The Dime Novel and Penny Dreadful are two terms that mean the same thing: cheap, mass-produced books.
Often lurid, usually in poor taste, the whole point of the genre was to get as much cash as possible as cheaply as possible. Reprints were common. Exciting subjects - gunslingers, highwaymen, vampires, range wars, cannibal murderers - were standard. The whole point was to draw the purchaser in, get their dime or penny, and vamoose - because next month, next week even, there'd be another penny dreadful, another dime novel.
As might be expected these were not books built to last. Much like the broadsheets of previous centuries, they were mass-produced as cheaply as possible and started falling apart soon after purchase.
The first thing you see is the cover illustration, typically of some awful crime, a gunfight, or supernatural scene. That's the draw. It's what gets you to fork over your cash; you have to know what happens to that poor unfortunate, or what hideous crimes that black-a-vised villain is about to commit. Then there's the sordid events themselves, and there are many of them, piled high in a hideous bonfire.
As Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a successful penny dreadful author, put it, the amount of crime, treachery, murder and slow poisoning, & general infamy required [by my readers] ... is something terrible.
That's what keeps you reading, and what keeps you coming back for more. It's the 19th-century equivalent of clickbait. Give the audience a picture of something titillating, then follow up with cheap, exciting trash. You'll never go poor when your business model relies on taking advantage of the gullible.
Pawn Stars, s17
These books are valuable now as collector's items. However, Bookhounds is set in the 1930s when it probably wasn't that difficult to find a moldering collection of cheap books from, say, the 1890s. Also, collectors weren't as interested in cheap ephemera. Fine copies of incunabula from the 1800s, yes please. Fine copies of Sweeny Todd's adventures, aka The String of Pearls, not so much.
So it's quite likely that penny dreadfuls and dime novels would find their way into the 1930s equivalent of the bargain bin. Or on one of the shelves outside, under canvas. Those outdoor shelving sections were ideal, from a bookseller's perspective. People would stop there to browse, perhaps because they got caught in a sudden downpour, and before long they came inside.
Alternatively the penny dreadful might find its way to the store's lending library. From Orwell:
It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was – Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. [two romance novelists and a historical romance novelist] Dell’s novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel – the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel – seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific.
It's easy to imagine Sweeny Todd or Spring-Heel Jack finding a comfortable home in the lending library. Easier still for the highwaymen, musketeers and pirates to find a home next to the detectives and crime novels, and especially those o-so-popular historical romances. If it has frills, curly beards and blushing maidens, it's practically gold - very cheap gold, but still.
How does this find your way into a Bookhounds game?
First, and most obvious, the comedy scene.
When I worked in a gaming store, Magic the Gathering was still on its first wave and the CCG market was exploding. Print a CCG and you were printing money. A lot of people with more money than sense bought full runs of obscure CCGs as an investment, and sure, some cards from back in the day are worth money, but the vast majority aren't worth the cardstock they were printed on.
Every so often someone would come in with a sack-full of cards, jumbled together. They expected me to pay out vast sums, in cash, for their trash. Imagine their shock when I turned them away.
Now imagine someone walking through the Bookhounds' front door with a sack-full of penny dreadfuls, expecting a fortune. Sure, they're worth beer money, but ... The argument starts. Voices are raised. Someone throws something. Pandemonium and chaos!
Then there's the titles themselves, like Sweeny Todd, which might inspire their own scenario ideas. I've discussed that before so I shan't delve deeply into it now, except to say that there's all kinds of horror ideas lurking in penny dreadfuls. Half the point of those books was to splatter as much blood as possible.
Take a look at the images from Wild Will, another penny dreadful. There's inspiration there for three or four scenarios at least!
Finally, let's use penny dreadfuls as part of the Battleground of the Mind. This is an idea I floated back in 2016 and will return to now.
The short version: mental combat can be described as a series of attacks against the Ego, Superego and Id. First described by Ken Hite in KWAS Mind Control, the central idea is to make mental attacks Thrilling, much as Chases are Thrilling in Night's Black Agents. You do this by changing the combat from a single win/lose die roll to a series of RP scenes in which the player fends off the attackers in what amounts to a mental dreamscape.
I said:
To look at, each layer of the target's mind exactly resembles the Bookstore ... Except different somehow, in odd little ways. A level 1 might be slightly unusual, feature NPCs who no longer exist - because they died - or have doors that will not open. A level 2 has doors which do open, and the protagonists may devoutly wish that they did not. Strange and terrible creatures may stalk the halls. Odd landscapes may be seen out the windows. A level 3 is completely beyond the bounds of reality. There is no outside world in this scenario, and you cannot trust any door to lead where you think it ought to.
Movement from reality to the mental realm may be as easy as stepping from one room to the next. The target simply discovers that, when she emerges from the stockroom laden with books that a customer asked for, not only is the customer not there but neither is anyone else. That signals the start of a mental attack, but as to when it ends ... ah, there's the rub ...
Now picture the same concept - except the landscape is the penny dreadful, not the bookstore.
Sweeny Todd's London. Varney the Vampire's adventures across Europe. The school from the Lambs of Littlecote, slowly becoming twisted and wrong.
Every time the character awakes from their 'dream' the penny dreadful is close by. Perhaps with a bookmark in the appropriate page. Were they reading it? Was it ... influencing them?
Above all, why is this happening?
Well, as to that last there are all kinds of options but I prefer Mythos influence. The target has become aware of the Mythos - perhaps they even suffered SAN loss as a consequence. This is especially likely if they've had direct contact with one of the big names, like Nyarlathotep. That Mythos contact is corrupting the character's psyche, and this attack on their mental facilities is one result of this. It might be deliberate, or it might be just one of those things.
Think of it this way: the dream state begins in the Bookstore, but soon unravels - and does so in the style and setting of the penny dreadful. Their main opposition is the main antagonist in the penny dreadful. Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, whoever it may be. The attack's resolved in the Zoom's style. Fail, and, well ... alas, alack the day. ;)
That's it for this week. Enjoy!
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