What Rides at Night: Queer, Feminist, Fantastical Bicycle Halloween Stories
Have a queer and bikey Halloween!
When the veil thins, the bicycle revolution rises—along with thirteen new, original, spooky stories for the thirteenth volume in the series!
Gather ‘round, ghoulfriends, and peer into this enchanting collection of ghost stories, tall tales, and feminist fictions simmering with cyclist power. This monster mashup of thirteen queer and quirky stories grants us a glimpse into the world beyond this one, where community, creativity, and bike culture reign—a world where DIY zombies start a monster zine collective to fight their oppression by “normals,” time moves backwards as bones are covered again with flesh, cryptids defend fellow outcasts from bullying, and teen crushes take an otherwordly (though not unwelcome!) turn. Whether shared with your feminist book club, passed around the Halloween house show, or read alone on a dark and stormy night, each story is a spell, reanimating the land of the living with more fun, imagination, and bike rides.
Featuring original stories from Elly Bangs, Jessie Kwak, Nell Hanson, Mildred Locke, Kortney Nash, Dawn Vogel, N. Anaar, Erin Cullen, Grace Desmarais, Kay Hanifen, Siri Caldwell, Summer Jewel Keown, and Valerie Hunter.
Read on for a sneak peek at What Rides at Night edited by Summer Jewel Keown and series editor Elly Blue, available for preorder from our site or your local bookseller, heading to a shelf near you!
Queerly beloved, ride up and gather around tonight’s crackling bonfire for a tale of Halloween. Thirteen tales, to be exact.
I’ve always loved Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve, or Samhain) because anything can happen when the veils between the worlds are thin. Ghost stories feel like those ghosties could be waiting for us just there, in the shadows, and we shiver with fearful delight. Witches’ spells might really enspell and entrance us. The spirits may tell us truths through any manner of divination. We run through the halls of haunted houses and corn mazes that threaten to get us lost forever. It’s all for the thrill, and we’re perfectly safe, we think, but maybe, just maybe . . .
As a kid, the highlight of my Halloween was climbing into the straw-filled tractor of the haunted hayride that would take us out into the pitch-black night, where the Headless Horseman would inevitably ride by. I’d hold tight to the edge with one hand and peek through the other hand’s fingers, delightfully terrified of this shadowy figure atop a dark horse racing just alongside us, his eyes glowing orange in the night, sure that he was looking right at me. We survived with our heads, just barely, to do it all again the next year. But there was always the possibility that one Halloween, he would finally catch up.
Halloween is, and has always been, for the queers, the weirdos, the rebels, those of us who haven’t and don’t want to fit neatly into any of the boxes that sit waiting to trap us inside. It’s the one holiday where we can be anyone we’ve always imagined, as long as we can figure out a costume for it. We can try it on for a night and revel in this version of us, while wearing the cloak of plausible deniability until we’re ready to be ourselves all the time. On Halloween, we can trick, treat, and be spooky with ghosts, witches, monsters, and other role models.
In this time where reading the news each day can be a series of jump scares, we have to ride together to keep our beautifully wild and queer community safe, to bring each other joy, and to be the perfectly wonderful monsters we want to see in the world.
I was first a reader of the Bikes in Space series, then a writer, and now, thanks to Elly Blue for entrusting me with this volume, a guest editor. I fell in love with each story as they were shared with us by their authors. The characters are trans, ace, gay, bi, pan, any and all flavors of the queer rainbow, but what they all have in common is riding into that Halloween Eve on two wheels and finding something for themselves there. I hope you’ll find something for yourself too.
Summer Jewel Keown
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Halloween 2025
Dive into more What Rides at Night with a preorder from our site or your local bookseller, shipping just in time for getting in the spooky spirit!