It was the beginning of 2022, and my younger sister was making efforts to be a better reader of books. She’d been a late bloomer with reading comprehension from the beginning, and English still hasn’t become one of her favorite or stronger subjects. But she was making strides—strides that I, as a writer and word nerd, respected and cared to cultivate. She’s also into good spooks and refused to compromise on happy, whimsical things like, well, most of the things that I tend to read. It hurt, but I figured I could work her over, eventually. I just had to get her to enjoy reading, first.
So I used my connections with writers on Facebook to get book recommendations to fit her palette. I got many recommendations in response to that post and compiled them into a list for her. All set. Except, after research, she wasn’t interested in any of them—any of them but one: Nightbooks, by J. A. White. Different as we are, she’s a critical beast after my own heart. She read the first page and gave it up for garbage. Instead of pressing on, she asked me to check it out and give her a report on whether it improved.
That is how I came to read Nightbooks.
Forewarning: the answer to that immediate question I sought to answer—“Was it worth her time?”—is no. No, it never got better. But I pushed through the whole thing. And I have thoughts, because simple answers never satisfy me. So let’s jump in.
The premise is simple: main character Alex Mosher is lured into a witch’s apartment and must read her the scary stories that he writes every night in order to save his life. Pretty straightforward. Doesn’t seem overly ripe for picking, if I’m being honest. Somehow, this book is still 302 pages long. It’s kind of impressively bloated.
The book opens with Alex sneaking out of his family’s New York apartment to the basement to burn…something…in the boiler down there. On his way down, the elevator stops at the wrong floor, so he gets off there to use the stairs. As he searches for the stairs, he hears the sound of his favorite movie—the original zombie horror movie, Night of the Living Dead—playing on someone’s TV. What are his thoughts as he heads to the stairs? “Huh, neat, someone else in this God-forsaken apartment complex shares my interests.”? No, his thought is, “I love that movie so much I should go inside of that stranger’s apartment and watch it.”
After the fact, the explanation is that the apartment magicked him out of his free will, but I call bull. It was totally a cop-out for the complete and utter foolishness it took just to make the plot happen. Everything happens so fast that Alex isn’t given time or space on the page to ruminate about an invisible force drawing him, at least nothing that doesn’t just sound like an ordinary impulse control issue. In fact, we, as the reader, are not given time to register anything about the character or world we’re diving into before it goes from “Kid sneaking out of his apartment” to “Oh, yeah, omnipotent magic exists just like the fairy tales, lol.”
We’re off to a great start.
We find out a short time after Alex is trapped in the apartment with its witchy resident, Natacha, that what he was planning on dumping into the apartment complex boiler were his composition notebooks that he uses to write scary stories in—his “nightbooks,” as he calls them, because he writes at night. He was called weird at school, or something like that, so he planned to burn them as a symbol of starting a new life as a normal kid. Now they’re the only thing that may save him from being turned into a ceramic figurine on Natacha’s shelf. A voice—which we soon find out is his fellow prisoner, Yasmin—outside his new bedroom’s door advises him that Natacha likes stories, so Alex makes sure Natacha knows that before she kills him.
In response, she pulls up a chair and makes him read her a story to prove he can write scary stories.
So we get the first of a handful of short horror stories from Alex, a tale about a boy who encounters a dog that only shows up before people die. It’s pretty lackluster. All of his stories are. With the strange exception of certain word choices seeming beyond the vocabulary of our protagonist, nothing is really a standout for a kid his age. Still, Natacha is impressed, for some reason, and eager to turn him into her own personal story machine. By the end, we find out this is because the witch from Hansel and Gretel, called Aunt Gris, is real and is the real power behind the apartment, but she’s in a magic-induced slumber because of Natacha and only nightmares/scary stories keep her asleep. And I guess Alex’s stories serve that purpose well enough. Lord knows how any mortal idea can be considered a sufficient nightmare to a cannibal witch, but okay.
The only other real complaint I’ll address about how thin and unintelligent this plot is is just the ending. Alex and Yasmin, a calloused, smart alec girl his age (because heaven forbid that cliche finally die) manage to escape into what they think is a wood. Turns out, it’s just an extension of the apartment where the candy house from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale is, and also Aunt Gris herself. The beating heart of the magic.
