“We thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all…” Stephen Graham Jones writes some killer opening lines. If you’ve been following this blog lately, you’ll know that Jones is swiftly becoming one of my favorite horror writers, especially with his recent masterpiece The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. But Jones is a prolific writer who had published over a dozen books before his star really started to rise. Now that his writing is getting the attention it deserves, his publisher is very cleverly re-releasing some of his earlier books that flew under the radar. One of those is the novella Night of the Mannequins, which initially came out in 2020 amidst the chaos of the pandemic, but got a second chance with a new release this past February. And I’m glad it did! Reading this fun little slasher tale now, you can see Stephen Graham Jones playing around with ideas that he would explore more deeply in later books like My Heart Is a Chainsaw and I Was a Teenage Slasher.
Sawyer, Shanna, Danielle, Tim, and RJ have been best friends since they were little kids, but now they’re in high school and it’s starting to seem like the future will lead them down separate paths. To bring them all together again, Sawyer suggests they play one last big prank on Shanna as she works her new job at the local cinema. It will be simple: They’ll take Manny, the old mannequin they found in the woods so many years ago, dress him up like a regular person, buy tickets to the new superhero flick, and sit him down in the center of the theater. Then, when the manager does a headcount and notices something off, he’ll come to check tickets and find himself face to face with blank plastic. But something goes wrong—no one looks twice at Manny, and when the movie ends he gets up and walks away with the rest of the crowd. Sawyer quickly realizes what must have happened: Manny, who used to be cherished by the friend group and then lay neglected for years, has come to life to seek revenge against those who abandoned him. If Sawyer doesn’t act quickly, the mannequin’s murderous rampage could have catastrophic casualties.
Sawyer, it turns out, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Though he speaks with almost flippant confidence, you’ll quickly get the sense as the reader that perhaps you shouldn’t always trust his understanding of a situation. This tension creates a slow-building feeling of dread as Sawyer’s actions grow ever more drastic while his justifications grow slimmer and slimmer. This tense reading experience reminded me of how I felt when reading my very first Stephen Graham Jones book, The Only Good Indians (which came out the same year as Night of the Mannequins’ original publication).
Indeed, much like the character of Lewis in The Only Good Indians, Sawyer is led astray by his own genre savvy. Unlike the typical horror protagonist who seems to have never seen a horror movie before, has never heard the words “vampire” or “zombie,” and sees nothing wrong with going to check out the basement alone, Sawyer is very familiar with popular tropes and always trying to suss out what kind of story he is in. Part of the problem is that he can’t land on one genre. Having recently read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in his English class, he views Manny the mannequin as an abandoned creature with a strong motivation to seek revenge against its creators. Sawyer seeks to avoid the tragic fate of Victor Frankenstein, who allowed his younger brother and new bride to become collateral damage while he shirked responsibility for his creation. Not just content to imagine Gothic revenge narratives, though, Sawyer also views Manny through the lens of monster movies. With very little basis, Sawyer becomes convinced that Manny has grown to the size of a giant and lurks underneath the lake, ready to rampage through the town like a plastic kaiju. Sawyer, then, must take on the role of the superhero who defeats the monster and saves the town—just like in the movie that was playing on the big screen when Manny first awoke. But this is a Stephen Graham Jones book, which means it’s not a superhero flick—it’s a slasher. And Sawyer may not exactly be the hero…
If you like deeply unreliable narrators and slasher stories about the end of childhood and unraveling friend groups, definitely pick up Night of the Mannequins! You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments! And feel free to share any other recommendations of works from Stephen Graham Jones’s backlist.