Night of the Mannequins - of Spooky Puppets and Confused Kids

I’d read Frankenstein in AP English, so I knew you don’t just walk away from your creations. Not without consequences.

2020 is the year of Stephen Graham Jones! With two seriously grand novellas and an impressive full-sized novel within only a couple of months, he is hard to keep up with right now and is finally achieving the breakthrough he deserves in and outside the horror zone. His latest release that completes the literary Tour de Jones'20 (apart, I think, from his annual contribution to Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year), Night of the Mannequins, is a small slasher story that holds in store quite a few surprises for the unsuspecting reader.

I don't really enjoy slashers that don't have a supernatural element to them, no. It just seems to me that people going out there killing other people is a concept, although I enjoy a good scare, too verisimilarly terrible for me to read. I need something to break that reality, something which in reality could never be.* But I reckon and respect that that too is a kind of horror and that there is a great cult following who especially enjoy the killings the more over the top and absurd they get, even though it's just not mine. All the more reason for me to be astonished at how much I liked Mannequins. And yes, I am biased towards SGJ, but I would still hold no punches if it were a basic slasher.
So why is it that Night of the Mannequins is not a regular slasher even though it ticks all the boxes to qualify as one? It's primarily a devastating jumble of subconscious justifications, reasoning, contradictions and inconsistencies in the mind of a young boy, a hell of a psychological analysis, that's why.**

I guess we're entering spoilered territory now, so if you are bothered by that kind of thing, you know what to do. I usually don't mind spoilers, but for this book I deliberately didn't read any reviews beforehand and it definitely paid off.

Night of the Mannequins, a small novella of about eighty pages, starts off with a group of kids (Sawyer, Danielle, Tim, JR) playing a prank on a friend of theirs (Shanna) who works in a movie theater: they dress and place a mannequin in a show and wait in the back for the attendant to realize it's a puppet. But nothing happens and at the end of the showing the mannequin just stands up and leaves the cinema. And after that the killing begins.
The story starts with a manifestation: we are upfront told how all this is going to end for the friends, and we're obliquely and gradually being let in on the secret of who did it - first Manny the Mannequin, then Sawyer himself. What starts indeed as a supernatural slasher turns into a very real and tragic one. Right after the night of the prank and Shanna's subsequent apparent death unfolds a literally crazy story interrupted by Sawyer's inner conflicts, shame, emotions, vindications, contradictions, insecurities: the portrait of a serial killer. Magical thinking at its best. Sawyer's need to justify himself despite being aware of his culpability - "[...] not my fault at all, not completely."-, his crooked thinking combined with dangerous arrogance deriving from insecurities - "It’s logical. It’s the way I’m supposed to think. I should get a medal for thinking like that, I should be a model thinker for some public service announcement." - and lack of empathy - "The flags in front of the high school were fluttering halfway down the poles like, I don’t know, like Tim had been a federal building or something, I guess." - build up to that tragic ending in such a delicate, cruel and immersing way that they elevate this book from your usual slasher (in my eyes) to an important literary work: this is state-of-the-art Tell-Tale Heart... goes slasher royal.

I also immensely enjoyed the Manny descriptions and the puppet character in general. Even though it is to Sawyer everything scary and terrifying impersonated, I personally would love a creepy puppet friend and the idea of "a painted-on eye watching from a break between the bushes" or "a blank-faced man made of plastic watching a whole movie, then standing up from that movie, walking away into the real world" rejoices my horror heart. Plus, SGJ's carefully constructed casual prose is always a treat! There are no excuses not to read this book, grab it immediately!

* I guess I'm like Sawyer in that way.

**I've already recommended this to my friend Gonza, who is the only psychiatrist in the Otherland book club and I'm really curious as to how she will see it!