Back at it again at Freddy Fazbear’s. I recommend reading my previous two posts about the FNAF short stories before reading this one, but prior knowledge of the games isn’t necessary. This is the third and final story in Fazbear Frights #1: Into the Pit. Because it’s the final story, I’m also going to spend a little time at the end of this review talking about the book as a whole.
“Count the Ways”
Unlike the previous two stories, this one isn’t told in a linear, chronological fashion; we begin in media res with the protagonist having already landed herself in a dire predicament and the bulk of the story is told through flashbacks explaining how we got here. Occasionally we cut back to the present between scenes to keep the suspense up (because, again, dire predicament). For the sake of keeping this plot summary easy to follow, I’m just going to tell the story chronologically, but I will tell you that we know from the very first page of this one that protagonist Millie Fitzsimmons (wow, a protagonist with a last name!) winds up trapped inside the belly of Freddy Fazbear, who is musing about how he should kill Millie while also making fun of her for being goth. Hopefully that piques everybody’s interest. Let’s start from the beginning now.
So the backstory here is that fourteen-year-old Millie’s parents have temporarily moved overseas after Millie’s dad was offered a one-year teaching position in Saudi Arabia, leaving Millie in the care of her eccentric grandfather. We’re right back to these stories feeling like Goosebumps. Millie’s grandpa lives in an old Victorian, which you’d think would be a goth girl’s dream, but Millie takes issue with the fact that her grandpa is a collector and the house is packed with assorted weird antique shit. I wouldn’t expect a goth to have a problem with that either. However, Millie is extremely angsty and fourteen years old on top of being goth and so she finds a way to have a problem with just about everything. Her bedroom (formerly her deceased grandmother’s sewing room) is cramped and still has “sweet old lady” vibes despite her efforts to goth up the space. Her grandfather’s cooking is terrible. School sucks, homework sucks, everything is miserable forever, you get the picture.
Given that she’s an extremely angsty fourteen-year-old goth, Millie spends a good deal of time bemoaning the misery of her existence and dramatically wishing herself dead. It’s not that she’s suicidal. Millie doesn’t, at any point, talk or think about killing herself. However, she does romanticize the concept of death, and I mean that literally. In an (honestly pretty funny) early scene, Millie googles “poems about death” after getting upset at her grandpa and reads an Emily Dickinson poem — the book doesn’t outright say which poem, but it’s obviously “Because I could not stop for Death” — and interprets the poem as being about Death, whom she imagines as a sexy goth boy like the lead singer of her favorite band, taking a girl on a date.
It probably won’t shock you to learn that Millie has no friends at school. Other kids view her as weird, partly because she’s goth and partly because her family is considered to be sort of the “weird family” in town. However, it seems things might be about to change when a new boy sits with her at lunch. New boy’s name is Dylan and not only does he have dyed hair and a cool leather jacket, but he immediately strikes up a conversation about the works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. On top of that, he compliments Millie on her earrings, which are Victorian mourning jewelry, and he actually knows what that is! Millie thinks she’s never met somebody so cool and sophisticated in her life.
Millie’s in a rare good mood after having met Dylan, and her grandpa notices at dinner. He can clearly tell Millie has a crush and teases her a bit about it, saying that he was just a bit older than Millie when he met her grandmother. Then he gets sidetracked reminiscing about Millie’s grandma, who died before Millie was born. Millie’s grandpa never remarried and it’s clear how much he loves and misses his late wife still. The topic shifts to Poe after Millie references “Annabel Lee.” Grandpa tells Millie that Poe didn’t write about death just for the sake of being spooky, but that it was because he’d lost so many people that he loved. Later, Millie goes back over “Annabel Lee” in her head, and this time it seems to her like a poem about love, not about death.
Dylan hands Millie a copy of The Call of Cthulhu the next day at lunch. He tells her she can keep it, he’s got another copy. Millie tries to play it cool, but she can barely contain her excitement about the gift. It’s not really about the book, it’s the fact that Dylan thought of her and went out of his way to do something nice. In an (also very funny) follow-up to the earlier scene where Millie googles “poems about death,” this time she googles “poems about love,” reads an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem — again, the book doesn’t outright say the title, but it’s obviously “How Do I Love Thee?” — and thinks “wow, this time I really get what the poem is about.”
