47 pages • 1 hour read
J. A. WhiteNightbooks
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Wrong Floor”
After Alex Mosher’s family goes to sleep, he sneaks out of their apartment. He doesn’t want to be a “Weirdo” or “Loser” anymore, so he makes his way down the hallway to the elevator and presses “B” for the basement. He wants to burn his notebooks in the basement’s furnace.
When the elevator stops at the 4th floor, however, he can hear one of his favorite movies, Night of the Living Dead, playing in apartment 4E. Alex grows desperate to watch it, no longer thinking clearly. He knocks on the door, and a woman opens it immediately. He tells her about the movie, and she invites him in. She is surprised, claiming it is usually food that brings children to her door.
Suddenly scared, Alex is about to walk away when he smells pumpkin pie. Later, he learns that he was under a powerful spell. As soon as the door clicks shut behind him, the television and pie disappear. The woman says the apartment did what it could to get Alex inside. He struggles to focus but notices that the front door is gone. Just before he collapses, the woman tells him she’s a witch.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Voice at the Door”
Alex wakes up in a bunk bed. He recalls what the witch said, realizing he’s not the first child to succumb to the apartment’s tricks. He thinks that it’s like a “smarter version” of the candy cottage that tempts the children in Hansel and Gretel (12). When he realizes his room is bewitched, he yells and bangs on the wall, which starts to shake.
The witch, Natacha, enters, telling Alex the apartment’s enchantment means no one outside can hear him. She explains the shaking was the apartment “settling itself.” He asks if she’s going to hurt him, and she asks if he’s ever read any fairy tales. Natacha blames Alex for making her late and quickly leaves. Alone, Alex cries, realizing the differences between the scary stories he loves and real-life scariness. Later, a voice outside his door tells him Natacha likes stories.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Thing Inside the Backpack”
Alex does not feel brave. He thinks of his big brother, John, a “walking meathead” who would knock Natacha out. He decides to surprise Natacha by shoving her down the next time she enters, but when he tries, the bed’s legs wrap around him like vines. She explains that she owns a magic-infused oils business, and things are going so well that Natacha has decided to get rid of him. She raises her hands, telling him to “be a doll and stand still” (23), to keep his eyes open like he’s posing for a photograph. In response, he asks if she wants to hear a story.
Natacha doesn’t believe he knows any good ones, but he insists that his stories are scary and that’s why he was going to burn them up. Natacha wants to know why he’d get rid of the stories if they are so good, but he stays quiet, realizing he must keep her interest if he wants to live. She sits, and he reaches for his backpack, explaining that his “nightbooks” are inside. This is what he calls the journals he writes his stories in when he has trouble sleeping. The only way to get rid of his bad dreams is to write them down.
Alex selects a story called “Lost Dog,” in which a sad-eyed pup appears to the main character before a death occurs. Natacha likes the story, and Alex explains that he’s not like other kids. She presses her ear to the wall and tells Alex that his story will do. His work, she says, starts tomorrow.
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Room of Dark Wonders”
When Alex wakes up the next day, there’s a big orange cat on the top bunk. He pets the cat, who looks at him with disdain. The door to his room is open, so he investigates the hallway and other doors. He finds the bathroom and the living room, which seem “grandmotherly,” like they were designed by someone much older than Natacha looks.
He sees many mysterious objects and reaches to touch one, but the cat hisses at him whenever he tries. In the kitchen, he finds a glass of milk and two peanut butter sandwiches. After eating, Alex notices a china cabinet that displays a collection of porcelain figures; they are all of children at play.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Other Prisoner”
A girl, covered in dirt, emerges from the coat closet. Her name is Yasmin, and she says she’s supposed to show him around. While he slept, she found his nightbooks, which made her think of Scheherazade. He thanks her for saving his life by telling him that Natacha likes stories, but Yasmin snaps back, telling him he’s still trapped there, like she is.
Yasmin says that the cat’s name is Lenore, and that the cat is Natacha’s spy. Alex realizes the cat can become invisible at will. Yasmin tells Alex the rules: First, he shouldn’t touch anything; second, he shouldn’t try to escape because it’s not worth the risk. She explains that some doors have two keyholes so that Natacha can hide the magical rooms. Keys carved from bone open those ones.
Yasmin takes Alex into the library, where he is supposed to write new stories. She is careful about answering his questions, noting Lenore’s presence.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Misting Room”
Alex cannot concentrate with Lenore watching, though he’s supposed to be writing a new story for that night. He’s distracted by all the books. He goes to get something to eat from the kids’ cupboard, and he’s thrilled to find a box of Froot Loops. He offers some to Lenore, but she refuses.
Alex grabs his backpack, intending to read Natacha one of the stories he’s already written. Yasmin prepares dinner for Natacha, and Alex’s stomach grumbles watching her eat. Afterward, Natacha turns on an oil diffuser, and Alex watches as invisible walls shimmer around her, sealing her in a tiny room that fills with mist. She knows that Alex enjoys reading to her because he finally has an appreciative audience. She guesses that he never shares his stories with others because he’s afraid of what they’ll think, and asks again why he tried to destroy them. He reveals that he wanted to be “normal,” not just the “fat, geeky” boy anymore. He believed getting rid of the stories was the first step.
