I feel I have to explain. So I’m not a Five Nights at Freddy’s fan, but had the circumstances been slightly different — like, if I was still a kid when the first FNAF game came out, or if I was a furry — I probably would have been. As a cultural phenomenon, I think Five Nights at Freddy’s is sort of fascinating. I don’t think a horror franchise quite like this has ever existed before. FNAF is very much a product of the modern internet; it owes both its existence and its popularity to YouTube. Its success brought about a wave of imitators and now there’s an entire “mascot horror” subgenre of indie horror games. The games don’t really have a plot, instead they have Lore, and the lore is so vague and convoluted that video essayists and “game theorists” are still trying to puzzle it out to this day — and this is a huge part of the appeal of the series. The creator, Scott Cawthon, is a conservative Christian who donates to the Republican Party and this wound up putting him at odds with his fans (a significant number of whom are transgender Gen Z furries) once this information became widely known, even though it was also never a secret. Etc. It’s a weird series.
A little over a year ago I got curious about the Fazbear Frights books, an anthology series of short stories based on the games. When I was a little kid I really liked Goosebumps, and these looked to be pretty similar. Short-ish horror fiction for children. I wasn’t originally intending to do this for the blog, but now that I’ve read a few of these books I really feel like I need to talk about them. I’ve read some things in these stories that I simply must share with the world at large. I have some things to say. How about we just get into it, though?
A few disclaimers:
I’ve still never played a single Five Nights at Freddy’s game. I did, however, watch playthroughs of all of them so that I’d have some idea of what I’m talking about here. For the benefit of anybody else who isn’t a FNAF fan, I’ll try to provide explanations and/or context when appropriate.
These books were all acquired secondhand. Not giving my money to Scott. Don’t worry.
There are twelve of these books, each containing three short stories and an epilogue. I’m going to review these books one story at a time, going by publication order, so this post is about the first story in the first book. Yes, that does mean this whole undertaking is going to take forever. I also haven’t read the whole series yet, I’m only about halfway through, but I am already dead certain I need to talk about these. Please just bear (geddit, bear like Freddy Fazbear lol) with me here. I think my reasoning will become apparent as we continue.
Anyway, let’s… dive right in…
“Into the Pit”
This story opens with our protagonist, ten-year-old Oswald, being driven to school by his dad. It’s the last day before summer break, which Oswald’s dad tries to hype his son up about, but Oswald isn’t looking forward to the vacation. The narration (limited third person) explains to us that three years ago the local mill shut down, and this has economically devastated the generic American small town Oswald lives in. Hundreds of people lost their jobs, including Oswald’s dad, and many families moved away, including Oswald’s best friend’s family. The town is slowly dying, and Oswald’s family is struggling to make ends meet. His mom works twelve-hour shifts as a nurse while his dad works part-time at a deli making significantly less than he made working at the mill. As a mark of how poor they are, it’s mentioned Oswald has a cheap cell phone rather than a smartphone and his family owns only one computer, which they share. I know times change and technology marches on but this sure made me think about how when I was Oswald’s age most kids didn’t have phones and it was normal even in middle-class households for everybody to share a single family computer, and that sure makes me feel one million billion years old even though I’m not even thirty.
Anyway. Oswald is a bored and lonely kid; with his best friend gone, he doesn’t have anybody else to socialize with, and there’s not much to do in town anymore. There’s no money with which to go on vacation or to send Oswald to summer camp. As an alternative to leaving him at home alone all day, Oswald’s dad suggests bringing Oswald into town with him on the way to work, dropping him off at the local library in the morning and picking him up at the local pizza place in the afternoon. The pizza place in question, Jeff’s Pizza, is a run-down one-man operation doing business out of what is clearly an old Freddy Fazbear’s. The narration doesn’t explicitly tell us this up-front because Oswald is only ten and only knows the place as Jeff’s, but even Oswald can tell this place was once something bigger and better. Most of the interior of the restaurant is unused space, the walls are painted with murals too faded to tell what they are, there’s a small empty stage, and — most importantly to this story — there’s an old, dusty ball pit. (If you got a chuckle out of “old, dusty ball pit,” you’re going to love the rest of this story! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) Oswald is a bit reluctant but winds up agreeing to his dad’s plan because getting to eat pizza every day is sort of exciting when you’re ten.
