I’ve been working on getting myself back into a regular reading habit, and to warm up I’ve been looking for some punchy short horror novels. When I was recently at my local Barnes & Noble, this book practically jumped off of the shelf at me:

I mean, there’s hardly anything creepier than the concept of mannequins coming to life! I picked up the book and read it pretty much in a day. It is a fun, punchy novel that isn’t quite what it’s title suggests it to be.

The book is narrated by a teenager named Sawyer, explaining the events that have led up to almost all of his friends being dead. It all starts with a mannequin that they found discarded in the wilderness one summer when they were kids. They named him “Manny,” and used him as a plaything that they shared between them until they finally reached high school and grew bored with him. He ended up in Sawyer’s garage, straddling his father’s unused motorcycle.

With high school ending soon, however, Sawyer and his circle decide to play one last prank with Manny on their friend Shanna, who works at the local movie theater. They dress up Manny in some clothes and sneak him into a movie with them, expecting that he’ll give a scare to Shanna and her coworkers when they stumble across him in the darkened theater. But when ushers come in to check everyone’s tickets, they pass right by Manny like he’s a regular customer.

And then, when the movie ends, Sawyer sees Manny get up and leave the theater with the rest of the audience.

This is disturbing enough, but then a few days later Shanna and her family are killed when an tractor trailer barrels through their house. Sawyer becomes convinced that Manny is responsible, and is taking revenge on their circle of friends for the way he was treated. When objects start disappearing around the neighborhood, Sawyer believes that Manny has been gorging himself on anything he can eat, and has grown as big as a house. And, as the tragedy of Shanna illustrates, he is willing to kill entire families to get to his targets.

What is a boy to do? Sawyer reasons that he can’t stop Manny, and that his friends are doomed, but he can at least save their families — if he kills them first.

That’s right, Night of the Mannequins is largely a story of a serial killer, told from his perspective. As you might suspect, Sawyer is also a classic example of an unreliable narrator. We follow his increasingly calculated acts and unhinged reasoning to the very end — and at the end, there is a surprise that nobody was expecting.

Overall, though Night of the Mannequins wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it was a lot of fun! I’ll be looking into more of Stephen Graham Jones’ work in the future.