Death Cycle (Midnight Place) by Simon Lake

**This blog contains adult language.**

Warning: Contains Spoilers!!!  This is a recap blog which means I read the book and tell you everything that happens so you don't have to read it yourself.  Do NOT continue to read unless you want to know who the bad guy/girl/ludicrous legend is.

Tag Line: None.  Weird.  You'd think a blatant R.L. Stine knockoff would have added a tag line.

From the Back of the Book: Beware of Midnight Place.  At first it seems like an ordinary street in an ordinary neighborhood.  But the kids sense there's something different about Midnight Place.  It's nothing tangible - just an eerie sensation that won't go away.  Walk down the street, a street like Midnight Place, all too soon the terror is real.  Wherever they go, Roz Jordan and her friends are followed by a mysterious motorcycle that seems to appear out of thin air.  At first they are intrigued, but when a classmate is hit and killed by this wild rider, everyone is frightened.  For Roz there is something eerily familiar about this phantom rider.  She keeps thinking of someone - someone who used to live on Midnight Place.  Will this ghostly rider destroy Roz and her friends?

Let's talk about this blurb, shall we?  First of all the part in italics is horribly written.  That last italic sentence is just awful and makes very little sense.  It doesn't really fit the book either.  There's one sentence in the book where our protagonist mentions that kids in school tell stories about Midnight Place (sound familiar Fear Street-ers?) but otherwise it's not really mentioned.  No one talks about eerie sensations.  To be honest, no one talks about it at all.  Also, NO ONE is intrigued by the mysterious motorcycle.  Whoever writes these things clearly never reads the book.  Not that I blame them for not reading this one.

This book was published in 1993 when I was still pretty actively reading this genre.  However, I'd never heard of this book OR this series until I found this one.  I looked the series up and, as near as I can tell, there were only 3 or 4 books in it.  That should tell you all something since the Fear Street series is in the billions.

Blogger Confession: the name of one of the characters has been altered in this recap to avoid a trigger for one of my readers.  Altering the name does not change the course of the story in any way.  Unfortunately.

So, as many of you know, my manager keeps me on a short blogging leash (love ya but you know it's true!). When I told her I wanted to start the Canby Hall blog (I Went to Canby Hall and All I Got Was This Stupid Recap) she wasn't exactly happy. I was already pretty slow about getting my recaps up and she was worried that the Canby blog would make this blog even more stagnant. So I had to agree that I would only read/recap one Canby Hall book a month. Here we are on June 20^th and I just published the Crash Course recap and it's ten days too early to start a Canby Hall. ((((Nooooooooooooooooo!!!))))  What's a blogger to do? I don't want to start a PH and have it lag into July when all I really want to do is find out how Andy and Toby ruin Jane's party. So I grabbed the shortest PH book I own. Hopefully I can get it read and the recap up in ten days. {fingers crossed} 

(Note from future me: it's not looking good. I procrastinated for about 5 days and now there's no way I'll get this done in time. Boo. Hiss.) 

(Note from future FUTURE me: I read this book in 24 hours. That's not a good thing.)

We begin with our protagonist Rosiland thinking about how lousy Tuesdays are. Weird. I had this exact conversation with both my husband and a good friend last week. I guess Tuesday hatred is more common than I knew. She's also suffering from a recent break-up and that's not helping. Bart, her ex, moved unexpectedly without much of a goodbye and she's thinking of writing him a “stick-your-motorcycle-up-your-ass” letter.

The book insists on calling her Roz. I hate the name, but it's shorter to type so I guess I'll give in.

Roz is in her last period geometry class and it's deadly dull. She's staring out the window at the rain when she notices something odd on the practice field below. It looks like a giant black motorcycle and she briefly wonders if Bart has returned. She dismisses the thought. The bike isn't anything like Bart's and the rider dressed in unrelenting black is taller than Bart. (Note from future me: Why?  Why taller?  It makes no sense with what we learn later.)  She can't figure out why she never heard the giant bike drive up. The rider is sitting facing the school and she has the uneasy feeling that he's watching her. Her teacher calls her attention to the board for a few seconds and, when she looks back, the bike is gone.

She goes to check the area after school and is surprised there are no tracks in the grass to mark the bike's passage. It looked way too big to not leave evidence of it's presence. Her friend Melanie theorizes that it might have been a ghost boy on a ghost bike coming to haunt the school. Roz wants to laugh but she knows that Melanie absolutely believes in all things paranormal and she doesn't want to hurt her friend's feelings.

