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Five Nights at Freddy's #3
The Fourth Closet
What really happened to Charlie? It's the question that John can't seem to shake, along with the nightmares of Charlie's seeming death and miraculous reappearance. John just wants to forget the whole terrifying saga of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, but the past isn't so easily buried.
Meanwhile, there's a new animatronic pizzeria opening in Hurricane, along with a new rash of kidnappings that feel all too familiar. Bound together by their childhood loss, John reluctantly teams up with Jessica, Marla, and Carlton to solve the case and find the missing children. Along the way, they'll unravel the twisted mystery of what really happened to Charlie, and the haunting legacy of her father's creations.
Meanwhile, there's a new animatronic pizzeria opening in Hurricane, along with a new rash of kidnappings that feel all too familiar. Bound together by their childhood loss, John reluctantly teams up with Jessica, Marla, and Carlton to solve the case and find the missing children. Along the way, they'll unravel the twisted mystery of what really happened to Charlie, and the haunting legacy of her father's creations.
352 pages, Paperback
First published June 26, 2018
About the author
Scott Cawthon
110 books2,036 followersScott Cawthon is an American independent video game developer, animator, and writer, best known for his creation of the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 782 reviews
July 10, 2018
IM EMOTIONAL DONT TOUCH ME
October 19, 2018
The Fourth Closet by Scott Cawthon tied up some of the FNAF literature universe, but opened up a whole 'nother can of worms.
I was a little too hooked to this book, but mainly because I am totally obsessed with the FNAF lore. The video games, the potential movie, the books! All of them are my guilty pleasure, which I will easily admit. But this book? It tops the other two. I found the first book to be intriguing, the second book to lag just a bit, and this book went flying off the handle to utter insanity! In a good way.
If you are going to take anything out of this book, it's the strange way Scott is weaving and changing lore. The books don't perfectly match up to the video games, but they will definitely spike your interest if you have played the games. There are easter eggs and references to so many different parts of the games that it's almost hard to keep track of. Yet, it all works for perfectly well.
I found myself really hooked to this story and I didn't want to put it down. It is fast paced and full of crazy twists and turns that you will need to read the first three books for. But, you could easily jump into this series if you haven't played the games. Playing the games just makes the easter eggs in this book more fun!
If you don't like sci-fi or thriller type books, this novel isn't for you. The hype about the supernatural aspects of this book is unreal and goes beyond what I expected. The book is no longer just a silly YA novel, it's full of technology and supernatural twists.
I found the ending... interesting. I'll leave it at just that word, because the ending left me feeling like I had tons more questions coming out then going in. While I did get some answers and I thought the ending itself was a nice way to tie up the story, it really didn't tie up the story that well. It made the story end, but it didn't close the story as nicely as I wanted. So, maybe there will be another side series or another game or something that ties this storyline up. I hope, anyways.
Five out of five stars.
This was one of the few books I paid full price for. This whole series I was desperate to read, so lucky Scott Cawthon got my money on this one.
I was a little too hooked to this book, but mainly because I am totally obsessed with the FNAF lore. The video games, the potential movie, the books! All of them are my guilty pleasure, which I will easily admit. But this book? It tops the other two. I found the first book to be intriguing, the second book to lag just a bit, and this book went flying off the handle to utter insanity! In a good way.
If you are going to take anything out of this book, it's the strange way Scott is weaving and changing lore. The books don't perfectly match up to the video games, but they will definitely spike your interest if you have played the games. There are easter eggs and references to so many different parts of the games that it's almost hard to keep track of. Yet, it all works for perfectly well.
I found myself really hooked to this story and I didn't want to put it down. It is fast paced and full of crazy twists and turns that you will need to read the first three books for. But, you could easily jump into this series if you haven't played the games. Playing the games just makes the easter eggs in this book more fun!
If you don't like sci-fi or thriller type books, this novel isn't for you. The hype about the supernatural aspects of this book is unreal and goes beyond what I expected. The book is no longer just a silly YA novel, it's full of technology and supernatural twists.
I found the ending... interesting. I'll leave it at just that word, because the ending left me feeling like I had tons more questions coming out then going in. While I did get some answers and I thought the ending itself was a nice way to tie up the story, it really didn't tie up the story that well. It made the story end, but it didn't close the story as nicely as I wanted. So, maybe there will be another side series or another game or something that ties this storyline up. I hope, anyways.
Five out of five stars.
This was one of the few books I paid full price for. This whole series I was desperate to read, so lucky Scott Cawthon got my money on this one.
July 2, 2018
This was my favorite book of this trilogy it was wrapped up well and by the end everything made sense. I loved the characters especially John and I like the whole group I liked what Charlie ended up being that just made sense once you put it all together. I loved the story it was an amazing conclusion to one of my favorite stories the writing was so good there were plenty of good scares and it was really thrilling loved it so much. So overall I loved this book so much that I really want more.
June 29, 2018
I'm so confused. I need a day to process this book.
June 23, 2019
There better be another one...
July 2, 2018
I was impressed by the first book in this series, the Silver Eyes, for how it presented a more streamlined take on the FNAF universe while also delivering it's own interesting and original set of characters and situations. The second book, The Twisted Ones, built very well on the first book's foundation and took the story even further into unique territory, while still having FNAF flair. Now we've reached the end of the trilogy a few years in the making, and I'm glad to say the wait was worth it. Twisted Ones ended on a very intense and ambiguous cliffhanger, and Fourth Closet not only resolves that book's ending, but actually brings back several details from the first book that I didn't even think of as ongoing mysteries and fleshed them out in a way that ties everything from every book together. I think I'm going to really need to re-read the entire trilogy with the new context and just look for all the stuff that was set up, because some of the things that come back are just masterful. Every single plot twist is earned, and there's point someone pointed out that brings the inclusion of a single, seemingly offhanded line from the first book into an entirely new context (though you don't need to have the series memorized in such detail to enjoy this book. I didn't even notice this one bit until someone pointed it out).
For those alone, the plotting is massively impressive, but the Fourth Closet also has it's own story to tell beyond just resolving things that happened in other books. Bad things are once again happening in Hurricane, Utah, and I won't spoil specifics, but I will say that there are several incredibly tense moments. As far as pure horror, this is easily the darkest and most grotesque of the trilogy, and yet the most suspenseful moments in the book are often when a single experience is stretched into an entire chapter, in which case the things that *aren't* happening (yet) are almost more horrifying than the stuff that does. Oftentimes the most horrific parts are also the most revealing, and while the books have a different lore from the games, there are passages that certainly relate. I oftentimes found myself slowly re-reading certain passages and even making notes of individual words that evoked something pertaining to the game or even other bits of other books. I don't think I've ever willingly read into the text of a book so closely, looking for hidden meanings. It's the type of thing you do all the time in an English class for "serious literature" and yet, I think this is where I've finally realized what a thrill that type of reading can be, hanging onto every word for some tiny, but revealing detail.
The Fourth Closet is amazing. The novel trilogy could have been a cheap cash-in like other gaming spinoffs sometimes are, but it truly stands as it's own brilliant artistic endeavor. Fans of the games will probably appreciate it the most, but even without having played them, the FNAF trilogy is a compelling and well written series. Cawthon and Wrisely have accomplished something incredible.
For those alone, the plotting is massively impressive, but the Fourth Closet also has it's own story to tell beyond just resolving things that happened in other books. Bad things are once again happening in Hurricane, Utah, and I won't spoil specifics, but I will say that there are several incredibly tense moments. As far as pure horror, this is easily the darkest and most grotesque of the trilogy, and yet the most suspenseful moments in the book are often when a single experience is stretched into an entire chapter, in which case the things that *aren't* happening (yet) are almost more horrifying than the stuff that does. Oftentimes the most horrific parts are also the most revealing, and while the books have a different lore from the games, there are passages that certainly relate. I oftentimes found myself slowly re-reading certain passages and even making notes of individual words that evoked something pertaining to the game or even other bits of other books. I don't think I've ever willingly read into the text of a book so closely, looking for hidden meanings. It's the type of thing you do all the time in an English class for "serious literature" and yet, I think this is where I've finally realized what a thrill that type of reading can be, hanging onto every word for some tiny, but revealing detail.
The Fourth Closet is amazing. The novel trilogy could have been a cheap cash-in like other gaming spinoffs sometimes are, but it truly stands as it's own brilliant artistic endeavor. Fans of the games will probably appreciate it the most, but even without having played them, the FNAF trilogy is a compelling and well written series. Cawthon and Wrisely have accomplished something incredible.
