Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu & Mary Shelley 
The Literary Roots of Penny Dreadful 

Showtime’s Penny Dreadful is arguably the most literary TV show ever produced. It manages to adapt five literary works at once and to insert in its story line some of the best known fictional characters from classic books of the horror, gothic, and supernatural genres. The show features a team of people who fight monsters, vampires, witches and similar entities in the gaslight and fog of Victorian London.The five main source texts of Penny Dreadful, a show that John Logan himself, the creator of the show, called “hyper-literate” are all collected in this e Book production, which also includes over a dozen illustrations, many from printed editions of the books.