This should've been a quick read, but I started and stopped a few times so maybe that threw me off trying to embrace the premise of a mannequin coming to life, growing in size, and supposedly murdering the group of teenagers that found and abused him over the years. No sooner was I embracing the haunted object trope than the main protagonist, Sawyer, starts his theory that Manny (as he's named a mannequin) came to life after a failed prank at movie theater, is now running around eating plant fertilizer, and is growing. Then I was left in a sort of no-man's land of wondering whether I should continue to embrace the haunted object trope, or maybe Sawyer's going off the rails. When the true cause of the ensuing mayhem becomes apparent, I was already too thrown to sustain interest, so I jumped to the end. Liked the writing, though.

This was a very well crafted novella that started out with a light and comic tone, and escalated very quickly into an incredibly dark and troubling place. It tells the story of a group of friends who set up a mannequin as a prank in a cinema, and must deal with the consequences. To begin, this story had a bit of a slasher comedy vibe, and definitely reminded me of the slasher films of the eighties. I thought the initial set up was great and that the 'killer mannequin' angle was fun. Where this story really took hold, however, was in the second act, when things became incredibly dark and what had been a light prank slasher became a claustrophobic exploration of motivation and madness that was terribly unsettling. This is my second Stephen Graham Jones story, and in both, he has held a mirror up to the depravity present in suburbia with great aplomb. I would definitely recommend this to anyone with a strong constitution!
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Auteur is a term commonly used for filmmakers who have a distinct flavor and style to their work, no matter what the genre. For example, you always know you’re watching a Stephen Spielberg movie be it drama (Saving Private Ryan), sci/fi (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or horror (Poltergeist; fight me). I don’t know if there’s a similar term for authors, but if there is, it would describe Stephen Graham Jones.

His latest novel, Night of the Mannequins, is a surreal romp through the life of Sawyer Grimes and his journey to do whatever it takes to stop a giant mannequin, named…wait for it…Manny, from terrorizing the city and killing innocent people. See, Sawyer and his group of pals found Manny in a creek and used him for all sorts of pranks. Then one day, a prank went horribly wrong and Manny came alive and went on a killing spree. According to Sawyer, anyway.

You can read my full review at Horror DNA: https://www.horrordna.com/books/night-of-the-mannequins-stephen-graham-jones-book-review

This is a truly brilliant novella. Jones takes bits of all those corny teen slasher movies I grew up watching and uses the very best characteristics to pull together this immensely captivating read.

Sure, it’s quirky; a mannequin comes to live and decides to seek revenge on its creators. Fortunately, Jones rescues this plot from the brink of absurdity through its main character, Sawyer. Sawyer is a truly unreliable narrator, not because what he’s saying isn’t the truth, but his experience is that through the eyes of a naive teenager. He’s the victim who runs up the stairs instead of out the front door. His reaction to Manny sounds right to him, a teen of sound mind and vast knowledge, so obviously it has to be the right decision.

The opening line tells it all:

"So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, 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."

The reader follows Sawyer’s unique and terrifying coming-of-age moment as he comes to terms with the results of his actions. As the “creators” of Manny, Sawyer and his friends are Frankenstein and Manny is the monster they have created. They are responsible for his actions and whatever happens to them is punishment they deserve.

The most pivotal moment, in my mind, is when the author picks up all the pieces of the puzzle that we, the reader, have carefully assembled….and throws it all up in the air. Perfectly crafted, expertly paced, a completely mesmerizing read.

If you haven’t read Stephen Graham Jones, this is the perfect example of his sheer brilliance and talent, the perfect first sampling of his tremendous work. Highly, highly recommended

Wow! This is such a fun quick read. Perfect to read on a stormy day (which i did). This is a physiological horror which I wasn't expecting but greatly appreciated. I can't say too much since this is under 150 pages long so I'll just say this... If you are new to horror and want something creepy but not super scary read this. If you like creepy kids read this. Night of the Mannequins was my first Stephen Graham Jones book but definitely will not be my last!

The horror here is classic Jones: under-the-skin moments of creeping mood that burst unexpectedly into wince-inducing violence. You know it’s coming. You know it’s going to be bad. But you’re never sure where it’s going to rear its head. Jones fills Mannequins with narrative twists and swerves, taking everything you know about slashers and monster movies and using it against you. He solves the mathematics of horror in surprising ways here. Jones is doing calculus, while we’re all stuck in algebra.

