Originally I wanted to have this up for Halloween, but November 7th is close enough, right? This is the first story in Fazbear Frights #2, and, as before, I recommend reading the previous posts I’ve made about these books but you shouldn’t need anything more than a surface-level knowledge of FNAF to follow along.
My policy for these stories is that I won’t warn for the type of content you’d expect from the Five Nights at Freddy’s series anyway (i.e. creepy animatronics, child death, violence/blood/gore) but I will warn for things one wouldn’t know to expect going in. As such, I will say that there’s animal death in this story and we get a somewhat graphic description of the corpse. I haven’t included any unnecessary details, but I figured some might appreciate the heads-up regardless.
“Fetch”
It’s a dark and stormy night and three teenage boys are exploring an abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s. Protagonist Greg and his two friends Hadi and Cyril had originally planned on spending the night gaming, but when the storm rolled in and the power went out Greg convinced his friends to check out the abandoned pizzeria with him. This Fazbear’s has been closed for a long time and the building is in poor shape — boarded up, badly weathered, and seemingly about to collapse. Most of the exterior signage is gone and the boys are evidently not familiar with the Fazbear brand, so they don’t really have any idea of what to expect in here. Greg, however, feels inexplicably drawn to the old building. More on Greg feeling inexplicably drawn to things later.
Oddly, though the pizzeria looks totally derelict from the outside, the interior is surprisingly well preserved. The kitchen is still fully stocked with pots and pans and the dining area still has all its tables and chairs. It looks as though no one else has entered the building since it was abandoned; there’s no graffiti, no signs of vandalism or looting, just a thick layer of dust over everything.
The boys discover the prize counter is still stocked with prizes, including the “TOP PRIZE,” which catches Greg’s attention. It’s an animatronic dog, about the size of a beagle, with a collar identifying it as “Fetch.” Greg thinks it’s remarkably ugly, with patchy gray-brown fur and an unsettlingly wide mouth. Accompanying the dog is an instruction booklet explaining that Fetch can be synced up with a user’s phone so that the dog can retrieve information and other things for you. Vague phrasing courtesy of the story, not me. The boys are naturally confused as to why and how this old animatronic dog in an old abandoned building is capable of syncing with a smartphone. Cyril says the dog won’t be compatible with their phones anyhow and Hadi quickly loses interest, but Greg is still intrigued by the animatronic and tries to get it working. He tries following the booklet’s instructions, which detail how to press buttons on Fetch’s control panel in sequence to activate the animatronic. No luck. Greg tries pushing buttons at random and suddenly Fetch lifts its head and growls. Surprised, Greg drops Fetch and all three boys stare at the dog to see if it’ll do anything else. It doesn’t.
The boys hear a door slam from somewhere else inside the building, get spooked, and hightail it out of the pizzeria.
Now is probably a good time for me to go over some background information regarding the characters and setting; this is all trickled out fairly naturally over the course of the story’s initial scenes, but it’s difficult to work it organically into the summary, so I’ll just lay it all out here. Okay. Greg, Hadi, and Cyril are ninth graders; Greg and Hadi are fourteen and Cyril is thirteen. Both Greg and Cyril are unpopular nerds, while Hadi is pretty well-liked at school, but Hadi also happens to be very handsome with an upbeat personality whereas Cyril is described as looking and sounding like a mouse and Greg is, well, Greg’s a weirdo but we’ll get to that later. The story takes place in a coastal town in the Pacific Northwest. It’s autumn.
When Greg makes it home, he’s greeted by his uncle Darrin, or “Dare,” as Greg calls him. Uncle Dare is Greg’s cool uncle, and this guy is without a doubt the coolest uncle we’re ever going to get in a FNAF story and also probably the closest thing we’ll ever get to a canon gay character — I mean, the story doesn’t explicitly say that Dare is gay, but he’s described as a big beefy 6’5” guy with long purple hair who wears vibrantly colored suits and the story does go so far as to use the word “flamboyant,” so I think I can read between the lines on that one. Especially when we’re told that Dare encourages Greg in pursuing his non-traditionally-masculine interests, like babysitting, growing out his hair, and doing yoga.
