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 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.įor one halcyon summer, Manny was their best friend. And a whole lot of imagination.Īt first, it’s the imagination of a circle of friends. (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.) 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.Īctually, the advice to “Run” works pretty well for this story, too. 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. Night of the Mannequins is propulsive and poignant, capturing the mundane terror of adolescence, and adding that ever-so-essential dab of killer mannequin.

'Stephen Graham Jones' has one of the most gripping, stream-of-consciousness voices in horror fiction. The narrator's first person delivery is the most notable aspect of this surprising and creepy tale that nods to popular stalker-killer films of the past, but is so much better than the bulk of those films, and what an ending. 'Wicked and wry, this is a terrific story by one of my favorite writers, Stephen Graham Jones. 'Sly, surprising psychic sleight-of-hand, in a tale of teenage madness where the next plastic face might be your own.'-John Skipp If there’s an heir apparent to the kind of no-rules, wild imagination, down home storytelling perfected by Joe R. The opening setup gets way under your skin, and then Jones takes the story somewhere much darker than you imagined. Night of the Mannequins is dark and twisted, funny, a little crazy, and unsettling as hell. “Reading Stephen Graham Jones is like sitting in the corner of a bar with an old friend, and everyone quiets down the moment they start telling a story. 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? Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Published by Tor.com on September 1, 2020 Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

The night of the mannequins