Blog-o-ween 2023: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

It’s time! It’s time! That’s right, kiddies, it’s that time again!

Well, maybe not quite that time yet. But it is time for another “Long Form Friday” (I think that’s the name we’re going with?) here at Blog-o-ween 2023 HQ. Time to dig into a slightly longer story in the form of a novella or novelette or novelinho or whatever cute diminutive you want to tack onto the end of the word “novel.” But not to worry, the stories we pick for Long Form Fridays (are we really sticking with that name?) are still of a manageable length so that you can get through them in a single, drawn-out reading session or over a couple of days. I mean, what else are you going to do this weekend? Chores? Exercise? Go out with friends?

C’mon! Who you foolin’?

Today’s story is about a group of friends who probably should have stayed home in bed reading. Instead, they head off to their local multiplex movie theater to pull a prank on a friend. Only they end up being the butts of their own joke. And now no one’s laughing.

Today, let’s grab some popcorn and a drink and sneak into the back of the theater to enjoy Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones.

“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.”

Our intrepid (and just maybe unreliable) narrator, Sawyer, along with his friends Danielle, Tim, and JR, sneak a fully-clothed mannequin into the movie theater to fool their friend Shanna. Manny, as the mannequin is known (natch), was rescued from a creek bed years before by the group when they were in elementary school. He became just one of the gang, you know? But now it’s almost time to graduate from high school, time to grow up, time to be adults. So, the friends decide it’s time for one last blast for ol’ Manny. One last goof.

Only their goof doesn’t come off as expected. People don’t react to Manny sitting by himself in the theater like Sawyer thought they would. In fact, Manny doesn’t react to being in the theater the way Sawyer thought he would. At the end of the movie, Sawyer watches Manny get up and leave the theater with the rest of the crowd.

Uh-oh.

And thus begins the true terror of the novel as Sawyer takes it upon himself to be the hero of his story and “save” his friends. Yeah, there’s a reason why that word is in quotes. And I’m not going to tell you the reason. You’ll just have to find out for yourself.

Heh-heh-heh!

(Augh! Jeepers, that's creepy!)

Night of the Mannequins is a fantastic — in all senses of the word — story told in the slasher tradition. (Or maybe that’s should read the "slasher vein”? Heh-heh-heh!) We can talk about the slasher being a tradition now, can’t we? I mean, it’s been nearly fifty years since John Carpenter’s Halloween.

(And, yes, I know there are some of you out there who have a different idea of when the slasher began and who was responsible and you’re pushing your glasses up the bridge of your nose right now and scoffing, “Well, actually...” Can it, will ya? I gotta paint in broad strokes here, alright?)

I love when writers play with a genre the way a really great football team plays with the ball. Someone like John Carpenter sets down the size of the field and the rules and what not, and then along comes someone else, and they do things with the ball that you wouldn’t have thought possible.

Hmm...well...believe you me, when I say author Stephen Graham Jones is a baller. The man is well-versed in what makes a story a slasher. He writes a column about the genre’s “final girls” for Fangoria, for cryin’ out loud. He knows the rules. And, more importantly, he knows how to push against them, when to bend them, and when to break them. He’s like a horror version of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.”

Stephen Graham Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana, was born in 1972 in Midland, Texas. He is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

While earning his Ph. D. from Florida State University in 1998, Jones met a Houghton-Mifflin editor at a writers’ conference. Jones pitched her a novel, and The Fast Red Road became his dissertation and was published in 2000. Jones has since gone on to win many awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Bram Stoker Award. Currently, he is in the midst of The Indian Lake Trilogy, a series of books that follow the (mis)adventures of a young, half-Indian woman named Jade Daniels, who believes that her deep knowledge of the tropes of horror movies is the only thing that can save the people of her town.

Both the print and audio versions of Night of the Mannequins (and many other of Jones’s excellent books) are available at your local library. Check ‘em out!

Meanwhile, Blog-o-ween will be back here tomorrow with more seasonal stories for you to slash your way through. Although, if we’ve learned nothing else from horror movies, the characters who announce to the party, “I’ll be right back!” never seem to be right back, do they? At least not alive. Or in one piece. So, instead, maybe I’ll just say...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!