Anyway, Dare’s just here to get the generator running, this scene isn’t particularly important in itself, but once more we get some important background information. First, there’s a one-sided rivalry between Dare and Greg’s dad (for the record, they aren’t related; Dare is Greg’s maternal uncle). Greg’s dad disapproves of Dare’s fun easygoing lifestyle, and by “disapproves” I of course mean that he’s jealous — Dare is independently wealthy thanks to a successful mechanical engineering career and some lucky investments, whereas Greg’s dad is overworking himself to be able to afford the oceanfront house the family lives in plus the expensive cars he likes to drive. Greg isn’t close to his dad and treats Dare as sort of a surrogate parental figure. Second, Dare and Greg have a running joke about Dare’s “Magic Finger of Luck” — the backstory here is that when Greg was a little kid he was trying to win a specific toy from a claw machine, got upset after an unsuccessful attempt, and then Dare said something like “I’ll win it for you with my Magic Finger of Luck!” and won the toy on the first try. The two of them still reference Dare’s Magic Finger of Luck whenever they need something to go their way. Dare also happens to wear a distinctive ring on said finger. Third, Greg's next-door neighbor has a small but aggressive mixed-breed dog which once bit Greg’s ankle badly enough that he had to get stitches. I know that was a lot of infodumping but it’s all going to matter later, I promise. Moving on.
The following Monday, power has been restored to the town and Greg is attending his favorite class, Advanced Scientific Theory with Mr. Jacoby. This is an AP class with only twelve students, and Mr. Jacoby is a visiting teacher who also teaches at the local community college, so this goes a bit beyond a typical high school science curriculum. As luck would have it, today Mr. Jacoby is lecturing on one of Greg’s favorite scientific topics, zero-point energy. Mr. Jacoby explains the basics of the topic by telling the class how even at absolute zero, where theoretically there ought to be no energy and no movement, subatomic particles continue to fluctuate and interact with one another. It’s not really clear at this point how this is relevant to the story, but what is clear is Greg’s enthusiasm for the subject; he’s so thrilled he can barely pay attention, but it doesn’t matter to him because he knows all this stuff anyway. The only thing that snaps him out of it is seeing his longtime crush Kimberly Bergstrom, a girl so attractive that the story gives her a last name. Kimberly is also taking Advanced Scientific Theory, but she and Greg haven’t interacted before, so Greg hastily looks away from her lest he be caught staring.
When class ends, Greg gets a text from an unknown number. The texter claims to be Fetch and asks Greg why he left (the pizzeria, presumably). Greg assumes it’s Hadi playing a prank, but this is quickly disproven when Hadi shows up and the texts continue. Cyril’s there too, so it can’t be him, but who else knew about the dog? Greg’s initially creeped out by the idea that someone might have been watching when they explored the abandoned building, but as the texts continue that night and into the next day it becomes apparent that the actual explanation is stranger. The instruction booklet they found with Fetch must have been for real — Fetch is synced with Greg’s phone, and he’s now getting texts from an animatronic dog that seems to double as a digital assistant.
It starts off simple enough. Greg texts Cyril about needing more time to complete his homework and Fetch texts Greg an article on time management. Greg tries to look up information about random event generators and Fetch links him to the latest research. Greg attempts to translate a sentence for his Spanish homework and Fetch provides him with a correct translation. Then it begins getting weirder — one day Greg asks his mom to buy him chocolate at the grocery store, she tells him no, and then upon picking up her online grocery order she finds a chocolate bar among the other groceries. It’s on the receipt as something she ordered, which Greg’s mom assumes to be a glitch, but Greg thinks Fetch is responsible. Part of him thinks this is cool and exciting (he’s treating this like a science experiment he’s conducting, for reasons I’ll get into later), and part of him is beginning to get spooked. Fetch being synced with Greg’s phone is one thing, but how was he able to access Greg’s mom’s phone? Greg hasn’t told Cyril and Hadi about any of this, but he’s beginning to think that maybe he should.
I should be clear, about these texts, that Fetch doesn’t converse on the level of a chatbot, nor is he comparable to a digital assistant like Siri or Alexa. He texts in short, simple sentences and uses a lot of texting abbreviations. It makes it difficult to determine how conscious &/or intelligent the animatronic dog is.
