Nightbooks

Nightbooks (2018) is the first fantasy horror novel in J.A. White’s Nightbooks series. The novel combines references to The Thousand and One Nights and classic fairytales like Hansel and Gretel to explore the importance of friendship and the power of storytelling. It follows Alex Mosher, a boy who is lured into an enchanted apartment and forced to read scary stories to a witch every night. Like Scheherazade, he knows that his life depends upon his ability to craft and tell tantalizing stories. He befriends his fellow captive, a girl named Yasmin, and they help each other to survive. Netflix adapted Nightbooks into a film in 2021. White is a middle-grade teacher of writing, math, and science, and writes creepy stories particularly for this age group. He also wrote the Thickety series, which received numerous awards, including a Children’s Choice Award for Best Debut Novelist.

This guide uses the 2018 Katherine Tegen Books paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material depicts animal abuse, child abduction, and endangerment.

Plot Summary

When Alex sneaks out of his family’s apartment, he plans to go to the basement to throw his notebooks into the boiler. He feels different from other kids, and not in a good way. He thinks getting rid of his scary stories is the first step to blending in. When the elevator stops at the 4th floor, he heads for the stairs but overhears one of his favorite movies, Night of the Living Dead, playing inside 4E. He knocks on the door in a trance, and is met by a young woman who is eager to learn what drew him to her door. When he smells pumpkin pie, he accepts her invitation to enter. The door disappears, as do the movie and pie. The woman, Natacha, tells Alex that it’s usually food that lures children to her door. He collapses.

When Alex wakes up, he is alone in an enchanted room. When he bangs on the walls, the entire apartment shakes, and this brings Natacha, the witch. She explains the shaking as the apartment “settl[ing] itself.” Natacha leaves and Alex spends the day alone, crying. That night, a girl’s voice outside his door tells him Natacha likes stories. The next day, the witch decides to kill him, and he asks if she’d like to hear a story. She agrees, and he reaches for his backpack, explaining that his “nightbooks” are inside—he writes when he has trouble sleeping due to bad dreams. He reads her a story called “Lost Dog,” about a boy who sees a strange dog before someone dies. Natacha presses her ear to the wall and tells him his story will do. She leaves and locks the door behind her.

The next morning, Alex finds his door open. He explores the hallway and other rooms, which look as though they were decorated by someone much older than Natacha. He eats the peanut butter sandwiches someone left for him. Whenever he tries to touch one of the creepy objects there, an orange cat hisses menacingly. He notices a cabinet filled with ceramic figures depicting children at play. His fellow captive, Yasmin, enters the room from a door that Alex thought led to a closet. She explains that she’s supposed to show him around. She found his notebooks and says he reminds her of Scheherazade. Yasmin says the cat is Lenore, Natacha’s spy, who can make herself invisible. Yasmin shows Alex the library, where he’s to spend all day writing under Lenore’s watchful eye.

Alex is too distracted to write, so he decides to read an old story to Natacha that night. He finds Froot Loops and offers Lenore some, though she refuses. That night, Natacha orders Alex to read to her while she gets out an oil diffuser and creates a magical “misting room,” in which only she can breathe the vapor. She suggests that Alex likes having an appreciative audience, and though he denies it, he knows it’s true. He reads “Mr. Boots,” about a vengeful teddy bear who steals his former owner’s son after the man abandoned the bear on a family vacation. Natacha is impressed and asks if Alex wrote the story that day. He explains that he had trouble writing with Lenore staring at him, and Natacha tortures the creature. Alex is horrified and demands that Natacha stop.

Yasmin seems determined to dislike Alex. Lenore again refuses his offer of Froot Loops, and he decides to explore the library. He finds one book with a child’s handwriting in the margins; she was lured to the apartment by a unicorn. That night, Natacha wants to know why Alex planned to destroy his stories, but he knows he must keep her interested to stay alive, so he holds back. Natacha thinks 4E could be a good home for him because she appreciates his creativity. He reads her a story called “The Shape in the Mirror,” in which a vampire steals a girl’s reflection, thereby turning her into a vampire. Natacha is outraged by the inaccuracy, but she listens to the walls again and declares that his story still worked. She explains that the apartment’s dark magic is old, and its aches are soothed by scary stories.

