Fazbear Frights Review: Book #10: Friendly Face

Fazbear Frights reviews are back! After a hiatus for the sake of letting the publisher put out more books, we have the tenth issue in this gory, odd series. Was the wait worth it? Is this book even remotely child-friendly? Let’s get into things!

Section 1: “Friendly Face.”

All right, full credit due, this one scared me. I can think of only one other story that effectively creeped me out in this series, and that was “The Breaking Wheel.” And the two both worked for the same reason: masterful suspense. There’s not even a mystery of what the threat is—the cover of the book shows it—and yet the building tension makes the jump scare worthy of the FNAF franchise. 

Section 2: “Sea Bonnies.”

This story would’ve been a lot scarier if we’d not had multiple stories already about something crawling into a person’s body and killing them. This has the unique angle of essentially being a nanobot horror story, just with a fish instead of a bot. But that’s not enough to carry it. The characterization takes utterly forever, and the horror tips its hand too obviously for any real dread to build. 

Section 3: “Together Forever.”

And here I thought this Fazbear Frights was going to be somewhat kid appropriate. How naïve of me. The other stories had deaths and some gore, sure, but pulled back and implied more than showed. With “Together Forever,” we’ve arguably got the most gruesome description of child death in the entire series. And it’s somehow tied to one of the more cliché and predictable tales in the books. The two mains are so similar I mixed them up constantly, and it didn’t even make the story confusing. The younger characters have some uniqueness, but it’s not enough. This would have been entirely forgettable. As it stands, it’s a ticking time bomb of viscera for anyone finding this as their first book.

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And that’s the penultimate (sort of) book. I’m looking forward to seeing how the last one goes. Say what you will of Fazbear Frights, but it’s never actually boring. The degree and variety of messed-up stuff that happens is enough to keep any fan on their toes.

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