November 8, 2023
Wiem tyle że nic nie wiem, ilość niewytłumaczych wątków mnie denerwuje ale czego w sumie można było sie spodziewać 😭 zdecydowanie wole uniwersum gier i filmu bc what the fuck was the whole story about
August 17, 2019
um, I’m like... really confused with the ending. It’s the last book and I feel that there were so many things unanswered.
so I guess I’ll binge game theories now 🤷🏻♀️
so I guess I’ll binge game theories now 🤷🏻♀️
November 25, 2018
Wow.
((SPOILERS AHEAD))
I mean I can't say I'm happy with the ending, because who could be happy with that ending. But I can say that it was an AMAZING ending!
A lot of books will just go where is predictable they won't veer off the beaten path so to speak. Sure they'll throw a few curve balls here and there but usually the ending is pretty much the same. And I really hate books that leave you with those "open to interpretation" endings. I want a solid answer not whatever I think happened cause that's no fun!
This books ending was a strange mix of both interpretation and an actual answer. We got our answer about Charlie yet a lot is still left open for us to figure out. I'm sure if you think back on the book as a whole it will make sense but still. I have so many questions.
And can I just say A ROBOT CHARLIE WAS A ROBOT THE WHOLE TIME!! Not only that but DID JOHN KNOW??
I have no doubt in my mind the woman John went to the arms of was Charlie. Who else could it be? Baby (or Elizabeth) is obviously dead. Charlie should have been dead too but did something else happen?
And honestly the fact that Charlie was literally dead. Like never even really lived at all kind of rips my heart out. She was three years old and no one even knew. How did she die? If William took her and just killed her then who is Elizabeth? Who was the little girl that Baby took the soul of? Because I thought that was Charlie. I thought it was the Charlie William took. I thought maybe Henry got her back and the trauma of the kidnapping was just like locked out of her mind.
I'm so happy and upset with this book. I loved it but I'm angry that it's the last one. I seriously need like a prequel or something to explain Henry and what the absolute heck happened with him. And maybe an epilogue to explain who John went with specifically and what happened to him.
I am happy the children all got to go into the light. They finally got to move on instead of being trapped in that poor melted body. And William is dead so that's good.
But I've got so many questions. Like (and I'm sure I missed it and it's probably really obvious and I'm just missing it) but what was behind the door that Charlie kept hearing the heartbeat? Was it the dumping ground for her old bodies? And what happened to her old body? Did her Aunt have a spare on hand? Was her aunt even real? How did she show up when Charlie "died" in the second book?
I know that revealing all of this will destroy the nice cryptic vibe that these books have but is it so much to ask for some clear and blunt answers?
What happened to Sammy? And Charlie's mom? Are they just out there living their lives not even knowing what happened to Henry or the Charlie Bots he built? I know loosing a kid is really rough but what happened that made Henry completely disregard Sammy and become obsessed with the not-Charlie? I really wish I could do like an interview with Cawthon and Breed-Wrisley just to get the idea of what was going on in their heads. Cause apart from a few things I am at a complete loss and it's really bugging me...
I really liked this series. I thought it took the silly creepiness of the games and brought them a new light. I can't ever go to Chuck-E-Cheezes now but it's probably fine. 10/10 loved it.
((SPOILERS AHEAD))
I mean I can't say I'm happy with the ending, because who could be happy with that ending. But I can say that it was an AMAZING ending!
A lot of books will just go where is predictable they won't veer off the beaten path so to speak. Sure they'll throw a few curve balls here and there but usually the ending is pretty much the same. And I really hate books that leave you with those "open to interpretation" endings. I want a solid answer not whatever I think happened cause that's no fun!
This books ending was a strange mix of both interpretation and an actual answer. We got our answer about Charlie yet a lot is still left open for us to figure out. I'm sure if you think back on the book as a whole it will make sense but still. I have so many questions.
And can I just say A ROBOT CHARLIE WAS A ROBOT THE WHOLE TIME!! Not only that but DID JOHN KNOW??
I have no doubt in my mind the woman John went to the arms of was Charlie. Who else could it be? Baby (or Elizabeth) is obviously dead. Charlie should have been dead too but did something else happen?
And honestly the fact that Charlie was literally dead. Like never even really lived at all kind of rips my heart out. She was three years old and no one even knew. How did she die? If William took her and just killed her then who is Elizabeth? Who was the little girl that Baby took the soul of? Because I thought that was Charlie. I thought it was the Charlie William took. I thought maybe Henry got her back and the trauma of the kidnapping was just like locked out of her mind.
I'm so happy and upset with this book. I loved it but I'm angry that it's the last one. I seriously need like a prequel or something to explain Henry and what the absolute heck happened with him. And maybe an epilogue to explain who John went with specifically and what happened to him.
I am happy the children all got to go into the light. They finally got to move on instead of being trapped in that poor melted body. And William is dead so that's good.
But I've got so many questions. Like (and I'm sure I missed it and it's probably really obvious and I'm just missing it) but what was behind the door that Charlie kept hearing the heartbeat? Was it the dumping ground for her old bodies? And what happened to her old body? Did her Aunt have a spare on hand? Was her aunt even real? How did she show up when Charlie "died" in the second book?
I know that revealing all of this will destroy the nice cryptic vibe that these books have but is it so much to ask for some clear and blunt answers?
What happened to Sammy? And Charlie's mom? Are they just out there living their lives not even knowing what happened to Henry or the Charlie Bots he built? I know loosing a kid is really rough but what happened that made Henry completely disregard Sammy and become obsessed with the not-Charlie? I really wish I could do like an interview with Cawthon and Breed-Wrisley just to get the idea of what was going on in their heads. Cause apart from a few things I am at a complete loss and it's really bugging me...
I really liked this series. I thought it took the silly creepiness of the games and brought them a new light. I can't ever go to Chuck-E-Cheezes now but it's probably fine. 10/10 loved it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 27, 2023
all i can say is: HUH???
deep dive video: https://youtu.be/JWUF_wzB_uw
deep dive video: https://youtu.be/JWUF_wzB_uw
April 29, 2021
This is definitely a trilogy that could have benefited from stopping with the first book. The second book was only saved by its surprise ending. This book was totally ridiculous start to end. There was no plot. It was mostly just a bunch of random action scenes clumped together of kids running from the animatronics. Very little of the end of book two was really properly explained here and huge chunks of what is supposedly going on in this book isn't properly explained. Literally, nothing makes sense and it's just kids running away. Kids who miraculously managed to outsmart murderous animatronics every single time.
January 7, 2020
Mam problem. A mój problem polega na tym, że chociaż książkę nadal świetnie mi się czytało, właściwie ją pochłonęłam, to od strony fabularnej zostawia mnie z jednym wielkim "WTF?". Mam w tym momencie jeszcze więcej pytań niż odpowiedzi, a właściwie tylko mały fragment mogę powiedzieć bez spoilerów.
Pamiętacie jak William bardzo czegoś chciał od Charlie? No to nie ma to już znaczenia, bo chyba sam o tym zapomniał. Możemy się na podstawie przebiegu historii tylko domyślać, co miał na myśli.
Carltona uwielbiam i uwielbiam go zdecydowanie najbardziej spośród wszystkich 3 części. Wie, kiedy faktycznie być poważny, ale nie opuszcza go jego specyficzne poczucie humoru. W ogóle wszystkie postacie są jakieś przyjemniejsze w odbiorze i lepiej ogarnięte.
Oczywiście nie muszę mówić, że moim ulubieńcem i tak pozostaje William. Tu staje się bardziej stonowany, poważniejszy, mniej szalony. Niestety, nie dowiadujemy się, jakim cudem przeżył pierwszy strój zatrzaskowy i nie poznajemy ukrytej za tym historii. Właściwie dalej nie znamy też jego motywów. Dlaczego postanowił zabić jedno z dzieci Henry'ego? Dlaczego w ogóle postanowił zabijać dzieci? Niby udziela nam odpowiedzi, ale brzmi to raczej jak efekt innego wydarzenia, o którym nie wiemy, i dalej nie wyjaśnia masy spraw.
Brakowało mi tu pewnych uzupełnień historii. Brakowało mi większej ilości wewnętrznych przeżyć bohaterów związanych z jakimiś wydarzeniami. Brakowało mi ich wspomnień, szczególnie w kontekście Williama i Charlie. Coś było, ale zbyt mało lub zbyt szczątkowo.