For the first couple weeks, the plan goes smoothly. Oswald likes reading, likes getting to use the library computers, and likes pizza, so initially he’s having fun. As time passes, though, the routine begins to get stale. The library doesn’t have the next book in the series Oswald is reading, the browser game Oswald was playing on the library computers was of course lying about being free to play and he can’t proceed without paying money, and he still doesn’t have anyone his age to socialize with. His parents do make an effort to try and spend time with him, but this is only really possible on the weekends and they don’t have the money to take Oswald to the movies or the roller rink like they did when he was younger. Oswald does try texting with his best friend Ben, but Ben is on vacation having a blast, so this only makes Oswald feel worse about how his own summer is going.
I should take a moment here to talk about the relationship between Oswald and his dad, since this story is largely about their father/son dynamic. While Oswald and his dad do clearly love each other and generally get along alright, there is some apparent tension. Oswald is, after all, a sulky preteen having an underwhelming summer, and his dad’s attempts at putting a positive spin on things grate on his nerves. This ends up coming to a head one morning as Oswald’s dad drops him off at the library. Oswald has a frustrated outburst about how he’s tired of the same routine every day and how he feels like his parents are treating him like garbage. He doesn’t give his dad the chance to respond before getting out of the car, so all day long Oswald continues stewing with the tension still unresolved. And so, that afternoon at Jeff’s, Oswald decides he’s going to hide in the restaurant to force his dad to come find him. And where better to hide than the ball pit?
I promise I’m trying not to editorialize too much, but it must be said that this story has some… amusing descriptive language about balls. Ball pit balls, of course, but I have a hard time not snickering a little when the story describes how Oswald “climbed into the pit and felt the balls parting” or when we’re informed that “the balls were strangely sticky.” You could argue that I only think that that’s funny because I have the comedic sensibilities of a middle schooler, and that would be a fair point, but this book is for middle schoolers. (Or at least I think it is? Later on it may be worth questioning exactly what demographic these books are aimed at, but this particular story feels pretty solidly middle-grade.) There are several scenes involving the titular ball pit and they tend to be important moments, so I think there’s an undeniable effect that this has on the tone. To avoid totally derailing this summary, I’m not going to point out every single time there’s a funny line about balls, but just know that it happens a lot.
So Oswald climbs into the pit — get it, like the title — and completely submerges himself in the balls. His plan is to hide until his dad finds him, but the dusty pit makes Oswald sneeze and he figures that gave the game away, so he comes up for air… but instead of the drab, run-down interior of Jeff’s Pizza, he sees the colorful and lively interior of Freddy Fazbear’s during what must have been peak business years. The place is full of kids, the walls are lined with arcade cabinets, and the Freddy, Chica, and Bonnie animatronics are giving a performance on the stage. Oswald puts it together that he’s time traveled. He isn’t sure what time period he’s wound up in at first, but from descriptions of the arcade cabinets and the way the other kids are dressed it’s pretty clearly the eighties, and Oswald does figure out that this must be back when his dad was a kid. Later it’s confirmed to be the year 1985.
Oswald manages to keep calm, mostly because before he has time to freak out another kid bumps into him. It’s a boy about Oswald’s age, who introduces himself as Chip and invites Oswald to join him and his buddy Mike in a game of Skee-Ball. Oswald makes up a story about being from out of town and visiting his grandma for the summer to explain why they’ve never seen him at the arcade before.
