Welcome to Back Shelf Sundays, where I review backlist titles that I never got around to reading when they actually released. For the purposes of these reviews, backlist books are books that have been published for at least one year. I’m starting off with quite a big one: Stephen Graham Jones’s Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Award-Winning novella Night of the Mannequins. This Tordotcom published novella was the starlet of 2020, and I somehow missed reading it when it first released. Not only that, but this is my first ever adventure into Stephen Graham Jones’s backlist.

The Blurb:

Award-winning author 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?

We thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead.

One last laugh for the summer as it winds down. One last prank just to scare a friend. Bringing a mannequin into a theater is just some harmless fun, right? Until it wakes up. Until it starts killing.

Luckily, Sawyer has a plan. He’ll be a hero. He’ll save everyone to the best of his ability. He’ll do whatever he needs to so he can save the day. That’s the thing about heroes—sometimes you have to become a monster first.

The Review:

This was practically a perfect book for me. It was not at all what I thought it was going to be, but it’s better for it. Graham Jones weaves together a story full of childhood nostalgia, adolescent hunger, and suburban horror. The story is brutal, intensely psychological, full of death, and wholly demonstrative of the panic in suburban summers. It’s a story about sneaking into movie theaters, pulling pranks on your friends, and, thinking about, maybe, killing your friends for the greater good. It’s filled with confused adolescent boys, town-destroying tornados, visions of mannequins, and even some brief prosaic commentary on gun violence. This novella does a lot of things, but it’s also very clean and clear in its delivery. Point blank: Stephen Graham Jones is a master at his craft.

Rating: 5/5 stars. I can’t wait to dig into more of Stephen Graham Jones’s backlist. I have my eye on his recent comic debut, Earthdivers, and another novella of his Mapping the Interior.