I ok, było mi autentycznie szkoda pewnej dziewczynki. Henry'ego tez jak w żadnej innej części.
A końcowa scena kompletnie namieszała mi w głowie. Domyślam się, kto to mógł być, ale biorąc pod uwagę, co działo się wcześniej, kompletnie nie widzę w tym sensu. Albo po prostu nie umiem zinterpretować tej sceny i widziałam, że nie tylko ja miałam z nią problem.
I pytam: DLACZEGO imię "Baby" zostało przetłumaczone? DLACZEGO?
Początek może być trochę nużący, ale gdy akcja się rozpocznie, to będzie trwać. Oczywiście uważam, że przeczytać tę książkę jak najbardziej warto, szczególnie jak nie zwraca się zbyt mocno uwagi na jakieś dziwne zawiłości w fabule, ale można poczuć niedosyt przez to, że wiele rzeczy pozostaje niejasnych.
Pamiętacie jak William bardzo czegoś chciał od Charlie? No to nie ma to już znaczenia, bo chyba sam o tym zapomniał. Możemy się na podstawie przebiegu historii tylko domyślać, co miał na myśli.
Carltona uwielbiam i uwielbiam go zdecydowanie najbardziej spośród wszystkich 3 części. Wie, kiedy faktycznie być poważny, ale nie opuszcza go jego specyficzne poczucie humoru. W ogóle wszystkie postacie są jakieś przyjemniejsze w odbiorze i lepiej ogarnięte.
Oczywiście nie muszę mówić, że moim ulubieńcem i tak pozostaje William. Tu staje się bardziej stonowany, poważniejszy, mniej szalony. Niestety, nie dowiadujemy się, jakim cudem przeżył pierwszy strój zatrzaskowy i nie poznajemy ukrytej za tym historii. Właściwie dalej nie znamy też jego motywów. Dlaczego postanowił zabić jedno z dzieci Henry'ego? Dlaczego w ogóle postanowił zabijać dzieci? Niby udziela nam odpowiedzi, ale brzmi to raczej jak efekt innego wydarzenia, o którym nie wiemy, i dalej nie wyjaśnia masy spraw.
Brakowało mi tu pewnych uzupełnień historii. Brakowało mi większej ilości wewnętrznych przeżyć bohaterów związanych z jakimiś wydarzeniami. Brakowało mi ich wspomnień, szczególnie w kontekście Williama i Charlie. Coś było, ale zbyt mało lub zbyt szczątkowo.
I ok, było mi autentycznie szkoda pewnej dziewczynki. Henry'ego tez jak w żadnej innej części.
A końcowa scena kompletnie namieszała mi w głowie. Domyślam się, kto to mógł być, ale biorąc pod uwagę, co działo się wcześniej, kompletnie nie widzę w tym sensu. Albo po prostu nie umiem zinterpretować tej sceny i widziałam, że nie tylko ja miałam z nią problem.
I pytam: DLACZEGO imię "Baby" zostało przetłumaczone? DLACZEGO?
Początek może być trochę nużący, ale gdy akcja się rozpocznie, to będzie trwać. Oczywiście uważam, że przeczytać tę książkę jak najbardziej warto, szczególnie jak nie zwraca się zbyt mocno uwagi na jakieś dziwne zawiłości w fabule, ale można poczuć niedosyt przez to, że wiele rzeczy pozostaje niejasnych.
June 18, 2018
If you are a fan of the games and book series then you are going to enjoy this conclusion. It may answer some burning questions or at least give the readers more to theorize about while they try to connect the books to the Five Nights at Freddy's game series. The only reason why I am giving it a three is because the writing is not great and for dropped plot lines like everyone car pooling to one destination only for everyone to split up and have their own cars magically there for them to take. Again, if you like the series then you will enjoy this book and may even find this one the best of the three.
July 26, 2018
This book was a complete trainwreck. The first chapters are annoying, the last chapters make no sense and are utterly stupid, and the ending is just like What the fuck were you thinking?
Let's start with the beginning. The first two chapters consist entirely of...John complaining. Great. Those first three chapters were just depressing and boring reading through John's daily routine of not caring about anything except "what happened to Charlie" and being sad. It gets to the point where's so spacy and careless about anything that his boss actually fires him and I can honestly see why! I wouldn't want people standing around acting like a space cadet in the middle of an active construction zone! It's dangerous to the other people actually doing their job, it's dangerous to him, and it's a liability to my business!
Not much happens after that. There's a party, John and fake Charlie meet and go out to dinner again, then John talks to Clay about Aunt Jen, Charlie's mom and Charlie's past. After that John hears Theodore saying "Shining star, Silver Reef," presumably a message sent by Aunt Jen telling him and Jessica to come to Silver Reef. But there are two major concerns here...first, how? How did she get Theodore to say that from her little house in the middle of an abandoned 200-year-old town in Utah? And third of all, she doesn't have any reaction when John relays Theodore's message to her after him and Jessica go to her house. So did she send it? If not then who did, and the same question still applies: Why? That's the big question of this book: Why?
So John goes back and surprise surprise, the girl he saw walking towards Clay's house when he left attacked him. My main concern is why didn't John go back in and tell Clay "yo there's a creepy clown girl coming your way"? I mean, if he thought it looked suspicious, then the chief of police of all people should. Anyways, John and Jessica take him to the hospital, he gives them an envelope full of pictures and says "It has to have a maximum range" before falling asleep again. John tells Jessica about Theodore and she somehow knows about a ghost town 30 minutes away called Silver Reef. The next day they drive there and find Aunt Jen, who tells them she can't reveal her secret when suddenly fake Charlie arrives, distracting Jen and giving John and Jessica time to snoop around and then they find Charlie in a box. They comment on how strange this is and then leave after they see fake Charlie killed Jen. OK, here's another problem here. How did Charlie survive and why is she in a box at Jen's house? Well, I guess we'll never know because Jen is dead now.
So, John and Jessica take Charlie to his apartment and John leaves and goes to Clay's house, where he finds one of the mind discs, which makes Ella look like a little girl. He takes her, the disc, and tells Jessica to meet him at the library, stupidly leaving Charlie alone susceptible to fake Charlie killing her. At the library, they see that fake Charlie is actually Baby and realize that they stupidly left Charlie alone susceptible to fake Charlie killing her. They go back and then are lucky enough to manage to distract fake Charlie long enough so John can hide her, and then he asks her on a date so they can spy on her. After John for some reason reveals that he knows about her being Baby and then she chokes him for a few seconds and then goes to pay. Why did he reveal that he knows about her being Baby? How did that help? Anyways, Jessica decides to hide in Charlie's car and go to Baby's Pizza World and tries to go in..? I mean I get following her and spying on her but you could at least watch from a distance. But she didn't and Baby reveals herself and captures Jessica.
So then Baby ties up Jessica and then there's a whole lot of exposition to reveal things that anyone who has a basic understanding of the lore would already know. Also Elizabeth exists in this universe...? I thought William didn't have a family in this universe, and that was the entire reason he killed the original five kids? Anyways, Jessica escapes Baby and her ruthless exposition dialogue and encounters William who got out of the Spring Bonnie suit even though when he was in it he felt powerful and strong (which he probably was (physically, anyways) based on what we've seen of these animatronic so far) so I guess he just decided to remove the suit so he could do science. But as we learned from Cave Johnson, "Science isn't about why, it's about why not!"
Then he and Baby make Jessica do surgery on him and this scene was actually pretty good. The gory and gruesome detail it goes into as Baby takes out his organs and replaces them was actually really nasty. But that leads to another problem where sometimes the book goes into very little description and then sometimes it goes into really gruesome and brutal detail which can be pretty jarring at some points. Then Jessica can't take it anymore and screams at the top of her lungs until Baby transforms into Charlie again.
Now suddenly we're following real Charlie's POV and this is where we get into an issue with the pacing. From this point on we can go from Charlie and John in Aunt Jen's house to Jessica escaping hentai monster Funtime Foxy and it's kind of jarring. Anyways, John realizes he can switch the wires in the earpieces from Charlie's experiment from TTO to make them invisible to the animatronics which will later become kind of a MacGuffin for the characters so they can easily escape situations where they would normally be caught, which to be honest, is kind of cheating. So Carlton goes to get the earpieces. He switches the wires around when suddenly he's caught by fake Charlie. This scene was actually pretty funny, considering so far while everyone else is calling fake Charlie not-Charlie, Carlton calls her hot Charlie. Not-Charlie tries to creepily flirt with him, and he turns her down and tells her to "hit the gym and maybe we can try again in a few years" (I actually laughed out loud when he said that). However things quickly take a turn for the worse as she transforms into Baby and tries to kiss Carlton, her faceplates opening up. Carlton quickly puts the earpiece in, and here's the first instance of MacGuffening from the earpieces. Baby is suddenly confused as to where Carlton went, and she transforms back into Charlie and leaves.
