This was a hard read. Not because of the content or source material or anything like that. I know what I'm getting with a Five Nights at Freddy's tie-in novel - killer robots possessed by the spirits of the victims of a serial killer trying to stop it from happening again. But, dammit, who was the editor on this? Could you AT LEAST have given it another editing pass? Or six?

The narrative was so clunky. It read like a high school senior trying to shove in every SAT vocabulary word into a college entrance exam. Which is fine for a college entrance exam. Not for a novel based on a popular video game that is supposed to add to the complex lore of said game. Also, it is perfectly fine for an author to put contractions into their prose. All the instances of "it was" "she is" "did not" "could not", etc. would have read so much better written as "it's", "she's", "didn't", "couldn't". The prose was way too formal otherwise. This should have been an easier read.

I'm not even mad that the characters were flat and boring. That's normal in the horror genre. The characters in horror are either boring or evil, so you don't feel bad about them when they finally die. If there was a moral and heroic character, you'd feel terrible for liking them and hate it when they get killed in the story. It's obvious that the only character you're supposed to connect with in this story is Charlie. The rest are animatronic fodder (though no one actually dies in this installment. Maybe in the next one).

I dunno - the FNAF story is fascinating to me, even though I've never played any of the games (nor do I plan to). I do enjoy watching people on YouTube play the games and put together all their nutty theories. I feel like an anthropologist (of sorts) watching people get really worked-up over timelines and bites and springlock suits. It's not my tribe or fandom necessarily, but I appreciate the determination and I admire their tenacity and passion for it. But I figured the books would try to fill in the gaps, which is why I'm reading them.

I want to read the other two novels still. But I guess I need to lower my expectations even further as far as writing quality goes. But I will say this - I have read a fair number of indie-published books that were far better edited than this traditionally published one. Clearly, Scholastic thought that they could slap the Five Nights at Freddy's label on this and rake in the cash and not worry about putting out anything of quality. Which is a shame, because the story here could have been good, if they cared enough to put some polish on it. Or any polish at all.