HAUNTED CASTLES

Haunted Castles is the definitive and complete collection of Ray Russell’s masterful Gothic horror stories, including the famously terrifying trio of novellas Sardonicus, Sagittarius, and Sanguinarius. The characters that sprawl through these tales are frightful to the core: the heartless monster holding two lovers in limbo; the beautiful dame journeying down a damned road toward depravity (with the help of an evil Gypsy); the man who must wear his fatal crimes on his face in the form of an awful smile. Macabre, grotesque, perverted—and completely entrancing—Russell’s Gothic tales are the best kind of dreadful.

Penguin Horror is a collection of novels, stories, and poems by masters of the genre, curated by filmmaker and lifelong horror literature reader Guillermo del Toro. Included in the series are some of his favorites: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Raven: Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories by Ray Russell, and American Supernatural Tales, edited by S. T. Joshi and featuring stories from Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert E. Howard, and Stephen King, alongside many others. Penguin Horror reminds us what del Toro writes in his series introduction: “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are.”