This is when things start to become a sitcom and it branches off into the A, B, and C plots. Carlton goes back to John's place and John and Charlie have left to find answers at Aunt Jen's house (A plot). Marla and Carlton decided to go back to Circus Baby's to find Jessica and the missing kids (C plot) (even thought on the back it implies John initiated his friends to find the kids, even though he's at Jen's house with Charlie while Jessica, Carlton and Marla are saving the kids...false advertising!) They break and enter and go into a mirror maze with Funtime Freddy in it and for some reason he doesn't have Bon-Bon which is sad because that's like one of the main reasons I like him so much. Anyways, here's the first instance of the earpieces deciding to be useless and almost letting Carlton get caught by Funtime Freddy before Marla lets her use his and they barely escape with the power of "because plot" on their side.
Meanwhile Jessica has been thrown into a room with the missing children (B plot). They've all been captured by Baby when she was out and about as Charlie. Jessica explains that Baby is also trying to track her and her friends down (nice job at calming them down) and tries to find a way to escape. The door is obviously locked and the only other thing in the room is a hot-water heater. Suddenly Funtime Foxy appears and his head pops open and limbs start to come out..? One of them tries to capture the little girl Lisa, but Jessica saves her. Unfortunately she forgot about Jacob, the son of the woman she promised she would help find the missing children to, and he was snatched by Funtime Foxy.
Now, like a sitcom, the B and C plots merge. Jessica takes Carlton's earpiece, and he goes after Funtime Foxy and Jacob while Jessica and Marla escort the children out of the pizzeria, when suddenly Funtime Foxy, who is now a hentai monster, comes down and tries to capture them, and Marla tells them to run, making more noise and likely drawing him to them. They get out into the main room and these creepy baby clown animatronics (who I assume are supposed to be the Bidybabs) start coming after them. Jessica and Marla drown them in a ballpit, and just after they think they've gotten away, Funtime Foxy appears and, as I can only assume, tries to tentacle-fuck them again. While Jessica distracts Funtime Foxy, Marla and the children escape, and Jessica's earpiece decides to stop working suddenly.
Jessica escapes into a pipe maze and just follows where the pipe takes her and suddenly tons of pairs of eyes begin to watch her which literally appear for this scene and then have no relevance later on...okay them. Jessica for some reason goes back into the room with Funtime Foxy and realizes she can trap him in the ballpit. Jessica lures Funtime Foxy into a point in the pipe where there's a hole over the ballpit, and suddenly hear earpiece works again, Funtime Foxy gets entangled in the net over it and falls to his doom.
Meanwhile, Charlie and John go back to Aunt Jen's house to figure some stuff out. Charlie finds Henry's suicide note (which was too poetic to find sad, IMO. It should've been more straightforward and simple) and some blueprints for Ella. Then she notices fake Charlie is coming around the house. She grabs them, almost suffocating them both until Baby decides she would rather emotionally torture Charlie before asphyxiating her. She reveals herself as Elizabeth, and shares her memories before getting scooped by Baby and for some reason she stole her Kindergarten teacher's lipstick and Baby was being created in a school (still trying to work that out). And then here comes the kicker that made me want to throw the book into the Grand Canyon (and I may actually do that because I'm going there on a day trip tomorrow). Elizabeth reveals that Charlie was the one who was kidnapped by William and not Sammy, and Henry couldn't handle life without Charlie, so he cried over a ragdoll for months, pretending it was her. And so he devolved into insanity, and recreated her as a robot - oh, come the FUCK ON! THIS IS SUCH A GARBAGE COPOUT! Apparently Henry created the most realistic robot ever, that can perform every single human bodily function. This is such a stupid solution because IT CREATES MORE PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS THEN ANSWERS! What, are you telling me that THE CHIPS FOOLED EVERYONE?! Even Aunt Jen agrees with me, she even says that with those chips the teakettle can tell him his life story, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fourth book that would be the twist villain: the teapot! It's gotten so absurd and stupid that it wouldn't even be that shocking. Moving on from this outrageously stupid garbage copout, Elizabeth also explains how he made her four bodies - one for a toddler, one for an adolescent, one for a “sulky teenager”, in Elizabeth’s words, and one for an adult, and that’s what the four closets were four. The second housed Ella, which was actually Charlie’s second body - oh, ARE YOU SHITTING ME? Ella was just supposed to be one of Charlie’s creepy childhood toys before the Freddy’s animatronics, not CHARLIE HERSELF. But the twist is that Elizabeth is actually the fourth endoskeleton that was supposed to be Charlie’s adult body. Apparently William stole it after Henry died, even though he was perfectly capable of creating his own if the other two Funtimes tell you anything. Which leads me to another question - Why does Henry want Charlie so badly? Earlier in the book he says it’s because “Henry found something truly unique”, but he’s able to create friggin ice cream robots, so it’s not like he’s incapable of creating extremely complex robots. Anyways, Elizabeth explains that all of her rage came from the fury Henry had put into making Charlie’s fourth endoskeleton - when he started to realize he’d completely lost it. His first words to her were “You are wrong.” Of course, she didn’t realize this until she had a conscious to understand Henry’s anger poured into her. And I’m sorry, and I can’t even blame the book for this, but to me that line is kinda funny because it reminds me of that meme “The fat controller laughed. ‘You are wrong.’” Anyways, all memes aside, Charlie smashes Elizabeth’s face with a paperweight, and then goes into the closet where Henry’s suicide bot is. She lures Elizabeth in, and trips the robot, stabbing them both right through the heart, killing Charlie for the third time. But...how? We just learned that Charlie’s a robot and we’ve known since a third into the book that Elizabeth is a robot, too. So how can she kill two robots? Then again, Charlie can perform every bodily function known to man, so I guess the answer here is plot.
Meanwhile, Carlton is still going after Jacob. He lures Funtime Freddy into a room with a ride that, based on how it’s described, reminds me of Bertrum Piedmont from Bendy and the Ink Machine. He turns on the ride, and Funtime Freddy is obliterated in it. Carlton runs into the next hall, but when he realizes he’s lost and on the verge of dying, he breaks down and accepts his fate, apologizing to Michael for not being able to avenge him. Then he wakes up and realizes there was a door right next to him he didn’t notice somehow. He was just too scared, I guess. He goes in and finds Jacob sitting in the corner. Jacob tells Carlton to also save the thing on the table, which is an amalgamation of all the Fazbear endoskeletons. William emerges from the shadows, and Carlton tries to smash him with a pipe. However, William has the upper hand and suspends Carlton in the air as he draws a syringeful of remnant from the endoskeleton and injects it into Carlton. Suddenly he wakes up under a table at Freddy Fazbear’s with the original five missing kids, who are the gravestones at the end of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator. Susie is the Fruity Maze girl, who talks about her dog. If you’ve been on the FNaF and/or Game Theory Reddits for the past three or four months you should know about the whole Cassidy ordeal, and she’s also one of the missing kids. There’s also Fritz, Gabriel, and Jeremy. They’re trying to collect pictures to put themselves back together, and Carlton decides to help them, of course. Meanwhile, all the animatronics have come back and suddenly turned on William (even thought only minutes ago they were trying to kill Jessica, Carlton, Marla and the children), and just as the children put the pictures together, William falls into a fireplace and the children fade away.
Carlton, just barely surviving the ordeal, wakes up in the hospital surrounded by his friends (except Charlie), and after a brief exchange, Jessica gives him the drawing of the children around Spring Bonnie. Meanwhile, John goes to the cemetery and passes Henry and Charlie’s graves. He meets some woman implied to be Charlie, despite the fact she stabbed herself and Elizabeth with the suicide bot, and they walk away together, ending the books on a very abrupt note.
So that’s it. That was the grand finale to the Five Night book series. This book creates more problems and raises more question than give solutions and answers, and the supposed “solutions” it presents are either very confusing or very stupid, and a lot of the time it’s both! There were some good parts but they were few and far between. The writing is clunky, and despite these books originally being meant to help solve the games’ story, this book is just so bizarre and different than the games that it’s unusable for that. The only thing it helped solve was why in Sister Location Baby switches perspectives back and forth from Baby to Elizabeth. In Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator she goes from Baby to Elizabeth within a single sentence, in fact, so I guess that was sort of helpful. But really, that’s it. Overall 4/10, even if you do like FNaF I don’t recommend this.