It’s now mid-December and Greg is babysitting four-year-old Jake (this is his regular Saturday babysitting gig; Greg’s uncle Dare is friends with Jake’s mom and got Greg the job). Since it’s rainy out, Greg and Dare plan a “rainy day picnic” for Jake, where they spread out a picnic blanket and eat sandwiches indoors. Dare also decorates the scene with rubber bugs (this guy rules) but Jake gets freaked out by a rubber spider and insists that Greg get rid of it. Greg makes a big production of putting the spider in a plastic bag and burying it outside. Time passes again; now it’s a couple days before Christmas. Greg and Hadi are chatting on the phone about Trent, a kid at their school who’s been bullying Cyril. Hadi suggests they try to get back at Trent by exploiting his fear of spiders and Greg remembers the rubber spider buried in his yard. He tells Hadi about it and jokes that he should dig up the spider before heading over to Hadi’s house later that day. Greg ends up not digging up the spider as it’s pouring rain, but he still heads out later to go meet up with Hadi and is shocked to see the rubber spider lying on his doorstep. The spider is still in the plastic bag. The plastic bag has teeth marks in it. Fetch texts Greg to wish him a Merry Xmas.
This is when Greg finally decides he has to tell his friends about what’s been going on. He invites Hadi and Cyril to his house the day after Christmas and begins to explain about Fetch. Greg has printouts of his text conversations with the dog for proof, tells them about the spider incident, and then begins to go into his theory on what’s really going on, but before he can finish explaining who Cleve Backster was Cyril interrupts to ask if maybe Greg is being stalked by someone who followed them into the abandoned restaurant. At precisely this moment Fetch texts Greg the letters “EL,” which the boys figure must stand for “Evil Laugh.” Hadi and Cyril are spooked. Greg decides not to explain his theory on what’s happening with Fetch to his friends after all. He doesn’t feel ready yet, not until he’s conducted further experiments.
When school starts back up, Mr. Jacoby announces that they’ll be learning about random event generators! I mentioned earlier that this is a topic Greg is interested in, but here’s where we get some more information about that. For those who aren’t in the know or who didn’t click on the link I provided earlier, a random event generator or REG is a machine that outputs random binary sequences. They’re used in parapsychology experiments, such as the Global Consciousness Project, where the goal is to see if the machine’s output can be influenced using one’s mind. Mr. Jacoby has managed to obtain a small REG and will be pairing the students up to do some “intention experiments” with it. To his delight, Greg finds himself paired up with Kimberly — looks like his own intention experiment just worked! At Mr. Jacoby’s directive, the two exchange phone numbers.
Remember when I mentioned Greg’s next-door neighbor owns a small but aggressive dog? Here’s where that comes into play. As Greg is heading home from school, the neighbor’s dog uses the outdoor furniture in order to launch itself over the fence between the two properties and go right for Greg’s throat. Fortunately, since it’s a small dog, Greg is able to grab it and toss it back over the fence before it can do any damage, but he’s still shaken by it — remember, this dog has previously bitten his ankle badly enough to require stitches, so if it had actually gotten him by the throat it wouldn’t have been pretty. Greg texts Hadi about the incident right after it happens and they have a brief conversation where Greg just describes how the dog lunged at his neck and Hadi asks Greg if he’s okay. The following morning, Greg exits his house and discovers that the neighbor’s dog is dead. It’s been disemboweled and its throat has been torn out. The injuries clearly look to be the work of another animal, not a human — still, Greg knows that if he doesn’t move the body, he’ll get blamed for it, because the dog’s corpse has been posed against his bike. There’s very little blood at the scene, meaning the dog must have been killed elsewhere and intentionally moved. After Greg uses a plastic bag to move the dog’s body back to the neighbor’s side of the fence, he receives a text. Fetch has messaged him “YW” for “You’re welcome.”
At this point Greg is officially scared. It was one thing when Fetch was just accessing his text messages and providing assistance based on things Greg said over text, but now it appears that Fetch is listening in on his phone conversations and could potentially interpret any offhand comment Greg makes as a request for “help.” With some difficulty, he manages to convince Hadi and Cyril to return to the abandoned pizzeria with him to look for answers.
