Stephen Graham Jones is a certified superstar of the Horror genre… that kind of happens when one of your books makes it to President Barrack Obama’s highly-publicized annual reading list. To be fair, SGJ was a big deal horror writer before that and has been writing long before that though and with the recent acclaim and awards he’s been receiving, some of his earlier works are coming back into print. One of those short novels is Night of the Mannequins, originally published in 2020 by Tor Books (about a year before My Heart is a Chainsaw was published and launched him high in the stratosphere) and reissued in February 2026 by their horror imprint, Tor Nightfire.
When the opening sentence of the short novel includes the phrase “and now most of us are dead” how can you put it down?
So, what is this one about? A slasher, of course, but like a lot of SGJ’s stories and novels, this one has a twist in that it reads almost like a super-hero (or rather a super-villain) origin story. Sawyer and his friends are winding down their summer, maybe one of their last summers together. They have a history of pranking each other, including their friend who works at a movie theater by sneaking in and watching the movies without paying. Their “one last prank” involves the mannequin they found, dubbed Manny being brought into the theater as if he were a patron.
During that “one last prank” Sawyer sees Manny stand up from his seat and walk away. Soon after, one of his friends is killed, so of course Sawyer can only blame the mannequin and takes matters into his own hands in order to save his friends and their family from Manny’s continuing murder spree.
SGJ has such an engaging and unique voice in all of his stories and novels and Sawyer is no different. His voice pulled me into the story and made a short novel breeze by even more swiftly. He is engaging but he is by no means a reliable narrator. With a first-person narrator, it is tough to know anything beyond what the protagonist decides to tell the reader so we only know their perspective. As this story unfolds, and Sawyer reveals more of himself and his actions, his reliability comes into question. There is a great deal of ambiguity to the narrative and that is something SGJ leans into with great power in many of his stories. Here, it is very effective.
But at the heart of the story is this: A mannequin gaining a spark of life only to murder lends itself to the supernatural, but that has to be balanced with the deterioration of Sawyer’s reliability as narrator. I’ll say no more at this point.
Night of the Mannequins is a very short novel, under 140 pages in print and fairly small pages, somewhere in area between the traditional mass market paperback and a trade paperback. In other words, it is a very brisk read made much more brisk because of Sawyer’s engaging, frenetic voice. A wonderful, unique take on the slasher story from a master.
Highly recommended.
© 2026 Rob H. Bedford
Paperback | 130 Pages
February 2026 | Tor Nightfire
https://www.stephengrahamjones.com/
Excerpt: https://www.penguinrandomhouseretail.com/book/?isbn=9798217191338#tab-book-excerpt
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