Let's start with the beginning. The first two chapters consist entirely of...John complaining. Great. Those first three chapters were just depressing and boring reading through John's daily routine of not caring about anything except "what happened to Charlie" and being sad. It gets to the point where's so spacy and careless about anything that his boss actually fires him and I can honestly see why! I wouldn't want people standing around acting like a space cadet in the middle of an active construction zone! It's dangerous to the other people actually doing their job, it's dangerous to him, and it's a liability to my business!
Not much happens after that. There's a party, John and fake Charlie meet and go out to dinner again, then John talks to Clay about Aunt Jen, Charlie's mom and Charlie's past. After that John hears Theodore saying "Shining star, Silver Reef," presumably a message sent by Aunt Jen telling him and Jessica to come to Silver Reef. But there are two major concerns here...first, how? How did she get Theodore to say that from her little house in the middle of an abandoned 200-year-old town in Utah? And third of all, she doesn't have any reaction when John relays Theodore's message to her after him and Jessica go to her house. So did she send it? If not then who did, and the same question still applies: Why? That's the big question of this book: Why?
So John goes back and surprise surprise, the girl he saw walking towards Clay's house when he left attacked him. My main concern is why didn't John go back in and tell Clay "yo there's a creepy clown girl coming your way"? I mean, if he thought it looked suspicious, then the chief of police of all people should. Anyways, John and Jessica take him to the hospital, he gives them an envelope full of pictures and says "It has to have a maximum range" before falling asleep again. John tells Jessica about Theodore and she somehow knows about a ghost town 30 minutes away called Silver Reef. The next day they drive there and find Aunt Jen, who tells them she can't reveal her secret when suddenly fake Charlie arrives, distracting Jen and giving John and Jessica time to snoop around and then they find Charlie in a box. They comment on how strange this is and then leave after they see fake Charlie killed Jen. OK, here's another problem here. How did Charlie survive and why is she in a box at Jen's house? Well, I guess we'll never know because Jen is dead now.
So, John and Jessica take Charlie to his apartment and John leaves and goes to Clay's house, where he finds one of the mind discs, which makes Ella look like a little girl. He takes her, the disc, and tells Jessica to meet him at the library, stupidly leaving Charlie alone susceptible to fake Charlie killing her. At the library, they see that fake Charlie is actually Baby and realize that they stupidly left Charlie alone susceptible to fake Charlie killing her. They go back and then are lucky enough to manage to distract fake Charlie long enough so John can hide her, and then he asks her on a date so they can spy on her. After John for some reason reveals that he knows about her being Baby and then she chokes him for a few seconds and then goes to pay. Why did he reveal that he knows about her being Baby? How did that help? Anyways, Jessica decides to hide in Charlie's car and go to Baby's Pizza World and tries to go in..? I mean I get following her and spying on her but you could at least watch from a distance. But she didn't and Baby reveals herself and captures Jessica.
So then Baby ties up Jessica and then there's a whole lot of exposition to reveal things that anyone who has a basic understanding of the lore would already know. Also Elizabeth exists in this universe...? I thought William didn't have a family in this universe, and that was the entire reason he killed the original five kids? Anyways, Jessica escapes Baby and her ruthless exposition dialogue and encounters William who got out of the Spring Bonnie suit even though when he was in it he felt powerful and strong (which he probably was (physically, anyways) based on what we've seen of these animatronic so far) so I guess he just decided to remove the suit so he could do science. But as we learned from Cave Johnson, "Science isn't about why, it's about why not!"
Then he and Baby make Jessica do surgery on him and this scene was actually pretty good. The gory and gruesome detail it goes into as Baby takes out his organs and replaces them was actually really nasty. But that leads to another problem where sometimes the book goes into very little description and then sometimes it goes into really gruesome and brutal detail which can be pretty jarring at some points. Then Jessica can't take it anymore and screams at the top of her lungs until Baby transforms into Charlie again.
Now suddenly we're following real Charlie's POV and this is where we get into an issue with the pacing. From this point on we can go from Charlie and John in Aunt Jen's house to Jessica escaping hentai monster Funtime Foxy and it's kind of jarring. Anyways, John realizes he can switch the wires in the earpieces from Charlie's experiment from TTO to make them invisible to the animatronics which will later become kind of a MacGuffin for the characters so they can easily escape situations where they would normally be caught, which to be honest, is kind of cheating. So Carlton goes to get the earpieces. He switches the wires around when suddenly he's caught by fake Charlie. This scene was actually pretty funny, considering so far while everyone else is calling fake Charlie not-Charlie, Carlton calls her hot Charlie. Not-Charlie tries to creepily flirt with him, and he turns her down and tells her to "hit the gym and maybe we can try again in a few years" (I actually laughed out loud when he said that). However things quickly take a turn for the worse as she transforms into Baby and tries to kiss Carlton, her faceplates opening up. Carlton quickly puts the earpiece in, and here's the first instance of MacGuffening from the earpieces. Baby is suddenly confused as to where Carlton went, and she transforms back into Charlie and leaves.
This is when things start to become a sitcom and it branches off into the A, B, and C plots. Carlton goes back to John's place and John and Charlie have left to find answers at Aunt Jen's house (A plot). Marla and Carlton decided to go back to Circus Baby's to find Jessica and the missing kids (C plot) (even thought on the back it implies John initiated his friends to find the kids, even though he's at Jen's house with Charlie while Jessica, Carlton and Marla are saving the kids...false advertising!) They break and enter and go into a mirror maze with Funtime Freddy in it and for some reason he doesn't have Bon-Bon which is sad because that's like one of the main reasons I like him so much. Anyways, here's the first instance of the earpieces deciding to be useless and almost letting Carlton get caught by Funtime Freddy before Marla lets her use his and they barely escape with the power of "because plot" on their side.
Meanwhile Jessica has been thrown into a room with the missing children (B plot). They've all been captured by Baby when she was out and about as Charlie. Jessica explains that Baby is also trying to track her and her friends down (nice job at calming them down) and tries to find a way to escape. The door is obviously locked and the only other thing in the room is a hot-water heater. Suddenly Funtime Foxy appears and his head pops open and limbs start to come out..? One of them tries to capture the little girl Lisa, but Jessica saves her. Unfortunately she forgot about Jacob, the son of the woman she promised she would help find the missing children to, and he was snatched by Funtime Foxy.
Now, like a sitcom, the B and C plots merge. Jessica takes Carlton's earpiece, and he goes after Funtime Foxy and Jacob while Jessica and Marla escort the children out of the pizzeria, when suddenly Funtime Foxy, who is now a hentai monster, comes down and tries to capture them, and Marla tells them to run, making more noise and likely drawing him to them. They get out into the main room and these creepy baby clown animatronics (who I assume are supposed to be the Bidybabs) start coming after them. Jessica and Marla drown them in a ballpit, and just after they think they've gotten away, Funtime Foxy appears and, as I can only assume, tries to tentacle-fuck them again. While Jessica distracts Funtime Foxy, Marla and the children escape, and Jessica's earpiece decides to stop working suddenly.
Jessica escapes into a pipe maze and just follows where the pipe takes her and suddenly tons of pairs of eyes begin to watch her which literally appear for this scene and then have no relevance later on...okay them. Jessica for some reason goes back into the room with Funtime Foxy and realizes she can trap him in the ballpit. Jessica lures Funtime Foxy into a point in the pipe where there's a hole over the ballpit, and suddenly hear earpiece works again, Funtime Foxy gets entangled in the net over it and falls to his doom.
