Murder! Body-snatching! Premature burial! Cannibalism! Writers of the Victorian era sure knew how to spice up their fiction and tell ripping yarns! Penny Dreadfuls is an anthology of sensational terror tales all first published in the nineteenth century. The original penny dreadfuls were cheaply printed, inexpensive publications written to entertain the masses with shocking thrills and lurid horrors. Over time, "penny dreadful" became a catch-hrase for any story steeped in gothic horror that pushed the limits of what was acceptable in popular fiction. The twenty stories collected for this volume include two full-length novels—The String of Pearls, the novel that immortalized Sweeney Todd, the demon-barber of Fleet-street; and the original 1818 edition of Mary Shelleys classic tale of a man-made monster, Frankenstein—as well as tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Louisa May Alcott, and Arthur Conan Doyle.