The boys sneak into the restaurant on another rainy night, armed with flashlights, a baseball bat, and kitchen knives. At first, there are no obvious signs that anyone except them has been in the building, but then Hadi spots dog tracks on the dusty floor. Something clatters from behind one of the closed doors in the staff area of the building. All three boys are apprehensive, with Hadi and Cyril questioning what they’re even doing here (if they do find Fetch, where are they supposed to go from there?), but Greg is adamant about checking the rooms one by one. The first couple rooms don’t appear to contain any clues, but when Greg opens a door marked “Storage” he finds himself face-to-face with the main four animatronics from the original Five Nights at Freddy’s. Of course, the boys don’t know these characters, to them this is just a room full of creepy animatronics and animatronic parts. Suddenly, something small and furry emerges from behind the animatronics and bolts out of the room at top speed. The boys hear it bark — it has to be Fetch! All three of them take off running for the exit, but once they make it outside they realize the animal they ran from was just an ordinary stray dog taking shelter from the rain.
Hadi and Cyril are ready to just leave at this point, but Greg insists on going back inside to check if Fetch is still at the prize counter where they initially found him. Sure enough, the spot Fetch occupied at the prize counter is now empty. Not knowing how else to proceed, the boys call it a night and head home. Greg checks his phone to find a message from Fetch: “H2CUS” for “Hope to see you soon.”
Greg becomes increasingly paranoid that Fetch might interpret anything he says, either over the phone or through text, as a command to do something. In one scene, he casually texts his classmate Manuel (whose family recently moved to the US from Spain) asking for help with Spanish homework, but seconds later realizes that Fetch might try and make Manuel help him. Greg bikes to Manuel’s house in a panic and, to his horror, discovers the front door left open and dog tracks in the front yard… then he notices Manuel is also in the front yard playing with his dog. False alarm.
After this incident, Greg’s anxiety begins to dissipate somewhat. Several days pass without any further alarming behavior from Fetch, and besides, he’s got something else on his mind: his science experiment with Kimberly. Each pair of students in Mr. Jacoby’s class has been assigned a time after school to meet and use the REG machine, with the idea being that they’ll try to influence its output by concentrating on either 0s or 1s. There’s also a research paper associated with this project; it has to be about REGs, but beyond that they’re free to choose. Greg figures it’ll be on him to suggest the topic since REGs are a particular interest of his, but Kimberly beats him to it by suggesting they write about the connection between REGs and real-world disasters. Greg’s so thrilled he can hardly believe it — turns out Kimberly is just like him for real and shares his niche interest in specific fringe science theories! Emboldened, he strikes up a conversation about Cleve Backster’s plant experiments, and now it’s time for me to finally try and explain what Greg’s deal is. I’m hesitant to call this a reveal given how much the story has alluded to it, it’s not really a mystery, but this is the first time Greg explicitly talks about his beliefs to another character and so I thought it best to wait till this point to explain:
Greg sees Cleve Backster’s experiments on plants, the stuff about human consciousness influencing the output of REGs, and zero point energy as all indicating that the universe is governed by invisible forces that one can learn to manipulate using one’s thoughts. For clarity, Backster’s experiments, in which he used a polygraph machine to show that plants react not only to their environment but to human emotion and thought, have been widely debunked and his results were never replicated; obviously the REG stuff isn’t exactly mainstream science either. This stuff is more popular with Scientologists than with actual scientists. However, Greg isn’t skeptical in the least (there’s no mention in the story itself of these theories not being generally accepted by the scientific community; Greg doesn’t seem aware how “out there” this is) and Uncle Dare has supported him in his interests by getting him his own polygraph machine to experiment with. According to Greg, the plant experiments he’s done indicate that his houseplants do understand his thoughts (to a degree). After hearing that zero point energy might explain psychic phenomena, Greg began to think of the zero point field as something he could communicate with, that might direct him to do things or that he might be able to direct himself. When he went to the abandoned pizza place on a whim at the start of the story, that’s because he thought he was being influenced by the universe to check out the abandoned pizza place. When he got paired up with Kimberly for this science project, Greg thought he’d successfully used his desires to influence the world around him. Greg attributes various other things in his life, like his parents (dad in particular) having to work so often they’re rarely around, to his own conscious manipulation of the zero point field. Tl;dr Greg has independently reinvented The Secret.