As they’re walking over to the Skee-Ball area, they pass somebody in a yellow rabbit suit. Oswald assumes this is an employee and doesn’t comment on it. However, I have to. For anyone familiar with FNAF lore, this yellow rabbit character showing up is a very bad omen, as the primary antagonist of the series is known for having worn a yellow rabbit costume. For those of you not familiar with the lore, hang tight, I’ll explain further in a bit. Just know for now that there may be a serial child murderer inside that rabbit suit.
The boys play a few rounds of Skee-Ball before Oswald starts to worry about getting back to his own time. He isn’t sure it’ll work, but he decides to try climbing back into the ball pit, submerging, counting to 100, and standing back up. It works, and he emerges to find himself back in Jeff’s Pizza. Oswald gets a text from his dad saying he’ll be outside in two minutes; it seems no time at all has passed since Oswald entered the ball pit.
From here, it becomes part of his daily routine: Oswald gets dropped off at the library in the morning, heads to Jeff’s Pizza as soon as it opens, and time travels to 1985 to hang out with Chip and Mike. For the sake of clarity I need to mention that time also advances in 1985, so every time Oswald time travels he’s experiencing the next sequential day in that year. Chip and Mike are at Freddy Fazbear’s every single day, a fact the story never comments on or explains — I guess the pizzeria/arcade is literally the only place for kids to hang out in town in the mid-eighties? Oswald spots the yellow rabbit again and is disconcerted by how the person wearing the suit just seems to be standing around creepily rather than actually doing anything, but Chip and Mike give no indication they notice the rabbit, so again Oswald doesn’t mention it. Other than that, Oswald enjoys hanging out in 1985 Fazbear’s. Mike and Chip are nice kids, always willing to share their arcade tokens and pizza with him. His summer vacation isn’t turning out so bad after all.
One morning (this is the last day of summer break, though the story fails to inform us until later) Oswald asks his dad about the arcade that used to be where Jeff’s Pizza now is, since his dad also grew up in this town and would have been around Oswald’s age in 1985. His dad doesn’t say much, just that the place closed. It seems like he’s not comfortable with the subject.
Oswald enters the ball pit that day as per usual, but when he emerges in Freddy Fazbear’s, something is wrong. The scene is chaotic; children crying, people screaming, a crowd of people fleeing the restaurant. Oswald, who’s hoping that maybe his status as a time traveler means he can’t really be in danger here, heads further into the arcade instead, trying to find Chip and Mike. He doesn’t find them. Instead, he finds the yellow rabbit, who beckons him through a staff-only door and down a long dark corridor. The rabbit opens a door marked PARTY ROOM to reveal the corpses of six dead children propped against the wall, all wearing Fazbear-brand party hats.
Okay, let’s talk about the rabbit now. So the big bad of the FNAF series is a guy named William Afton, one of the co-founders of the Fazbear franchise. He is, like I said before, a serial child murderer. The details aren’t important except that Afton dressed in a yellow rabbit suit both while on the job at Freddy Fazbear’s and while luring children away to be murdered. Also, the rabbit suit is what’s called a “springlock suit” — it’s basically an animatronic that can also be worn as a costume by disengaging the internal mechanisms to allow room for someone to put it on. This unsurprisingly went horribly wrong eventually and the suit’s internals snapped back into place while Afton was still wearing it, killing him. When Afton first properly appears in the series it’s as a posthumous character: his spirit is still haunting the springlock suit and his corpse is still trapped inside. I admit that I’m not remotely close to being a FNAF lore expert (I tried to do my research, but, after watching several YouTube videos on the subject, I feel as though I somehow know less than I did when I started) but this is pretty surface-level stuff. “Springtrap,” aka the Spring Bonnie suit with William Afton’s corpse inside it, is the main antagonist of FNAF 3.
