Nightbooks Ending Explained (Spoilers)

Alex, a boy obsessed with scary stories, is imprisoned by an evil young witch in her contemporary New York City apartment.

Nightbooks: Spoilers Below

A young boy from Brooklyn, New York named Alex Mosher loves to write scary stories but swears never to write another one again due to his parents' concerns about his mental health. So he trashes his room, grabs his "Night books"—his collection of self-written scary stories—and sneaks out of his apartment while his parents talk. Before he can reach his complex's furnace room to burn them, he passes an open door that bewitches him to enter. It shuts closed behind him and disappears.

He wakes up in the witch Natacha's magical apartment, who informs her that it lures children to her, and she only keeps alive those who are helpful to her. Intrigued by Alex's scary stories, she demands he writes and reads one to her every night, or she'll kill him. Next, she makes Alex work with Yazmin, a girl who was similarly lured into the apartment years ago in Washington and forced to be Natacha's housekeeper. Yazmin tells Alex that the apartment travels across the world, and only the front and back doors are exits that can be opened with Natacha's magical keys.

Yazmin shows Alex the witch's colossal library and tells Alex that Natacha is making him write scary stories because she's already read every one in her library. Alex is hesitant and claims he cannot write but won't tell her why. Yazmin lets Alex know that Lenore, Natacha's magical cat capable of turning invisible, is watching them and will report back everything it sees to her.

Natacha is unimpressed with Alex's stories each night and demands they end in tragedy. She repeatedly asks him why he intended to burn his Night books, but Alex distracts her each time to dodge the question. Alex reads through the library's collection for inspiration and discovers margins in books written by another trapped girl describing her attempts to escape Natacha's home. He dubs her "Unicorn Girl" after her prized possession, a unicorn necklace.

Alex and Yazmin bond over their household chores and eventually earn Lenore's trust. Yazmin tearfully reveals she was scared of befriending him because all the other children she became friends with were killed by being transformed into figurines held in Natacha's cabinet. Alex realizes each of the figures still has their personal effects and accessories they had in their life and deduces Unicorn Girl must have escaped since none of the figurines have a unicorn necklace. Yazmin and Alex search through Unicorn Girl's notes and find a recipe for a sleeping potion for the witch so she can take her keys. They make the potion, and Lenore pours it into Natacha's perfume bottle, which she douses herself in habitually every night.

They steal her keys when she falls asleep and opens the door to a forest. They escape but realize the forest is also part of the apartment. They eventually find a cabin made of candy, but Natacha catches them and brings them to its basement. When they get there, she reveals that she is Unicorn Girl. The original witch lured her in, but she escaped, only to find her parents had moved away. She returned to the witch's home with nowhere to stay, where she became the witch's pupil to learn witchcraft and eventually subdued her by lulling her to sleep with scary stories, which she was obsessed with. Alex's tragic scary stories that he reads to her each night keep the witch from waking, while Natacha harvests her magic using the perfume bottles she sprays on herself. She demands Alex tell her why he wanted to burn his Night books, saying his fear of telling it makes it the ultimate scary story. Alex sadly recalls the past. His best friend said he was embarrassed to see him on his birthday due to his scary story obsession. No one attended his birthday party as a result, and Alex felt so hurt and ashamed that he decided to burn his scary stories and hide what made him special. Natacha and the sleeping witch are mollified, but Alex ends it by saying that he was Natacha kidnapped him because he met Yazmin and Lenore, friends who value him and his specialty.

The happy ending awakens the sleeping witch who overpowers Natacha, making her drop her perfume bottle. Yazmin takes it and flees with Alex and Lenore. Yazmin opens the front door with Natacha's magic, allowing them to exit back to Alex's apartment complex. The witch chases them, planning to eat them, as they run to the furnace room. Alex distracts her with a scary story he invented and throws his Night book into the open furnace before he can finish. The witch dives after it to know the story's ending while Alex and Yazmine push her in, killing her. They go to his scared parents, and he introduces Lenore and Yazmin as his best friends. Yazmin reunites with her parents.

Yazmin gives him a new notebook and encourages his passion for writing scary stories, and they continue to be friends. Meanwhile, Natacha cackles while the children's figurines in her cabinet begin to move and break free.

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