Kimberly is interested and credulous as Greg’s explaining all this to her, but she does muse aloud that trying to manipulate zero point energy with one’s mind might be a bad idea, comparing it to a monkey attempting to fly an airplane.
After his meetup with Kimberly, Greg tries to get Hadi and Cyril to discuss the Fetch situation with him, but it’s clear his friends are sick of being roped into this. In their view, Greg’s the one who wanted to go to the abandoned pizzeria and Greg’s the one who activated the animatronic dog, so dealing with the animatronic dog is Greg’s problem. Since even Greg seems to acknowledge this as a fair point, he tells Hadi and Cyril they can go home and attempts to brainstorm solutions by himself. Maybe if he could conduct more experiments, he’d know what to do about Fetch, but more experiments would require having more equipment and more equipment would require having more money. Greg spends some time Googling ways to make money from home but is frustrated and confused by the results (ah, another reminder that this book came out in 2020), so he texts his uncle Dare something along the lines of “Hey, I need your Magic Finger of Luck. Can you teach me how to make money?”
Greg doesn’t realize his mistake at first, but he suddenly snaps awake at four in the morning with the awful realization that Fetch might have interpreted his text as a literal request. He tries calling Dare; no answer. Panicking, Greg gets dressed and rushes outside (Dare doesn’t live within walking or biking distance, but Greg hopes he might be able to ask one of his neighbors for a ride), but upon opening the front door he sees Dare’s severed finger (and its distinctive ring) lying on the welcome mat. Greg doesn’t have time to properly react before his mom comes downstairs, prompting Greg to impulsively hide the finger in his pocket. He’s expecting to have to come up with a story about why he isn’t in bed, but then he notices his mom crying and asks her what’s wrong. Greg’s mom tearfully explains that uncle Dare has just been airlifted to the hospital. He’ll be okay, but he’s been attacked by some sort of wild animal, and it tore his finger clean off!
The reality of the situation, and of his role in it, begins to hit Greg. Before he can have a total breakdown, he tells his mom he needs some air and runs out the front door. Greg doesn’t have a destination in mind, but before he can get anywhere he notices Fetch sitting at the edge of his yard. Immediately Greg shifts gears, grabs a baseball bat, and begins violently beating the animatronic dog with it. Fetch doesn’t react or resist as Greg uses the bat to smash him into pieces. Once Fetch has been reduced to metal debris, Greg drops the bat and collapses, lost in his own guilt, until his mom calls him back inside. Greg hastily covers up what’s left of Fetch by shoving the parts into a shallow hole in the ground beneath a log.
I mentioned previously that Greg has been treating his interactions with Fetch like an experiment. That hasn’t really been elaborated on until this point, but, for clarity, Greg has been viewing Fetch as sort of like an REG he can influence with his thoughts and desires — this is why he wasn’t too concerned when Fetch first began responding to questions and requests Greg didn’t text him directly about. (Supporting this, at one point Fetch texts Greg “REG M2” which Greg takes to mean “REG, me too” as in Fetch has a REG inside of him. Fetch doesn’t clarify whether this is what he meant.) Clearly, however, Fetch is not interpreting Greg’s desires in the way Greg intends him to. Greg thinks back on how Kimberly compared trying to manipulate the universe with one’s mind to a monkey trying to fly an airplane. He’s starting to think she might have been right. Looking at it that way, Greg, not Fetch, is the one ultimately responsible for stuff like the neighbor’s dog dying and Dare losing a finger. Fetch has only been trying to do what Greg wants, right?
Greg has a bit of a breakdown, smashes all the potted plants in his bedroom, then collapses from exhaustion. When he wakes up, it’s the afternoon. Hadi calls to check up on Greg since he was absent from school. Greg tells Hadi that something happened to Dare, but doesn’t get into it. Hadi offers his sympathies and tells Greg that Kimberly has been asking after him. She wants to get started working on their paper. As guilt-ridden and miserable as he currently feels, Greg does still want to spend time with Kimberly, so he tells Hadi it’d be nice to see her.
Not long after hanging up the phone, Greg receives a text from Fetch. “Will retrieve.”
Greg races outside to check the spot where he left the remains of Fetch and, to his horror, discovers that Fetch is gone. Drag marks in the sandy ground seem to indicate that the animatronic dog has somehow reassembled itself.