Millie runs into Dylan at the library that weekend. She’s finished The Call of Cthulhu and is looking for something to read next. Dylan points her towards Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and then hangs out with her while she reads so he can see her reaction. Afterwards Dylan asks Millie if she’d like to accompany him to a nearby café for tea and they continue to chat about books. Nothing is said about whether or not this is a date and there’s no outright flirting between the two, but given that both of them are fourteen this could mean anything and Millie clearly is hopeful they might become a couple.
The following week is the last week of school before winter break, and Millie’s school is holding a “holiday bazaar” in the evening. Millie doesn’t want to go, she thinks it’s stupid, but her grandpa on the other hand is excited — he used to teach math at the school, so he has friends there, and on top of that there’s going to be an all-you-can-eat cookie buffet. Seeing his enthusiasm, Millie agrees to go, figuring it might be an opportunity to see Dylan if he’s there. Sure enough, Dylan is there, but to her horror Millie sees he’s holding hands with a girl. The girl in question is Brooke, a “blandly pretty” blonde girl Millie knows in passing from one of her classes and clearly views as a basic bitch. Without confronting the couple, Millie leaves to find Grandpa and demands that they go home now.
On the drive home, Millie’s grandpa tries to ask Millie what’s wrong and Millie has a meltdown and proclaims that nobody cares if she lives or dies. Her grandpa sympathizes and says that he remembers how awful it is to be fourteen. Millie thinks that he just doesn’t fucking get it. She’s gone right back to wanting death to save her from the never-ending nightmare of her existence et cetera et cetera.
The next day at school, Millie’s surprised and angry when Dylan sits across from her at lunch as though nothing is wrong. She tries to confront him, but he’s confused about what the issue is until finally it dawns on him that Millie thought they were dating. Dylan apologizes for potentially having misled her and says he thinks Millie is cool and pretty but he just wants to be friends — hasn’t she ever just been friends with a boy before? (Millie hasn’t. She’s had a grand total of one friend before in her life.) Millie argues that Dylan said during their first encounter that she was the only cool person he’d met at this school, and Dylan says, yeah, that was his first day and he hadn’t met Brooke yet. Millie doesn’t hide her disdain and tells Dylan that Brooke is “blonde and basic,” and Dylan calls her out on judging a girl she’s never so much as had a conversation with. He tells Millie that he’s disappointed in her for judging others based on appearances when she ought to know better. After that, Dylan doesn’t sit with Millie at lunch anymore.
Millie becomes increasingly unhappy as the holidays approach; seeing everybody else cheerfully prepare for Christmas is making her feel worse. She announces to her grandpa that she isn’t going to be celebrating Christmas this year. Her grandpa tries to get to the root of what’s bothering her, but Millie denies that this is about missing her parents (even though she does miss them a little) or about falling out with a friend (she hasn’t told her grandpa about what happened with Dylan).
On Christmas Eve, Millie’s extended family — aunt, uncle, and cousins — arrive for the festivities. Millie quickly becomes fed up with the cheery holiday atmosphere and leaves to go for a walk, not bothering to grab her coat before heading out the door. It’s too cold to stay outside without a coat for long, but Millie doesn’t want to go back in and face her family, so she decides to go hang out in her grandpa’s workshop instead. Grandpa’s workshop is crammed with all sorts of stuff he’s gotten from yard sales, flea markets, and the like, and she notices a particularly strange item in one corner. It’s a large animatronic bear in a top hat, with a body cavity big enough for somebody to climb inside. This time we don’t need to speculate about which animatronic this is; from the description, it’s Funtime Freddy, although Millie doesn’t recognize the character. Millie can hear her cousins playing outside and worries that they’ll find her and drag her back into the holiday celebration, so she decides to hide by climbing into the animatronic and shutting herself inside it.
And this brings us full circle back to the story’s opening. Once she’s inside the animatronic, the door becomes stuck, trapping her inside. The animatronic’s eyes roll inwards so that all Millie can see in the dark are its glowing blue eyes staring at her (good detail) and it begins to talk to her. Funtime Freddy addresses Millie by name and tells her that since goths like her are always daydreaming about death, he’s going to make her wishes come true by killing her. Millie pleads to be let out, but Freddy refuses and instead begins musing about all the different ways in which he might kill Millie and describing each potential execution to her in gruesome detail. Perhaps he’ll just keep her inside his chamber until she dies from dehydration or starvation. Perhaps he’ll short out the power in the workshop and allow his body to get so cold that Millie freezes, or alternatively heat himself up until she boils. Perhaps he’ll use his metal internals to impale her. Perhaps he’ll electrocute her. He continues making suggestions, waiting for Millie to choose.
