FREE Reads

Book download page: https://www.gwellstaylor.com/blog/?page_id=2956

Dracula’s Gypsy servant Horvat has the special duty of preserving his master’s body if the worst should ever happen, and the worst has happened!

Van Helsing’s team of vampire hunters has decapitated the count and reduced him to dust and ashes.

Horvat’s instructions are simple. Dracula’s remains must be stored in a special urn and bathed in blood while en route to South Africa where a mysterious ally will see to his resurrection.

But fate steps in off the African coast and a shipwreck casts Horvat and his precious burden into the jungle setting of another literary classic.

Book download page: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20230236

Before he wrote his most famous book, The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham was writing wonderfully strange pulp science fiction under the name John Beynon Harris, and in 1932 he decided to send humanity to Venus.

Hundreds of years after an earlier expedition disappeared, the spaceship Fyra reaches Venus and discovers something nobody expected.

Somehow the descendants of that lost expedition survived, but after centuries on Venus they've developed into very different societies. And they aren't exactly getting along. Throw in the planet's intelligent native inhabitants, strange aircraft, an alien wilderness and a new group of Earth explorers suddenly dropped into the middle of everything, and you've got a proper old-school planetary adventure.

This is a 1932 pulp story, so some of its ideas about race, "civilization," human development and colonialism have aged pretty badly. But still an interesting bit of science fiction.

Book download page: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/scratch-monkey/how-not-to-sell-a-novel.html

Humanity has spread across the galaxy, but humans are no longer the smartest things in it. Vast artificial intelligences called Superbrights control much of civilization, while human minds can be copied, transmitted, rebuilt, and dumped into new bodies. Death has gotten complicated.

Oshi Adjani works for one of these Superbrights, doing the dangerous jobs her “Boss” can’t handle directly. Revolutions. Mass murderers. Broken colonies. The kind of assignments where disposable humans come in handy.

Then Oshi learns something she was never supposed to know.

Fast, nasty, weird, and packed with early versions of ideas Stross would later push much further in Accelerando, Scratch Monkey feels like cyberpunk launched several thousand years into the future.

Book download page: https://manybooks.net/titles/the-ranch-went-quiet

A science-fiction mystery by Sandra Boyle and a prequel to her Uintah Rift series.

For six years, Elias Ward has worked the night shift monitoring a restricted ranch in Utah's Uintah Basin, where bizarre activity is so common that it has become part of the job.

Strange lights. Radiation spikes. GPS readings that don't make sense. Cameras malfunctioning at exactly the wrong moment. Instruments recording things that shouldn't be possible.

Then one night the ranch goes quiet.

Apparently that's a hell of a lot worse, because Elias soon finds himself dealing with impossible measurements, an old tape recorder behaving in ways it shouldn't, recordings connected to events that haven't happened yet, and evidence that something may be buried beneath the area.

Book download page: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html

The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake.

He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much.

And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world, and the world of his descendants, is turned on its head.

___

Book download page: https://craphound.com/news/2012/09/17/free-creative-commons-licensed-downloads-of-rapture-of-the-nerds/

It's the late 21st century, and the Singularity has already happened. Huge numbers of people have abandoned biological bodies and uploaded themselves into vast posthuman computational civilizations spread throughout the solar system. About a billion stubborn old-fashioned humans remain on Earth.

Unfortunately, the uploaded superintelligences keep sending Earth technological ideas. Potentially civilization-destroying inventions capable of wrecking industries, cultures or society itself.

So Earth has created Tech Jury Service. Ordinary people get drafted to examine these technologies and decide whether humanity should actually be allowed to use them.

Our protagonist, Huw Jones, is hilariously inappropriate for the job. He's a cranky Welsh potter and something of a technophobe living in a world overflowing with posthuman technology. Then he gets selected for jury duty.

We're talking about uploaded humans, molecular machinery, artificial superintelligences, intelligent anarchist ants, body modification, gender changes, bizarre religions, courtroom insanity, conspiracies, technological viruses, simulated realities and eventually contact with something much larger than humanity's own posthuman civilization.

Everything is satirical, vulgar, extremely geeky and intentionally absurd. Doctorow himself described it as a comic novel about the Singularity that was partly a celebration of technophilia and partly an indictment of it.

Set in an alternate version of America shaped by real

I especially liked how the book takes real places and historical ideas, then twists them into something magical without losing that sense of reality.

The mix of history and magic makes it a great read.

Book download page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76352

Feel like an adventure with giant killer frogs and man-eating cabbage plants?

Well, then here ya go.

A scientist has figured out how to throw things 500,000 years into the future and bring them back a couple of minutes later. Naturally, they eventually decide to try it with people.

