Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones Review (Book, 2020)
content warning: child death, grief, mental illness, murder, suicidal thoughts, toxic friendship, torture
Sawyer and his friends are in trouble. They’ve always hung out together, playing pranks on each other and the neighbors. This time, things go a step too far and now they’re all as good as dead. When the story starts, Shanna has already died. Sawyer is convinced the rest will soon follow and decides to become the hero of his own story.
Horror writer Stephen Graham Jones’ Night of the Mannequins is a first person horror novella lying at the intersection of a slasher and a superhero story. This is a short, tense read filled with dread, violence, and twists. It hits you like a truck, which is ironic since the first death in the book is caused by an out of control tractor trailer.
Stephen Graham Jones is one of the big names in horror right now. He’s built a reputation for excellence in short and long form fiction. In May, he took home two prizes at the Bram Stoker Awards, winning Best Novella for Night of the Mannequins and Best Novel for The Only Good Indians. His work is dark, often mixing different genres and styles to critique horror while writing horror.
The mannequin of the title is actually a mannequin. Sawyer and his friends found an abandoned department store mannequin by the lake one summer and had to bring him home. They fixed Manny back up and started posing him in people’s yards for laughs. Eventually, they got bored of their toy and left him to fall into disrepair in the back of the garage. Sawyer and his friends decide to prank Shanna, their only friend with a job, by sneaking the mannequin into movie theater she works at. Then Sawyer sees Manny walk out of the theater on his own at the end of the movie.
Night of the Mannequins is a great character study. Sawyer feels real, with all of his mischievous instincts and growing guilt over the final Manny prank. It’s all fun and games for him until his friends get in trouble. He’s rarely the one caught, but he’s usually the one who came up with the idea. This is a short novel of Sawyer spiraling out of control when he finally can’t fix something. Night of the Mannequins isn’t a resurrection horror story; you can’t bring back the dead.
I want to write so much more about this book, but if I go any further I have to spoil the first big twist of the book. Suffice it to say that I’ve actually read this book a few times now just to experience what Jones accomplishes in so little text. There are slasher films that don’t hit as hard as this 134 page novella. If you can handle that level of violence, I highly recommend reading this one.
Night of the Mannequins is available in eBook, audiobook, and paperback.