Millie comes to the realization that all her talk of wanting to die was really about wanting her life to be different, and tells Freddy she’s not suicidal, the death talk was more of an escapism thing. He’s undeterred by this argument and continues suggesting execution methods. It’s clear Millie won’t be able to talk her way out of this one.
As Freddy’s describing to Millie how he could decapitate her by quickly passing a sharp sheet of metal through his own body cavity, Millie notices a tiny sliver of light coming through the door and thinks she may be able to pry it open. She’s wearing a metal cuff bracelet that’s thin enough that she may be able to work it through the crack in the door; however, she’s worried that if she tries testing this out, Freddy’ll notice her before she manages to escape.
Freddy prompts Millie to tell him what she thinks of his decapitation idea and Millie does actually think it over. If the blade passes through the chamber aiming for her neck, she might be able to avoid it by ducking down as low as she can. Since Freddy had also suggested he might aim the blade lower and bisect her, Millie curls up at the bottom of the chamber, trying to make herself as small as possible. She thinks about how if she makes it out of this alive she’s going to apologize to Dylan and make a point of being nicer to her grandpa.
Before executing her, Freddy tells Millie he’s sentencing her to die for “Crimes of Humanity” and calls her out on having been rude, judgmental, and ungrateful. Millie acknowledges he’s not wrong but says that everybody’s guilty of that stuff from time to time, so why does she have to die for it? Freddy tells her, “Because you’re the one who crawled into my belly,” and, after counting to three, passes the blade swiftly through his chamber.
The scene cuts back to Millie’s grandpa as he and the rest of the family prepare to open their presents. He hadn’t thought much of it when she failed to show up for dinner given her insistence on not celebrating the holiday, but Millie’s grandpa is starting to get a touch worried and tries calling Millie’s cell phone. It rings from inside the house; Millie forgot it in her coat pocket. Grandpa is a bit concerned that Millie is outside without a jacket, but reassures himself thinking she’ll come back when she’s ready. He arranges her presents into a pile for when she returns. The story ends there, without revealing whether or not Millie survived.
Bonus Round:
Millie has a black cat named Annabel Lee after the Edgar Allen Poe poem. I tried to find a way to work this into the summary, but seeing as the cat is only ever mentioned and never actually appears in the story, I couldn’t manage it.
I get the sense that the author (that’s Elley Cooper again) might have felt a little self-conscious about using such a Goosebumps-ass plot point as “parents travel overseas for work leaving the child protagonist in the care of an eccentric elderly relative,” because the story spends a good deal of time justifying it by describing Millie’s parents — who never appear in the story, we never even see Millie call them although we’re told that she does — as disorganized and flighty, constantly starting projects they can’t finish and hopping from job to job without ever finding anything more permanent. In fact, we’re told that Millie’s parents are the subject of local gossip because they’re always trying out new passion projects that inevitably fail, and because the family owns a fixer-upper colonial that Millie’s dad repainted two sides of before tiring of the project and leaving the other two sides of the house in their original run-down condition. I totally believe that people might gossip about that kind of thing in a small town, but I have a harder time accepting (as the story wants me to) that Millie’s classmates make fun of her because her dad sucks at home renovation. Doesn’t seem like something the average ninth grader would care about one way or the other. My point is, the amount of focus on this plot point makes me buy it less, and as you can probably tell from how little I mentioned it in the summary, it doesn’t even matter.
We’re told that in elementary school Millie was best friends with a girl named Hannah, but in middle school they drifted apart after Hannah began hanging out with the popular crowd instead. From her outside perspective, it seems obvious to Millie that the popular girls Hannah hangs out with now don’t truly accept her as one of them (there’s a class difference, with the popular girls coming from rich families and Hannah having a more ordinary background). This is discussed in the story for all of two paragraphs and then completely forgotten about, but I think it’s interesting to note that Hannah is basically the same character as Sarah from the previous story, minus the turning into scrap metal and dying part (probably?).
Lore Implications:
Like I said, there’s no need to speculate this time about the identity of the evil animatronic. We know it’s Funtime Freddy, the pink-and-white variant of Freddy Fazbear that appears in Sister Location. This makes some amount of sense, as Funtime Freddy is shown to have a chest cavity big enough that I presume a small fourteen-year-old would be able to fit inside. The confusing part is that, personality-wise, this is not recognizable as the same character at all. Freddy in this story is described as speaking with a deep, booming voice, and he seems in no rush to kill Millie, taking his sweet time describing different execution methods to her. Freddy in Sister Location, on the other hand, has a voice that is neither deep nor booming (it’s raspy and frequently shifts into a high register) and he comes across downright manic, so it’s difficult to imagine him as a patient fellow. There’s really no common thread between the two depictions of this character, except, I guess, that both are affably evil.
