This book was a complete trainwreck. The first chapters are annoying, the last chapters make no sense and are utterly stupid, and the ending is just like What the fuck were you thinking?
Let's start with the beginning. The first two chapters consist entirely of...John complaining. Great. Those first three chapters were just depressing and boring reading through John's daily routine of not caring about anything except "what happened to Charlie" and being sad. It gets to the point where's so spacy and careless about anything that his boss actually fires him and I can honestly see why! I wouldn't want people standing around acting like a space cadet in the middle of an active construction zone! It's dangerous to the other people actually doing their job, it's dangerous to him, and it's a liability to my business!
Not much happens after that. There's a party, John and fake Charlie meet and go out to dinner again, then John talks to Clay about Aunt Jen, Charlie's mom and Charlie's past. After that John hears Theodore saying "Shining star, Silver Reef," presumably a message sent by Aunt Jen telling him and Jessica to come to Silver Reef. But there are two major concerns here...first, how? How did she get Theodore to say that from her little house in the middle of an abandoned 200-year-old town in Utah? And third of all, she doesn't have any reaction when John relays Theodore's message to her after him and Jessica go to her house. So did she send it? If not then who did, and the same question still applies: Why? That's the big question of this book: Why?
So John goes back and surprise surprise, the girl he saw walking towards Clay's house when he left attacked him. My main concern is why didn't John go back in and tell Clay "yo there's a creepy clown girl coming your way"? I mean, if he thought it looked suspicious, then the chief of police of all people should. Anyways, John and Jessica take him to the hospital, he gives them an envelope full of pictures and says "It has to have a maximum range" before falling asleep again. John tells Jessica about Theodore and she somehow knows about a ghost town 30 minutes away called Silver Reef. The next day they drive there and find Aunt Jen, who tells them she can't reveal her secret when suddenly fake Charlie arrives, distracting Jen and giving John and Jessica time to snoop around and then they find Charlie in a box. They comment on how strange this is and then leave after they see fake Charlie killed Jen. OK, here's another problem here. How did Charlie survive and why is she in a box at Jen's house? Well, I guess we'll never know because Jen is dead now.
So, John and Jessica take Charlie to his apartment and John leaves and goes to Clay's house, where he finds one of the mind discs, which makes Ella look like a little girl. He takes her, the disc, and tells Jessica to meet him at the library, stupidly leaving Charlie alone susceptible to fake Charlie killing her. At the library, they see that fake Charlie is actually Baby and realize that they stupidly left Charlie alone susceptible to fake Charlie killing her. They go back and then are lucky enough to manage to distract fake Charlie long enough so John can hide her, and then he asks her on a date so they can spy on her. After John for some reason reveals that he knows about her being Baby and then she chokes him for a few seconds and then goes to pay. Why did he reveal that he knows about her being Baby? How did that help? Anyways, Jessica decides to hide in Charlie's car and go to Baby's Pizza World and tries to go in..? I mean I get following her and spying on her but you could at least watch from a distance. But she didn't and Baby reveals herself and captures Jessica.
So then Baby ties up Jessica and then there's a whole lot of exposition to reveal things that anyone who has a basic understanding of the lore would already know. Also Elizabeth exists in this universe...? I thought William didn't have a family in this universe, and that was the entire reason he killed the original five kids? Anyways, Jessica escapes Baby and her ruthless exposition dialogue and encounters William who got out of the Spring Bonnie suit even though when he was in it he felt powerful and strong (which he probably was (physically, anyways) based on what we've seen of these animatronic so far) so I guess he just decided to remove the suit so he could do science. But as we learned from Cave Johnson, "Science isn't about why, it's about why not!"
Then he and Baby make Jessica do surgery on him and this scene was actually pretty good. The gory and gruesome detail it goes into as Baby takes out his organs and replaces them was actually really nasty. But that leads to another problem where sometimes the book goes into very little description and then sometimes it goes into really gruesome and brutal detail which can be pretty jarring at some points. Then Jessica can't take it anymore and screams at the top of her lungs until Baby transforms into Charlie again.
