When the Sun Went Out
Science Fiction Series No. 4, 1929 · 29 min
The Moon is gone and the Sun is guttering out. The last of humanity gathers on a freezing Earth to watch it die.
Gaslight
A free archive of public domain pulp fiction.
Line of the day
Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed of.
Gaslight is HOUDINI Magazine's pulp fiction archive. Pulp was written for working-class people by working-class people, and these stories should be free and easy to read today.
We dig up the dirtiest, filthiest, freakiest, scariest pulp classics on this side, that side or any side of the internet. We work like a gravekeeper, with a shovel.
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These stories contain murder, drug use, vampirism, cannibalism, debauchery and existential dread, and a few of them hold universal horrors unbeknownst to man.
Gaslight takes its name from the age of the original Houdini, the magician, when workers read their cheap fiction by gaslight. They grabbed a few precious minutes with a penny dreadful or a shilling shocker. Publishers printed whatever they could get out of their writers, and the writers were underpaid and underknown. Those writers fed a culture for the working class.
Today the readers are the people gaslit by a society that exploits and takes. That society holds more horror than any story in this archive.
Reading is for everyone, and Gaslight was designed around that from the ground up. The Reader and Tools buttons change how every story looks and reads.
Gaslight began as Grime and Ghouls, a zine that mixed organizing material with pulp stories short enough to read at lunch. Every story here still has a zine. Print it, fold it, staple it and leave it in the break room.
We dig up about two new stories every week. Check back for the next one.
Getting back into reading
Start here if you have not read for fun in a while.
Pick a story from On Your Break. Each one takes under twenty minutes and shows its reading time. Tap Reader to make the words bigger or try an easier typeface. Tap Tools to put each sentence on its own line, split long words into syllables, or dim everything except the line you are reading. Every story has a word list for the old words, and many have a recording you can follow along with.
Gaslight also works with screen readers and with a keyboard alone. More on accessibility
Newest
Recently added
- Transformation Mary Shelley The Keepsake for 1831 · 30 min
- The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman The New England Magazine, January 1892 · 26 min
- The Tunnel Under the World Frederik Pohl Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955 · 49 min
- The Striding Place Gertrude Atherton 1896; collected in The Bell in the Fog, 1905 · 10 min
- The Strength of the Strong Jack London Hampton's Magazine, March 1911 · 28 min
- The Salem Horror Henry Kuttner Weird Tales, May 1937 · 28 min
Selected Shelves
Women in Pulp
Women wrote this fiction before pulp had a name, and they kept writing it after. Gaslight keeps pulp a loose word: cheap fiction for people with a few minutes between jobs.
15 stories
Socialist Sci-Fi
Science fiction has always asked what the future does with working people. These six stories answer from the working side of the question.
6 stories
Triple-XXX Rated
Pulp sold on sex and violence, and this shelf holds the stories that sold it hardest. A moll sets up her own man's rival. A pirate queen takes Conan aboard her ship. Mars puts a striptease on the sky, and a rub-down man at the Gotham Baths sells new bodies for three thousand dollars.
4 stories