Meanwhile, Charlie and John go back to Aunt Jen's house to figure some stuff out. Charlie finds Henry's suicide note (which was too poetic to find sad, IMO. It should've been more straightforward and simple) and some blueprints for Ella. Then she notices fake Charlie is coming around the house. She grabs them, almost suffocating them both until Baby decides she would rather emotionally torture Charlie before asphyxiating her. She reveals herself as Elizabeth, and shares her memories before getting scooped by Baby and for some reason she stole her Kindergarten teacher's lipstick and Baby was being created in a school (still trying to work that out). And then here comes the kicker that made me want to throw the book into the Grand Canyon (and I may actually do that because I'm going there on a day trip tomorrow). Elizabeth reveals that Charlie was the one who was kidnapped by William and not Sammy, and Henry couldn't handle life without Charlie, so he cried over a ragdoll for months, pretending it was her. And so he devolved into insanity, and recreated her as a robot - oh, come the FUCK ON! THIS IS SUCH A GARBAGE COPOUT! Apparently Henry created the most realistic robot ever, that can perform every single human bodily function. This is such a stupid solution because IT CREATES MORE PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS THEN ANSWERS! What, are you telling me that THE CHIPS FOOLED EVERYONE?! Even Aunt Jen agrees with me, she even says that with those chips the teakettle can tell him his life story, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fourth book that would be the twist villain: the teapot! It's gotten so absurd and stupid that it wouldn't even be that shocking. Moving on from this outrageously stupid garbage copout, Elizabeth also explains how he made her four bodies - one for a toddler, one for an adolescent, one for a “sulky teenager”, in Elizabeth’s words, and one for an adult, and that’s what the four closets were four. The second housed Ella, which was actually Charlie’s second body - oh, ARE YOU SHITTING ME? Ella was just supposed to be one of Charlie’s creepy childhood toys before the Freddy’s animatronics, not CHARLIE HERSELF. But the twist is that Elizabeth is actually the fourth endoskeleton that was supposed to be Charlie’s adult body. Apparently William stole it after Henry died, even though he was perfectly capable of creating his own if the other two Funtimes tell you anything. Which leads me to another question - Why does Henry want Charlie so badly? Earlier in the book he says it’s because “Henry found something truly unique”, but he’s able to create friggin ice cream robots, so it’s not like he’s incapable of creating extremely complex robots. Anyways, Elizabeth explains that all of her rage came from the fury Henry had put into making Charlie’s fourth endoskeleton - when he started to realize he’d completely lost it. His first words to her were “You are wrong.” Of course, she didn’t realize this until she had a conscious to understand Henry’s anger poured into her. And I’m sorry, and I can’t even blame the book for this, but to me that line is kinda funny because it reminds me of that meme “The fat controller laughed. ‘You are wrong.’” Anyways, all memes aside, Charlie smashes Elizabeth’s face with a paperweight, and then goes into the closet where Henry’s suicide bot is. She lures Elizabeth in, and trips the robot, stabbing them both right through the heart, killing Charlie for the third time. But...how? We just learned that Charlie’s a robot and we’ve known since a third into the book that Elizabeth is a robot, too. So how can she kill two robots? Then again, Charlie can perform every bodily function known to man, so I guess the answer here is plot.
Meanwhile, Carlton is still going after Jacob. He lures Funtime Freddy into a room with a ride that, based on how it’s described, reminds me of Bertrum Piedmont from Bendy and the Ink Machine. He turns on the ride, and Funtime Freddy is obliterated in it. Carlton runs into the next hall, but when he realizes he’s lost and on the verge of dying, he breaks down and accepts his fate, apologizing to Michael for not being able to avenge him. Then he wakes up and realizes there was a door right next to him he didn’t notice somehow. He was just too scared, I guess. He goes in and finds Jacob sitting in the corner. Jacob tells Carlton to also save the thing on the table, which is an amalgamation of all the Fazbear endoskeletons. William emerges from the shadows, and Carlton tries to smash him with a pipe. However, William has the upper hand and suspends Carlton in the air as he draws a syringeful of remnant from the endoskeleton and injects it into Carlton. Suddenly he wakes up under a table at Freddy Fazbear’s with the original five missing kids, who are the gravestones at the end of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator. Susie is the Fruity Maze girl, who talks about her dog. If you’ve been on the FNaF and/or Game Theory Reddits for the past three or four months you should know about the whole Cassidy ordeal, and she’s also one of the missing kids. There’s also Fritz, Gabriel, and Jeremy. They’re trying to collect pictures to put themselves back together, and Carlton decides to help them, of course. Meanwhile, all the animatronics have come back and suddenly turned on William (even thought only minutes ago they were trying to kill Jessica, Carlton, Marla and the children), and just as the children put the pictures together, William falls into a fireplace and the children fade away.
Carlton, just barely surviving the ordeal, wakes up in the hospital surrounded by his friends (except Charlie), and after a brief exchange, Jessica gives him the drawing of the children around Spring Bonnie. Meanwhile, John goes to the cemetery and passes Henry and Charlie’s graves. He meets some woman implied to be Charlie, despite the fact she stabbed herself and Elizabeth with the suicide bot, and they walk away together, ending the books on a very abrupt note.
So that’s it. That was the grand finale to the Five Night book series. This book creates more problems and raises more question than give solutions and answers, and the supposed “solutions” it presents are either very confusing or very stupid, and a lot of the time it’s both! There were some good parts but they were few and far between. The writing is clunky, and despite these books originally being meant to help solve the games’ story, this book is just so bizarre and different than the games that it’s unusable for that. The only thing it helped solve was why in Sister Location Baby switches perspectives back and forth from Baby to Elizabeth. In Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator she goes from Baby to Elizabeth within a single sentence, in fact, so I guess that was sort of helpful. But really, that’s it. Overall 4/10, even if you do like FNaF I don’t recommend this.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 29, 2023
Welp this one was definitely better than the second one lmao
August 26, 2024
Okej było 🫡🫡
February 1, 2024
Favorite book of this series so far
May 5, 2020
I was so distraught when Charlie died in the second book. But when she died in the third I was okay with it. It gave it a resolute ending that didn't fail to disappoint. It was sad (to me anyway) that she was an animatronic the whole time but it reminded me of a post-apocalyptic book I read a while back. I smiled when John walked away with the woman in the end. I will always assume that it was Charlie he walked away with. Whether that puts the point that Charlie is still "alive", she's an allusion of John's mind, or John died. All in all, it was a great book and I enjoyed reading the series.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 2, 2018
Scott, I don't know if you know what you're doing because I sure don't. While this wasn't as bad as The Twisted Ones, and does answer a few questions, you have to dig through the story to find the answers. Are we looking at a book number four? You kind of ended this one almost exactly the same way as number 2.
July 9, 2019
disclaimer: i feel the need to explain that my five star ratings are just a flat "recommendation" and not a glowing review like you would normally expect.
This book kinda freaked me out a bit. I wasn't expecting to be as invested as I was. I read the other two in the series and liked them enough, and I've been very very loosely trying to keep track with what the games are all about. I'm not exactly a 'fnaf' expert and I wasn't expecting to be particularly invested in this book, especially considering i've had it for like a whole year since it came out and i've barely touched it after the first couple paragraphs.
but holy cow, geez, uu h .
so, i finished this in one sitting?
I've never been the biggest fan of YA stuff, nor am I a big fan of thrillers. I say horror is one of my favorite genres, just not horror thrillers specifically. Too often YA and thrillers both shoehorn in needless elements purely just because, i guess, they're sort of just "expected" to be there. The pace always has to be on 110 percent, obviously, its a thriller, right? so, PLOT TWIST! CLIFFHANGER! STEALTH SCENE! or, in YA stuff: there HAS to be SOME romantic elements, right? It's a YA book! etc.
I don't hate romance or plot twists I just think it's annoying when a story doesnt really commit to being about those things and just, like, has them.
stapled on top.
"Why would you ever write a dystopian novel about rebellion if theres not a romantic subplot?" is the type of question that needless genre conforming compels people to ask, and that's baffling to me. I've used this example elsewhere, but it'd be like if there was a law mandating that all films, books, etc ever made must include a baking competition at some point in the plot.
Sure, some stories would work out just fine, because there are some stories written in OUR universe (without that hypothetical law) that are already about baking competitions. But trying to shove that in there somehow in a story about like a bank heist is gonna raise a few eyebrows.
i bring my dislike of YA and thrillers up because i'm not entirely sure what to classify the fnaf books as, if not YA-thrillers. I'd almost argue it doesn't fall into those traps though, weirdly enough, by the time it comes to a close. I have my own issues with it -- spectacular issues all of its own! -- but it largely stayed clear of...those ones.
I would argue it really is about a million plot twists, monologues, and a romantic subplot, by the time it comes to a head. Of course, by the time it comes to a head, it also dissolves into existential nightmares about the reliability of memories and the existence of a spirit world, which feels absurdly off base on the one hand and on the other hand, as ive mentioned before,
it
freaked
me
out.
like, holy geez. I'm not sure entirely what to make of my experience other than that it was, at least, legitimately affecting, and clearly at least a little captivating. To be fair, half the reason I didn't put it down once after i started reading was that the entire way through I had the well-founded fear that if i did put it down, i would literally never pick it back up again.