Now suddenly we're following real Charlie's POV and this is where we get into an issue with the pacing. From this point on we can go from Charlie and John in Aunt Jen's house to Jessica escaping hentai monster Funtime Foxy and it's kind of jarring. Anyways, John realizes he can switch the wires in the earpieces from Charlie's experiment from TTO to make them invisible to the animatronics which will later become kind of a MacGuffin for the characters so they can easily escape situations where they would normally be caught, which to be honest, is kind of cheating. So Carlton goes to get the earpieces. He switches the wires around when suddenly he's caught by fake Charlie. This scene was actually pretty funny, considering so far while everyone else is calling fake Charlie not-Charlie, Carlton calls her hot Charlie. Not-Charlie tries to creepily flirt with him, and he turns her down and tells her to "hit the gym and maybe we can try again in a few years" (I actually laughed out loud when he said that). However things quickly take a turn for the worse as she transforms into Baby and tries to kiss Carlton, her faceplates opening up. Carlton quickly puts the earpiece in, and here's the first instance of MacGuffening from the earpieces. Baby is suddenly confused as to where Carlton went, and she transforms back into Charlie and leaves.
This is when things start to become a sitcom and it branches off into the A, B, and C plots. Carlton goes back to John's place and John and Charlie have left to find answers at Aunt Jen's house (A plot). Marla and Carlton decided to go back to Circus Baby's to find Jessica and the missing kids (C plot) (even thought on the back it implies John initiated his friends to find the kids, even though he's at Jen's house with Charlie while Jessica, Carlton and Marla are saving the kids...false advertising!) They break and enter and go into a mirror maze with Funtime Freddy in it and for some reason he doesn't have Bon-Bon which is sad because that's like one of the main reasons I like him so much. Anyways, here's the first instance of the earpieces deciding to be useless and almost letting Carlton get caught by Funtime Freddy before Marla lets her use his and they barely escape with the power of "because plot" on their side.
Meanwhile Jessica has been thrown into a room with the missing children (B plot). They've all been captured by Baby when she was out and about as Charlie. Jessica explains that Baby is also trying to track her and her friends down (nice job at calming them down) and tries to find a way to escape. The door is obviously locked and the only other thing in the room is a hot-water heater. Suddenly Funtime Foxy appears and his head pops open and limbs start to come out..? One of them tries to capture the little girl Lisa, but Jessica saves her. Unfortunately she forgot about Jacob, the son of the woman she promised she would help find the missing children to, and he was snatched by Funtime Foxy.
Now, like a sitcom, the B and C plots merge. Jessica takes Carlton's earpiece, and he goes after Funtime Foxy and Jacob while Jessica and Marla escort the children out of the pizzeria, when suddenly Funtime Foxy, who is now a hentai monster, comes down and tries to capture them, and Marla tells them to run, making more noise and likely drawing him to them. They get out into the main room and these creepy baby clown animatronics (who I assume are supposed to be the Bidybabs) start coming after them. Jessica and Marla drown them in a ballpit, and just after they think they've gotten away, Funtime Foxy appears and, as I can only assume, tries to tentacle-fuck them again. While Jessica distracts Funtime Foxy, Marla and the children escape, and Jessica's earpiece decides to stop working suddenly.
Jessica escapes into a pipe maze and just follows where the pipe takes her and suddenly tons of pairs of eyes begin to watch her which literally appear for this scene and then have no relevance later on...okay them. Jessica for some reason goes back into the room with Funtime Foxy and realizes she can trap him in the ballpit. Jessica lures Funtime Foxy into a point in the pipe where there's a hole over the ballpit, and suddenly hear earpiece works again, Funtime Foxy gets entangled in the net over it and falls to his doom.
