Ok so firstly i hate the title Modern Penny Dreadfuls. Admittedly the now famous show also has nothing in common with actual penny dreadfuls so i guess that term has just lost all meaning.
The subtitle, which i would guess was going to be the only title, is a little more accurate.

These are VERY short stories, most being about 2-4 pages i like it.. its pithy. Unfortunately it is rather front loaded. I do like my classic monsters though so the fact that most of the monster tales are at the start and the fact i rate the first section so much higher than the rest is probably no coincidence :P .
While the stories can involve death, murder and monsters, they tend not to feel very dark and some are quite funny. There's a fair bit of social commentary and something approaching observational humour in places.

So its broken into 3 sections, First Section [5/5], is classic monsters in real world tales. Feels a bit like 'What We Do in the Shadows'. It's also better themed than the rest as a number of tales revolve around the same supernatural organization.
Second Section [3/5] suffers in comparison, its just more mundane even though it involves a lot of deaths.
Third Section [3.5/5] picks up a bit. I don't think the final tale should have been the one chosen. You want to go out with a bang, the final line should have had some punch but i didn't feel it here.

Anyway none of the stories are BAD, they're all decent to good and i really liked the collection overall and would recommend grabbing an ecopy.

Edition Review:
So i have a hardcopy of this one and its fairly bad. It looks like the kind of copy books you used in school. I hate the font, which is like Courier New or something. It has these really small margins which i found constantly annoying.
But the main issue which may or may not apply to electronic versions is the text errors. There are quite a few and a couple of times i couldn't even figure out what the line would have been originally.
Another case of someone just turning on the spellcheck and hitting ok to all. So there are no spelling errors, everything in here is a word, but certainly not all the right words.

Edit: A thought occurs. It might be a lot more enjoyable if you read the First section last. ( )