There’s something creepy about department store mannequins.

They’ve been making people uneasy in retail establishments and freaking out moviegoers on film and television screens since the 1960s. 

But author Stephen Graham Jones puts an interesting spin on this horror trope in his novella, “Night of the Mannequins.”  

“They’re off-putting and disconcerting,” he said during a recent phone interview from his home in Colorado, where Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, teaching creative writing and specializing in Ethnic American Literature, Native American Literature, horror, pop culture and film.

“They do creep me out, too. I like the ones I’ve been seeing in department stores lately, though. They’re made of this speckly-like material with some different ridges and lines, so you don’t just look at them and think ‘Oh, that’s a person looking at me.’ You go, ‘Oh, that’s fake.’ I appreciate that.” 

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Originally released in 2020, “Night of the Mannequins” earned Jones the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction and the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella. Though he has gone on to become a New York Times bestselling author with works that followed – “The Only Good Indians,” The Indian Lake Trilogy, and 2025’s “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” which landed on a former U.S. President’s summer reading list, garnered a Los Angeles Times’ Festival of Books fiction nomination and appeared on the Southern California News Group’s Best Books of 2025 among other accolades.

He’s excited to be republishing “Night of the Mannequins” this week with a new cover design. 

“It surprised me that (‘Night of the Mannequins’) made as big a splash as it did when it hit because back in 2020, it was a different novella landscape,” he said.

“Novellas weren’t as big as they are now. Usually, you drop a novella into the ocean, and it sinks a bit and people have to dive down to find it. But in the years since it’s been published, the novella has become more of a staple on the bookshelf, I think. ‘Night of the Mannequins’ benefited from that, but also from the fact that it’s a slasher told in a different way than they’re usually told.” 

“Night of the Mannequins” follows a group of teenagers who attempt to pull off an epic prank with a mannequin, named Manny, which they strategically place in a movie theater. Things go terribly wrong. The narrator, Sawyer, believes the mannequin has come to life to kill off his friends one by one, and he must intervene to save the lives of their families. 

“The thing with Sawyer is, he thinks he’s the good guy, too,” Jones explained, referring to the storytelling point of view in “Night of the Mannequins,” which isn’t a spoiler and certainly not the twist in this story.  

“That’s been my question with slashers, is when (the antagonist) is going around and killing everyone at the party or camp, I’m always wondering how they’re rationalizing this to themselves,” he said. “How are they making this make sense in their little worldview, and I finally got to explore that with ‘Night of the Mannequins.’” 

Jones came up with the title of the book first and was convinced it was going to be more similar to “Night of the Living Dead,” but with mannequins instead of zombies. 

“I sat down to write it and the first line that came out, I knew it was obviously not going to be a George A. Romero-type story,” he said with a laugh. “It just kept blooming and opening up to me in different ways. I never know how things are going to go, and it’s always fun to watch it develop.” 

Since the novella was originally published six years ago, there’s been heightened interest in horror as the literature has become as popular as franchise films like “M3GAN,” “The Black Phone,” and “Scream” at the box office. And TV shows like “Stranger Things,” “The Last of Us,” “Chucky” and “The Haunting of Hill House” have captured the attention of audiences streaming at home. 

“It’s like we’ve been pulled into the big tent when we’ve always been in the little tent in the circus of books,” Jones said. “Now we have the hot lights on us, and we’re all getting to perform. It’s good, but brings more pressure. I think more pressure is good, myself.” 

Last year was a big one for Jones. He was fresh off of wrapping up The Indian Lake Trilogy in 2024 with “The Angel of Indian Lake,” featuring his fan-favorite protagonist Jade Daniels.

“I miss her a lot and think about her a lot too,” Jones said of the character he’d lived with for nearly a decade. “But not too much so that I want to revisit Indian Lake. I think she deserves to live her life without me fiddling with it now.” 

In 2025, Saga Doubles released a pair of his novellas, “Killer on the Road”/ “The Babysitter Lives.” The format was a nod to the old Ace Double books, which were primarily science fiction, mystery, or western books combined back-to-back in one volume. 

“That was a fun format to publish a book in and something I never thought I’d get to do because those Ace Doubles went away decades ago,” he said. “Saga brought it back for their 10th anniversary and allowed me to be the lead title in that little series. It was such an honor, and those books pair well back-to-back because I had written them in successive months and they play off of each other in a fun way, I think.”

He also dropped a piece of historical horror fiction titled “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” that blended the changing American West, Native American history and folklore and the story of a vampire out for revenge – all told by a modern-day professor who stumbles across a diary from 1912.   

The book garnered Jones a lot of praise, but he was most surprised to find out that it landed on President Barack Obama’s 2025 Reading List. 

“That was amazing,” he said. “Not only a president, but my favorite president. ‘Buffalo Hunter Hunter’ is all about not letting history be erased, and that’s not really the push of the current administration.” 

But being on a president’s reading list? 

“Not something I would have ever in a 1,000 years guessed would happen,” he said with a laugh. 

Stephen Graham Jones Discusses ‘Night of the Mannequins’ 

When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26

Where: Mysterious Galaxy Books, 3555 Rosecrans Street #107A, San Diego

Information: mystgalaxy.com/22626Jones

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