TITLE: Night of the Mannequins
AUTHOR: Stephen Graham Jones
136 pages, Tor.com Publishing, ISBN 9781250752079 (paperback, ebook)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): A contemporary horror story where a teen prank goes very wrong and all hell breaks loose: is there a supernatural cause, a psychopath on the loose, or both?
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Note: I read an electronic advance review copy provided through NetGalley.
Stephen Graham Jones’ Night of the Mannequins is a phenomenally scary take on the monstrous serial killer trope. I read it one sitting because I could not let myself look away.
One of the things I love about pretty much every Stephen Graham Jones book I’ve read is his ability to take very ordinary moments and spin horror out of them. In this case, the ordinary moment is a simple practical joke between high school friends who have grown up together and know each other almost too well. Three of the teens decide to sneak a mannequin they’d found and played with as kids into the movie theatre their fourth friend works in and plan to use it to cause a ruckus. The attempted joke plays out in the first two chapters, so it’s not a spoiler to say things don’t go as planned and that the rest of the story builds off of what did or didn’t happen to the mannequin.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found department store mannequins creepy. As a kid, they seriously freaked me out in every store we walked into. I was convinced that when my parents’ attention was elsewhere, they would grab me. It didn’t help that I saw the Jon Pertwee Doctor fight the Autons on our local PBS affiliate when I was small. Even as an adult, finally seeing the Stephen Sondheim television musical “Evening Primrose” at the Museum of Television History in NYC, the idea of people being turned into mannequins gave me the shivers. So it’s no surprise that I read Night of the Mannequins expecting to be at least a little freaked out from the start. Jones did not disappoint. The mannequin in question, whom the teens creatively named ‘Manny’ when they were much younger and discovered ‘him’ and made him one summer’s plaything before abandoning him in our narrator’s garage, hit all the right notes for me from the moment he’s introduced. The featureless face, the easily disassembled-and-reassembled body, the pranks the kids played with him that one summer, and the way ‘Manny’ feels larger than life to the narrator all felt sufficiently eerie and set the tone for the rest of the novella.
In a tight 136 pages, Jones subverts or subtly plays with most of the tropes of the slasher-flick genre. We have a small group of teens who start the story doing something they shouldn’t be doing that will have repercussions they can’t foresee (except they’re not misbehaving at a summer camp or a party while parents are away, they’re pulling a practical joke in a mall movie theater). We have a “high” body-count (considering the number of teen characters we meet against the number still alive at the end of the story). We have a killer who might be supernatural or might be quite mundane (in fact we might have more than one killer running around). The killer manages to arrange at least one victim in a horrific tableau without leaving any forensic evidence behind to be tracked by. We have an impending natural disaster, as the threat of a tornado rears its head multiple times adding to the tension. And we have a “final boy” telling us the story in flashback (rather than a final girl, or so it seems).
Sawyer, our narrator and erstwhile “final boy,” is a wonderfully unreliable narrator. For most of the novella, we’re unsure who he’s telling this story to or even when he’s telling it. He sounds nervous, anxious. Some of the details he gives subtly contradict each other. We’re soon questioning if he’s seen what he thinks he’s seen, and if his part in the story is motivated by something other than fear of a mannequin that has come to life. I have to admit that partway through the story, I was wondering if ANY of it was really happening, or if it was all in Sawyer’s head … which lead of course to wondering where the story was going to go if I was correct.
I of course will not spoil in this review what the truth of the story is. I will say that Jones kept me wondering throughout the entire story and delivered a logical and satisfactory ending that still left some questions lingering (as any good first installment of a slasher flick would). The variety of death scenes also kept me on my toes and tense, even with the narrator telling us well in advance who was going to die next. Jones builds the dread and expectation in prose the way a movie would use music cues. He even works in the printed version of a movie “jump scare,” which I think is quite the feat.
Five stars and full marks for another great novella by Stephen Graham Jones. I anticipate this being on my reread list come October each year. It’s just that good.