Part of thats in the underdeveloped prose and lack of place a lot of the scenes (not all of them! just a lot) had, which meant i had to put in an extended amount of effort of my own trying to track what like, the rooms all looked like, and often times just to figure out what was happening in the first place. There are plenty of beats where I legitimately just didn't understand what was going on, so I had to read afterwards and fill in the gaps later as to what *might* have happened, or at least a suitable alternative as to what really happened. That was a lot of effort and I sorta felt like if I stopped reading, I'd never be invested enough to pick it back up again and expend all that attention.
Of course the book did carry its own weight a lot of the time, and this is a really important detail wherein i might dissent a little bit from some other reviewers, because i really liked EVERY single main protagonist across this series. If something bad were to happen to any of them, I'd feel legitimately bummed out, and when a given scene had actual stakes, I was actually rooting for the protagonists to make it out alive! There's no shortage of weird robot chase scenes or sneaky sleuth stealth scenes, and I was genuinely into it a lot of the time.
The way the plot progressed was, actually, surprisingly compelling, ratcheting up the conflict with several well placed reveals which, to me, proved to be all really interesting. And, weirdly enough, all of them had little to do with the previous books, for the most part. There was sort of an underlying mystery in the previous books but the central mystery here mostly revolved around the very very ending of the last book, with of course plenty of plot points from the previous ones being reintroduced to help explore this new mystery in a sense
and then it stops. it eventually pulls back and the last third is a weird mad dash to explain all the mysteries of the previous books, and it was exhausting to read. Like, legitimately exhausting, long plot dumps, but heres the problem here
i was legitimately invested in every protagonist, and for all its faults, at least every protagonist was legitimately invested in these really long plot dumps
this increased emphasis on the supernatural, extradimensional stuff sort of had an oddly similar effect on me as, like, the weirder sequences in twin peaks, where I'm similarly invested in the fates of the protagonists but it kinda broadens out and questions the importance of those characters in the first place. We catch a glimpse into this "child afterlife" where the plot-relevant dead kids are all hanging out like its freetime at preschool forever and im reading it being mostly concerned with the safety of the POV character of the scene more than the actual far-out genre sensibilities. Problem is?
I am LEGITIMATELY invested in that POV character
this is the part that "freaked. me. out."
my problem, really, is that at some point i was tricked into caring about these people. The plot isnt really about them so it became strangely, cosmically depressing the longer it went on.
this is compounded by the eventual, capital B "BIG PLOT TWIST" which i'd already predicted about halfway into the previous book and was REALLY hoping wouldn't be the plot twist because it sounded very much uninteresting to me. It was, technically, uninteresting to me, but because its so existentially tied to the nature of one of the protagonists it proved to be not boring just really, really upsetting, in a way i couldn't have predicted
i wasnt joking when i say this book freaked me out. it wasnt scary it just kinda f'd me up a little bit with its weird dichotomy of likable protagonists and a plot that is unconcerned with these protagonists
i mentioned how i read this book in one sitting. such a thing is LITERALLY unprecedented, btw. Books i completely connect with and fall in love with, like the time machine or the time ships, both took me about a month, and the other books on my reading list which are all books im really really enjoying have been keeping me company for about a year
somehow this one cast a weird spell on me and kept a weird, sustained "meta dread" throughout. I just really hoped the plot wouldnt be what it was. but what can i say? it was.
Frick.
This book kinda freaked me out a bit. I wasn't expecting to be as invested as I was. I read the other two in the series and liked them enough, and I've been very very loosely trying to keep track with what the games are all about. I'm not exactly a 'fnaf' expert and I wasn't expecting to be particularly invested in this book, especially considering i've had it for like a whole year since it came out and i've barely touched it after the first couple paragraphs.
but holy cow, geez, uu h .
so, i finished this in one sitting?
I've never been the biggest fan of YA stuff, nor am I a big fan of thrillers. I say horror is one of my favorite genres, just not horror thrillers specifically. Too often YA and thrillers both shoehorn in needless elements purely just because, i guess, they're sort of just "expected" to be there. The pace always has to be on 110 percent, obviously, its a thriller, right? so, PLOT TWIST! CLIFFHANGER! STEALTH SCENE! or, in YA stuff: there HAS to be SOME romantic elements, right? It's a YA book! etc.
I don't hate romance or plot twists I just think it's annoying when a story doesnt really commit to being about those things and just, like, has them.
stapled on top.
"Why would you ever write a dystopian novel about rebellion if theres not a romantic subplot?" is the type of question that needless genre conforming compels people to ask, and that's baffling to me. I've used this example elsewhere, but it'd be like if there was a law mandating that all films, books, etc ever made must include a baking competition at some point in the plot.
Sure, some stories would work out just fine, because there are some stories written in OUR universe (without that hypothetical law) that are already about baking competitions. But trying to shove that in there somehow in a story about like a bank heist is gonna raise a few eyebrows.
i bring my dislike of YA and thrillers up because i'm not entirely sure what to classify the fnaf books as, if not YA-thrillers. I'd almost argue it doesn't fall into those traps though, weirdly enough, by the time it comes to a close. I have my own issues with it -- spectacular issues all of its own! -- but it largely stayed clear of...those ones.
I would argue it really is about a million plot twists, monologues, and a romantic subplot, by the time it comes to a head. Of course, by the time it comes to a head, it also dissolves into existential nightmares about the reliability of memories and the existence of a spirit world, which feels absurdly off base on the one hand and on the other hand, as ive mentioned before,
it
freaked
me
out.
like, holy geez. I'm not sure entirely what to make of my experience other than that it was, at least, legitimately affecting, and clearly at least a little captivating. To be fair, half the reason I didn't put it down once after i started reading was that the entire way through I had the well-founded fear that if i did put it down, i would literally never pick it back up again.
Part of thats in the underdeveloped prose and lack of place a lot of the scenes (not all of them! just a lot) had, which meant i had to put in an extended amount of effort of my own trying to track what like, the rooms all looked like, and often times just to figure out what was happening in the first place. There are plenty of beats where I legitimately just didn't understand what was going on, so I had to read afterwards and fill in the gaps later as to what *might* have happened, or at least a suitable alternative as to what really happened. That was a lot of effort and I sorta felt like if I stopped reading, I'd never be invested enough to pick it back up again and expend all that attention.
Of course the book did carry its own weight a lot of the time, and this is a really important detail wherein i might dissent a little bit from some other reviewers, because i really liked EVERY single main protagonist across this series. If something bad were to happen to any of them, I'd feel legitimately bummed out, and when a given scene had actual stakes, I was actually rooting for the protagonists to make it out alive! There's no shortage of weird robot chase scenes or sneaky sleuth stealth scenes, and I was genuinely into it a lot of the time.
The way the plot progressed was, actually, surprisingly compelling, ratcheting up the conflict with several well placed reveals which, to me, proved to be all really interesting. And, weirdly enough, all of them had little to do with the previous books, for the most part. There was sort of an underlying mystery in the previous books but the central mystery here mostly revolved around the very very ending of the last book, with of course plenty of plot points from the previous ones being reintroduced to help explore this new mystery in a sense
and then it stops. it eventually pulls back and the last third is a weird mad dash to explain all the mysteries of the previous books, and it was exhausting to read. Like, legitimately exhausting, long plot dumps, but heres the problem here
i was legitimately invested in every protagonist, and for all its faults, at least every protagonist was legitimately invested in these really long plot dumps
this increased emphasis on the supernatural, extradimensional stuff sort of had an oddly similar effect on me as, like, the weirder sequences in twin peaks, where I'm similarly invested in the fates of the protagonists but it kinda broadens out and questions the importance of those characters in the first place. We catch a glimpse into this "child afterlife" where the plot-relevant dead kids are all hanging out like its freetime at preschool forever and im reading it being mostly concerned with the safety of the POV character of the scene more than the actual far-out genre sensibilities. Problem is?