The other most notable thing about Funtime Freddy as he appears in the games is that one of his arms terminates in a hand puppet, and the hand puppet (based on Bonnie, referred to in-game as “the Bonnie hand puppet” or “Bon-Bon”) functions as a separate animatronic that can move independently, including being able to attack/jumpscare the player on its own. It’s conceivable to me that Funtime Freddy in this story might just be missing his hand puppet, since the animatronic was acquired secondhand and isn’t exactly in pristine condition; however, I am disappointed Bon-Bon wasn’t incorporated into this story in some way, because I’m personally fond of him. Look at his jumpscare. He’s far too little and silly for it to be remotely threatening. I love it and I think his presence would have improved this story.
Setting aside the lack of Bon-Bon and the inconsistencies in characterization, I have a bigger Lore Question. Is Freddy psychic in this story? He addresses Millie by name when she first climbs inside him, references her parents being away in Saudi Arabia, and mocks her for romanticizing death even though she certainly never told him about any of that. I truly can’t tell if the implication is that he can read Millie’s mind or not. Maybe Freddy just overheard Millie’s grandpa talking to or about her, since he’s been in the workshop all along, or maybe he’s directly overheard Millie complaining and wishing herself dead, but the way to establish this would have been to actually have a scene where Millie and her grandpa are talking to each other in the workshop and that never happens. Freddy also calls Millie “Silly Millie” at one point, which we later learn was something kids called her in elementary school, but it’s not a difficult moniker to come up with so that could mean anything. In the same scene Freddy mocks Millie for “daydreaming about Death like he’s the lead singer of some boy band,” which is quite literally something Millie does and not something she ever talks about out loud… but, again, this could just be coincidence, it’s not really a far-fetched assumption to make about a young teenage girl who heavily romanticizes the concept of dying. Millie never challenges him on how he knows any of this stuff. I genuinely don’t know how it’s supposed to read.
Closing Thoughts:
I’ve got mixed feelings about this story, but I’ll begin with what I liked. I like the ambiguity of the ending. I like that the story is told out of chronological order; having the story open with Millie trapped inside an animatronic that’s about to kill her does make the reader want to know how she wound up in that predicament, and it certainly makes the story feel more interesting than it would if told chronologically. I think the scenes where Millie is googling famous poetry about death and love are both pretty funny. I’m running out of nice things to say at this point, so I guess it’s time to switch gears and be a hater?
Prior to rereading this story for the blog, I actually expected to have a more positive attitude towards it. Part of this is just that it works better on an initial read, when you actually don’t know how Millie wound up in her predicament, and I think it also helps that this story comes right after “To Be Beautiful,” which ended with the main character dying. A lot of kid horror won’t go so far as to kill off the protagonist, but this series has already proven its willingness to do so and thus the stakes here feel real. Plus, this story is of objectively better quality than many of the later entries, so I figured that when it came time to review it I’d be saying something about how this one is pretty good. I don’t know, though, on reflection this one isn’t really working for me. I’ve tried to narrow my vague feelings of dissatisfaction with this story down to a couple specific problems that I have with it, and I fully acknowledge that these are going to seem a bit silly and nitpicky, especially when we consider these are licensed video game tie-in books for twelve-year-olds and I am so not the target audience. Regardless:
My first problem is with the way Millie’s character is written. She doesn’t really have any character traits outside of being goth, and yet she also doesn’t feel convincing as a goth character. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on goth subculture, but I’m familiar with the stereotypical depiction of goths in media and Millie feels unconvincing even by that standard. This is a goth girl who doesn’t like getting to live in an old Victorian filled with antiques, doesn’t like the other kids at school calling her “Dracula’s Daughter,” and doesn’t like that she and her family are considered weird. None of that is an inherent problem, but I would at least like to know more about why someone who dresses in alternative fashion and sticks out from her peers as a direct consequence of this would be so bothered by not fitting in with her peers, or why someone who collects Victorian mourning jewelry has a problem with other antique collections. Where this all becomes a real issue to me is that the story wants us to feel invested in whether this character lives or dies, and Millie is already sort of difficult to like considering how much of the story she spends being an asshole to her grandpa for no real reason or being upset she got friendzoned. Not that being rude at age fourteen is something anybody deserves to die for, but when this character is both frequently unpleasant and written in a way that feels inauthentic, it’s hard to want to root for her. This sucks, because there are moments (like in the aforementioned poetry scenes) where Millie feels like a melodramatic teenager in a fun way, and I really wish the story had learned into that harder. I think I could have really liked that Millie. Instead I just feel apathetic about her.
