PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Nightfire, the sci-fi/horror division of Tor Publishing Group, has rereleased Stephen Graham Jones’ (read our interview with him HERE) 2020 novella Night of the Mannequins so now you have no excuse to not read it. Complete with a new cover, what was once supposed to be a rip of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is one of Stephen’s most unique stories.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones, comes a slasher story where a teen prank goes very wrong and all hell breaks loose in a small town. Winner of both the 2020 Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards!
We thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead.
One last laugh for the summer as it winds down. One last prank just to scare a friend. Bringing a mannequin into a theater is just some harmless fun, right? Until it wakes up. Until it starts killing.
Luckily, Sawyer has a plan. He’ll be a hero. He’ll save everyone to the best of his ability. He’ll do whatever he needs to so he can save the day.
That’s the thing about heroes—sometimes you have to become a monster first.
To celebrate the release of the book, I chatted with Stephen about the story behind the story, his writing career and creative process, surviving a horror movie, and more!
PopHorror: I’m really excited to talk to you about Night of the Mannequins. I have the new copy right here.
Stephen Graham Jones: Thank you! Yeah, I just got mine today. It’s pretty.
PopHorror: It’s really nice! I like this cool new cover.
Stephen Graham Jones: They did good with that. I’m happy with it.
PopHorror: What sparked the idea for the book?
Stephen Graham Jones: What sparked the idea was Ellen Datlow called me after we’d done Mapping the Interior together for Tor.com and she said, “Hey, Mapping did pretty well. Why don’t you write another novella for us?” and Mapping the Interior took four days and I thought, I’ve got four days. I can do that. I sat down to jam out Night of the Mannequins, but it was longer. It ended up not being four days and I wrote a lot of other things on accident but finally kicked out Night of the Mannequins. All I had when I started was the title. What I wanted to do, sort of, was… I had the dumb idea that maybe it would be Night of the Living Dead but with mannequins instead of zombies, except for then right when I started writing it, it turned into a slasher.
PopHorror: I appreciate that because I like slashers. I think we established that when we spoke before. Four days to write a whole novella! I know they’re shorter, but still. That’s impressive. That’s not a long time. I’m impressed.
Stephen Graham Jones: Thank you. I do a lot better when I can go fast and not think. Thinking, for me, is the worst thing for writing and so if I can get the velocity high enough, then I don’t have time to think.
PopHorror: Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the final draft, no matter what?
Stephen Graham Jones: Let me think… No, I can’t actually think of anything that Ellen Datlow asked me to change, or thought was a poor idea. Ellen generally has good ideas. Most of her ideas are about intelligibility or like logical connections, that kind of stuff. When she makes me straighten that stuff out, it does make the story better so I generally do it.
PopHorror: Was there anything that you were forced to take out?
Stephen Graham Jones: No, I don’t think… Let me think… No. I’d like to say that there used to be a sixth character that is now like a ghost but no, there was none of that.
PopHorror: If Night of the Mannequins was to be made into a movie, who would you cast as Sawyer?
Stephen Graham Jones: Oh, wow! It would have to be a kid, or I guess a 17-year-old is usually played by a 22-year-old, right? I honestly don’t know but it’s fun to think about because right after it came out a producer wanted me to turn it into a screenplay for them so I did and now, a director I really like got ahold of it and he rewrote it and so keeping the novella and the script separate in my head is tricky because they had to change a lot. I don’t actually have a real idea of who to cast for it, to tell you the truth. Even if it was 2025, I probably wouldn’t know who to cast for it. I’m really bad at dream casting. I never have been the person who can do that. Some people, like they keep their characters’ faces like they’re actors, like Idris Elba or whoever. They put them up there like that’s this person. That must be cool to do but I’ve never been able to do it.
PopHorror: It’s interesting to hear that you don’t have someone in mind when you’re writing it. I’m horrible at picturing the character correctly so I’m not good at this.
Stephen Graham Jones: That would be fun, like I want a 23-year-old Paul Newman or something. If you’re dream casting, why not pick from different eras?
PopHorror: So, Night of the Mannequins is being made into a movie?
Stephen Graham Jones: Well, who knows if it will happen. It’s trying.
PopHorror: Well, let’s hope!
Stephen Graham Jones: Yeah!
PopHorror: Can you tell us about the moment you wanted to be a writer?
Stephen Graham Jones: I think it was when I got my very first check for writing. When I was 19 years old. I had never written a story before then. I wrote a story randomly sitting in an ICU at a hospital for three days and three nights and I turned it in in place of an essay I was supposed to have written for a college course. I never planned to go to college. I was just going to be a farmer but it was all stupid and arbitrary and random and just a stupid thing I was doing for a few months. A way to kill time before I got on a tractor. I didn’t have my essay done so I turned that story in. It wasn’t even typed. It wasn’t even stapled; I just tore it out of my notebook. That instructor of Composition 2, she should not have read that story. It was so off topic, but she read it and she liked it enough to pass it on to the creative writing faculty, who liked it enough to type it up on a computer or word processor or something – this was 1991 I guess – and then unbeknownst to me, that creative writer faculty member submitted it for a departmental fiction contest and I won. Three months after I turned that in, I was at an awards ceremony getting a check for $50, which was an amazing amount of money back then and I thought, you mean I can just tell lies and get $50 checks? That is the dream! That’s better than driving tractors. That’s probably when I realized that I might as well be a writer.
PopHorror: So, you hadn’t planned on going to college but aren’t you now a college professor?
Stephen Graham Jones: Yes.
PopHorror: Look at what this did!
Stephen Graham Jones: Yeah, yeah for sure. I’m an endowed charitable professor, all that stuff. I’m teaching at Stanford right now; that’s where I am. I say it’s better than farming but I didn’t become a farmer so I don’t know. Maybe that would have been pretty good too.
PopHorror: What is your creative process when you go to start a new book?
Stephen Graham Jones: I got no plans, I got no characters, I got no place. Sometimes I would have a title, probably about half the time I have a title. With Night of the Mannequins, I had a title and what I told you, that dumb idea that this was going to be a Romero story of some sort and that went south with like the first word, once it became this first-person high school kid. I didn’t know it was going to be set in Rockwall, but I had spent some time in Rockwall, so I set it there. Then I just write and never know what’s coming. I guess if I have a process it’s any time I sense myself getting bored or losing inertia, not moving forward as quickly as I have been, I kind of reach into a bag of random stuff and I drop one of those random things into the story like a bomb, and I make myself incorporate it instead of delete it. It gives the story twists and turns and it’s really fun to wreck yourself like that in the process of trying to move forward. I think it makes the story more interesting for the reader and it makes me a better writer in order to try to make this ridiculous thing work.
PopHorror: I have just one last question for you. I normally ask what’s your favorite scary movie but last time we spoke about Scream, so now I’m going to ask you what horror movie do you feel you would survive?
Stephen Graham Jones: I think the easiest horror movie to survive is Poltergeist because nobody dies in Poltergeist.
PopHorror: I never thought of that!
Stephen Graham Jones: The bad thing is I’ve never thought of myself as a survivor in horror films because I’m always and forever going to be part of the couple at Lovers’ Lane in the first five minutes who gets killed and strung up from a tree and hung upside down on top of a car and all that stuff. That’s just the way I am; that’s where I’m going to be. I’m not going to be thinking and vigilant and worried and all that stuff. I don’t know how I would ever survive. The only way I would have a chance of surviving is if I were the killer, I think. Like a Leslie Vernon or something and everybody thinks he’s dead but he’s not really dead.
Thank you so much to Stephen for taking the time to chat with us. Night of the Mannequins is available now!