But Mannequins is also a really sweet story. (If you’re not counting the murders. There are plenty of murders.) It’s a friendship story, a story about sacrifice, a tender story about sticking up for the people you love. It’s joyful, too. You can tell that Jones loves the genres he’s playing with here, and a gleeful sense of play emerges as the bodies pile up. Reading Mannequins is what loving horror feels like: the laugh after a jump scare that really gets you, the smile on your face when the kill is sublime.

But it’s still horror. And when you’re out on the dark water at the novella’s end, you’re stuck with what Jones has really been messing with all along: the pain of loneliness, the fear of being abandoned by the people you love, the terror of being left behind.

You can love being scared by the faceless monster in the dark. Until you find that monster might be you.

Night of the Mannequins, by Stephen Graham Jones, starts like this:

"So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, 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."

That is, perhaps, the best first line I've ever read. It sums up the whole thing: the narrator's four friends (and some maybe douchebag, maybe perfectly ok bf) being killed off by a lonely mannequin or two (one of whom may or may not have missed nearly a weekend's worth of pills). Oh, and there's at least two movie theaters involved.

This book is a slasher film, a horror film, and a coming of age novel all smashed into one novella. Normally I'd have a gripe about the length, but I'm actually loving short horror lately. Anyone who can pack a scary story into less than 800 Stephen King-sized pages is my hero.

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.

Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most unpredictable horror authors out there – there's just no telling what he's going to come up with next. His latest novella, Night of the Mannequins once again brings with it plenty of surprises.

It all started as a prank. Harmless, right? Well, perhaps not. The body count is stacking up, and there's some real concern about whether or not the origin is supernatural. It's a most disturbing case of whodunnit.

“So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, 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.”

Warning: Night of the Mannequins is, at its core, a horror novella. It isn't afraid to get graphic, using both explicit and implicit means to tell a story. There's mention of animal death, graphic details about death, as well as scenes depicting strangulation.

Night of the Mannequins is every bit as dark and disturbing as I ever could have hoped for. You just know that when a horror novel brings mannequins into the mix, things are going to get pretty twisted before the end.

This novella did not disappoint. It's one of those novels that tells you the truth upfront, in regards to the death count, at any rate. Everything else feels obfuscated, and with intention. It creates a distressing swirl of events, making it difficult to be sure if the narrative can be trusted.

On that note, there's no doubt that this horror story took advantage of the concept of the unreliable narrator. I personally loved that. It seemed like every chapter gave reason to flip the perspective once again, and with it, opinions and theories about what was truly going on.

This is a psychological horror through and through, one that relishes in its own brutal nature. This here is a book that is unafraid of what it is, and that is a tale of classic horror and psychological doubt.

3.5 stars
this was a pretty fun, campy, horror read. I really enjoyed the writing style and how it really just felt like Sawyer was a friend casually talking to me and telling me this weird story. I wish there was a little bit more explanation throughout, especially with the ending, but obviously that's hard to do in such a short story. would definitely recommended and I'm excited to check out more from this author!

Aww, man! This novella was sleep with the lights on spooky when it seemed like it was about a mannequin that got up and walked out of a movie theater. But it quickly becomes apparent that we're dealing with an unreliable narrator, and this is more of a sad story about delusion and mental illness than one about a mannequin that comes to life when no one is watching.

For what it's worth, the ending is pretty sad. And the teenage killer's stream of consciousness rambling reads realistically even if his actions don't. But by the time he successfully stages a serial killing worthy of a movie villain, it's difficult to believe that ANYTHING he describes really happened. And while that's fine and good for magical realism, and sad but true when dealing with someone with real delusions, it's probably not what readers will be expecting from a book with this title.

Also, there's only one mannequin.

I’ve never read Stephen Graham Jones before but he kept coming across my radar as a really good horror writer. Small wrinkle: Melissas don’t like horror novels. (Hey, I like to sleep at night. I had to put Geek Love, which is NOT a horror novel, in the freezer FOR REALZ because I was convinced that circus geeks were going to steal my toes in the middle of the night.) But in the interests of diversifying my reading – both in terms of genre and author diversity – I decided to give Jones’s new novella a read.

Night of the Mannequins is a wry psychological horror novella with a teen slasher (ish? but no actual slashing) vibe. The book opens with Sawyer narrating from the future. Apparently, he and his friends once found a mannequin in the woods and carried it around and used it to play pranks for years. They play one last prank on a friend at a movie theatre….and then everything goes wrong. People start dying. Maybe there’s a rogue mannequin. Maybe not? And then the plot takes a bit of a turn. Saying more is a spoiler but I will say that I got a whiff of the black comedy of Heathers and some of the goofier teen slasher movies from the 1980s.