Kimberly only lives a short distance away, so Greg bikes to her house as fast as he can, hoping to intercept Fetch. When he arrives, however, there’s no sign of Fetch, Kimberly, or Kimberly’s family. The lights are off and no cars are in the driveway. Greg decides to wait for the family to return home, so he hunkers down behind the bushes at the edge of the yard (it’s not clear why he decides to hide, but I’m assuming it’s so that Kimberly’s neighbors don’t ask him what he’s doing there). As the sun’s beginning to set, Kimberly and her parents pull into the driveway. Before Greg can approach the family himself, Kimberly’s dad spots him and demands to know what he’s doing in their bushes. Greg attempts to explain by launching into a brief summary of the events of this story, but of course this makes him sound completely insane and Kimberly’s dad calls the cops.
The police arrive and take Greg back to the station, where he’s processed and questioned (the cops don’t really seem too interested in the situation beyond one cop remarking that he’d forgotten all about that abandoned pizzeria). After that, Greg’s forced to sit at the station and wait for his parents to come pick him up, but they’re ninety minutes away visiting Uncle Dare in the hospital. As time passes, Greg becomes increasingly worried about Kimberly, and begins to dread going back to his house lest he be met with another horrible surprise from Fetch.
Eventually Greg’s parents (who aren’t exactly thrilled with Greg, but their reaction doesn’t matter to the plot here) show up to drive him back home. Greg fears the worst and is relieved to see that Kimberly’s body isn’t lying on the front mat waiting for him; everything looks normal. He immediately heads upstairs to shower — all that bike riding, hiding in bushes, being transported in cop cars, and being fourteen years old has him feeling pretty sweaty and stinky — with the intent of sneaking back out to check on Kimberly as soon as he has the opportunity. He’s starting to calm down a bit by now; after all, he’s had no actual indication yet that Kimberly is in danger, there’ve been no further texts from Fetch, and the “Will retrieve” message was sort of ambiguous. Maybe that text wasn’t in reference to Kimberly after all. Maybe it’s fine.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but it’s not fine. Greg opens the bathroom door to discover… something, wrapped in a bedsheet, laying across the doorway. He watches as a dark red stain slowly begins to creep across the fabric. Greg can’t bring himself to look at what’s inside the sheet, but he fears he already knows. His phone buzzes; it’s from Fetch. “CU.”
Bonus Round:
Earlier I joked about Uncle Dare being the closest thing we’ll ever get to a canon gay character in this series, and I do think it’s probably safe to assume this is on purpose. It seems unlikely that an author in the 2020s would write about a flamboyant man with long purple hair who enjoys knitting and yoga without anticipating that that character isn’t going to be interpreted as heterosexual. However, the actual gayest shit in this story is a scene where Greg and Hadi text each other about what football players (on their high school’s football team, we aren’t even talking about celebrities here) they’d most like to physically resemble, and wind up essentially building an ideal man out of parts from different footballers (this guy’s shoulders plus that guy’s chest plus that other guy’s eyes, and so on). Between Greg idolizing Dare so heavily, Greg himself being mildly gender nonconforming, his very close friendship with the very handsome Hadi (although Hadi and Cyril often appear in the story as a package deal, it’s exclusively Hadi that Greg texts or speaks to on the phone), and whatever the hell was happening in the build-your-own-footballer scene I just described, it would be easy to assume Greg also likes men. This is probably not intentional. Greg’s potential interest in men has no relevance to the plot of the story, and given his longstanding crush on Kimberly I assume we’re meant to read him as a straight boy (yes, of course this doesn’t rule out the possibility of Greg being bisexual, but the idea that Greg might be crushing on Kimberly and Hadi simultaneously isn’t a part of the narrative here at all). Most likely this happened because the author is (I presume) a straight lady who defaults to describing male characters in terms of their physical attractiveness and has a hard time writing from a straight boy’s perspective in a way that feels convincing. There are many such cases. The football scene really sticks out to me as a highlight of this story, though.
Some of Fetch’s texts are formatted within the story so that they appear inside text bubbles, like screencaps from a text messaging program. Others are just written in a bold sans-serif font without any special formatting. Probably an oversight on the part of whoever did the layout for this book, but it is odd and arguably detracts from the impact of some of Fetch’s lines (like the final “CU”).
