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Five Nights at Freddy's: The Fourth Closet is the third and final book in a trilogy of novels based on the Five Nights at Freddy's series, preceded by Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes and Five Nights at Freddy's: The Twisted Ones. It was released on June 26th, 2018. A Comic-Book Adaptation was released in 2021.
What really happened to Charlie? It's the question that John can't seem to shake, along with the nightmares of Charlie's seeming death and miraculous reappearance. John just wants to forget the whole terrifying saga of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, but the past isn't so easily buried.
Meanwhile, there's a new animatronic pizzeria opening in Hurricane, along with a new rash of kidnappings that feel all too familiar. Bound together by their childhood loss, John reluctantly teams up with Jessica, Marla, and Carlton to solve the case and find the missing children. Along the way, they'll unravel the twisted mystery of what really happened to Charlie, and the haunting legacy of her father's creations.
This novel contains examples of:
- Big Bad: William Afton yet again except this time he has help in the form of Baby/Elizabeth as well as the other Funtime Animatronics.
- Body Horror: William Afton managed to get the outer shell of his Springtrap costume off in the time he's been away, leaving him with just the metal endoskeleton and his mutilated body. As a consequence of this, he is now confined to a wheelchair and has chunks of his body missing."Scraps of metal are interwoven through every part of my body that has not been replaced with artificial tissue. Every movement causes me unimaginable pain. Not moving is even worse."
- Cruel Twist Ending: Practically everything to do with Charlie can be seen as this. She loses her home, her aunt, finds out that she isn't human, and then decides that she doesn't deserve to actually live and kills herself and Circus Baby.
- Dead All Along: Charlie.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: They go through a lot of trouble, but William Afton is finally put down for good, taking his horrible creations with him. The missing children are found and saved, the old missing children finally move on to the afterlife, and John is finally reunited with Charlie... maybe.
- Gainax Ending: The ending of the story has Charlie's friends all fighting like children over a drawing as though they didn't just go through the fight of their lives and one of their friends might be dead as a result of it. Then John goes to the cemetery and meets a woman that might be Charlie before they close the book by walking off together into the sunset.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Elizabeth was extremely jealous that Baby was getting so much more love and attention from her father than she got and wished that she could've been her instead. Needless to say, she got her wish, alright.
- History Repeats: Twelve years after the tragic murders at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a similar pizzeria opens up and children start disappearing again. Our heroes are pretty sure it's no coincidence.
- Immortality Seeker: See Your Days Are Numbered.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Elizabeth and Charlie near the end.
- Killed Off for Real: William Afton and Elizabeth... possibly.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: The plot synopsis hopes you've read The Twisted Ones, as it isn't shy about hiding what seemingly happened to Charlie at the end of that book.
- Mind Screw: The very end of the novel. Is the woman with John at the cemetery Charlie? Is it Elizabeth? Or is it someone else completely?
- It's not outright stated, but it is implied that after impaling herself and Baby/Elizabeth on the same contraption that Henry used to kill himself, Charlie somehow used the baby doll — her Soul Jar — to transfer her soul from the teenage form that she was in to the adult form that Elizabeth had claimed, which Henry had meant for Charlie in the first place, and that it is this version of Charlie that waits for John at the cemetery. The Mind Screw is how Charlie pulled it off at all.
- Oh, Crap!: Carlton when he realizes he is alone with the wrong Charlie.
- Properly Paranoid: John spends most of the first part of the book convinced that something is wrong with Charlie. It turns out that it's really Elizabeth Afton using Charlie's final body to masquerade as her in order to get close to them all.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Charlie.
- Sanity Slippage: Henry after Charlie was taken and killed by William Afton.
- Soul Jar: As with Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, Remnant is what keeps the souls of the children, Afton, and Elizabeth tied to the mortal world. Another example would be Charlie's doll Ella which keeps her tied to her bodies.
- The Reveal:
- The reason for Charlie's strange behavior? It's because she's not Charlie. Its Elizabeth Afton who is posing as her using a combination of the Brown Note technology from the previous book and a robotic body Afton stole from Henry long ago, adding child-kidnapping tech to it in the process. She also has most of her memories as well, allowing her to keep up the facade for awhile, despite John's suspicions. Before that, the body was meant for Charlie which leads to...
- Charlie isn't really human. She was the one killed by Afton all those years ago instead of Sammy as she'd believed. In reality, Charlie is really an animatronic created by Henry to allow his daughter to live on, sporting four different bodies for her development, the last one being stolen by Afton to be turned into Baby.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Thanks to The Reveal, we now know that Sammy has been alive and well this whole time, yet he is not mentioned at all in this novel. We can only assume that when Charlie was murdered, her mom took Sammy with her when she divorced Henry and that he may just be living a normal life now while "Charlie" has to deal with William and his animatronics. Lucky him.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: When Carlton asks where Charlie is, Clay says she's gone and will keep looking, but aside from that, none of them seem too distressed she's missing. John casually says they won't find her, and the ending implies that he was more upset by the revelation that the "real" Charlie was dead for years, and less so that the one who'd been his friend/romantic interest was dead. She may still be alive at the end, but this was before that was made apparent to John.
- Your Days Are Numbered: William Afton knows that being Springtrap has taken a huge toll on his body, so he's trying to recreate the haunted animatronics with his new pizzeria in order to attain immortality.