I’m laying all this out because I think it’s reasonable to make the same assumption that I made reading this story: that the yellow rabbit Oswald encounters is William Afton wearing the Spring Bonnie suit, either before or after his death. After all, it’s unmistakably the same costume from the description (although it can’t be Springtrap the way he appears in FNAF 3, since by then both the suit and the corpse inside are rotting apart), and the rabbit behaves in a way consistent with what we know of Afton’s behavior (killing children, luring children away so he can kill them, etc.). I consulted with a friend who knows more about FNAF than I do and she also assumed this was Afton. Well… maybe not? While in the process of writing this blog post, I checked the wiki and they seem pretty confident that it’s not Afton, that it’s actually a “demonic entity” and/or “Agony.” The concept of Agony is one I’m not ready to get into yet; this relates to the framing device used in Fazbear Frights to tie all the different stories together, and I wasn’t planning to talk about that until later. If there is anything definitive later in the series to prove that this isn’t Afton, I haven’t read that far ahead yet. For now let’s just keep calling the rabbit “the rabbit” since technically we don’t know who’s in there.
Back to Oswald being confronted with the bodies of six dead children. He screams and takes off running back the way he came. The rabbit chases him. Oswald dives into the ball pit and quickly counts to one hundred. He emerges back in his own time, but strangely on this occasion time has passed while he was away. Oswald’s dad is already here and none too pleased that his son was hiding in that dusty old ball pit. He marches over and pulls Oswald out, but then a pair of fuzzy yellow arms emerge from the pit and pulls Oswald’s dad in. The rabbit steps out of the pit, takes Oswald by the shoulders, and escorts him out the front door of Jeff’s Pizza. Jeff himself watches the entire thing go down and reacts as though this is all completely normal.
The rabbit drives Oswald home in silence. Oswald tries to question what the rabbit did to his dad, how the rabbit knows where he lives, and if the rabbit even knows how to drive, but whoever or whatever is inside the suit ignores his questions. Once they reach Oswald’s house Oswald tries to make a run for it, but the rabbit forces him inside. Oswald retreats to his room and locks the door (the rabbit doesn’t seem to mind this). His mom is still at work, and her shift doesn’t end till midnight. Frantically, Oswald texts for her to come home, it’s an emergency, there’s something wrong with dad, please hurry! Upon seeing the text, Oswald’s mom rushes home and knocks on Oswald’s bedroom door. Seeming both exasperated and concerned, she asks Oswald what’s going on. Oswald’s dad is fine, he made chicken pot pie for dinner and is currently watching TV. Oswald is too confused to attempt to explain what he saw and knows it’d sound crazy if he did. He doesn’t think his mom would lie about the whereabouts or safety of his dad, but if she’s telling the truth, his dad must have driven him home, meaning he can’t have been driven home by a yellow animatronic rabbit. Which might mean he’s losing his mind. Well, there’s medication for that and no medication for when your dad is replaced with a time-traveling evil animatronic from 1985, so I know which I’d prefer to be true, personally. Evil time traveling animatronic all the way.
Next morning Oswald wakes up hoping it was all just a bad dream, but when he sits down at the breakfast table the yellow rabbit sits down across from him. Oswald tries asking where his dad is and his mom tells him to cut the funny business, his dad is right there sitting at the table and this “where’s my dad” bit is getting old. Oswald realizes arguing would be useless and drops it. His mom apparently can’t tell the rabbit isn’t his dad. Aside from Oswald himself, the family cat Jinx is the only one who seems to have a problem with the situation.
The rabbit drives Oswald to school that morning, the way his dad normally would, and nobody perceives this as odd.
At recess Oswald ends up talking to a new student, a girl named Gabrielle. She’s reading a book on Greek mythology and confides in Oswald that the stories help her feel braver, since the protagonists are constantly having to fight monsters and it really helps her put her own issues in perspective. This conversation helps Oswald feel better about his own situation, for some reason, even though he actually does have to fight a monster. I think the implication is that this improves his morale because Gabrielle is pretty? In any case, Gabrielle — much like Chip and Mike — never appears again in the story.
