There's a maxim among writers that villains must be heroes in their own story. Sure, they remain villains to us, doing outrageously awful deeds, but, in their own minds, they have to be doing what they think is the right thing for the right reasons. Of course, that's a goal and many, if not most, writers end up falling notably short. With 'Night of the Mannequins', Stephen Graham Jones may have conjured the textbook to define how this should be done.

It's another novella, following 'Mapping the Interior', which Nightfire reissued last year. This one dates back to 2020 but reissued in this new edition last month and I liked it a lot more. There was serious depth to 'Mapping the Interior' but it's elusive, as if we need more cultural grounding to grasp which of many interpretations might be the appropriate one. This has depth too, but it's a much more accessible depth, at least once we realise what's happening.

We're in Texas and Jones capably sets the scene with an absolutely pristine first line: "So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, we thought we'd play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I'm really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all." Quite frankly, everything that this book has to offer is contained right there in that single line, though we don't remotely grasp the ramifications of it all until much later, perhaps until the whole thing is done.

Shanna's part of a clique and "we" turns out to mean her, Danielle, Tim, JR and the narrator, who we eventually learn is Sawyer. They're young adults, I guess, which means that they're adults but still young enough to know everything, and they certainly know how to have a good time. One way that seems obvious is to have Shanna sneak them into a theatre so they can watch a film for free, but they get caught and she gets into trouble and that sparks the prank.

You see, they have Manny the mannequin, a shop dummy that they found in a swamp and had fun with for a year in ways that probably only make sense to teenagers. He's sat idle for a while now, but they decide to bring him out of retirement for a grand prank. They'll take him apart, enough so that he's portable inside baggy clothing, sneak him into the theatre and then assemble him in one of the seats, then anonymously complain about how noisy he's being. Chaos will, as they say, inevitably ensue.

Well, it goes oddly wrong. They get Manny into place seamlessly enough and the house lights are brought up to deal with the troublemaker, but everything fizzes away into nothing from then on. What's more, Manny gets up and walks out. That's what jars Sawyer more than anything. How can a shop dummy get up and walk out of a theatre like it's the most natural thing in the world. That rankles in his brain and when Shanna dies, a runaway Mack truck crashing through her house and into her bedroom, he knows that Manny is getting his revenge on them.

Here's where we come to that writer's maxim, because Sawyer realises that it wasn't just Shanna who died in the accident that Manny surely caused. Her mom died too and her little brother. It's a horrible tragedy, everyone says, just one of those tragic things. Sawyer, however, knows for sure that Manny was targetting Shanna and the rest of her family were just collateral damage. And it just isn't fair. Maybe they deserve to be punished, he thinks, but only them. Not parents and not siblings. And so he conjures up a cunning plan to save all the other parents and siblings from this deadly vengeance that's going to come for the rest of them.

This could be read straight, I guess, as a surreal slasher story, to sit alongside all the many movies featuring inanimate objects as slashers, though 'Rubber' has kind of owned that market now. It's pretty obvious, though, that it's really all about guilt. If we hadn't grasped it from that powerful opening sentence, Jones gives us plenty of opportunity to catch up when Shanna died. Sawyer has his take on how that happened, but he's also aware that people would call him "crazy from grief, suffering from survivor's guilt, acting out via conspiracy theories, engaging in magical thinking, maybe even showing the front edge of a psychotic break with reality".

As with 'Mapping the Interior', there are a lot of ways we can take this but they're all focused in the direction: what's going on in Sawyer's head at a particular troubling time in his life, the death of a close friend who he and his buddies had just pranked. I don't know how much of this is survivor guilt and how much is just plain old guilt guilt, but it's surely about guilt in some fashion and that makes it all the more powerful. Sawyer goes about his business, saving lives, and the entire story unfolds from his perspective as he does so, a villain who's a hero in his own mind.

I liked this immensely. It's a short book, that probably runs about a hundred pages if we discount the blank pages in between some of the chapters, and it's a quicker read. I'm sure that there are cultural references to be found here, as there probably are in all Jones's books, certainly the two that I've previously read and reviewed, but, if they're here, they're far less obvious than normal. I'm not sure that he ever tells us what race these characters are. They could be anything because this is universal horror, magnificently accessible but deep and meaningful nonetheless.

Jones has written a lot of books and he continues to gather acclaim like he's a magnet for it. The two novellas Nightfire has reissued recently from earlier Tor editions are relatively recent work, coming right before 'The Only Good Indians', the novel of his that I've read and reviewed. All his most acclaimed work follows that, starting with 'The Only Good Indians' and continuing with 'My Heart is a Chainsaw', 'Don't Fear the Reaper' and 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter'. I should get hold of those, because the more I read of his work, the more I like it. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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