Penguin Classics is proud publish reissues of some of the most blood-thirsty fiction written in a special Speculative Fiction Series: Bram Stoker’s DRACULA; John Polidori’s THE VAMPYRE, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s CARMILLA; and THE GILDA STORIES by Jewelle Gomez.
Designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the Penguin Clothback classic Speculative Fiction series are bound in high-quality colorful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
Designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the Penguin Clothback classic Speculative Fiction series are bound in high-quality colorful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
Vampires have always served as dark mirrors for our desires and fears: immortality, seduction, contagion, otherness. From the flickering shadows of early cinema to today’s blood-soaked prestige dramas, they remain eternally potent. Recent box office juggernauts like Sinners (2025) and the Nosferatu (2024) remake prove that the horror genre—and the vampire in particular—is not just back but evolving.
Hit television series like FX’s What We Do In the Shadows and AMC’s Interview with a Vampire reveal the comedy of life through the lives of the undead. Vampires don’t just instill fear – their presence brings up questions about power, identity, and transformation.
THE GILDA STORIES
by Jewelle Gomez
Foreword by Jewelle Gomez
Afterword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
On sale: 10/14/2025
ISBN: 9780143138921
Hardcover, Penguin Classics
336 Pgs
First published in 1991 and now presented in a lush hardcover format for the first time, THE GILDA STORIES stands as a revolutionary redefinition of the vampire mythos. Beginning in 1850s Louisiana, a young Black woman escapes slavery and is initiated into a chosen family of immortals. Over two centuries, she traverses America—never killing for blood, always seeking belonging. With themes of ecology, queer identity, and intergenerational memory, Jewelle Gomez’s enduring novel has only grown more prescient. This edition features a new introduction that situates GILDA as both counterpoint and heir to DRACULA—a heroine of compassion and agency in a genre often defined by predation.
Author Bio: Jewelle Gomez is a writer, an activist, and the author of many books, including Forty-Three Septembers, Don’t Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen U.S. cities.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs (afterword) is the author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, several works of poetry, and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Award for Nonfiction in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham-Campbell Prize for her poetry.
THE VAMPYRE
On sale: 10/14/2025
ISBN: 9780143138921
Hardcover, Penguin Classics
336 Pgs
First published in 1991 and now presented in a lush hardcover format for the first time, THE GILDA STORIES stands as a revolutionary redefinition of the vampire mythos. Beginning in 1850s Louisiana, a young Black woman escapes slavery and is initiated into a chosen family of immortals. Over two centuries, she traverses America—never killing for blood, always seeking belonging. With themes of ecology, queer identity, and intergenerational memory, Jewelle Gomez’s enduring novel has only grown more prescient. This edition features a new introduction that situates GILDA as both counterpoint and heir to DRACULA—a heroine of compassion and agency in a genre often defined by predation.
Author Bio: Jewelle Gomez is a writer, an activist, and the author of many books, including Forty-Three Septembers, Don’t Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen U.S. cities.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs (afterword) is the author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, several works of poetry, and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Award for Nonfiction in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham-Campbell Prize for her poetry.
by John Polidori &
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Foreword by V.E. Schwab
Introduction by Nick Groom
On sale: 10/14/2025
ISBN: 9780143139003
Hardcover, Penguin Classics
192 Pgs
Collected for the first time in a deluxe, unified edition, these foundational tales reveal the vampire’s earliest steps into English literature. THE VAMPYRE (1819), with its cold, aristocratic predator, established the blood-drinker as a figure of both allure and death. CARMILLA (1872), by contrast, introduced the seductive lesbian vampire—a narrative of queerness, intimacy, and isolation still echoed in film and fiction today. With a historically rich introduction from V.E. Schwab and rare contextual material (including Alaric Watts’s original preface), this volume bridges myth and modernity.
Author Bio: John Polidori (1795–1821) was born in London to an Italian immigrant father and English mother. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, graduated at the age of just nineteen, and in 1816 became physician to Lord Byron. He accompanied Byron on a tour through Europe, famously spending the summer at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland where they regularly met with the poet Percy Shelley, his partner Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. It was here that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was inspired, influenced in part by Polidori’s conversation and behavior—as recorded in Polidori’s diary. Although Polidori’s fractious relationship with Byron led them to part ways, they remained on cordial terms until the publication of Polidori’s tale ‘The Vampyre’ in 1819, which was willfully misattributed to Byron by the publisher Henry Colburn. Polidori was attempting to realize his literary ambitions by publishing ‘The Vampyre’, extracts from his diary, a volume of drama and poetry, and a novel begun at Diodati (Ernestus Berchthold; or, The Modern Œdipus). However, the controversy surrounding ‘The Vampyre’ sank his writing career and he published little else. He died by his own hand in 1821.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was born in Dublin to staunch Protestant parents descended from French Huguenots. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin, and while he maintained a somewhat desultory legal practice after graduating, his chief energies were directed towards fiction and journalism. He published his first novel, the historical adventure The Cock and the Anchor, in 1845, and edited a number of newspapers during his lifetime—notably the Dublin University Magazine, in which he serialized his own stories and, despite his Irish nationalist tory sympathies, took a relaxed editorial line. He found his distinctive authorial voice in mysteries and thrillers such as The House by the Church-Yard (1861–3), Wylder’s Hand (1863–4), and Uncle Silas (1864), and in his collections of uncanny and supernatural tales—most famously In a Glass Darkly (1872)—which are often haunted by Irish politics and history. Known as ‘The Invisible Prince’ in Dublin due to his solitary and nocturnal lifestyle, Le Fanu died a recluse in 1873.