This story also contains multiple typos. Fazbear Frights #2 was published just a few months after Fazbear Frights #1, and with a tight release schedule like that I assume certain things (formatting, proofreading, writing a coherent narrative, etc.) might have been rushed.
While it’s made pretty clear over the course of the story that Greg and his dad don’t get along, Greg’s dad doesn’t actually appear in the story until near the end when he and Greg’s mom pick their son up from the police station. During that scene, Greg’s dad tells his son, “I’d say I was disappointed in you, but I haven’t expected anything good from you in years.” Even under the circumstances, that’s a remarkably harsh thing to say to a fourteen-year-old and suggests that there has been an ongoing pattern of Greg “disappointing” his dad in some way, but the story ends one page later so none of this is elaborated on at all. I’m not really sure why we needed Greg’s dad to show up for a single scene just to deliver some Gendo Ikari-ass dialogue if we weren’t going anywhere with that.
Lore Implications:
So to get this out of the way first, in the early days of FNAF fandom a rumor was circulated about a hidden animatronic character named “Sparky the Dog” in the first Five Nights at Freddy’s game. Allegedly, Sparky wouldn’t attack the player, but could sometimes be spotted in a specific in-game location. While this was a hoax, the rumor and the faked screencap that went along with it became so well-known by fans that Sparky got a cameo in the FNAF movie. I can’t say definitively if the character of Fetch is based on or inspired by Sparky, but I’d be pretty surprised if that wasn’t the case.
I’ll talk more about Fetch himself in a minute, but first I want to talk about the abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s. It’s ambiguous, but there’s a certain liminality to the place that suggests something supernatural may be going on with the space itself. As I recounted in the summary, the interior of the building is strangely well-preserved compared to its exterior; the story itself points out that given the coastal location, one would expect there to be water damage and mildew/mold, but none is present, nor are there any signs of anyone having broken in prior to Greg and his friends. Additionally, after his first exploration of the building, upon arriving home Greg sees that he’s missed multiple calls and texts from Dare despite not hearing his phone go off at all when he was inside. There could be mundane explanations for all of this — maybe the building’s better insulated from the elements than it looks, maybe Greg and co. actually are the first people to set foot in the restaurant since it closed, maybe Dare’s calls and texts didn’t go through because of patchy service — but taken together it feels as though the place exists slightly outside of normal reality.
As to how Fetch fits into this, well… the seemingly anachronistic nature of the animatronic dog is noteworthy, as it contributes to the impression of the abandoned pizzeria itself being Not Quite Right. Why would an animatronic that Greg describes as looking older than his dad be designed to link with a modern smartphone? Is the restaurant itself a malevolent entity that somehow enticed Greg inside in order that he might find Fetch? Was Fetch created, perhaps by the location itself, to specifically appeal to Greg and to be something he could use? Like I said, this is all ambiguous; we don’t get any definitive answers, and it’s not really the focal point of the story. You could interpret this in a variety of ways, and in that way it’s much like the lore in the games (which I’m fairly sure is vague on purpose to encourage theorycrafting). I do think this is the closest any of the Fazbear Frights lore has come to being genuinely interesting, though. I’m in favor of the ambiguity here.
Closing Thoughts:
I like this one. It’s also kind of a mess. Where do I start? Normally I think I’d begin with the stuff I like and then move onto the stuff I don’t, but this time it’s all sort of mixed together. I’ll just go in no particular order.
First, let’s talk about Greg. It could be personal preference — I enjoy weird protagonists, or more specifically I enjoy when a protagonist notably differs from the norm in how they think and/or behave — but I think Greg’s the most compelling main character we’ve had so far. Using fringe science to justify magical thinking is both interesting and believable for a fourteen-year-old science nerd; it’s unique (at least, I think it is? If anyone else knows of another fictional character obsessed with zero point energy as it relates to Cleve Backster’s plant experiments, let me know) without being so out-there as to strain suspension of disbelief.
