#Spooktober ‘Night Of The Mannequins’ by Stephen Graham Jones

About the book…

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?

A Tor Original novella, available in e-book , audiobook or paperback, and boy I was not ready for this!
Stephen Graham Jones is truly a chameleon-esque writer who can change his art from to fit the brief he is given-whether it is a short story, a novella , or a full blown novel, his plotting and characterisation, always snugly inhabits that space. Like a mummy filling their bandages, a killing rage slotted inside a zombie’s ever decomposing carcass, he is  a consummate professional of his craft.

In this novella, you have a first person narrator, Sawyer, telling you the tale of what happened the night of the mannequin. What looks, ostensibly like a slasher story of a mannequin on a rampage, quickly becomes so much more than that.

It is a coming of age tale, a cinematic conceit which puts you in the front row of the ensuing carnage, a motif used to explain that odd sense of dislocation between leaving school, and being recognised in the eyes of society as a grown up. And Manny, the recovered mannequin, is emblematic of this process. He is a found object, recovered from a pond, a companion through summer days, dressed up in the clothes of Sawyer, and his gang’s parents clothes. But when the summer days are gone, and they have to navigate that final step, one last prank is on the cards, a night at the cinema where one of their number, Shanna, works. After sneaking them into a movie without paying, Shanna’s boss is riding her hard, as the ex-boyfriend of Shanna’s mother, he has employed her to earn enough money to compensate her parents for their last prank.

”Maybe this is how it happens after high school,right? Or even on the ramp up to high school being over. You just drift away, and then it gets easier not to call, and then you forget the number, and then you see your old friend in line for the movie or whatever and you let your eyes keep moving, because it is going to be awkward now.”

So they break Manny up into cartable pieces, take him into the cinema, paying for tickets this time, and re-assemble Manny in the front row, besides themselves with glee at the sheer terror this will give the unsuspecting manager.

Except, of course, the joke is on the kids.

I really don’t want to spoil why, or how, suffice it to say that as with the synopsis of this tale, appearances are deceptive. The mannequin can be dressed up any which way you like, but, in the end, he has to conform to the shape in which his owner poses his. He has no autonomy, no get out clause, he is what he is.

I really enjoyed the way that reading the book felt like being told a tale by one of my own teens. Sitting here, writing this after she has gone out to get supplies with her dad, I feel a familiar exhaustion bought on by the onslaught of her re-capping her day in school. Graham Jones has this down pat, including the rhetorical questions, which I can hear in that particular way which is quintessentially a teen-speak thing.

Sawyer (I am not sure, more learned readers may say if this is based on ‘Tom Sawyer’, adding a layer of textual richness to the tale) notes that the mannequin skin tone doesn’t even come close to matching his own. It made me think back to an article which I read last year, about non-Caucasian skin tone plasters, and I had never, ever realised that plasters were designed to blend in to Caucasian skin. Apart from feeling embarrassed at not knowing that, and outraged, it had never occurred to me as I am literally vampire-esque in skin tone so they always stuck out . Anyhow, when you start to think about it, when do you see non-Caucasian mannequins?

Being huge nerds, we are always secretly thrilled by the way Doctor Who was filmed in, and around, South Wales. The autons from initial episode, ‘Rose’ were placed in shops we know very well, and whilst you jokingly mention, ‘Don’t turn your back on the dummies, they may be autons!’

A) You never know, they really might be and

B) The blank features of these dummies, the lack of expression, the lack of movement is very , very scary.

As humans we are used to using our flight or fright mechanism in order to assess levels of danger and in those faces, there is nothing to read, nothing to show intent, no way of bargaining. And this is what is so very clever here, the march of the mannequin is inevitable, the face shown to the world lacks any humanity, it is smooth, featureless, white and non-negotiable. It could be at once anyone, or no-one. And as Sawyer’s friends start dying, and Manny takes on a life of his own, the gap between being your own person and freefalling into an adulthood for which he and his friends are woefully unprepared, feels like an abyss.

Suffice to say, I may have had too much coffee and over thought this story, a lot, but it really impacted on  me, as does pretty much most everything I have read by this author to date.

About the author…

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and six collections. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but ‘Valis’ and ‘Love Medicine’ and ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘It’ and ‘The Things They Carried’ are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a big change from the West Texas he grew up in.

He’s married with a couple kids, and probably one too many trucks.

Links-http://www.stephengrahamjones.com/

Twitter @SGJ72 @torbooks