Emmelina And The Monster

Gina is big and loves food. Dina is tall and loves herself. Emmelina is small and thoughtful and loves everyone. The queen wants the sisters to get rid of the monster that is threatening her village, turning everyone into stone. Will it be brawn, beauty or brains that wins the day?

H. M. Milner was a hugely successful playwright, producing a great many melodramas and popular tragedies. His most notable work, The Man and The Monster; or The Fate of Frankenstein - a melodramatic adaptation of Mary Shelley's famous 1818 novel, Frankenstein - opened at the Royal Coberg Theatre in July of 1826. Many of the horror stories of monsters and ghouls, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The Frankenstein we know is not Mary Shelley's creature at all. Rather it is an amalgam of over 200 years of images and dramatizations that range from the ghoulish fiends of nineteenth-century sensation dramas to Boris Karloff's movie monster to Mel Brooks's tap-dancing giant. These versions treat the Frankenstein myth with varying levels of horror, hysteria, and humor, but all of them attest to its enduring power. In Hideous Progenies, Steven Earl Forry offers a historical overview of the legend's transformation over time—beginning with Shelley's original and the earliest popular dramatizations of it (which transformed the myth, adding a burlesque quality and simplifying its moral allegory) and continuing on through the advent of cinema. He also documents this development with actual texts of seven pre-1931 dramatizations, a sampling of cartoons and playbills, and a shooting script for the first cinematic version, Thomas Edison's Frankenstein (1910). Forry's rare materials and interesting survey offer a valuable resource for scholars and students of theater history, literary history, and popular culture.

Monsters are fragmentary, uncertain, frightening creatures. What happens when they enter the realm of the theatre? The Monster in Theatre History explores the cultural genealogies of monsters as they appear in the recorded history of Western theatre. From the Ancient Greeks to the most cutting-edge new media, Michael Chemers focuses on a series of ‘key’ monsters, including Frankenstein’s creature, werewolves, ghosts, and vampires, to reconsider what monsters in performance might mean to those who witness them. This volume builds a clear methodology for engaging with theatrical monsters of all kinds, providing a much-needed guidebook to this fascinating hinterland.

Eleven mystery short stories by Dorothy Cannell, including The Purloined Purple Pearl, Cupid’s Arrow, One Night at a Time, Telling George, The January Sale Stowaway, The Gentleman’s Gentleman, Come to Grandma, Fetch, Poor Lincoln, The High Cost of Living, and The Family Jewels: A Moral Tale. Mystery Short Stories by Dorothy Cannell; originally published by Five Star First Edition Mystery Series