My second problem is that the story is full of literary references that don’t mean anything. I know this is horribly nitpicky, and I will be fair and acknowledge that some of the literary references do mean something. The scene where Millie reads “Because I could not stop for Death” serves to establish what Millie’s concept of death is. The title of this story serves as both a reference to the poem “How Do I Love Thee?” and to Freddy listing off (counting, if you will) the different ways in which he could kill Millie, and from there you can sort of pull out a theme about love vs. death, especially when factoring in the conversation Milllie has with her grandpa about “Annabel Lee.” The other literary references, however, just seem to function as set dressing. This story doesn’t have anything to do with The Lottery or The Fall of the House of Usher or The Call of Cthulhu. It’s already rather bold, I think, for a story like this one to be making so many references to the classics — like, you probably shouldn’t be trying to draw a parallel between a classic work of horror fiction and your Five Nights at Freddy’s story aimed at middle school kids, you’re punching way above your weight there — but at least half the references aren’t even meant to draw any parallels or highlight any themes, this is just about Millie being a goth who likes to read. Of course, I didn’t go into this story expecting it to be anywhere near on par with the likes of Shirley Jackson, but this story really isn’t doing itself any favors by inviting that comparison only to do nothing with it. In conclusion, everybody should go read The Haunting of Hill House if you haven’t already.
Closing Closing Thoughts:
We’ve reached the end of the first Fazbear Frights book, not counting the “Stitchwraith Stinger” at the end of the book since I’ll be giving all of those their own post eventually, and I thought it might be worthwhile to reflect on the book as a whole, maybe compare/contrast these three stories a little.
Of our three protagonists, all three are children (this may seem like it’d be a given considering the target demographic, but it’s not always the case going forward), and all three are lonely, having few or no friends. There’s a common theme in all three stories about being careful what you wish for. One protagonist lives, one dies, and one’s fate is unknown. If we consider Eleanor to be based on Circus Baby, and I think it’s pretty clear that she is, then two out of the three stories feature animatronics from Sister Location specifically, and I’m not sure whether or not that means anything.
The thing that really sticks out to me here, though, is the financial issues that keep coming up across all three stories. “Into the Pit” spends a great deal of time on how Oswald’s family is struggling financially and their entire town is struggling financially and as a result Oswald has to spend his summer at the library or the run-down local pizza place while both his parents work. In “To Be Beautiful,” Sarah and her mom live paycheck to paycheck in a bad part of town, and all the people Sarah deems beautiful also happen to be wealthy; there’s also the scene where she talks about all the cosmetic procedures she’d have done if she won the lottery, which directly highlights how “beauty” is something rich people can just buy, and the scene where the gorgeous wealthy girls Sarah idolizes mock an employee for making minimum wage. It’s less of a focal point in this story, but “Count the Ways” does talk about how Millie’s parents can’t manage to hold down jobs and are only really keeping their heads above water because Millie’s grandpa is able to help with bills/food. This isn’t really surprising for FNAF considering that the early games all had you working as an overnight security guard in some of the most abysmal working conditions imaginable only to take home less than $100 at the end of the week, and, while it’s played for comedy, it’s also part of the horror. Scott Cawthon struggled to make ends meet and provide for his family before he found success with the FNAF series, and it makes sense that his experiences with financial instability would be reflected in his creative output. However, these stories (except maybe “Into the Pit”) weren’t written by Scott directly, so I’m not sure how much of this we can attribute to him, and I’m also not sure where we’re going with this theme, if anywhere. It’s almost certainly not intended as a critique of capitalism, given Scott’s conservative politics. Maybe it’s just a sign of the times and otherwise Not That Deep. It’s going to continue to be a recurring theme in these books, though, so I wanted to mention it before we move on.
Anyways, next up we have the second book, which contains one story I’ve been looking forward to talking about on here for a long time and two others I don’t remember well at all. Stay tuned!