What would the Gotham City of one hundred years ago have been like?. In an age of mystery and superstition, how would the people of Gotham react to a weird creature of the night, a bat-garbed vigilante feared by the guilty and the innocent alike?. Some would live in terror. Others would rest easier. Only one man would take no notice at all, a man with other matters to attend to. His name?. No one knows for sure. Most people know him only as Jack. Jack the Ripper. Batman, Gotham by gaslight collects the classic tale of the Victorian era Bat-Man's encounter with the Butcher of Whitechapel alongside its acclaimed sequel, Master of the future, in which the Dark Knight encounters a crazed prophet determined to prevent Gotham City from entering the twentieth century.

From the pages of the award-winning, iconoclastic magazine McSweeney's comes a second entertaining anthology of never-before-published short fiction, with contributions by Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Jonathan Lethem, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, Amy Tan, and other distinguished authors. Original. 85,000 first printing.