Having only read one other Stephen Graham Jones work, I was unaware that he also dabbled in short stories. In looking for some shorter reads recently, I was happily surprised to come across Night of the Mannequins at my local library.
Even from the very first pages of this short story, I couldn’t help but think of the story laid out in his more recent novel, I Was a Teenage Slasher. In this story, a group of teenage friends decide to pull a prank on their friend who works at a local discount movie theater involving a store mannequin they’d found in a swamp a number of years ago. They used to play with this thing all of the time, but like most toys, they eventually lose interest. So this mannequin, Manny, has been living in Sawyer’s garage for quite some time, sitting astride his father’s unriden motocycle. The plan is to make him look like a customer, which involves some serious planning and smuggling on their part.
When the prank does finally get executed, it doesn’t quite have the desired effect, but what shocks Sawyer even more is seeing Manny get up and walk right out of the theater. Now, in an almost throwaway line, Sawyer mentions that he’s been off his meds for the past week. Maybe I missed the details about what the meds could be for, but I’d be willing to bet it might be schizophrenia based on what goes down the rest of the story. He doesn’t think much of Manny until he notices that fertilizer is going missing throughout the neighborhood, and then the friend who the prank was played on ends up dead along with the rest of her family.
Now, most people would chalk this up to a freak accident, but Sawyer is convinced that this is the doing on Manny, furious that he’d been abandoned for all these years, and then suddenly made to be the center of a prank. Sawyer is terrified that Manny is going to take out the rest of his friend group and unnecessarily take out innocent bystanders in his murderous wake. Sawyer’s solution to this problem? Take out his friends before Manny gets the chance to. At first, I had forgotten about the meds line earlier, but as he starts more manaically strangling his friends with weed whacker wire, it becomes evident that Sawyer is not okay.
It’s hard to know if he will ever truly get caught, but to me, this is the seed of the idea that had to have spawned what I Was a Teenage Slasher became. I really, really liked this short story and would love to see this adapted somehow. But, this has mainly given me motivation to read more of Jones’ work. Stay tuned!