The Death Cycle

by Charles W. Runyon

The Death Cycle by Charles Runyon is a dark, psychological descent into the fragile architecture of the human mind — a taut, unnerving thriller that blurs the line between sanity and horror. In this gripping novel, Runyon explores obsession, guilt, and moral collapse through the eyes of a man trapped in a spiral of violence and memory from which there may be no escape. Combining the psychological tension of Patricia Highsmith with the existential chill of early noir, Runyon crafts a narrative where every revelation deepens the sense of dread.

His prose is spare yet hauntingly lyrical, evoking a world of cold motel rooms, shadowed alleys, and restless conscience. The story moves with relentless pace, as the protagonist — half victim, half predator — confronts the ghosts of his past and the monstrous potential within himself. Beneath the trappings of crime fiction lies a philosophical meditation on fate, identity, and the cyclical nature of destruction.

 The Death Cycle   stands as one of Runyon's most accomplished grimly elegant, fiercely intelligent, and unforgettable in its portrayal of a soul unraveling. For readers who appreciate the psychological precision of Jim Thompson or the fatalism of Cornell Woolrich, this is noir stripped to its bones — lean, unsettling, and impossible to shake. 

238 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 23, 2025

About the author

US author of thrillers and some sf, who began publishing the latter with "First Man in a Satellite" for Super-Science Fiction in December 1958; sixteen further short sf/fantasy stories followed, chiefly for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first sf novel Pig World (1971) depicts a Near-Future USA governed by a right-wing tyranny challenged by a vicious would-be demagogue. Soulmate (April 1970 F&SF; exp 1974) is a novel of possession (see Horror in SF), the victim being a young prostitute. I, Weapon (1974) features much violence and Sex involving Aliens. Runyon's sf tends to be action-filled, without extensive displacement or speculative content.
Runyon was one of several sf authors who ghosted paperback-original thrillers under the Ellery Queen byline.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Six long years before Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider exploded across Big Screens across the country, Charles Runyon wrote a novel (the Death Cycle) about a pair of motorcycle riders heading across country from north to south to escape the heat (meaning the police) in Mexico. Coincidentally, Runyon’s riders have $65,000 in rolled bills welded inside the tubular steel frame of the largest cycle and $3,000 seen in the saddle bag clipped to the windshield. This is strikingly similar to the situation in Easy Rider where there is cash stuffed into a plastic tube hidden inside the Stars & Stripes–painted fuel tank of Peter Fonda’s (Wyatt’s) motorcycle. Although no one in The Death Cycle dresses up like Captain America, there is such an obvious connection that, reading the Death Cycle, one assumes that it is derivative of Easy Rider, not the other way around.

Runyon is at his best in his writing style here. He begins the story with the four riders headed out of Chicago as snow fell around them and describes the four in quite a bit of detail before offering us their background: “The two women huddled against their men like baby koala bears clinging to their mamas, welded together breast to back, pelvis to coccyx, thigh to thigh, shin to calf, and toe to heel. The men shielded the women from the wind; the women gave back the heat of their thighs.” The four are on the run although it appears that the two women think they are just going on vacation. They only stop to sleep when the “night transformed the highways into murderous tunnels of wet asphalt walled in by blackness.” They slept in the same bed when there were no extra rooms, men on the outside, women in the center, “flesh against flesh, flaccid with a fatigue as lustless and sexless as death. They lay like drowned bodies fished from a cold river and laid out to be identified by their next of kin.”

We are told that Carl Newsome is the leader of the pack, most recently a police reporter and criminal mastermind in his off hours. “He walked with the held-in violence of a stalking cat, like a gladiator conserving his strength for a coming death-struggle.” The woman with her arms around him was 19-year-old Doris, his wife of four years (although he wrongly assumed she was 17 going on 18 when they met), who “moved her large, lovely and generous body with the languor of a female whose mind is linked directly to the ebb and flow of fluids within her glands.”

The second man was Brett Phelan, with quick black eyes that denied fear as they denied compassion, warmth, love and anything but sudden fiery cravings. Brett wa a rapist, not only of women, but of the world. Where Carl was a plotting mastermind, Brett was impulsive. Behind him rode Jeanne, who seemed out of place, having come out of finishing schools and the like. Sometimes she looked at the other three “with the shocked fascination of a girl caught up in a lynch mob on her way to Sunday school.” Brett had a prosthetic leg he had earned in the Korean War and Jeanne met him and his sour attitude when she was visiting wounded veterans, never imagining that they would eventually marry and he would waste away her inheritance.

The four are on the run from the law with a strong of robberies and a jeweler’s killing behind them. The plan is to head south and keep heading south past the Mexican border all the way to the beaches of Brazil where Carl thinks they will be safe.

As they get closer, tensions quickly explode between the two couples. Carl knows it is only a matter of time before Brett wants not just his own half share, but the whole enchilada of loot and he would kill to get it. He also is uncomfortable with the attention Brett’s sour attitude and spatting with Jeanne is bringing and will not have Jeanne leave the group and hitch a ride back to Chicago where in her foolish innocence she could give the group away. There are also a variety of lusts between the four and jealousies.

Brett admits to Doris that when he’s ready, he’ll take it all from Carl — money, woman, and bike. And the battle is on between them as each waits for the other to act. As is so often true in caper novels, it is the greed and lust that fouls the getaway as the crime partners realize that the spoils have to last them and they can’t trust each other not to stab them in the back.