Some of those people don't come back. So our narrator, George, agrees to go after them. He packs some food, a knife and, very sensibly, an axe, then gets fired half a million years into Earth's future.

And Earth has gone completely freaking bonkers. The first landscape he encounters is covered in enormous green plants resembling eight-foot cabbages. Pretty weird, but harmless enough.

Well, until one of the things suddenly explodes open into writhing red tentacles, grabs a furry humanoid creature and starts dragging her underground.

We're barely getting started. The book throws in Frog-Mouths, Killers, Bat-Wings, living books, strange temples, underground worlds, gigantic beings, war, telepathy and evolutionary weirdness.

It's basically H. G. Wells' The Time Machine after somebody fed it hallucinogens and dropped it half a million years farther into the future.

.epub downloage page: https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.epub

.mobi downloage page (for older ereaders): https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.mobi

HTML page to read online: https://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601701h.html

Before Robert E. Howard was sending Conan into temples full of monsters and lunatic sorcerers, he wrote some weird-ass occult detective stories.

And in this story, Howard goes nuts with the weird-menace formula: poison cigarettes, cobras, assassins, opium dens, secret passages, hallucinogenic drugs, knife fights, torture chambers, a sacrificial altar, a supposedly dead criminal mastermind, and a dude running around with a freaking spiked mace.

Steve Harrison is investigating a string of bizarre murders when Joan La Tour shows him something very uncool: a page from the Black Book of the Dead.

Books with that title are never awesome in pulp stories. Five names are written on it. Three have already been crossed out.

The remaining two are Joan La Tour and Steve Harrison!

It gets worse, the man apparently responsible is Erlik Khan, the Lord of the Dead, a criminal mastermind Harrison had previously watched get stabbed and apparently burned to death.

Apparently that didn't take. Some people are just hard to kill, man.

Published in Super-Detective Stories in May 1934, and reads as if Conan accidentally got a job as a detective.

WARNING: this is a 1934 weird-menace story and contains some very dated racial language and stereotypes.

Book page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79595

Before author Erle Stanley Gardner created Perry Mason, he was writing fast, ridiculous, violent pulp stories for Black Mask, and this story is a great example of just how wild his early stuff could get.

Black Barr is an infamous gunfighter dressed head to toe in black, riding a black horse, because apparently subtlety wasn't much of a concern in 1928. He takes the wrong fork in a trail and rides straight into a mess of crooked ranchers, hired killers, stolen land, and a woman trapped in a vicious scheme.

Barr could probably just turn around and continue on his way. But nah, that's not the pulp way. Instead, his solution involves six-shooters, night riding, getting shot, shooting other people, shooting still more people, and generally leaving the town of Caliente Flats with a smaller population than when he arrived.

And then there's Wing Lee, the mysterious stranger who calls himself the Devil's Deputy.

It's decent pulp, but it's very much 1928 pulp. Gardner knows how to keep a story moving. Some pretty good action and fun storytelling. Some of it's aged really badly though. Uses some pretty bad racial stereotypes and slurs that were common in fiction of the period.

Sample of writing style:

A white signboard hung at an angle from a small tree, fastened by a rusty nail, bleached by sun and wind, cracked and checked, and yet it still bore its message “Caliente Flats 10 M.” It was a sign such as is used by the Forestry Service to mark mountain fire trails. Yet the printing was not that of a government stencil. It was crude hand-lettering.

Another mile and a rider approached, coming up the trail, pressing his horse.

I stopped, swung to one side, and waited, hands ready, poised over my pistols. In the mountains of the West, particularly in those communities where the main means of communication are over horseback trails, it is well to be prepared for trouble when one meets another on the trail.

He saw me, scowled, averted his glance and passed in sullen silence. That, of itself, was unusual. The code of the West calls for a brief exchange of courtesies when two riders meet. More, there was a blood-stained bandage on his shoulder, and the blood was a bright scarlet, not the rusty red of dried blood. The man had been wounded, and the wound was bleeding even as he urged his mount up that trail, away from Caliente Flats.

I shrugged my shoulders and rode on.

Book Page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79565

.epub File Download: https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Spawn%20of%20the%20comet%20-%20Otis%20Adelbert%20Kline.epub

This one is pure 1930 pulp monster madness by Otis Adelbert Kline. With chapter names like Threads of Death, Bleached Bones, A Field of Monsters, and The Attacking Medusa, ya can't really go wrong with this one.

A gigantic comet comes roaring past Earth, close enough to cause earthquakes, storms, tidal waves, and some gnarly meteor showers. Enough to definitely freak out about.

But it's a near miss, and the comet goes on its merry way into outer space. Earth survives, and everyone figures the excitement is over.

Whew!