I am LEGITIMATELY invested in that POV character
this is the part that "freaked. me. out."
my problem, really, is that at some point i was tricked into caring about these people. The plot isnt really about them so it became strangely, cosmically depressing the longer it went on.
this is compounded by the eventual, capital B "BIG PLOT TWIST" which i'd already predicted about halfway into the previous book and was REALLY hoping wouldn't be the plot twist because it sounded very much uninteresting to me. It was, technically, uninteresting to me, but because its so existentially tied to the nature of one of the protagonists it proved to be not boring just really, really upsetting, in a way i couldn't have predicted
i wasnt joking when i say this book freaked me out. it wasnt scary it just kinda f'd me up a little bit with its weird dichotomy of likable protagonists and a plot that is unconcerned with these protagonists
i mentioned how i read this book in one sitting. such a thing is LITERALLY unprecedented, btw. Books i completely connect with and fall in love with, like the time machine or the time ships, both took me about a month, and the other books on my reading list which are all books im really really enjoying have been keeping me company for about a year
somehow this one cast a weird spell on me and kept a weird, sustained "meta dread" throughout. I just really hoped the plot wouldnt be what it was. but what can i say? it was.
Frick.
May 20, 2023
Unironically, this book was really good. It pulls off that cliffhanger from the last one and although not the MOST surprising, the twists were executed really well and the horror moments really WENT there.
Honestly I would recommend this horror trilogy to even non-FNAF fans.
Honestly I would recommend this horror trilogy to even non-FNAF fans.
July 2, 2022
Me ha agradado más el primer libro aunque en general si me han gustado , solo que quisiera una precuela de estos libros
Necesito más sobre los papás de Charlie
Necesito más sobre los papás de Charlie
December 18, 2023
To było mega dziwne.
October 28, 2018
This was definitely the best of the three. I think what I find the most fascinating about this horror series is the emotions it pulls from you and how attached you become to the story and the characters. Even at the end, once we figure out (and acknowledge) who Charlie really is, you are still emotionally connected to her. I feel like this still might not be the end, but with Scott who knows! Lol.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 1, 2018
This was such a great series! Book 3 really clears a few things up that book 2 didn’t, it just left you hanging. I do wish these were canon but either way they were great! I’d love to see a Five Nights At Freddy’s movie.
July 9, 2018
It was amazing. so many questions, but so many answers. such an unexpected twist, but its a sensible ending and was great!
January 12, 2024
This was still not a good book but once again I had fun with it.
I think it’s super important to say that I don’t think these will be enjoyable for anyone who isn’t at least superficially aware of the game lore. The plot lines are unhinged and nonsensical and low key I don’t think there was a single thing explained well enough to be understood without knowing the games. I do think this was better written than book 2 (which was a fucking train wreck let’s be honest) but that still doesn’t mean it was good.
I did enjoy how this book ended and it aligned with my expectations and predictions pretty cleanly but I think the journey was a bit rougher than I’d have hoped. I do think it felt consistent with the games in that the first instalment was simple, clear and easy to follow (whilst also dropping in crazy tidbits of lore) and that as the series continued it got consistently murkier and more far fetched. I say this as someone who laps up the games and subsequent lore: this series is ridiculous, the lore is convoluted and inconsistent, and no one theory remains cohesive and consistent under careful scrutiny. The book followed this equation perfectly.
Once again, I think this book is a fun little piece of bonus content - a cute DLC if you will - for lore gremlins like myself. But he warned: this is not especially well written and if you are not familiar with the existing lore, this will make little to no sense to you as a plot line (and even then be warned that this is not canon to the games, but os canon to a side universe I believe).
I think it’s super important to say that I don’t think these will be enjoyable for anyone who isn’t at least superficially aware of the game lore. The plot lines are unhinged and nonsensical and low key I don’t think there was a single thing explained well enough to be understood without knowing the games. I do think this was better written than book 2 (which was a fucking train wreck let’s be honest) but that still doesn’t mean it was good.
I did enjoy how this book ended and it aligned with my expectations and predictions pretty cleanly but I think the journey was a bit rougher than I’d have hoped. I do think it felt consistent with the games in that the first instalment was simple, clear and easy to follow (whilst also dropping in crazy tidbits of lore) and that as the series continued it got consistently murkier and more far fetched. I say this as someone who laps up the games and subsequent lore: this series is ridiculous, the lore is convoluted and inconsistent, and no one theory remains cohesive and consistent under careful scrutiny. The book followed this equation perfectly.
Once again, I think this book is a fun little piece of bonus content - a cute DLC if you will - for lore gremlins like myself. But he warned: this is not especially well written and if you are not familiar with the existing lore, this will make little to no sense to you as a plot line (and even then be warned that this is not canon to the games, but os canon to a side universe I believe).
April 5, 2020
i read this series as a bit, and i didnt think 1 was very good, and 2 was frankly pretty terrible. but for some reason this third one is, like, legitimately good. what makes it different from the other 2? ive placed a few reasons:
1. there is an actual mystery central to the story. in the first two, lets be frank, the first 3/4 of the stories are just padding to get the kids into chuck e cheese. "who could be killing these people?" i dunno, maybe some sort of robot. we all know how each of these books are gonna end, location-wise. but the hook of 3 is that theres are actual questions about the true identity of a major character that takes a while to get resolved. i found the build-up sections of the first two books lacking wherein there wasnt really a "hook" for the story. but this one has one, and a fun one too.
2. higher stakes. since this is technically the last one published, you get to worrying whats gonna happen to the characters. this isnt really work from the authors standpoint, actually, just a matter of it being the last in a trilogy. regardless, this adds to the mood.
3. plot feels more cohesive. the characters actually have reason to be doing things this time around. 1 didnt really have any point to the characters doing what they were doing, and 2, frankly, felt totally uncessesary most of the time. here there are legitimate motivations at play and not just "oh were breaking and entering for the third night in a row, for no real reason".
somehow all the elements that FAILED in earlier books in the series, work here. ive tried to lay out what was different in this one. or at least thats my rationalization for how much better the fnaf 3 novel is than 1 & 2.
i think this is decent YA horror. it certainly surprised me how much i enjoyed it, but you have to think to yourself if its worth getting through the first two, far worse, stories in order to get to this one.
1. there is an actual mystery central to the story. in the first two, lets be frank, the first 3/4 of the stories are just padding to get the kids into chuck e cheese. "who could be killing these people?" i dunno, maybe some sort of robot. we all know how each of these books are gonna end, location-wise. but the hook of 3 is that theres are actual questions about the true identity of a major character that takes a while to get resolved. i found the build-up sections of the first two books lacking wherein there wasnt really a "hook" for the story. but this one has one, and a fun one too.
2. higher stakes. since this is technically the last one published, you get to worrying whats gonna happen to the characters. this isnt really work from the authors standpoint, actually, just a matter of it being the last in a trilogy. regardless, this adds to the mood.
3. plot feels more cohesive. the characters actually have reason to be doing things this time around. 1 didnt really have any point to the characters doing what they were doing, and 2, frankly, felt totally uncessesary most of the time. here there are legitimate motivations at play and not just "oh were breaking and entering for the third night in a row, for no real reason".
somehow all the elements that FAILED in earlier books in the series, work here. ive tried to lay out what was different in this one. or at least thats my rationalization for how much better the fnaf 3 novel is than 1 & 2.
i think this is decent YA horror. it certainly surprised me how much i enjoyed it, but you have to think to yourself if its worth getting through the first two, far worse, stories in order to get to this one.
January 29, 2022
Out of all of the books, this was the best. Was this series worth three weeks of my time? No. But I've got some deeper understanding of the lore now😂. Do I believe Scott when he said that the books are not canon? Absolutely not. Do I believe MatPat's belief that Charlotte and Henry's last name is Emily? Absolutely not. But it was fun to see some of the cameos and stuff. And knowing Scott and the FNAF series, cameos are never just that. So once again, I think it's complete BS when he says the books aren't canon. There's too much overlap and things that help piece more lore together for this to not be canon.
March 13, 2023
The conclusion to the trilogy.
It brought back Marla and Carlton who were gone in book 2; and that's fine except who really cared about them? It revealed a lot of lore...had an interesting, if confusing, twist. Thank heavens for MatPat otherwise I wouldn't have fully grasped what happened at the end.
But a cool way to explore the lore of the games with spooky/chilling implications. There were scenes I gasped out loud at for their graphic depcitions. Yuck. But held my interest. John still sucks though.
It brought back Marla and Carlton who were gone in book 2; and that's fine except who really cared about them? It revealed a lot of lore...had an interesting, if confusing, twist. Thank heavens for MatPat otherwise I wouldn't have fully grasped what happened at the end.
But a cool way to explore the lore of the games with spooky/chilling implications. There were scenes I gasped out loud at for their graphic depcitions. Yuck. But held my interest. John still sucks though.
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