Alex develops a routine, searching the library books during the day, and each night reading Natacha an old story. He finds five more messages from Unicorn Girl. One day, Yasmin needs Alex’s help, and she shows him an enormous nursery for magical plants. She fed one plant the wrong food, and it developed “danglers,” small sacs that grow monstrous creatures inside. She gently twists each one off the vine and hands it to Alex, who drops it into a void before the creature inside wakes up. Alex tries to make conversation, but Yasmin insists that she doesn’t want friends anymore. She gets upset, dropping a dangler, and a horrifying centipede emerges. They chase it, but the shredder, as Alex calls it, frees more danglers. Lenore is wounded while fighting the tiny monsters, and the apartment becomes infested.

Natacha returns, tortures Lenore for allowing it to happen, and is about to kill Yasmin, but Alex covers for her. When the apartment begins shaking, Natacha demands a story. He reads “The Playground,” about a boy who is saved from a gang of murderous ghosts by his dead best friend. Natacha hates it, but it stops the rumbling. She goes to her bedroom, and Alex glimpses a forest inside. Later, he realizes the shredder destroyed his nightbooks.

Yasmin is grateful to Alex for taking the blame for the dangler mishap. She brings him a pain-relieving poultice that he shares with Lenore. Yasmin explains that the smell of her grandmother’s cooking lured her to 4E. Once there, she befriended Claire, Eli, and Hwan, the other captives. Over time, however, Natacha turned each one into a porcelain figure. This is why Yasmin was so mean to Alex at first: It’s hard to lose friends. She asks why he wanted to destroy his nightbooks, and he briefly explains his fear of being weird. She tells him everyone is weird in their own way.

Yasmin helps Alex look for more messages from Unicorn Girl. They find one in which she details a sleeping potion she’s created to drug the witch, but she needs to find an ingredient to mask its odor. Lenore begins to yowl, and Natacha bursts in; the kids tell her that Yasmin was helping Alex with research. Lenore covers for them, and they invite her to be part of their escape plan.

Alex writes a new story to trick Natacha into revealing the ingredient that will hide the smell of a sleeping potion. The next day, the children prepare it, but when added to Natacha’s lemonade, it leaves a greasy film. Natacha interrupts them, so Lenore secretly takes the oil. When Natacha creates her misting room, Lenore turns invisible and adds the potion to Natacha’s diffuser, but Lenore gets trapped inside with her. Once Natacha is asleep, Alex finds the cat’s invisible, sleeping body. Yasmin steals the witch’s keys, and they escape to the forest.

The children realize that the forest is still inside the apartment. They follow a path to a cottage made of candy. Before they can stop themselves, they cram handfuls of sweets into their mouths. Alex passes out and wakes up two days later on the candy house’s floor. Natacha is preparing stew, and she tells him the house only wants his stories now, serving him the food and offering him the chance to be her friend. He realizes she is Unicorn Girl when she tells him how she was captured, 20 years ago, by Aunt Gris, whose magic controls the apartment. Natacha shows him Aunt Gris’s sleeping form inside a candy coffin.

The house built the shell around her to protect itself because, when a witch dies, her spells reverse. Now, Natacha inhales the fumes from melted pieces of her coffin to access Aunt Gris’s magic, and she diffuses sleeping potion into the coffin to keep the witch asleep. When Aunt Gris gets restless, only scary stories soothe her. The house shakes violently, and Natacha orders Alex to tell a story now. He tells the story behind his decision to destroy his nightbooks. As he speaks of his isolation and self-doubt, the house calms, but when he describes his friendship with Yasmin, who helped him to realize that he is not a weird “loser,” the cottage begins to crumble.

Aunt Gris awakens. While Natacha pretends to help her, Alex frees Yasmin and Lenore. Aunt Gris is now made entirely of candy, but she remembers what Natacha did and kills her. She follows the children back to the apartment. Lenore tries to help them, but the old witch is too powerful. The kids lure her to the basement, where Alex seems to cast a spell over her by reading scary sentences from unfinished stories aloud. Desperate to know what happens next, Aunt Gris follows him. When he throws the nightbook into the furnace, Yasmin pushes the witch in after it. She melts into a mound of sugar.

58 children emerge from 4E, though none except Yasmin and Alex remember what happened. They are all the same age as when they disappeared. Yasmin and Alex, now best friends, take turns caring for Lenore, though she is happiest when all three are together. Yasmin gives Alex a new nightbook in which he can write more stories.