Dick Perry is spending a weekend in the country with his fiancée Sue when they notice something that seems pretty harmless: strange, hair-thin threads appearing in the countryside.

Not so bad, right?

Except the threads are alive, they grow insanely fast, and they've developed the charming habit of attaching themselves to animals and sucking them dry. And that's only the beginning.

Before long, we've got giant alien jellyfish flying around, complete with dangling tentacles and a taste for living prey!

And they aren't just stupid space jellyfish. They're learning.

Yeah. That's probably not a good thing. So hey, bring out the freakin' flamethrowers, baby!

Book page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76623

Okay, this is exactly the kind of completely bonkers Weird Tales story I love finding. Written in 1937

In 1930s London, a hottie named, Countess Moonard, is running a secret occult cult devoted to a mysterious golden idol called Moonere.

And, naturally, young women are disappearing into her creepy little religion. Because that's the best reason for having creepy little religions, right?!

But this isn't just your standard evil cult story. Nah, see, this cult's supernatural power comes from OUTER SPACE!

Somewhere in the cosmos is a distant planet with a moon called Sudre. Strange radiation from Sudre reaches Earth, where the cult uses something called star-glass to collect and focus its power.

But don't worry folks, because we've got Pierre Soret to save the day. He's a horribly disfigured scientist who has his own laboratory full of bizarre technology and decides he's going to fight occult space magic...with science!

His arsenal includes telepathy, a long range viewing device, strange radiation experiments, and a counter-ray designed to fight the cosmic energy being used by the cult.

Seriously, ya can't go wrong with a story about cults, hypnotic countess, human sacrifice, aliens, magical star-glass, secret labs, and dude with a death ray!

My fav kind of forgotten pulp weirdness.

Story download page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79279

A gnarly short story from Weird Tales, 1936.

Old Masson is the caretaker of an old neglected cemetery. Of course, we can't have a good, upstanding caretaker for our story. Nope. Turns out the dude actually robs the graves. Can't let all that jewelry and fine clothing go to waste!

Unfortunately, something else is robbing them too. As in rats. Really freaking big rats.

The cemetery is infested with generations of enormous rats that have dug a network of tunnels beneath the graves. Some are as big as cats, and they've developed the charming habit of chewing through coffins and dragging the corpses underground.

One night, Masson is opening a freshly buried grave when the rats get to the corpse first. He watches the body disappear through a hole in the coffin and makes the sort of decision that characters in Weird Tales exist to make: He crawls into the rat hole after it!

Bad news is that it turns out the rats aren't the worst things living beneath the cemetery.

Book download page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76645

Return to Earth appeared in the June 1937 issue of Weird Tales, which immediately tells you something about what kind of story this is.

Henry Sanborn disappeared from his American hometown in 1917. Everyone assumed he had run away to avoid serving in World War I. In reality, Henry had secretly built an experimental spacecraft based on an anti-gravity principle he'd learned from a patient in an asylum. His test flight went spectacularly wrong and hurled him beyond the stars.

Eighteen years later, Henry returns with an incredible story to tell, expecting to be welcomed home.

There's just one problem. To the people he left behind, he isn't a pioneering explorer. He's the coward who disappeared during World War I.

And Henry hasn't returned alone. Watching from nearby is Usru, his strange extraterrestrial companion, hidden from sight by alien technology. Usru stands less than three feet tall. His head is larger than his body, he has no legs, and he possesses six arms, using four of them to move around. A single luminous eye sits atop a stalk, while another sensory organ resembles a fleshy flower growing from his head.

But since his alien sidekick is invisible, no one believes Henry's fantastic story. Instead, they assume he's either insane or lying.

Book download page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14317

This thing is nuts. I love it! It was written in 1912.

Three broke guys in San Francisco discover an old book describing the black magic of Atlantis. They decide they can use it to get rich and establish a commercial occult enterprise, the Sorcery Club.

Then it gets weird.

The book contains instructions for obtaining supernatural abilities. The men undergo occult tests and initiation rituals and encounter entities associated with the Atlantean magic

One manifestation is basically a monstrous gnarly supernatural tree with fruit that appears to laugh, an enormous white human-like tongue that shoots out of its trunk, and a huge eye staring through its branches.

So Atlantis + demons + occult instruction manual + supernatural powers + evil businessmen + grotesque entities + early-1900s San Francisco = AWESOME!

Book download page: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks23/2301041h.html

A largely forgotten historical novel set during one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history.

Brave Employments follows Patrick Sarsfield, a real-life Irish Jacobite soldier who fought against William III's forces during the Williamite War in Ireland.

The story covers the years surrounding the Battle of the Boyne, the sieges of Limerick, and the collapse of the Jacobite cause. Sarsfield finds himself caught between loyalty to James II, his Catholic faith, his personal sense of honor, and an increasing devotion to Ireland itself. Bowen mixes real people and events with fictional characters, political intrigue, military campaigns, divided loyalties, and some romance.