I’m here for the Autons. No, seriously, I picked this one up because the “monsters” sounded a lot like the Autons, the monsters in the first episode of the new Doctor Who in 2005. The store mannequins all came to life and the Ninth Doctor uttered a line to Rose Tyler that was emblematic of the entire series – “Run!.” She did, and the rest is history.

Actually, the advice to “Run” works pretty well for this story, too. (Hey, I got to Tomb of Gods, which I LOVED, by way of Pyramids of Mars, so this is not as big a reach – at least for me – as it seems.)

It starts with plastic people. Really, just one plastic person. And a whole lot of imagination.

At first, it’s the imagination of a circle of friends. When they were kids they found a mannequin in a swamp, named him Manny and used him to play all sorts of just-slightly-mean-spirited but mostly funny pranks around their neighborhood.

For one halcyon summer, Manny was their best friend. Then school started in the fall, and they all kind of forgot about him, sitting in Sawyer Grimes garage on the back of his dad’s slightly wrecked motorcycle – that neither Sawyer nor his dad are allowed to ride.

When this story begins, that same circle of friends is closing in on high school graduation. The college questions are coming thick and fast from the parents, the grandparents, the extended family and pretty much every other adult who comes anywhere near them – and maybe they just aren’t ready for that, at least not yet.

They’re growing up, whether they want to or not, and they all know, in that way of knowing what you don’t really want to know, that the last vestiges of their childhoods are coming to an end and that they are doomed or destined to leave their tight friendship behind as they move into adulthood.

So they decide to pull one last prank. With Manny along for the ride. They think they’re taking him to the movies for one, last fling at irresponsible not-quite-adulthood.

As much as they think they’re taking Manny, Sawyer Grimes believes that Manny is taking them. All of them. On one last prank-to-end-all-pranks.

Or is he?

Escape Rating B: That question, “Or is he?” can be read two different ways, depending on whether you put the emphasis on the second or the third word in the question. Which means that there’s also more than one answer.

I came to Night of the Mannequins expecting plastic people. Actually, I kind of got that, but more in the sense that people are still plastic, still able to make a whole lot of changes almost without meaning to, at the age of the protagonists of the story.

But instead of the science fictional version of plastic people – which I admit was more what I was hoping for – I got the plasticity of people in their late teens, as a prank that goes mildly wrong turns into more of a take-off of teenage slasher movies.

The situation they’re in is also plastic in an entirely different way, as events reshape themselves – or reshape the people in them – from something simple and slightly stupid to something complex and extremely deadly, just by passing through the mind of one teenager who has seen way too many movies and leaps to way too many coincidences.

This story kind of begins with a plastic body in a swamp, and it kind of ends with a plastic body in a swamp. But they’re not the same body, they’re not the same kind of plastic, and the second body had real agency in a way that only imagination can give the first. Even if he thinks he didn’t have any at all.

It’s creepy, bloody, scary and riveting every step of the way – and not to be read in the dark.

What a strange and macabre novella from an author whose works I'm just getting acquainted with. I went into NIGHT OF THE MANNEQUINS with a vague idea of what I was getting into. I got the sense that it was going to be similar to the short story HAROLD, which concerns a killer scarecrow that takes revenge on those that created him. But while that definitely has a part to play in this story, I got a mind twisting tale that feels like a slasher movie with just the right amount of wry humor to accompany the horror moments. Jones has created a very funny, and also disturbing, narrator in Sawyer, who is trying to save people from a mannequin named Manny that has come to life, a mannequin that he and his friends once took everywhere until they 'outgrew' him. Jones gives us a lot of ambiguity as to what is going on in this story, and honestly I was kept guessing and head scratching up until the very end. The action moments read like a horror movie, and the visuals and descriptions were strong along with some incredibly witty, and very authentic, teenage snark in the narration.

NIGHT OF THE MANNEQUINS is fun as all get out. As fall approaches and the Halloween season inches closer, this would be the perfect novella to get you in the spirit of the season.

A slasher film comes to the page in this misadventure in a teenage prank gone wrong. Sawyer and his friends sneak a dressed-up mannequin into a movie theater and at the end, the mannequin gets up and leaves. Everything goes downhill from there.

This novella nestles deeply into Sawyer’s head. We get everything from his lens: his impressions of his friends, their families, his family, his logic (and all its holes), the town they live in, and all of it. The sentences meander, but paint such a clear image of his descent into paranoid homicide. By the end, you find yourself wondering what’s real and what’s a delusion and it works so well. Like a finely illustrated car wreck, I could not look away. Every moment had me wondering where Sawyer was going next, even when he was straight up telling the reader.

A wild ride from start to finish, definitely a must-read for fans of 80’s films coming to you on 9/1.

