The Dream Palace
Author: Brynne Stephens
Illustrator: Stephen Hickman
First Published: March, 1986
ISBN: 0-671-65557-4
Length: 259 pages (237 pages of regular text plus 126 instruction paragraphs)
Number of Endings: 32
Plot Summary: A pair of friends decide to leave their dull lives
behind and go on a Quest to find their True Loves.
My Thoughts:
This is a decidedly unusual book, and unfortunately
an only partially successful one. While it has many merits, it has distracting
flaws at every level. From a gamebook perspective, it is nearly a total
failure. The idea of a book that can be read in linear order or played as a
gamebook is an interesting one, but one which doesn't really work. When you
make a choice, there are only three things that can possibly happen: you can
skip ahead, you can double back, or you can die. None of these outcomes are
satisfying. If you skip ahead, you feel that you're missing part of the
story (and indeed you are -- very important segments can be easily bypassed
in this book); if you die or double back, you eventually end up back at the
same place anyway, so it feels rather pointless. After a while, I stopped
paying much attention to the interactive elements of the book simply because
there was no reason to use them. The contest aspect of the book may appeal
to fans of "solve-it-yourself" mystery books (the answers to the
questions are far from obvious, and left unanswered in the book), but that's
really the only way one might find this to be a satisfying literary
recreation.
The book fares considerably better if you read it simply as a light-hearted
fantasy novel. It contains some genuinely creative ideas, and the appealing
characters and occasional humor keep things pleasant. I felt that some of
the characters and relationships developed far too quickly to be plausible,
but I can't complain too much -- character development of any sort is rather
rare in the world of interactive books. Alas, the main downfalls of the book
come from its efforts to be interactive. The text is written in the present
tense, and this sometimes makes it more awkward than it should be. A bigger
problem is the aforementioned unanswered questions. Since the book was part
of a contest, it ends with intentional ambiguity. As I said, readers who
enjoy puzzling out the meanings of books will have fun working on this, but
everyone else will leave this adventure feeling a little frustrated. The
tale has a nice ending, but it leaves you wanting to know more. Sadly, I'm
fairly certain that no sequel was ever written, nor do I know of any way to
acquire the official contest answers now that it is so long over. I rarely
complain when an author chooses to write a gamebook, but I think it's
actually regrettable that this story wasn't given a more straightforward
treatment.
Errata: Instruction #35 should point to page 81, not page 78.