Book is around 600 pages, and Bowen clearly did her historical homework. She includes notes on her sources and explains where she departed from the historical record.

Book download page:* https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75441

"Terror Out of the Past" is a 1940 pulp science-fiction adventure. Fun example of lost civilizations, ancient technology, robots, underground mysteries and fast 1940s pulp science fiction.

Perry Wilcox and scientist Roderick Murgatroyd discover an enormous artificial structure buried beneath ancient hills, its metal walls dating from an age long before human civilization should have existed. When their excavation awakens machines that have been dormant for geological ages, the discovery quickly becomes far more dangerous than an archaeological curiosity.

Book download page: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601711h.html

A great little story by Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) if you like Lovecraft-style cosmic horror, forbidden books, ancient cults, mysterious ruins, folklore, and archaeological mysteries.

It follows an unnamed scholar who becomes fascinated by references to a mysterious ancient monolith hidden in the mountains near a remote Hungarian village. Old books, local legends, and the writings of a mad poet all suggest that the stone predates known civilizations and is connected to disturbing rituals held on Midsummer Night.

Curious enough to investigate for himself, the narrator travels to the village and begins uncovering hints that its folklore may preserve memories of something far older and stranger than ordinary superstition.

Incident by Thomas J. O'Hara

A deep-space expedition turns into a nightmare when a mysterious and deadly illness begins sweeping through the crew. Far from Earth, with no help coming and no clear idea what caused it, the survivors are forced to confront fear, isolation, and the possibility that their mission may have become something much more dangerous.

Book page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78725

The End of the Story is a weird fantasy/horror short story by one of my favorite writers, Clark Ashton Smith. It was first published in the May 1930 issue of Weird Tales.

The story follows Christophe Morand, a young law student, who stays at an old abbey in Averoigne. While there, he comes across a manuscript that tells of a knight and a mysterious supernatural woman connected to ruined lands nearby.

Curiosity gets the better of him, and the old story begins to feel much less safely buried in the past.

Nice mix of Gothic atmosphere, forbidden knowledge, supernatural seduction, old ruins, and strange religion.

Straight text version with original pulp illustrations: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_15/Issue_5/The_End_of_the_Story

Epub version for your ereader (though they generically just named the file "Short Fiction by Clark Ashton Smith"): https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/clark-ashton-smith/short-fiction

The Cosmic Cloud by Edmond Hamilton is a 1930 space-opera novelette from his Interstellar Patrol series. First appeared in the November 1930 issue of Weird Tales.

A vast region of total darkness hangs near the center of the galaxy, and ships that venture too close simply disappear. When the Interstellar Patrol sends Dur Nal and his crew to investigate, they head straight toward a place where ordinary light fails and no one knows what is waiting inside.

Classic pulp space adventure: mysterious cosmic stuff going on, dangerous exploration, and strange worlds.

All my fav things!

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79352

The story takes place in Khauran, a small kingdom ruled by Queen Taramis. One night, Taramis discovers something almost impossible: she has an identical twin sister named Salome, who was believed to have died as an infant. Salome carries the traditional mark of a witch and has returned after years away with some very unpleasant plans for her sister and the kingdom.

That sets off a violent political crisis involving deception, mercenary soldiers, rebellion, desert tribes, and Conan, who at this point in his life serves as captain of Taramis's guard. Conan isn't really the viewpoint character or even the center of the opening. The story spends considerable time on the people of Khauran and what happens when their political order suddenly collapses.

Book page: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600921h.html

Not my favorite title for a book, but it's a decent story packed with naval battles, pirates, political intrigue, betrayals, chariot racing, sieges, duels, and ancient Mediterranean warfare.

Historical adventure novel set in the violent aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination, when Rome is fractured, Cleopatra’s position in Egypt is increasingly dangerous, and pirates control much of the Mediterranean. It follows Tros of Samothrace, an independent sea captain and longtime enemy of Roman imperial power, as he gets pulled into Cleopatra’s political struggles while trying to protect his own people and pursue his relationship with Hero, Cleopatra’s sister.

Book page: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1300501h.html

Gods of the Jungle is a fast-moving 1942 pulp science-fiction adventure that starts as a World War II story. Then takes get weird. American airman Ramey Winters is flying over Southeast Asia when events leave him near the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. What looks like an archaeological mystery soon opens into something much bigger, involving a forgotten civilization, strange technology, ancient legends, and a secret that stretches across thousands of years.

Mix of WWII aviation, lost-world adventure, time travel, ancient mythology, and planetary science fiction into one story.

Book page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74490