Vitoria “V. E.” Schwab (foreword) is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including the acclaimed Shades of Magic series, the Villains series, the Cassidy Blake series and the international bestseller The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
DRACULA
On sale: 10/14/2025
ISBN: 9780143139003
Hardcover, Penguin Classics
192 Pgs
Collected for the first time in a deluxe, unified edition, these foundational tales reveal the vampire’s earliest steps into English literature. THE VAMPYRE (1819), with its cold, aristocratic predator, established the blood-drinker as a figure of both allure and death. CARMILLA (1872), by contrast, introduced the seductive lesbian vampire—a narrative of queerness, intimacy, and isolation still echoed in film and fiction today. With a historically rich introduction from V.E. Schwab and rare contextual material (including Alaric Watts’s original preface), this volume bridges myth and modernity.
Author Bio: John Polidori (1795–1821) was born in London to an Italian immigrant father and English mother. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, graduated at the age of just nineteen, and in 1816 became physician to Lord Byron. He accompanied Byron on a tour through Europe, famously spending the summer at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland where they regularly met with the poet Percy Shelley, his partner Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. It was here that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was inspired, influenced in part by Polidori’s conversation and behavior—as recorded in Polidori’s diary. Although Polidori’s fractious relationship with Byron led them to part ways, they remained on cordial terms until the publication of Polidori’s tale ‘The Vampyre’ in 1819, which was willfully misattributed to Byron by the publisher Henry Colburn. Polidori was attempting to realize his literary ambitions by publishing ‘The Vampyre’, extracts from his diary, a volume of drama and poetry, and a novel begun at Diodati (Ernestus Berchthold; or, The Modern Œdipus). However, the controversy surrounding ‘The Vampyre’ sank his writing career and he published little else. He died by his own hand in 1821.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was born in Dublin to staunch Protestant parents descended from French Huguenots. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin, and while he maintained a somewhat desultory legal practice after graduating, his chief energies were directed towards fiction and journalism. He published his first novel, the historical adventure The Cock and the Anchor, in 1845, and edited a number of newspapers during his lifetime—notably the Dublin University Magazine, in which he serialized his own stories and, despite his Irish nationalist tory sympathies, took a relaxed editorial line. He found his distinctive authorial voice in mysteries and thrillers such as The House by the Church-Yard (1861–3), Wylder’s Hand (1863–4), and Uncle Silas (1864), and in his collections of uncanny and supernatural tales—most famously In a Glass Darkly (1872)—which are often haunted by Irish politics and history. Known as ‘The Invisible Prince’ in Dublin due to his solitary and nocturnal lifestyle, Le Fanu died a recluse in 1873.
Vitoria “V. E.” Schwab (foreword) is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including the acclaimed Shades of Magic series, the Villains series, the Cassidy Blake series and the international bestseller The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
by Bram Stoker
Foreword by Robert Eggers
Introduction by Karen Winstead
On sale: 10/14/2025
ISBN: 9780143138990
Hardcover, Penguin Classics
480 Pgs
Terror, eroticism, and gothic excess—Dracula is the hallmark of our cultural understanding of vampires. With a new foreword by Nosferatu (2024) director Robert Eggers that situates the novel in conversation with modern fears—bodily autonomy, gender, and contagion—DRACULA emerges as more than just the origin of the vampire hunter mythos; it’s a fevered dream of Victorian repression and desire, rendered timeless.
Author Bio: Abraham 'Bram' Stoker (1847 - 1912) was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and joined the Irish Civil Service before his love of theatre led him to become the unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Mail. He went on to act as manager and secretary for the actor Sir Henry Irving, while writing his novels, the most famous of which is Dracula.
Robert Eggers (foreword) is an American filmmaker and production designer. He is best known for writing and directing the historical horror films The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), as well as The Northman (2022) and Nosferatu (2024). His films are noted for their folkloric elements, as well as his efforts to ensure historical authenticity.
Karen Winstead (introduction) is professor of English at Ohio State University. She is the author and translator of a number of books, including Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England (2020), and teaches on Special Topics in Film and Literature (“Monsters Without and Within”) and Special Topics in Popular Culture (“Vampires”).
On sale: 10/14/2025
ISBN: 9780143138990
Hardcover, Penguin Classics
480 Pgs
Terror, eroticism, and gothic excess—Dracula is the hallmark of our cultural understanding of vampires. With a new foreword by Nosferatu (2024) director Robert Eggers that situates the novel in conversation with modern fears—bodily autonomy, gender, and contagion—DRACULA emerges as more than just the origin of the vampire hunter mythos; it’s a fevered dream of Victorian repression and desire, rendered timeless.
Author Bio: Abraham 'Bram' Stoker (1847 - 1912) was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and joined the Irish Civil Service before his love of theatre led him to become the unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Mail. He went on to act as manager and secretary for the actor Sir Henry Irving, while writing his novels, the most famous of which is Dracula.
Robert Eggers (foreword) is an American filmmaker and production designer. He is best known for writing and directing the historical horror films The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), as well as The Northman (2022) and Nosferatu (2024). His films are noted for their folkloric elements, as well as his efforts to ensure historical authenticity.
Karen Winstead (introduction) is professor of English at Ohio State University. She is the author and translator of a number of books, including Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England (2020), and teaches on Special Topics in Film and Literature (“Monsters Without and Within”) and Special Topics in Popular Culture (“Vampires”).
GIVEAWAY
I have a hard copy of all three books (They are gorgeous!).
Fill out form (no emails will be kept after giveaway ends)
Winner will be picked October 31, 2025
US ONLY
