Things Are Already in Motion: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Coming of Night

The final novella in the Three Miles Past collection is an unusual exercise. According to the Author’s Notes, it started as just that, an exercise Jones devised was teaching a writing class. He decided to show the nuts and bolts of writing a story by writing a story under glass—this is similar to the days when Harlan Ellison would write an original story while sitting in a bookstore’s front window, taping up pages as he completed them. Such public displays help strip away some of the mystique behind the art of writing fiction, emphasizing how writing is a job. In his notes, Jones says “I wrote this one very spur-of-the-moment, too, kind of as a test: I was teaching an online workshop for LitReactor, and figured the best way to show how to write a story is to just maybe write a story, let the class watch it happen scene by scene.” (209) While Ellison would solicit a prompt from one of his famous friends and then write his piece from there, Jones selected a writing prompt chosen at random from his notebook: “kill a guy. find leathery eggs in his gut. take those eggs home. incubate them?” (210) Then, he started the story and did not write a finished piece, but the first two thousand words of what would eventually become The Coming of Night. The rest came in time.

How close the published version is to that initial draft is not specified. I expect great swaths of it are the same, some other pieces redone for the sake of smoothing out the rougher edges.

The Coming of Night is the story of a salesman who is also a serial killer, an effortlessly Narcissistic motherfucker who kicks off the story selecting a victim from the bar where his latest sales convention is and then taking that victim apart. The opening is eerie, particularly when the actual killing takes place later. Here, Jones channels the splatterpunk mode of showing us everything, and the result is affecting. Nauseating might be some people’s word for it, and this is even more so because the entire story is written with a second person point of view. Like some macabre Choose Your Own Adventure or, you know, Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, Jones makes us a participant in events, the perpetrator of crime. Consider this snippet, which mates a murder with preparation for a following day’s preparation:

Sawing through Stick Man’s gummy breastbone, the leading point of your saw dulled so as not to puncture the heart sac, you walk your talk through the paces. Mentally click through the slides, leaving the proper pause after each one resolves, so the audience can study its breadth and depth before you pull them into the unwavering lope of your voice.

Under your blade, Stick Man writhes and screams as he has to, but the pillowcase muffles the most of it, and the rest, what spills past, is just what you expect to hear next door in any hotel.

Crack the chest open, not pulling your face away from the heat that fogs your face-shield, and then fix one of the hotel’s complimentary pens there, to keep it open. So you can watch the heart glisten down, give up beat by beat. It’s not the best part, not your favorite by far, but you feel a certain obligation to witness it, don’t you?

As for the teeth, they come out as easy as you’d expect of an addict, some of them wired together in the most antique way—street dentistry?—and the muscles of Stick Man’s thigh aren’t just starved down, they’re limpid, atrophied, sucked dry. His body mass index, it’s got to be in the single digits, if not bottomed out completely. It’s a surprise his organs haven’t stopped working yet.

Three Miles Past, 144-145

How different would that passage have been if delivered in first or even third person? Quite. As it is, the piece reads almost like an instruction manual as well as a goad, a dare. It plays with the reader’s attention, giving us the literary equivalent of killer cam in slasher flicks or giallos, making us complicit in the deed those hands are performing.

However, this story is not simply an example of a killer going about your gruesome work. In the gut of this victim, you find something interesting, “a segment of large intestine with a string of petrified tangerines in it.” (147) Of course, the protagonist takes this away as a souvenir. That’s part of the weirder elements in the tale. Likewise, a couple of strangers who first appeared in the bar where the protagonist picked up Stick Man, a pair with similar noses that bring to mind the nose guards on ancient helmets, make their way into the protagonist’s life, bringing with them strange happenings. Murders that don’t happen the way you remember (less bodies for one thing) and an infestation of moths from no known source.

