Ryan Anscombe

Severally underwhelming. The story starts relatively well with better pacing than The Silver Eyes. However, and in similar fashion to the aforementioned, unnatural dialogue full of clunky, try-hard quips quickly sucks the enjoyment from anything remotely interesting. Something this book does do better than it’s predecessor is eliminate SOME of the dreary and cliche characters, but we’re still left with a moody main character who says and does ridiculously stupid stuff (all because of some existential crisis, apparently), and a love interest (is it?) as dull as a paper plate. I grew tired of Charlie’s unnecessary complexity and inconsistencies just as much as reading ‘we have to go!’, or seeing characters being ‘brought back to the present’ after a mundane, very-skippable bit of day-dreaming. It all bad writing and gets old very quickly. I should also mention the fact that the whole story is built around a cop recruiting teenagers to help him solve a murder case, and esentially follows their orders along the way. He’s well aware that the murders quite likely involve a psychopath and/or giant killing machines possessed by children, but he ropes them purely because the story needs him to. Great. In short, the writing is very poor, and the story is ‘meh’ at the absolute best.

I like FNAF as a franchise. The concept is naturally creepy and interesting, which is why I picked up a copy of TSE. Sadly, exceptionally bad writing resulted in it being a much less enjoyable read than I’d hoped. The characters and dialogue are the two worst bits for me: cliche, unnatural, and boring. No-one ever said, or ever will say, anything remotely similar to what Carlton says whilst imprisoned inside a mechanical-death suit. Something along the lines of watch out for those arteries, I’ve had them since I was a kid. The book is rife with out of place try-hard quips such as this and it made the experience unenjoyable. There were many moments that made me literally roll my eyes and skip chunks of needless and embarrassingly cringey chat between a bunch gruellingly bland characters. I did enjoy their finding Freddy’s hidden away, etc., and the general concept as mentioned above, but too much happens simply because ‘that’s what happens’ as opposed to there being a compelling and interesting plot behind it. All in all, not a great read, but better than The Twisted Ones.