Oswald takes the bus home after school and goes about his usual routine of doing chores before retreating to his bedroom until dinner. He’s decided his best strategy for now is to act like things are normal; attempting to run or to alert someone won’t work since everybody thinks the rabbit is his dad. Eventually the rabbit appears at Oswald’s bedroom door and beckons him downstairs in the same ominous manner it did when showing him the bodies, only to instead serve him pizza for dinner. It doesn’t eat when Oswald does, just sits at the table and watches him. Trying to act normal about the whole thing, Oswald finishes his meal and then announces to the rabbit that he’s going to bed.
Late that night, once the rabbit has “gone to bed” (it lies down on Oswald’s parents’ bed, though whether or not it’s “sleeping” is unclear), Oswald sneaks out of the house and heads to Jeff’s Pizza on foot. His plan is pretty simple: the rabbit dragged his dad into the ball pit, so Oswald’s going to drag his dad back out of it. Fortunately, Jeff’s is still open, and there are no other customers (Jeff’s never seems to have any other customers). Oswald orders a soda to distract Jeff, and then as soon as Jeff isn’t looking Oswald dives into the ball pit. This time he can feel that something else is in the pit with him. It’s the body of a man, and Oswald can’t tell for sure if it’s his dad, or if he’s alive.
With great effort, Oswald manages to lift the body enough to see that it is indeed his dad, and his dad is alive, albeit unconscious. Oswald’s relief is short-lived as he’s suddenly grabbed from behind by the yellow rabbit. He wriggles free, but actually escaping isn’t so easy; the ball pit is surrounded by netting and the rabbit is blocking the only way out. So here we are, the climax of the story: a ten-year-old boy fighting a rabbit animatronic in a ball pit, while the boy’s father lies there unconscious and half-submerged in balls. Good fucking stuff.
Fight sequences aren’t the easiest to summarize, but luckily this one only lasts about a page and a half. The rabbit has dropped all pretenses of trying to fill the role of Oswald’s dad and is just trying to kill him now, and it also turns out to have multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth that it tries to tear Oswald’s throat out with. However, I guess it’s pretty easy to knock your opponent off-balance when you’re fighting them in a ball pit, as Oswald is able to deflect the rabbit’s attacks — or maybe it’s just surprised that he’s fighting back at all, as even when it does manage to bite him (in the arm) the rabbit lets go after Oswald uses his other arm to punch it in the head. Oswald goes increasingly sicko mode throughout the fight and eventually uses the netting to climb onto the rabbit’s back, where he clings to its shoulders as he pummels it in the face. The rabbit shakes him off, but in the process becomes tangled somehow in the netting, with a loop of rope catching around its neck and pulling tight as the rabbit struggles. Oswald watches as the rabbit appears to silently asphyxiate, finally going limp. When Oswald blinks, the rabbit becomes nothing more than an empty, dirty costume.
At this moment, Oswald’s dad comes to, seeming confused as to where he is and what’s happened. Oswald considers telling the truth, but, since it sounds completely bananas, he decides to lie. He tells his dad he was hiding in the ball pit, his dad came to look for him, and somehow he hit his head on something and passed out. Oswald’s dad accepts this without question, which I’ll talk about more in a minute because that’s crazy. Oswald also explains away his injuries saying he got scraped on something while hiding in the ball pit (again, crazy, and we’ll talk about it). We end on a corny heartwarming moment: Oswald tells his dad “I know I can be a pain, but I really do love you” and Oswald’s dad returns the sentiment. They also playfully make fun of each other a bit, lest the story become too sappy. As they’re leaving the restaurant, Jeff calls out from behind them that Oswald forgot his soda.
Bonus Round:
This story has a lot of details that I couldn’t manage to work into the summary but didn’t feel right glossing over. This will probably be the case for all of these FNAF stories. I’ll just list off some bullet points.