Meanwhile, Charlie and John go back to Aunt Jen's house to figure some stuff out. Charlie finds Henry's suicide note (which was too poetic to find sad, IMO. It should've been more straightforward and simple) and some blueprints for Ella. Then she notices fake Charlie is coming around the house. She grabs them, almost suffocating them both until Baby decides she would rather emotionally torture Charlie before asphyxiating her. She reveals herself as Elizabeth, and shares her memories before getting scooped by Baby and for some reason she stole her Kindergarten teacher's lipstick and Baby was being created in a school (still trying to work that out). And then here comes the kicker that made me want to throw the book into the Grand Canyon (and I may actually do that because I'm going there on a day trip tomorrow). Elizabeth reveals that Charlie was the one who was kidnapped by William and not Sammy, and Henry couldn't handle life without Charlie, so he cried over a ragdoll for months, pretending it was her. And so he devolved into insanity, and recreated her as a robot - oh, come the FUCK ON! THIS IS SUCH A GARBAGE COPOUT! Apparently Henry created the most realistic robot ever, that can perform every single human bodily function. This is such a stupid solution because IT CREATES MORE PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS THEN ANSWERS! What, are you telling me that THE CHIPS FOOLED EVERYONE?! Even Aunt Jen agrees with me, she even says that with those chips the teakettle can tell him his life story, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fourth book that would be the twist villain: the teapot! It's gotten so absurd and stupid that it wouldn't even be that shocking. Moving on from this outrageously stupid garbage copout, Elizabeth also explains how he made her four bodies - one for a toddler, one for an adolescent, one for a “sulky teenager”, in Elizabeth’s words, and one for an adult, and that’s what the four closets were four. The second housed Ella, which was actually Charlie’s second body - oh, ARE YOU SHITTING ME? Ella was just supposed to be one of Charlie’s creepy childhood toys before the Freddy’s animatronics, not CHARLIE HERSELF. But the twist is that Elizabeth is actually the fourth endoskeleton that was supposed to be Charlie’s adult body. Apparently William stole it after Henry died, even though he was perfectly capable of creating his own if the other two Funtimes tell you anything. Which leads me to another question - Why does Henry want Charlie so badly? Earlier in the book he says it’s because “Henry found something truly unique”, but he’s able to create friggin ice cream robots, so it’s not like he’s incapable of creating extremely complex robots. Anyways, Elizabeth explains that all of her rage came from the fury Henry had put into making Charlie’s fourth endoskeleton - when he started to realize he’d completely lost it. His first words to her were “You are wrong.” Of course, she didn’t realize this until she had a conscious to understand Henry’s anger poured into her. And I’m sorry, and I can’t even blame the book for this, but to me that line is kinda funny because it reminds me of that meme “The fat controller laughed. ‘You are wrong.’” Anyways, all memes aside, Charlie smashes Elizabeth’s face with a paperweight, and then goes into the closet where Henry’s suicide bot is. She lures Elizabeth in, and trips the robot, stabbing them both right through the heart, killing Charlie for the third time. But...how? We just learned that Charlie’s a robot and we’ve known since a third into the book that Elizabeth is a robot, too. So how can she kill two robots? Then again, Charlie can perform every bodily function known to man, so I guess the answer here is plot.
Meanwhile, Carlton is still going after Jacob. He lures Funtime Freddy into a room with a ride that, based on how it’s described, reminds me of Bertrum Piedmont from Bendy and the Ink Machine. He turns on the ride, and Funtime Freddy is obliterated in it. Carlton runs into the next hall, but when he realizes he’s lost and on the verge of dying, he breaks down and accepts his fate, apologizing to Michael for not being able to avenge him. Then he wakes up and realizes there was a door right next to him he didn’t notice somehow. He was just too scared, I guess. He goes in and finds Jacob sitting in the corner. Jacob tells Carlton to also save the thing on the table, which is an amalgamation of all the Fazbear endoskeletons. William emerges from the shadows, and Carlton tries to smash him with a pipe. However, William has the upper hand and suspends Carlton in the air as he draws a syringeful of remnant from the endoskeleton and injects it into Carlton. Suddenly he wakes up under a table at Freddy Fazbear’s with the original five missing kids, who are the gravestones at the end of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator. Susie is the Fruity Maze girl, who talks about her dog. If you’ve been on the FNaF and/or Game Theory Reddits for the past three or four months you should know about the whole Cassidy ordeal, and she’s also one of the missing kids. There’s also Fritz, Gabriel, and Jeremy. They’re trying to collect pictures to put themselves back together, and Carlton decides to help them, of course. Meanwhile, all the animatronics have come back and suddenly turned on William (even thought only minutes ago they were trying to kill Jessica, Carlton, Marla and the children), and just as the children put the pictures together, William falls into a fireplace and the children fade away.
Carlton, just barely surviving the ordeal, wakes up in the hospital surrounded by his friends (except Charlie), and after a brief exchange, Jessica gives him the drawing of the children around Spring Bonnie. Meanwhile, John goes to the cemetery and passes Henry and Charlie’s graves. He meets some woman implied to be Charlie, despite the fact she stabbed herself and Elizabeth with the suicide bot, and they walk away together, ending the books on a very abrupt note.
So that’s it. That was the grand finale to the Five Night book series. This book creates more problems and raises more question than give solutions and answers, and the supposed “solutions” it presents are either very confusing or very stupid, and a lot of the time it’s both! There were some good parts but they were few and far between. The writing is clunky, and despite these books originally being meant to help solve the games’ story, this book is just so bizarre and different than the games that it’s unusable for that. The only thing it helped solve was why in Sister Location Baby switches perspectives back and forth from Baby to Elizabeth. In Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator she goes from Baby to Elizabeth within a single sentence, in fact, so I guess that was sort of helpful. But really, that’s it. Overall 4/10, even if you do like FNaF I don’t recommend this.