A boy named Jeff intercepts them before they can leave and asks Roz out to the movies. She declines citing the need to study for a test the next day. After he leaves, Melanie goes on and ON about how all the boys in the whole school love Roz. Of course they do. She has magical protagonist powers. They chat about their day and the name Kyle gets dropped into the conversation no less than 11 times but all we really learn about him is that he wears cowboy boots because he moved from “out west” and he's a cliche. Oh, and he got into a fight with someone named Forbin.

What the hell kind of name is Forbin?

Talk comes back to the biker and Melanie says if it wasn't a ghost, Roz must have hallucinated him. Because clearly those are the only two choices. They start to walk home and, to their utter amazement, Lake turns into Stine and puts them smack-dab in the middle of an asinine chapter-ending-cliffhanger. A black motorcycle comes out of nowhere, looses control and starts to skid right toward them. Naturally, by the start of the next chapter, the rider has miraculously regained control of the bike and all is well. It turns out to be Forbin and the girls are furious with him.

Forbin acts like an asshole about the whole thing and Melanie is so pissed after he rides off that she threatens to kill him.  Foreshadowing??  (Note from future me: Nope)

Roz heads home. Her housing development is close to Midnight Place which is clearly a rip off of Fear Street. Roz goes up to her attic room after dinner to study. Mostly she's staring out her window at Midnight Place though. Her mom comes up to tell Roz that someone had called for her but she told “him” that Roz was studying and couldn't come to the phone. She NEVER tells Roz who the caller was and Roz NEVER asks. So what the fuck was the point? Was it just to show us how popular and sought after our protagonist is?  Annoying.  Her mom then mentions that Mrs Rossman, the neighborhood busybody, called to report that Roz and Melanie had almost been run over by a maniac on a motorcycle. Her mom seems to think it was Bart but Roz tells her it was Forbin.

I'm a little confused about the geography of this place. Mrs R is the neighborhood busybody so I assume she lives close to Roz or at least in the same development. However, we're told the accident happened not long after the girls left the school AND that Roz ran a great distance to get home afterwards. So how did Mrs R witness this at all?

When her mom goes back downstairs, Roz looks out the window and sees the motorcycle and the mysterious rider parked on a street in Midnight Place pointed at her house. She thinks about telling her parents, but he disappears before she can.

The next day Roz and Melanie eat lunch with Lynda. She described as an activist and a feminist but then she calls herself fat and doesn't eat lunch. Consistency in characterization is clearly not a thing Lake is overly concerned with. Roz tells them about the rider being in Midnight Place and Lynda thinks it's uber romantic. She says Roz must have a secret admirer and she should leave her window open to encourage him to crawl inside.

Lynda's an idiot, y'all.

Melanie thinks Roz should tell her dad but Roz reminds her that they don't fucking do that in these books and could she kindly get her crap together and remember how this is supposed to go down?

Jeff asks her out again and isn't as accepting when she turns him down again. He's getting worrisome but Roz doesn't give him much thought. She wonders about the rider instead and thinks it would be just ducky if he was a secret admirer because that might make Bart jealous. Never mind that Bart, who lives across the country now, isn't likely to hear if his ex has a secret admirer. Never mind that secret admirers are usually the bad guys in these books. Roz don't care, y'all. She just wants Bart to want her again.

Roz falls asleep at her desk that night and dreams that the motorcycle is in her house coming up her stairs. She feels like a zombie the next day at school. She's not the only one. Melanie is also acting strange. Roz presses her, and Melanie admits that she saw the motorcycle and rider outside her house the night before. He was just sitting in the middle of the street staring at her house. Lynda says she saw him too but she's convinced it's Forbin and she totally wants to kick his ass. They decide to confront him.

They go to someplace called “The Barn” which is apparently the town hangout. Forbin isn't there but Kyle is and Roz feels glad to see him. She doesn't like feeling glad to see him. She only wants to be glad to see Bart. I'm so tired of Roz. Sigh. Anyway, Kyle is talking to some chick named Zeena and Roz feels jealous. How dare he talk to another girl when he has absolutely no feelings for Roz!? He's cheating on their non-existent relationship, y'all!!