I like Kimberly, too, at least in concept. I like that she’s built up throughout most of the story as the pretty girl Greg’s had a hopeless crush on for years, and then when she and Greg finally have a conversation it turns out that both of them are the exact same type of weirdo. Again, maybe this is personal preference — I’ll admit to just enjoying this trope in general — but I think the scene where the two of them infodump at each other about the esoteric topics they’re interested in like they’re characters in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is pretty great and does a lot to make me feel invested in their character dynamic. Unfortunately, it’s also our only real scene with Kimberly, so she ends up feeling more like a plot object than like a character. If she’d just appeared in a couple more scenes and gotten a bit more characterization beyond sharing Greg’s passion for fringe science, I think it’d really go a long way.
As for the character of Fetch himself, well… I have mixed feelings. There’s an idea in here that I really like, but I’m not sure it lines up with author intent. What makes Fetch feel like a compelling villain to me is that it’s not really clear how sentient/intelligent he is, and how the majority of what he does is presented as misguided attempts to help Greg. Is Fetch actively malevolent, or just a machine performing according to the instructions it thinks it’s being given? Especially once Fetch begins committing acts of violence on Greg’s behalf, it’s scarier not knowing if Fetch is being deliberately malicious or if he’s just doing what he thinks Greg wants. The texts from Fetch go a long way to sell this, and they’re unfortunately also where this completely falls apart. See, as I mentioned previously, Fetch has a particular way of texting — he doesn’t type in full sentences and uses a ton of texting abbreviatons, mostly ones I’ve never seen anybody use. It’s not how humans text, and it’s far less sophisticated than the way the average chatbot or digital assistant in the 2020s can communicate. The tone of his messages is generally polite and helpful, but in a way that feels canned; it’s always clear Greg is conversing with a machine. All of this works well except that Hadi, the other character Greg talks to over text, also uses weird abbreviations I have never seen anybody use. It reminds me of those 2000s-era PSAs to parents about teen texting slang. I remember this kind of thing getting rightfully mocked for how out of touch it was back when I was a child. Enough time has passed since then that I’m the out-of-touch adult now, but I still feel pretty confident that teenagers nowadays do not use abbreviations like “BFG” for “big freakin’ grin” when they’re texting the boys. This unfortunately makes me suspect that Fetch’s particular way of texting isn’t so much a deliberate character choice as it is a byproduct of the author having no idea how texting works. The other thing I have to complain about regarding Fetch’s characterization is the scene where he texts Greg “EL” for “evil laugh” — this is impossible to take seriously, it actively makes Fetch look less threatening because of how stupid it is, and this is the only moment in the story where Fetch acts like a card-carrying villain, so it just feels counter to the rest of his character. Cut that shit out! Where was the editor?
While the overall quality of the writing here is pretty middling (and I don’t expect anybody to have brought their A-game to the FNAF anthology series), I feel I have to give credit where it’s due for the death/gore scenes. When Greg opens the door to find that Fetch has killed the neighbor dog, or that Fetch has bitten off his uncle’s finger, the scenes are written in a way where we get Greg’s reaction to the gruesome sight before we actually get to know what he sees. This works pretty well to build suspense and make it feel like a reveal when we finally get the gory description; it reminds me of some of the better creepypastas I read when I was a kid, and I can imagine that this would work well on the target audience. (It’s also sort of a rule-of-three thing, since we have three violent incidents with Fetch, but Kimberly’s death is so foreshadowed the story doesn’t bother to drag it out any further by making us wait for the description of her body wrapped in the bloody sheet. Which, to be clear, I think was the right call.)
This is the first one of these stories that’s really made me give any thought to what might happen after the ending, mostly because I can easily imagine this turning into a story about Greg being framed for Fetch’s crimes. Kimberly turning up dead in Greg’s house right after he got picked up by the cops for allegedly stalking her looks pretty bad. It’s never mentioned that he got rid of it, so Greg still presumably has possession not only of his uncle’s ring but of the entire severed finger. Even the neighbor’s dog’s death seems like it could potentially be tied back to Greg if, say, someone spotted him moving the body. Greg already feels like he’s ultimately responsible for Fetch’s actions anyway, so it feels like a logical progression of the narrative. Maybe I’m only thinking about this because I play too many murder mystery adventure games, and I also don’t mean to sound like I’m criticizing the story for not going in this direction. I really mean it in a positive way — I liked this story enough that I think it’s fun to imagine there being more of it.