Synopsis:
We thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead.
One last laugh for the summer as it winds down. One last prank just to scare a friend. Bringing a mannequin into a theater is just some harmless fun, right? Until it wakes up. Until it starts killing.
Luckily, Sawyer has a plan. He’ll be a hero. He’ll save everyone to the best of his ability. He’ll do whatever he needs to so he can save the day.
That’s the thing about heroes―sometimes you have to become a monster first.
Review:
I’m a certified Stephen Graham Jones fan. I will buy and read anything he puts out, on sight. That’s not the same thing as saying I love everything he writes. My experience with his work is actually fairly hit or miss, but when it hits, he hits it out of the park, creating books like My Heart is a Chainsaw or Mapping the Interior, books that change the whole way I think about horror fiction and give me new characters that feel like lifelong friends. I’m more than willing to make my way through a couple of blind alleys to get those goods.
So, is Night of the Mannequins one of the greats? I don’t think so, but it does contain the seeds that will go on to become great. In the story of Sawyer’s transformation into a monster—more specifically into a slasher—we see elements of Jade Daniels. More importantly, Mannequins reads as a direct antecedent to I was a Teenage Slasher, Graham Jones’ 2024 novel about a teenage boy who becomes “infected” by a slasher and begins his own gruesome killing spree.
And that’s how much of Graham Jones’ slasher oeuvre works: it functions as both meditation on the genre and as metaphor. In much the same way that Michael Landon’s I was a Teenage Werewolf made lycanthropy about adolescence, much of these works transform the formulaic hacking up of teenagers into complex metaphors about abuse, coming of age, and generational trauma. When it works, it’s masterful, giving us a character like Jade Daniels, a Final Girl for the ages.
Night of the Mannequins doesn’t quite click in the same way, mostly because Sawyer is just not as fully flesh a character as Jade, and because the internal logic of the book doesn’t quite gel. Maybe that’s because there’s so much going on in so few pages. There’s the instigating prank, an old standby of the slasher genre, but it gets mixed up with the uncanniness of Manny the mannequin. That slowly morphs into an imagining of Manny as a Kaiju-sized monster in the lake. Which is just a lot for a novella to contain, and makes Night of the Mannequins feel a bit unfocused. What is the metaphor? At some points it feels like it’s everything and nothing.
Despite these misgivings, I know plenty of fans will eat up all of the gooey weirdness, and the book stands as a unique and interesting step in Graham Jones’ slasher trajectory.
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