They go over to talk to Kyle when Zeena leaves. Roz can't help noticing that everyone in the place seems more subdued than usual. Kyle has all kinds of information to give them but it takes him THREE FUCKING PAGES to spit it out. Majorly buries the lead too. Jeff and a group of kids were plowed into by motorcycle while crossing the street. There were a lot of injuries but Jeff was the only fatality. Poor Jeff. We hardly knew ye.

Roz immediately makes it all about her as she thinks about how horrible it would have been if she'd accepted Jeff's date. She could have witnessed the carnage. She could have been the one that was killed. Kyle suggests they go get some fresh air. On their way out of the place, he mentions that he saw some weirdo on a motorcycle outside his house the night before.

Lynda wants to go to the police. Kyle says it will be useless because he knows he's in a PH (ish) and that's what he's supposed to say. Roz doesn't voice an opinion because if it's not about her she can't be bothered to care. Lynda eventually gives up. The group is just wandering around I guess when Forbin's friend Beetle (seriously – who named these people?) drives by. He paces them for a bit, calling Kyle “chief” and asking where his feathers are and if the girls are his squaws. Super offensive. The girls can't figure it out and then Melanie realizes that they think Kyle is American Indian. Kyle confirms they've been racially harassing him.

That night, Roz tells her parents about Jeff and Forbin (who she's decided is the rider on the bike). Her parents think that Forbin has a crush on her and he's just showing off. She agrees that he's probably madly in love with her because all men should be, but she feels that something more sinister is going on. As soon as dinner is over, Melanie calls and asks to borrow notes or something to study from because she left hers at school. Roz agrees to meet her halfway between their houses to hand it off. It's dark and she's uneasy. Lake is full-Stine and ends the chapter with Roz hearing the motorcycle behind her. Dun dun dun.

There's four pages of overwrought description of the motorcycle going after Melanie and Melanie running away and Roz chasing them both. It goes on and on with way too many words and then, in the end, fails to actually describe if the bike hits Melanie. It says it roared toward her and she crumpled to the ground but it didn't say whether she got hit. Way to go, Lake. ((((Fail.))))  Melanie eventually tells us that the bike missed her.

Roz takes her home. No one bothers to call the police. Why on earth would they do that? Stop trying to be so logical and reasonable and wise, y'all.

The next day after school, Kyle tells Roz that he remembers a legend from when he was young that might explain the rider. This is really stupid but I'm going to try to explain it. The Black Rider is a spirit. Not a ghost but a spirit of a person still living. When a person leaves a place (moves, not dies) and someone holds on too tightly and doesn't let go, it causes a bit of that person's spirit to remain behind. If the person is a good person, it can be remedied and turn out well. If the person is a bad person, then the part that gets left behind is evil.

Roz realizes he's talking about her holding on to Bart even though he moved away and it makes her defensive. She says that the rider is clearly Forbin. They fall into an uneasy silence until Lynda shows up. She's full of school gossip. Apparently Forbin had been arrested the night before on suspicion of the hit and run that killed Jeff. Roz realizes with a jolt that Forbin can't be the rider if he was in jail when Melanie was chased down.

Later that evening, Melanie's dad calls Roz's mom. They want to go to the cops finally and report what happened to Melanie. Roz's mom is furious that Roz didn't tell them what happened. Roz is a mess. She can't stop thinking about how she keeps seeing the rider in Midnight Place. Bart used to live in (On?? Is Midnight Place a street name or a development name??) Midnight Place. She wonders if Kyle's story is possible and she created the Black Rider spirit because she can't let go of Bart.

They go down to the police station and make their report. As a result, Forbin gets released. He's super thankful and tells Roz that he owes her and Melanie big time. Everyone goes home and Roz is pretty much grounded from leaving the house after dark until she's 80. She's okay with that.

Melanie calls a little while later. She's upset and whispering. Apparently her parents left her home alone to go to her aunt's house and the rider is outside her house. Roz tells Melanie about Kyle's Black Rider story and Melanie thinks there might be something to it. In the meantime, the rider has left but Melanie is still scared. Roz asks permission to go over and keep her company. Her father is reluctant but agrees as long as he takes her and Melanie's parents bring her back.

Right. This would never happen. What would happen is that Roz's dad would insist that Melanie come to their house where there are two adults present. There's no way he'd let her go over there with a maniac on the loose. Please.