Stephen Graham Jones’ The Coming of Night is one of those stories that plays with the conventions of slashers, serial killers, and the supernatural. As with the first novella in this book, it mates up a real-world killer and brushes with the otherworldly to make something unique. It’s a story that feels heavy with meaning, though we do not necessarily get a full appreciation of that meaning. The story gives us images that are intriguing, and it does not waste our time with explanations. I appreciate a writer who can craft a moment and then trust the reader to fill in the blanks. Jones has been pretty good about doing this not only in his novel length works, but the novellas as well.

Where this story and Interstate Love Song diverge, however, is in the use of flashbacks. They creep up quite a bit here, events in the present harkening back to events from the past, a brother and single mom situation. There is none of those cliched explanations of serial killer as a byproduct of abuse that was so popular in the 1980s slasher knife kill books (sometimes such passages were done well, but often they felt obligatory, uninspired, and downright condescending), but these background pieces do some interesting heavy lifting in terms of building up the situation and “your character.”

Second person narratives are a bit odd to read for some folks. As a longtime tabletop gamer, LARPer, and Choose Your Own Adventure reader, I am not thrown out of the story when encountering it. I’m somewhat used to slipping into a character’s skin and hearing a gamemaster or whatnot referring to “you” while meaning a character I am playing. In straight ahead fiction, it’s a bit jarring at first, but if we can get over Cormac McCarthy’s nontraditional punctuation, we can get by the second person narrative. As I mentioned before, Jones uses that point of view here the way filmmakers use a first-person camera. It’s an attempt to draw us a little closer to uncomfortable material, to get under our skin. It is not a perfect mating with the material we read, but it’s an interesting experiment.

That second person point of view narrative certainly enhances the surreal qualities of the story and situation. What would you do if weird moths who had no business being in a conference room suddenly invaded your presentation? It’s a public speaking anxiety nightmare, all right, this event that is both out of your control and (eventually revealed to be) tied to your own choices and actions.

The narrative itself is perhaps the least conventional of the three found in Three Miles Past. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, but these boundaries feel a tad tenuous. The narrative has a kind of stream of consciousness quality, echoing the eerie surreality of a life spent in constant travel that Jones evoked in Interstate Love Song. Existence, the novella suggests, is a kind of waking dream, which is often lucid but can slip into something else altogether without warning. Of course, quite a few of Jones’ books carry a similar message underneath the surface. In Jones’ world, characters can take a step in the exact right (or wrong) way and find themselves witnesses a dead man walking across a kitchen, come to realize that someone they are playing one-on-one basketball against is not who she appears to be, or learn that some victims are not so easy to dispatch as we might expect. The senses are not to be trusted completely, a lesson a friend of mine back in college explained can best be learned through a dose of LSD.

Jones prose here is hallucinogenic, all right, but the details are not mere ornamentation. They ground the moments, even some of the odder ones, and make the reading experience into a journey. Some stories are seductions, whispers and promises. Some are pleas, some are shouts. Jones’ fiction often falls into the mode of a confession from someone who has seen the real deal going on behind the fabric of what everyone takes as plain old reality. Those glimpses are difficult to confine to words, those ideas are not the easiest to absorb, but damn if the details don’t make them seem convincing.

The Coming of Night is another intriguing example of the author’s enjoyment in slasher stories. Although I cannot say it ranks as high on my list of the author’s works as, say, The Only Good Indians or No Takebacks, it is nevertheless an entertaining read, fascinating and disturbing in equal measure.

#

Tree Miles Past is available in eBook and paperback editions.

Next, we return to our Jeff Strand reading series with a look at his newest novel Autumn Bleeds Into Winter, which mates a coming of age story with a serial killer tale, set in an Alaskan small town in the 1970s. Grab a copy today, available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook editions.

WORKS CITE

Jones, Stephen Graham. Three Miles Past. Nightscape Press: 2013.

“Things Are Already in Motion: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Coming of Night” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Nightscape Press paperback edition, released 2013.

Disclosure: Considering Stories is a member of the Amazon Associates program. Qualifying purchases made using the product links above can result in our site receiving a percentage of the purchase price as a payment from Amazon.com