Early on we find out that Oswald has been bullied for his name since preschool, with his classmates calling him “Oswald the Ocelot” after an in-universe kids’ cartoon. Recently the bullying has gotten worse because his fifth-grade class learned about who Lee Harvey Oswald was. The way we find this out is that on two separate occasions the same bully chararacter (who doesn’t exist outside these moments) shows up to say “well, if it isn’t Oswald the Ocelot,” and then immediately vanishes from the story again. None of this matters remotely to the actual plot and it’s not referenced outside of these two moments, so instead of tying into Oswald’s characterization as a lonely social pariah (which I don’t even know that he is, really) it just comes across like a weird thing that happens. Twice.
Also in an early scene, we find out that Oswald likes to draw and is specifically into drawing “mechanical animals — bears, bunnies, and birds.” This is before he’s ever been to Freddy Fazbear’s or even learned what the place was, so it seems like a pretty big coincidence that he would be drawing bears, bunnies, and birds specifically. Even more so when we find out his drawings depict these animals as having furry outer coverings over metal endoskeletons, just like the FNAF animatronics. The narration does say that Oswald doesn’t know what compels him to draw this stuff specifically, so is the implication that he’s somehow being influenced into thinking about the FNAF animatronics before he's even seen them or heard about them? Is the implication that he’s a Marilyn Manson fan? I don’t know. Or it could simply be about making Oswald more relatable to the readers, as I would imagine plenty of kids into FNAF have drawn fanart similar to the drawings Oswald makes.
On one of his trips back in time Oswald apologizes to Chip and Mike for not having any arcade tokens to play with, but when he does so his pockets suddenly and mysteriously fill with tokens. Not that this sort of thing breaks my suspension of disbelief when we’re already time traveling, but just because I’m willing to accept that a ball pit can contain some sort of time anomaly doesn’t mean I’m not confused by Oswald suddenly gaining the ability to manifest arcade tokens in his pockets. Nothing like this happens in the story ever again.
Oswald likes kaiju movies and at one point watches what’s clearly Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla except that’s copyrighted so instead of Godzilla it’s “Zendrelix.” I feel insanely nitpicky for pointing out something like this, it really doesn’t matter, but… unlike Godzilla, which is easy to say and write in Japanese (ゴジラ, gojira), Zendrelix is a fucking mouthful (my best guess is ゼンドレーリクス, zendoreerikusu?) and I feel like they could have gone with a less cumbersome name for their monster.
This story has a habit of Capitalizing Things Like This for emphasis, and it’s not that I have a problem with that, exactly — it’s something I do all the time when I’m typing casually, but casually is the key word there. It’s a little odd seeing this in a published book. The other two stories in this book don’t do this, by the way.
Related to the above, let’s talk about the authorship of this story. The other two stories in this book were definitively written by Elley Cooper, but this one isn’t credited to her, and the only other name on the book is Scott Cawthon’s. Maybe Elley Cooper wrote this one too and not crediting her was a mistake, but this story feels pretty different from the other two, so I genuinely think it wasn’t her. So did Scott actually write this all by his lonesome? With the other FNAF books, I think his name’s just on the cover because he’s the series creator and (presumably) comes up with the ideas for these stories, but he might actually be the sole author of “Into the Pit.” (Or it could be written by a different uncredited author. I do lean towards thinking this one is a Cawthon original, though — the thematic content is what I’d expect from him.)
Lore Implications:
I don’t want to spend too much time on if or how this story fits into FNAF canon, because frankly I can barely figure out what the canon is supposed to be, but I know the target audience is supposed to be considering this stuff and therefore it’s something I also have to consider. Okay. So Oswald’s hometown used to have a Freddy Fazbear’s. It was a popular hangout spot for kids in the mid-eighties. The thing in the rabbit suit killed six children in 1985 after luring them into a back room of the pizzeria; this is very similar to the “missing children incident” referenced in the games multiple times, in which William Afton wore the Spring Bonnie suit to lure children into the back rooms of Fazbear’s and kill them. However, in the games there are five children killed, not six, and the final murder occurs in June rather than August/September, and the wiki also seems real sure that it’s not Afton wearing the Spring Bonnie suit in this story… so is this a separate incident that just happens to be extremely similar? Couldn’t tell you. Anyway, the place presumably shuts down after the murders and presumably the entire franchise went out of business too, as Oswald’s never heard of it at all before. Oswald’s dad remembers the place from when he was a kid and is implied to know something about the murders but this is never elaborated upon further. Also I guess the ball pit in this particular Fazbear’s contains a time portal. Or maybe they all do. Who fucking knows.
