Today’s story is the novellete ‘The Night Cyclist’ by Stephen Graham Jones. You can read it here. Stephen Graham Jones is perhaps best known for his novels like The Only Good Indians and My Heart is a Chainsaw (an ode to the slasher) which have both won a couple of awards. Today’s novellete was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award in the novellete category.
The story focuses on a chef who loves to cycle home at night. He’s just come out of a long relationship, one that he deliberately sabotaged, finding himself a way out through an affair. His cycling is weighted with meaning, connected to the past, an idea of himself that he’s loathe to let go of, a way of feeling and being which seems to offer him himself back. It is also a sort of denial, moments snatched from a more mundane life.
Coming home at two in the morning, Velcroed into my old racing shoes that have the clips worn down to nubs—dull little nubs my pedals know like a ball knows its socket—I could pretend that life had never ended. That I was still me. That I hadn’t run Doreen off on purpose. That I wouldn’t run the next Doreen off just the same.
In the end, offered the chance to live that life forever, he turns it down. The vampiric night cyclist offers him something in exchange for the bloody aid he has provided to the night cyclist.
He lowered his teeth to my skin, his eyes never leaving mine, and I understood what he was offering.
Eternal youth. Night rides forever. Going faster than I’d ever dreamed.
He was offering to share the night with me.
He turns the offer down, says he’s going to ring Doreen back, gives his bike away. It seems like a renunciation and I couldn’t help feeling a little sad when he turned the offer down. But then, the night cyclist offers something else alongside the eternal night:
“Go,” I told him, and when he walked by I smelled it on him, from him. The decay. If he ever peeled out of his suit, it must smell like the grave for acres in every direction.
Stagnation and decay await any who accept his offer. As with Frankenstein’s creature, what is offered isn’t really the creation of life but rather the animation of death. There is something like death in a freedom so absolute as to represent a stasis, untouched by any changes, any external influences, just an endless night. There’s a part of me that still wishes he’d chosen it though because there’s also a kind of death in giving up that sort of reckless self-surrender to obsession in exchange for the mundane, the familiar, and the good enough. Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted everything though or perhaps you just disagree. Let me know!
What really struck me this time, were the descriptions. I have to admit to knowing nothing about bikes and being unable to visualise (aphantasia) means that I had basically no idea what was going on in the descriptions of bike manoeuvres or actions. Having said that, I found the story sucked me into its world with a language both rich and haunting. I love how the descriptions of the river echo and foretell the rest of the narrative. The swollen river almost floods the cycle path and
The surface of the water breathed like a great animal, the sides of the creek surging up just over the bank, washing the concrete of the path and then retreating.
This sentient world is both an incredibly evocative depiction; it also sets the scene for the night cyclist, himself a part of the night, a part of the world of rocks and caves and mountains. Like the river, he lives uneasily alongside the cycle path and the human world.
The second description of the water that stood out to me was the following description:
Down here by the creek, the sound was massive. It felt like the mountains were bleeding out.
This bloody imagery, echoes and foretells the bloodshed to come. For now the mountains bleed out, soon it will be bodies, sucked dry by the gaping maw of the night cyclist. These are just two examples but I love the use of language throughout and the way the night cyclist becomes written into the very language of the story.
Romancing the Gothic 