Many of us have fond memories of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, those staples of youth where you’d mark your place with a finger and flip backwards and forwards through their pages, trying to avoid a horrible end or a bad choice. Someone I know even plotted out every single book he’d read, drawing out decision trees and putting a star next to the best ending. For those of us who’re a bit older, it’s difficult to recover the thrill of those gamebooks, especially because the majority of literature tends to be frustratingly (and a little boringly) linear. Luckily, in recent years there have been a number of attempts to rectify this, encompassing everything from quantum SF to cosmic horror to gamebooks that recall that bygone era when a narrative could go in every direction possible. Here are six of our favorites…
All This and More by Peng Shepherd
Thanks to a quantum technology known as “bubbling,” the hottest new TV reality show, All This and More, lets one person per season alter the fabric of their life. Shepherd’s ambitious take on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics casts you, the reader, as both observer and participant in the most recent season of All This and More, setting up the initial interactions between Talia Cruz (the season 1 winner and host) and Marsh (the show’s contestant) before splitting into a choose-your-own adventure book where the reader’s decisions influence the story. Before you’re even face with the first choice, the reader is given a front-row seat to Marsh’s life as only reality TV could tell it, serving as a brutal satire of how empathy and misfortune are mined for entertainment and then plunging into an exploration of how the myriad moments and choices—or refusal to choose—can influence and alter the course of one life. While Shepherd might take a little while to get going, rest assured, this one hits hard.
To Be or Not to Be by Ryan North (and William Shakespeare; Illustrated by various artists)
We all know the story of Hamlet: a Danish prince sees his dead father’s ghost on the ramparts of his castle and embarks on a convoluted revenge plot to bring his uncle to justice. But what if there were more to the story? In Ryan North’s inspired Shakespearean satire (the joke being that Shakespeare just plagiarized his route through an Elizabethan choose-your-own-adventure book) To Be or Not to Be, you get to explore all the choices Shakespeare and his characters never made, whether that’s playing as Hamlet’s father and trying to get Horatio to avenge you or helping Ophelia fix the castle’s central heating problem. The humor might be wild and anachronistic, but North’s sincerity and full commitment to the bit turns what could be an extended wink at the audience into a wild ride through multiple alternate versions of Hamlet with a staggering number of choices.
Life’s Lottery by Kim Newman
Best known for Anno Dracula, a horror epic doubling as a history of horror fiction, Kim Newman wrote Life’s Lottery to be read both from beginning to end and played as a choose-your-own adventure novel. You are Keith Marion, an average English boy at an average school, asked in a schoolyard fight to choose your favorite character from The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuryakin. This simple choice sends you spiraling through narrative twists, everywhere from achieving true enlightenment to ruling the world through your depraved megacorporation. That is, provided that you don’t look too closely at the intermittent pages outside the book’s boundaries. Or how you’re chased by spiders. Or how the same Satan figure and two doctors keep popping up whenever you stop playing the game. While there’s more than meets the eye if you color outside the lines, Newman’s book when played straight is a touching exploration of the human experience and the different ways all our lives can go with one simple choice.
We All Hear Stories in the Dark by Robert Shearman
One part bizarre metafictional narrative about the ways stories flow and one part choose-your-own-adventure, We All Hear Stories is massive not just in size (101 stories over three volumes) but in undertaking. In a framing device, a widower encounters a mysterious librarian who sets him off on a quest to read every book in the world on order to (hopefully) resurrect his wife. This is just a showcase for Shearman’s vast hoard of stories, each one guiding you by a series of choices to your next exhibit. While there’s a “correct” sequence (the framing device has a “good ending” and a “bad ending”), it’s more fun to just find your vibe on a self-guided tour of stories that inject heart and an unnerving note of menace into bizarre premises like “three men are trapped within a series of bad jokes” and “a brother forces his sister to ritually execute her dolls.” Shearman’s got a story for everyone, and all of them are strange.
Super Giant Monster Time! by Jeff Burk (Illustrated by Chrissy Horchheime)
Released when the “bizarro” movement was at its peak, Burk’s wicked little adventure (billed as a “Choose Your Own Mind-F*ck-Fest”) casts you as one of three characters—a punk rocker, a research scientist, and “a boring office worker” amid an apocalyptic alien invasion. All around you, people are being turned into violent, crazed punks out of an ’80s movie by aliens, giant monsters are rampaging through the city, and with each new choice, things go from bad to worse. While intended as a parody of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books with the same amount of horrid death but an added helping of shock humor, Burk manages to walk the line between edgy humor and genuine fun. While the 2010s humor hasn’t all aged well (and honestly, what in the 21st century ever does?), this entry isn’t a bad way to spend some time flipping through its myriad choices.
Into the Tower by Hari Conner (Illustrated by Conner and various artists)
A “choose-your-own-path” book by the official illustrator for The Adventure Zone: Bureau of Balance card game, Into the Tower is a massive (320 pages is a lot for a gamebook) solo adventure meant to evoke the classic gamebooks of the ’80s and ’90s. Once every ten years, a masquerade ball is held at the impenetrable Locked Keep. The ball is your way into the infamous tower of the spellbinder princess and a dangerous hoard of magical items locked away by the kingdom. Your mission as one of several unique characters (Conner gives you a quick-start guide with challenge ratings and even ways to “cheat” and make the game easier or harder for yourself) is to breach the tower’s defenses and find your way inside to your hopeful fortune and heart’s desire. Conner’s imaginative descriptions and gift for detail are backed up by their excellent illustrations throughout, providing a wealth of reasons to pick up a pencil and draw up a new character to challenge the Locked Keep and its mysterious tower again and again.