Closing Thoughts:
Objectively, this is not a very good story, but I’d also hesitate to criticize it too harshly when I think there are several aspects at which it succeeds. Also because it’s a short story based on a video game series that’s popular with twelve-year-olds and obviously I’m not expecting greatness. I don’t say that to be disparaging, either. I know I would have loved this shit as a kid, and even as an adult I still like it. Or at least I like parts of it. Or at least I like it when compared to some of the later entries in this series, which are honestly completely baffling to the point where I don’t even know if I can “like” or “dislike” them anymore? But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Earlier I said that I went in expecting Goosebumps. I’d say my expectations were met, possibly even exceeded at points. Now, about Goosebumps — I loved those books as a kid, but most of them were also objectively not very good. Even the best Goosebumps stories tended to suffer from pacing issues, logical inconsistencies, and awkward prose. None of that really mattered, because when Goosebumps worked, it worked because it was fun. It didn’t take itself too seriously, and the tone was more darkly comedic than outright scary. “My dad got replaced by an evil animatronic bunny rabbit from 1985 and nobody noticed except me and my cat” is totally a Goosebumps premise. It’s easy to see the horror from a kid perspective; if you were ten and that happened to you, that would be fucked up. It’s also an inherently silly premise, which the story seems aware of; this story’s best scenes, in my opinion, are humorous in a way that I’m reasonably confident is on purpose. The scene where the rabbit ominously beckons Oswald downstairs and proceeds to serve him pizza for dinner is genuinely funny and clever and I really like it. This may have been less clear in my summary, but I think the scene where Gabriela tells Oswald that reading Greek myths helps her put her personal problems in perspective because at least she doesn’t have to fight any monsters and he’s like “Yeah same” even though he does have to fight a monster is also an intentional joke, since it’s lampshaded by the narration. And surely the author of this is aware of how funny it is to have the climactic scene in your horror story involve a ten-year-old fighting an animatronic rabbit in a ball pit? I can’t take this story seriously, but I don’t think I’m really supposed to, and that does make it feel fun!
That being said, I do want to note how… messy this story is. There are so many extraneous details in here that I did a whole bullet points section above about the ones I thought were the weirdest. I don’t think stories need to neatly tie off every stray plot thread at the end, but this one leaves so many threads hanging that it’s distracting — like, what happened to Chip and Mike? What’s Oswald’s dad going to think when he realizes he’s missing over a day’s worth of memories (and it’s not just any day, it was his son’s first day of middle school) but his wife is convinced he was there for it? And speaking of Oswald’s mom, who, remember, is a nurse… what’s she going to make of the bite marks on her son’s arm? Surely she isn’t just going to buy his story about accidentally injuring himself in the ball pit. Yes, none of those questions are really important to the story, but they do distract from the parts of the story that are important. That’s not even getting into the bigger unresolved questions, like the true identity of the person/thing in the rabbit costume or what said entity’s motivations and intentions might have been — part of me wants to say this will get clarified later as I keep reading through these stories, but another part of me has absolutely no faith that any of this will be explained.
Like I said up at the top of this post, when I started Fazbear Frights I wasn’t planning on reading these books for the blog. Despite the roughly six thousand words I’ve written here, this story isn’t what got me thinking “oh, I can’t not blog about this.” This one is actually relatively normal. It’s not the best story in Fazbear Frights nor the most interesting to talk about, but it does a solid job of setting the white balance. Now we know what to expect from these stories, right? Or, at least, I thought I knew what to expect after reading this one.