The Dark Side of Choose Your Own Adventure

Do you ever have a tidal wave of memories that crash over you without warning from the recesses of your brain? This happened to me one recent Saturday morning when I had a distinct memories of a family road trip, stuck in the very back bench seat of my family’s silver 1986 Plymouth Voyager as we crossed the hot Eastern Washington desert, reading and rereading a box set of four Choose Your Own Adventure books. I remembered picking out the set at Costco and how special it seemed because my mom was buying me four books instead of just one.

Whatever caused my sudden and unstoppable need for a nostalgia-fueled afternoon of sifting through Choose Your Own Adventure books was now gnawing a small pit in my stomach. It was a thirst that needed to be quenched immediately. Time to track down some of these gems of my childhood!

 WARNING!!! 

Do not read this book straight through from beginning to end! These pages contain many different adventures as you search for favorite books from your childhood. The adventures you take are a result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose! What will happen as you scour the town looking for Adventures?

Good luck!

I set out for my favorite used bookstores thinking it would be an easy quest. There are, after all 260 million copies in print. How hard could it be to find a few? After traveling across town and back to four used bookstores and pulling up to the library only to find that it closes early on Saturdays, I was empty-handed and ready to admit defeat. Tired and disappointed, I smelled like the musty pages of all the books I didn't buy. Then I remembered thrift stores! I hadn't thought to stop at any of them. They certainly had books from the 1980s so they must have a shelf of CYOA just waiting for me. Could I fight my weariness and continue my quest? This day was starting to feel like a Choose Your Own Adventure of my very own.

If you go to Value Village to continue looking for original Choose Your Own Adventure books, turn to page 75. 

If you give up and stop by a brewery for a pint on your way home, turn to page 83. 

I was tired, yet still unwilling to give up. I skipped the delicious porter and head to Value Village. Turning ahead to page 75 in my own adventure, I find the following.

You park your car in the large nearly empty lot and walk through a light rain to the thrift store entrance. You walk through the old automatic door and stroll hopefully up to the children's book section. On the shelves, you see tens of books from the Twilight series and multiple versions of Chicken Soup for the kid or teenage soul. You are momentarily distracted by the Sweet Valley High selection, before realizing that there are ZERO original or even reprint Choose Your Own Adventure books at Value Village. You return home, dejected and empty-handed and launch into a frantic and lonely ebay bender for CYOA books where you purchase many original and reprint books and also a disturbing number of copycat and wannabe series. As the spoils of your online auction addiction start to arrive, you wonder when you will have time to read them and where to store them all. While laying on the floor compiling information on CYOA books, you see your life flash before your eyes as an avalanche of small paperbacks topples and crushes your skull. 

The End 

Luckily, the beauty of CYOA books is the ability to start over after a quick and painful death. The reader always gets the opportunity for a new beginning with the hope for a successful and happy ending. As I dug through my newly acquired stash of CYOA books though, I was struck by how rare a truly gratifying conclusion was. I was dying left and right and with reckless abandon. Sometimes I would survive, but I would end up in a psych ward, hospital or kidnapped. Here are some samples of how I met my end, again and again.

“You will never escape. You will be a prisoner of the ants forever.”

“'Fools! You will never defeat me.' These are the last words you'll ever hear.”

“Your teeth rattle in your mouth. You are dying of instant old age.”

 “Almost worse than dying is the thought that the vampire will live to become the terror of the Earth.”

“You become delirious with thirst and walk straight into the path of a rattlesnake.”

 I bet you can guess what happens next. In other endings, I was lost in time and space, was enslaved (twice!), made a bargain with evil and was devoured by piranha feeding frenzy. Now I know why I had so many nightmares as a kid. I guess they include that warning at the beginning for a reason. Plus, even if I did survive, many of the endings weren't very satisfying. Maybe I survived, but I was left without riches or reward or my life was irreparably changed in some way. Endings here ranged from possibly great “You are now Genghis Khan” to downers like “Let's quit while we are still alive” and “Six months to the day after you first acquired Conrad (a supercomputer), he burns out his circuits from working too hard. Just two days after that you are sent away to fat kids' camp.” Sometimes they were truly bizarre, “You will have the distinction of being your own great-great-grandfather with the knowledge that no one else possesses.” Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think the book is suggesting that you bang your great great grandma. Um . . . Yuck.

Where were all the amazing endings that I remembered from my childhood? Where were my piles of treasure? Are all the titles in the series this dark? At this point, I decided a more quantitative look would be required. I read all the endings in nine books and charted them to find out if the series was as brutal as I thought in my first look.

It turns out that yes, they are very very dark. The data backs up my empirical evidence. I counted 242 endings and 66% of them ranged from kind of sucky to severely abominable (just like the snowman in one of the titles I purchased.)

Even though I categorized one third of the endings as “happy,” I am using that word as loosely as possible here. “Happy” in CYOA world just means that you lived. You might wake up in a hospital and find out that your friend is dead, but “Hooray!” at least you survived. If you’re lucky, perhaps you also stopped a group of Druids from completing their ritual or made friends with a yeti. Amnesia is sometimes involved.

Although the exact percentage was untracked in my study, true victory does occur in some cases. I would guess it happens about 10-15% of the time and most of those successes mean you have gained fame and/or fortune.

This darkness made me wonder about the author R. A. Montgomery. Did he even like kids? Why does he want us all to meet untimely deaths over and over? Were these book just his elaborate fantasies on eliminating children from this earth? He did write more than 50 of the books and since he died in late 2014, I guess we’ll never know.

 Luckily for me my personal Choose Your Own Adventure adventure had a happy ending. Much like one you would find in the books, I lived and am mostly unchanged. I walked a nostalgic path, completed an experiment, learned a little and gained no fortune. Now it’s back to Value Village for those Sweet Valley High books.