Rusty Pulp is a pulp fiction imprint and creative laboratory devoted to strange, industrial, and beautifully broken stories. Born from the Rust Belt Gothic universe, it explores the mythic decay of the American heartland – where steel skeletons whisper, ghosts haunt factory walls, and small towns hide cosmic secrets beneath their soot.
Rust Belt Gothic is an ongoing effort to explore, preserve, and reimagine community memory across the Mahoning Valley. This work intentionally incorporates real people, places, and events alongside fictional, supernatural, and allegorical elements.
While some individuals and landmarks appear as themselves, their presence here is woven into a larger artistic narrative that should not be read as literal documentation. The speculative elements – monsters, hauntings, transformations – are inventions meant to highlight deeper truths about memory, loss, and preservation in post-industrial communities.
This story is not history, though it draws from it; nor is it journalism, though it touches real lives. It is fiction as archive: a bridge between fact and folklore, intended to honor the legacies of the Valley and beyond and to carry them forward in a living mythos.
These stories are a work of fiction created for the Rust Belt Gothic project. While it incorporates real people and places, it should be read as allegory, not journalism.
Each episode of Rusty Pulp is a standalone tale: part Gothic horror, part speculative folklore, part social autopsy. Together, they form an interconnected mythology of the Mahoning Valley and beyond – a place where human resilience rusts and regenerates in equal measure.
What We Publish
- One-shot pulp episodes like The Mycellial Clock, The Cartography of Despair, and The Kintsugi Heart
- Long-form works including Rust Belt Gothic Volume I and the forthcoming short novel Knightlight
- Transmissions, featuring studio notes, event recaps, and multimedia from the expanding Rust Belt Gothic world
What We Stand For
Rusty Pulp exists at the intersection of art and aftermath – a testament to creators, dreamers, and outcasts who rebuild beauty from ruin. It’s pulp with a conscience: stories that honor working-class survival, queer identity, disability, and the relentless weirdness of the post-industrial Midwest.
This is pulp reimagined for the Rust Age – digital paper, heavy soul.