaduine before they can destroy planet earth. What can possibly go wrong? Penny Dreadful is a new vampire of the Gemini tribe, specifically the Gothic faction. She has no memories of her past life, which is part of the deal. She must deal with the usual teenage dramas, plus a small but vocal group of humans who want to kill all vampires. Then there's the Glam, the other faction of vampires that are trying to set her up, so it looks like she attacked them...

This edited collection is the first book-length critical study of the Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which also includes an analysis of Showtime’s 2020 spin-off City of Angels. Chapters examine the status of the series as a work of twenty-first-century cable television, contemporary Gothic-horror, and intermedial adaptation, spanning sources as diverse as eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, American dime novels, theatrical performance, Hollywood movies, and fan practices. Featuring iconic monsters such as Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, the “bride” of Frankenstein, Dracula, the werewolf, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll, Penny Dreadful is a mash-up of familiar texts and new Gothic figures such as spiritualist Vanessa Ives, played by the magnetic Eva Green. As a recent example of adapting multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful has as much to say about the Romantic and Victorian eras as it does about our present-day fascination with screen monsters. Hear the authors talk about the collection here: https://nrftsjournal.org/monsters-all-are-we-not-an-interview-with-julie-grossman-and-will-scheibel/

The second book in a mystical and adventurous junior fiction series from acclaimed author Allison Rushby. From the moment Penny steps into her family’s Hyde Park Square townhouse, she can sense something dreadful has happened. This is confirmed when she discovers her parents’ laboratory in terrible disarray. Before she can find out any more, Penny is whisked away with her authoress aunt to Harewood Hall in the countryside, where a malicious maze is rumoured to be gobbling up servants. Miss Penny Dreadful has yet another mystery to solve. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems!

In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron at his villa by Lake Geneva. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 had cast a long volcanic winter, and the weather was not conducive to outdoor pursuits. Instead the companions amused themselves by reading ghost stories, and Byron challenged them to write their own. A terrifying nightmare inspired the eighteen-year-old Mary to write the tale that she would later expand into her classic novel, Frankenstein: or "The Modern Prometheus", a deeply disturbing story of one man's attempt to reanimate the dead, and the deadly consequences of his actions. Frankenstein has horrified readers since the novel's first publication in 1818, and is hailed as one of the pioneering works of gothic science fiction.

Oscar Wilde's only novel was first published in 1890 in the July edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, and examined the interrelationships between art, life, and consequence, challenging Victorian conventions and shocking many readers. Many reviewers criticized its decadence, the call to believe in "art for art's sake", and its moral ambiguity. Yet still today it has power to enthrall, the very nature of sin explored through the tale of a young man who sells his soul for a lifetime of beauty, his debauchery manifest only on his portrait, every transgression a blemish or sign of aging. In Wilde's tale of vanity and self-destruction, Dorian Gray is a toxic force of nature, the novel building to a sensational conclusion that has inspired a century of writers and filmmakers.