The Five Nights At Freddy’s novel might have been quite good if it didn’t have to be about Five Nights At Freddy’s

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Text Adventure is our videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. Ahead of the imminent arrival of Season 2 of Text Adventure, we’re summarising the episodes of the first season, which aired while Total Playtime was still Patreon-funded. 

In this episode, we considered it appropriate to review a book about a malignant spirit haunting a former workplace by summoning former colleague Matthew Castle, now of The Back Page podcast, who joins as our guest and was able to offer both incisive judgement and additional deep Castle lore for fans of the old RPS podcast. 

The warning is there right in the author’s bio, which says of series creator Scott Cawthon that “while he is a game designer by trade, he is first and foremost a storyteller at heart”. This description indicates both a strong self-regard and tendency towards over-writing, which explains quite a lot about the hundreds of pages that follow. 

Cawthon has since stepped away from the simple but very effective survival horror series that made him extremely rich, but back in 2015 he was still closely involved in everything that carried the name. This included co-writing the first novelisation alongside Kira Breed-Wrisley, a professional ghostwriter who went on to become the go-to FNAF novelist for a time: looking at the voluminous list of rewrites and departed collaborators on the movie, one suspects she was blessed with a supernatural patience. 

There are traces here of something that could have been an average-to-good genre piece - a Goosebumps-plus teen horror story or a functional B-movie. The protagonist, Charlie, has a functioning inner life; there is an understanding of young lives and young obsessions, there are sometimes whole paragraphs of evocative prose. There is also, unfortunately, a non-negotiable requirement to spend five nights in a location where no sane person would spend five minutes, and that is merely one element of an increasingly incoherent morass of narrative elements that one suspects were dropped in throughout the writing process.