Melanie tells Roz that she'll call Kyle and Lynda and they can all hang out. By the time Roz gets to Melanie's house, Kyle is already there and Lynda is on her way. They sit and talk for a bit. Kyle and Melanie are both convinced that the legend is true and Roz has created the Black Rider out of Bart. (Then why is the rider taller than Bart??)  She resists at first and then comes to terms with the kind of person Bart was and the kind of relationship they had. There are some tears and then she asks Kyle how to send him away.

Guys.

This is so stupid.

Is this really a book?

Sigh.

Kyle doesn't know how to get rid of the spirit.  The legend never said that part.  Seems kind of useless to me.  Much like this book.  During all this, Melanie is getting more and more agitated because Lynda hasn't arrived. Suddenly they hear sirens coming into the neighborhood and they run outside to see what's going on. Lynda is in the street injured but alive. She says the rider hit her. Roz knows she has to end things. When no one is looking, she takes off alone into the night on the way to Midnight Place.

Lake either looses the thread of his own story or fails to accurately describe something again because suddenly Kyle and Melanie catch up with Roz and they're headed to Melanie's house instead of Roz heading alone to Midnight Place. Ooooookay. They kind of half-heartedly look around for some kind of weapon. They know it's no use because the rider isn't real. He's a spirit. Who drives a real motorcycle that can run actual people over. But we won't nitpick, will we?

Roz goes into the garage or workshop or something where Melanie's dad keeps his tools. She tries out several while Melanie and Kyle yell at her. Lake doesn't bother to write any actual dialogue here, he just tells us they yell at her. I picture them just standing there screaming without saying words at all. It amuses me. Roz puts a screwdriver in a vise and then uses a rasp to sharpen it into a deadly point. Melanie is pissed she ruined the screwdriver. Kyle tells her she's “crazed” and acting like a “female Rambo” which is annoying and hilarious in that order. She continues to ignore them as she gathers a hammer and her screwdriver. Kyle tries to physically detain her and she slaps him across the face. Which I'm pretty okay with. He put his hands on her first. She heads out into the night again.

Maybe.

I mean, we've been told this before.

Lake goes into a massively tediously overlong description of Roz walking through the woods between her development and Midnight Place. It's so Cooney that I now suspect he's ripping everyone off. Roz eventually reaches her destination and sees “him”. Lake then spends five pages describing how Roz stands there holding her screwdriver and the rider advances toward her slowly. I just did it in one sentence and he dragged it on for FIVE PAGES. Sheesh.

Roz and the rider begin to play chicken with each other. Or tag. I don't know. She darts around and he pretends to be revving towards her and nothing actually happens.  Midnight Place is supposed to be inhabited right?  Surely Bart's family were not the only people who lived there.  So why does no one come out to see what the racket is?  The motorcycle is described as loud and she screams every three sentences.  Why isn't anyone calling the cops?  Especially since the whole town surely knows that Jeff was run over by a motorcycle.

She leads the rider back towards the woods and the creek. He's actively trying to kill her now and I'm not mad at it. She manages to trick him into running his bike into the creek. He gets pinned under it. (HOW???? HE'S A FUCKING SPIRIT NOT A CORPOREAL BEING!!!)  She jumps in and starts attacking him with the hammer. She hits his helmet until she can't hit anymore.

When she removes it, it's empty.  (BECAUSE HE WAS NEVER CORPOREAL)  She crawls out of the water and the motorcycle and the rider vanish without a trace.

The bike vanishes.  The bike fucking vanishes.  A bike that was real enough to kill and injure people.  It vanishes.  THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Melanie and Kyle rush up. Roz tells them what happened and Kyle declares it over. He says Roz “beat” the rider so there was no reason for the spirit to stay.

Um.

What?

She “created” it by not letting go of Bart and she “uncreated” it by hitting it with a hammer? What the fuck kind of bullshit legend is this? It makes no sense. None.

Oh, and the book ended. Yep. Just like that.

I have FIVE pages of notes here, y'all. This is the least amount of notes I've EVER done. I've recapped 57 books between the two blogs and I've never had this few notes. He used 152 pages to describe what took me five. All those wasted words. He talked and talked and SAID NOTHING.  It took me 24 hours to read this book.  That's how little substance it contained.

I need a drink.

Oh, and I don't care that I still have 4 days until June is over and I can read Canby. I'm not recapping another stupid book until July. So there.