1 Introduction: Identity and the Fantastic in Penny Dreadful “. . . the best characters are the most complicated ones.” --John Logan (Qtd. Thomas 2014) In Season Two of television horror-drama, Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky, 2014-16), Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), American sharpshooter and werewolf, asks Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), a British heiress with supernatural powers and a troubled past, what happens when the monsters inside of them are released? She says: “We’re most who we are. Unrestrained. Ourselves.” Summing up a central concern of the series, she confirms the view of its creator John Logan, that the “greatest horror in Penny Dreadful is the horror of people. . . the way we interact with one another.” (Calia 2015) Penny Dreadful explores the darkness that exists not only in the physical world but also in the human mind. In it, monstrosity takes the familiar form of witches, werewolves, vampires, the revived and reconfigured undead—Dr. Frankenstein’s monsters—who kill and maim, but the series also routinely explores other, more mundane, forms of cruelty and depravity, while embracing a range of difference. In Penny Dreadful, the most human characters are revealed to be the most monstrous. Logan, as a gay man, says he feels a “deep kinship” with monsters; used in the series to explore gendered difference, they are linked to troubled, troubling, and alternative identities more generally. Accordingly, Vanessa and Ethan, along with friends like the “joyous fop” Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale) and foes like the seductive villainess, Madame Kali (Helen McCrory), struggle to come to terms with their deviant natures and problematic desires, those demons within and without which shape their worlds. Over its three season run, characters and storylines are developed in challenging