everyday is halloween

night of the mannequins by stephen graham jones [tor.com; 2020]

several weeks ago jonathan hayes sent me a batch of horror fiction that he was reading & thought i'd dig.  one of the books he mailed me was the above-named short novel by stephen graham jones.  i'd not heard of jones.  then again i'm fairly out of what is cool in contemporary fiction, horror & otherwise.  i was an avid reader of horror, & will still read the occasional novel or story collection, but i'd been sticking to old faves like clive barker, steve rasnic tem et al.  

this morning driving nick to school i often listen to the radio show 1A on NPR hosted by jenn white.  white is an intelligent, lively host & often the subjects are about the current state of affairs.  however, this morning hit me in the heart with the force of jason voorhees' ax.  the whole hour of talk was about horror fiction.  white's guests were the film scholar kinitra brooks, the horror fiction writers carmen maria machado & stephen graham jones. 

it was a lively hour & the guests did not need to convince me about the pleasures & pains of my beloved genre.  so when i had a couple hours i read night of the mannequins.  the novel is about a group of teenage friends in west texas killing time by doing stupid shit.  they find a mannequin in a swamp, whom the kids christen manny [get it?], & spend a summer using the life-size dummy to commit all sort of pranks.

the story is told in the first person by sawyer.  jones uses the language of teens to relay the uncertainties of teenage awkwardness of a body in rapid transition with a mind & the attendant powerful confusing sexual desires that are changing too.  sawyer is an unreliable narrator.  but what we do come to understand is that he is under psychiatric care of some kind with prescribed medications.  what might be those medicines & what might be sawyer's mental illness jones holds from us.  & even this information is said in a quick sentence or two.

so what happens?  the kids use manny for the grandest prank of pranks.  one member of the group, shanna, works in a run-down cut-rate movie house.  shanna works at this theater for reasons that are not fully developed until later in the narrative.  but it seems all the kids' home lives are relatively safe but are perhaps unsatisfactory.  some shit went down causing shanna to have to work to pay off some property damage caused by the kids.  

shanna often is in trouble with her boss because she will sneak her friends into the theater. & get caught in the act. the kids like to sneak into the theater so they can goof off, sometimes watch movies they have seen on dvd, illegal download, at another nearby multiplex, or the drive-ins.  jones references the third installment of a well-known superhero franchise yet thru the voice of sawyer never tells us the name of that movie.  & yet, this film is a motif used by jones to deliberate the actions made by sawyer.  for sawyer sees himself as a superhero even if his friends, parents, teachers, society at large, might find him the villain.  

you see, the prank goes sideways leading sawyer & friends to freak out.  without giving away the plot, for i think this book is well worth the time to read it, sawyer becomes the person he always wanted for himself.  the devil be damned.  the delight for me is how jones pulls all the pieces together.  the climax takes place at the drive-ins where that third installment superhero movie is playing large onscreen.  

jones' ear is subtle & musical.  he's got the slang & the teenager's fragmentary thinking speech nailed.  jones also has what i think is crucial for a good horror writer, humor.  some of these scenes are wickedly funny.  i've long claimed that horror & comedy are two sides of the same coin.  jones is proof of it.  stephen graham jones' novel is a campfire story that hits all the bumps in that night.

boo