Choose your own morality tale

Stumbled across a link to this on someone else’s blog. It’s a list of mock Choose Your Own Adventure books; kinda crass but funny as hell. Wonder how long it’ll take for a cease-and-desist order to take effect.

I was obsessed with CYOAs as a child. I still collect them; I’ll pick one up if I see one in a used bookstore. I especially love the old-school ones that Edward Packard wrote and Paul Granger illustrated. I think my favorite was No. 5, The Mystery of Chimney Rock. I read it so much it got all torn and wrinkled and I think I had to throw it away. I would dog-ear the pages with choices so that when I died (which you do in a lot of them, and quickly) I could backtrack and try the other option.

On the one hand, I loved those books because if you died you didn’t get all sad that it was the be-all and end-all of your personal story. There was never a feeling of finality or fatalism. I think I loved it most because I so wished life could have been that way. Sure, you may have accidentally opened the wrong door and died a slow and horrible death, but you can also just go back, start over, and find some treasure and live happily ever after.

On the other hand though, the books were pretty morbid. So much freakin’ death. And it’s actually “you” dying, not some fictitious character. The worst was when you would peek ahead to the page you chose and saw the words “The End.” The cheaters would go back and insist that that was not the choice they would have made anyway, so it didn’t count. But I would get so pissed at myself for making the stupid decision that got me killed in the first place, even though I was dead and couldn’t possibly continue self-flagellating. I think these books were written as morality tales for kids: If you make the wrong choices and die, you only have yourself to blame. Thanks, Bantam Books, for instilling self-loathing in me at such an early age.

But I still love those old books for keeping it real. After all, in life, you really only are successful with maybe five out of every 25 choices you make. And everyone dies eventually, even if you are a high-ranking space captain or some awesome superspy. What happy childhood memories. Sniffle sniffle.