After the kids can’t resist eating candy (seriously, what is this book’s fairy tale logic? I thought the whole thing with fairy tales was that, when presented with temptation, people cave to their impulses, not that these temptations strip people of their free will…) and end up under a sleeping spell themselves for two days, Aunt Gris is starting to stir and wake up if Alex doesn’t read her another story. In that moment, he decides, Hey, this child-eating witch hates Natacha as much as we do, so instead I should let her wake up so she’ll fight Natacha for us. I don’t know in what universe that’s a good plan by anyone’s standards, even children’s, but that’s what he goes with. So Aunt Gris wakes up and eats Natacha. Hooray for cannibalism.
It’s a dissatisfying end to Natacha after we find out that she was a former child-prisoner of Aunt Gris, just as Alex and Yasmin are prisoners to her. Natacha is the one that figured out how to put Aunt Gris to sleep and was going to kill her, only she also figured out how to leech off of her magic and decided that was more fun than escaping. I was upset by her ending partially because of a preconceived notion about fiction intended for children: aren’t the villains of children’s literature usually given a second chance, especially if they’re given a tragic backstory? The moment she was revealed to be horribly twisted by her experiences—experiences even worse than what she’s put Yasmin and Alex through—as a freaking nine-year-old who got kidnapped, I was sure the protagonists would resolve to try and free her with them. But instead they go with “Hope the witch you betrayed to save your skin just like we’re doing for ourselves now eats you.” And eat her she does. Yeesh.
After that, Aunt Gris is after the children. Naturally, they escape the apartment and lock the witch in the boiler to burn alive just, as we’re constantly reminded, like the fairy tales! The question that’s plagued me ever since: if the fairy tale is real, then why isn’t that witch already dead? Hansel and Gretel should have already locked her in her own oven. How is she alive to torment kids into the 21st century? The story is constantly winking about its explicit retelling aspects; Alex is trapped in a house with a witch just like Hansel and Gretel *wink* *wink*. Alex has to tell the witch stories every night to stay alive just like Scheherazade *wink* *wink*. It disrespects itself and never has the conviction of its own ideas. It’s like the author is insecure that people will draw parallels between his story and better stories, so he went ahead and made it extra obvious to prove, “I’m in on the joke, guys! Please don’t laugh at me!”
Aside from Nightbooks generally being unintelligent fiction that treats children like a foreign species, inspired more by other stereotyped versions of children in fiction rather than real children, it also has a disturbing undercurrent, directly related to the message of the book, that I’m certain the target audience, lacking in discernment, won’t catch. Oh, but they’d easily emulate it, and I find that very concerning.
Alex’s character arc is, of course, that being weird is cool and he just needs to accept himself. Why is that a problem, apart from being uninspired? Here’s why:
Alex’s age is never explicitly stated, but given genre conventions, he can’t be older than twelve, and he’s obsessed with horror. Not spooky vibes, like my sister, but horror. He’s the insecure “freak” at school who concerns people so much that he actually gets a counselor called on him. His favorite movies are things that should decidedly not be watched—on purpose, enough to memorize them—by a twelve-or-less-year-old. He has all the paraphernalia pertaining to these movies and even decorated his school notebook with serial killers, murder dolls, vampires, witches, and the like. He says his inspiration for his nightbooks is that he has nightmares, so he writes to get them out of his head. This kid is not okay. He needs therapy.
This book treats the school counselor and, furthermore, the teachers who reported his disturbing school papers, like they’re wrong to be concerned for Alex. He’s just quirky, that’s all. Throughout, Alex references these gory movies that he adores—not necessarily by name, but there is enough of his fascination laced throughout to give you the idea of which movies he watches. If he’d gone to the movie theater for these, he most certainly would have been denied. But his parents are letting him watch and rewatch these. In real life, it would make me wonder what other negligent or outright abusive behaviors Alex’s parents are displaying.
And Nightbooks is promoting this content to an eight- to twelve-year-old audience.
Without digging into the deep psychology behind fetishizing evil, even on a surface level, Alex’s plight is hard to get behind. He’s the ultimate “not like other boys” character, which is eye roll-worthy in its own right. This book treats the other boys that Alex talks about like stereotypical girls who don’t have any interest in creepy crawlies and grossing people out. As if creepy things are exclusive to “freaks” like Alex. I’m sorry, but my adult brothers still like showing me GIFs of giant spiders just to freak me out. Boys will be boys. Liking creepy things is the status quo. That’s a tragic backstory thin as air.
Though Nightbooks is intended as horror for children, it’s a real horror for the discerning adult. If you have an ounce of care in your heart for the innocence and wellbeing of children, it turns this book from an otherwise mediocre read into a truly disturbing one, for all the wrong reasons.
Ultimately, I can’t recommend this as worthwhile fiction for either demographic.
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