Sawyer and his friends found a discarded mannequin in an East Texas parking lot the summer before senior year. They named him Manny, dressed him, dragged him to parties. Then they got bored of him. With graduation close, the group plans one last prank: sneaking Manny into the movie theater where their friend Shanna works, to scare her. Manny gets up and walks off on his own.
Then the friend group starts dying, in ways that could pass for accidents. Sawyer decides the mannequin has come alive and is working through them for building him up and abandoning him. He starts protecting the ones still standing, appointing himself the one who gets to decide who is safe.
Sawyer narrates from after most of it has already happened, and says early on that most of his friends are dead. He never quite settles on his own story. The animate mannequin keeps sounding less like an explanation and more like a way to avoid one. Stephen Graham Jones keeps teenage banter next to a rising body count, so the horror and the joke land together.
It is a short, fast novella that plays out over a handful of days. It won both the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award for best long fiction in 2020.