While Natacha inhales the mist, Alex reads her a story about a vengeful teddy bear. She likes its “hopeless” ending. When Natacha asks if Alex wrote the story that day, he says it’s an old one, explaining that he couldn’t write with Lenore staring at him. Natacha yells at the cat, tossing her into the air, but Alex defends Lenore and begs Natacha to stop hurting her.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The opening chapters introduce the key theme of The Universality of Weirdness. Alex, the protagonist, feels out of place amongst his peers, fearing that he is “weird” for writing scary stories. When he sneaks out of his family’s apartment, it’s to destroy the stories that provide evidence of this “weirdness.” He doesn’t want to be a “Freak” or feel like a “Loser” anymore. Later, when Natacha presses him for information about his decision, he says, “I wanted to be normal […] I thought that destroying my nightbooks would be a step in the right direction” (64).
In fact, Alex feels so isolated from others that reading his story to Natacha—a witch who wants to kill him—prompts his “hunger for immediate feedback [which] bordered on desperate” (30). He wants to be known, accepted, and valued so badly that even a stranger can identify how much he longs for an “appreciative audience.” After he reads his first story to her, Natacha says, “You didn’t look like a boy who had lost his freedom. You looked like a boy who had found it” (63). Alex longs for acceptance; part of his character arc in the novel will involve understanding that his “weirdness” is actually a part of what makes him special and unique as an individual. Food also plays an important symbolic role in these chapters (See: Symbols & Motifs). First, Natacha is surprised that a movie is what lured Alex to her apartment because “Traditionally, it’s some sort of food that draws [kids in]” (9). While the sounds of the movie first catch Alex’s attention, it is the smell of freshly baked pumpkin pie that convinced him it is safe to enter. Recalling the smell of pie and Natacha’s words, Alex realizes that the apartment was “Like a smarter version of the candy house in ‘Hansel and Gretel’” (12). Alex is lured by the soothing smells of nutmeg and cinnamon, just as Hansel and Gretel—whose family was poor and whose bellies were empty—are tempted by the candy and cookies that make up the witch’s house in the fairy tale.
In addition, Natacha controls the children’s access to food, forcing Yasmin to prepare large, mouth-watering meals for her while the children eat only oatmeal and peanut butter. After not eating for the first two days in Natacha’s apartment, Alex is grateful to find the sandwiches Yasmin prepared for him. The food feels like an offer of friendship, a comfort to him in the figurative darkness of the witch’s apartment. Her thoughtfulness in making him a meal contradicts her cold demeanor, as she seems otherwise unwilling to be friends.
Several strange events create a mystery out of the apartment itself. After Alex reads his first story to Natacha, she “pressed her ear against the nearest wall like a safe cracker” and tells him, “Yes, that will do” (30). Therefore, her appreciation of scary stories—especially ones with tragic endings—seems linked to the apartment. She declares Alex’s first story to be satisfactory only after listening to the wall. Furthermore, the rumbling and quaking of the apartment is another highly unusual aspect of its existence. Natacha tells Alex that it is only “the apartment settling itself” (16), but when he tries to question her further, she vanishes and reappears behind him, a blatant attempt to distract him and change the subject. Her avoidance of addressing the apartment’s oddness indicates there is some greater mystery behind it.
Alex also notes that the décor seems “grandmotherly,” thinking that if he “had not already met the apartment’s owner, he would have assumed that she was far older than Natacha” (35). He also notices the cabinet full of ceramic figurines depicting children at play, which seems like a collection that a much older woman would possess and display. It is also at odds with the overtly creepy and macabre objects that Lenore warns him away from. The apartment’s décor thus foreshadows the reveal of Aunt Gris, the power behind the apartment, towards the novel’s end.
In addition, there are many meaningful allusions in the text—to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, the movie Night of the Living Dead, and The Wizard of Oz—but most significant are the references to Scheherazade, a character from One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights, as Yasmin calls it (See: Background). She introduces this allusion when she tells Alex that his nightbooks remind her of this character. She explains that Scheherazade married a king who had “a habit of beheading his wives,” and that “In order to stay alive, she tells him a different story each night and stops in the middle, so he has to keep her around to find out how it ends” (43). Scheherazade’s strategy of telling stories and ending on a cliffhanger each night is successful, demonstrating The Power of Storytelling as it literally keeps her alive.
Now, like Scheherazade, Alex is supposed to come up with stories to tell Natacha each night, and she must become as enamored of his tales as the king was with Scheherazade’s, or else Natacha will certainly kill him. Even before Yasmin told him about Scheherazade, his “storytelling instincts” told him he should withhold the reasons he planned to destroy his nightbooks. He realizes, “Once Natacha knew everything, she wouldn’t be interested anymore. And if he wanted to survive, he needed to keep her interested” (24). Alex understands the power of a good story, which he uses to his advantage when he trades his stories for his life each night.
