I see the name, Stephen Graham Jones, on the cover and immediately pick it up. Jumping into this novella, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones is published by of the Mannequins is a BRUTAL work of Psychological Horror, straight from the mind of one of my favorite Horror writers, Stephen Graham Jones. 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. 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. His complex identification with Manny in light of the group’s impending rupture manifests concurrently as sympathy and fear, which we feel in troves. 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. 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. 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.Īs with his previous work, Jones’s horror is neither puerile nor indicative of stereotypes thrown at the genre. Throughout Mannequins, reader affection for Sawyer is guiltily shoved under the rug and ready to reemerge at the bloodiest of times. Sawyer’s rationalizing process augments both the novella’s horror and the reader’s ability to empathize with him. 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.
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. Jones never falls into the trap of shock value rather, his careful writing saturates such moments in something far more disturbing than shock. The introspective nature of the novella invites his readers to anticipate the next move, a trick that heightens the pleasurable dread of reading Mannequins. In his threading of the plot, Jones gradually unspools Sawyer’s psychology.
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