This book is a quick and disturbing read and I very much enjoyed the time that I spent with it. It has an excellent unreliable narrator, and as the book went on, I questioned more and more what was going on it. Throughout the book, the tension and the dread just built up layer over layer, and ultimately, I had trouble putting the book down, cause I just had to know what was going to happen. My only complaint is that I wanted a little more than what it gave and I think if it had been longer, the build-up would've been a little better.

Overall, I’m going to keep this review short, because it’s a short novella and I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll recommend this to anyone who’s looking for 80’s horror and enjoys a good unreliable narrator.

Jones is a master of creepy, scary fun. His writing is uniquely conversational and he kept me guessing throughout. This reminds me of the work of Grady Hendrix or Paul Tremblay--he's someone who respects pulp horror.

Stephen Graham Jones returns with Night of the Mannequins, 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?- Goodreads

There are books for you and then there aren't. This one was not for me at all. I like the concept and its huge references to Frankenstein but I didn't like how the story was written. The lack of dialogue and the fact that the MC was fairly annoying, I just didn't like the book.

I have heard good things about this author and plan to read his other works but this one was not as good as the world was making it seem.

My review for Sublime Horror:

Sawyer Grimes’s friends are dead. Or most of them, anyway.

Stephen Graham Jones’s newest novella Night of the Mannequins follows his phenomenal novel of revenge and the horrors of American society The Only Good Indians, which released this summer to widespread acclaim. With a multitude of novels, several hundred short stories, and accolades from prestigious horror awards – including the Bram Stoker Award – under his belt, Jones is a modern master of terrifying tales. Night of the Mannequins upholds that reputation.

In a contemporary small Texas town, Sawyer has a tightly knit group of friends – the kind of friendship that dominates a lifetime and goes back summers and rollicking summers. The friends’ inevitable separation looms heavily over Sawyer from the start: “Maybe this is how it happens after high school, right? Or even on the ramp up to high school being over […] Never mind that they know you better than any other human in the world […] Never mind a thousand things.” Shanna works at the movie theatre. Danielle has a cruddy boyfriend. The group is slipping apart. It’s under the strain of this long goodbye that the group devises a prank with the help of Manny, a mannequin and once-cherished member of their group. Fished out of a pond, for a summer the group enrolled Manny as their starring prankster until they forgot about him and stowed him away in a garage. When Manny stands up and walks out of the movie theatre during their prank, Sawyer knows he’s out for revenge.

In his threading of the plot, Jones gradually unspools Sawyer’s psychology. The introspective nature of the novella invites his readers to anticipate the next move, a trick that heightens the pleasurable dread of reading Mannequins. Jones never falls into the trap of shock value; rather, his careful writing saturates such moments in something far more disturbing than shock. Much of the tension in the novel comes through Sawyer’s role as narrator, whose language is an artful combination of adolescent indifference and passion. His depiction as a teenager prone to justifications of evils as he navigates Manny’s revenge treads reader disdain for his character, a risk Jones aptly mitigates through Sawyer’s own acknowledgement of his tendency to draw patterns and motivations where there are none. Sawyer’s rationalizing process augments both the novella’s horror and the reader’s ability to empathize with him. Throughout Mannequins, reader affection for Sawyer is guiltily shoved under the rug and ready to reemerge at the bloodiest of times. In-between the gore and the trauma, Jones presents a paranoid narrator whose earnest love for his friends ultimately renders him an engrossing – if not entirely likable – narrator.

As with his previous work, Jones’s horror is neither puerile nor indicative of stereotypes thrown at the genre. Though the heartbreaking splintering of friendship remains the backdrop against which Mannequins progresses, Jones allows for further nuance within a seemingly straightforward plot of a prank gone wrong. Despite Sawyer’ hypocritical contempt for the artifice of superhero films – a motif drawn meticulously from the prank at the theatre through the end – Sawyer figures himself as heroic. His complex identification with Manny in light of the group’s impending rupture manifests concurrently as sympathy and fear, which we feel in troves. Likewise, the conflation of the mannequin’s “Band-Aid-colored face” with violence offers further depth to the novella in its implicit critique of whiteness and the masks we put on.

Thrillingly difficult to put down, Night of the Mannequins is a psychologically driven novella whose rich introspective analysis of friendship, paranoia, and heroism is cloaked in a delightfully frightful premise.

I was never a fan of mannequins, find them creepy but when I saw this book curiousity hit me. This book is without a doubt scary, creepy and nerve-wrecking. Unreliable narrator, unique plot and characters that are insanely well-developed equals one hell of a story! Though I seriously hope I didn't read this at night, gave me nightmares. But overall it is amazing.