Item - Welcome to Horror Hospital

Just as the original Choose Your Own Adventure series at its best is defined by the works of Edward Packard, peak Choose Your Own Nightmare is given shape and form by Laban Carrick Hill. Not everything he contributed is a winner—I can't pretend Watch Out for Room 13, The Evil Pen Pal, and The Toy Shop of Terror don't exist—but the two best books in the series are Bugged Out! and Welcome to Horror Hospital, both by Hill. Your big break as a player on your soccer team is coming today with your promotion to goalie, but the opponent, the Winston Kickers, aren't about to go easy on you. You make a gutsy save early in the game, but it costs you a head wound that is now gushing blood. Coach Duffy orders an ambulance to take you to Frankenstein Memorial Hospital, but you've heard rumors of gruesome experiments there. If only you hadn't asked your mother to stay away from the game today because she makes you nervous, she could decide what happens next. Coach Duffy commands you to lie still and wait for transport to Frankenstein Memorial, but must you do as he says?

If you fear hospitals badly enough, you stumble dizzily away from the soccer field insisting you won't go anywhere without your mom. Not far from the field, you discover your mom is here after all; she drives you to your own physician, Dr. Berns. Can you pass his test and say how many fingers he's holding up, despite kaleidoscopic vision from your head injury? Guess correctly and your mom takes you home, but next morning you awaken in unfamiliar surroundings. A woman's voice calls from another room; should you answer or run? Stick around to speak with her, and she claims to be your mother. Have you suffered amnesia? Should you let her take you to the hospital? Maybe you pretend you were joking about having amnesia, and hope to recover your memory quick enough so she believes it. If you now accept your need to be hospitalized, you may face a horrifying end at the hands of Dr. Ludwig von Frankenstein and his decrepit assistant, Dr. Igor. If you fled the house as soon as you heard the unfamiliar woman's voice, you to drift into restless sleep on a park bench. You regain consciousness in the worst part of the hospital, without your mom to guard you from experimentations on your body and brain. If you failed Dr. Berns's finger test earlier, you are sent for evaluation at Frankenstein Memorial by Dr. Skinnard, who unilaterally commits you to Frankenstein Sanitarium for the Insane. Dr. Skinnard has diagnosed you with Munchausen's Syndrome, claiming you habitually harm yourself for attention; can you escape this hellish facility and find someone who believes you? Avoid ever seeing Dr. Skinnard, and with luck, you’ll never face the horrors deep in the bowels of Frankenstein Memorial. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than clever.

Submit to Coach Duffy's plan from the start and you wait a long time in the Frankenstein Memorial emergency room, suffering blood loss and agonizing headache. Your bandage soaks through with blood; should you stagger around in search of a nurse to change the bandage? You might wander into an isolated wing of the hospital where a man demands you assist him in performing surgery...with an invisible scalpel, on an invisible patient. Is he an eccentric doctor, or a maniac from the psych ward? If you stay out of that wing, you bump into your mom while she’s shrieking at hospital staff for losing track of you. Her impulse is to remove you from the premises at once, but your ghastly head wound continues to leak. Can you evade round two of torture in Frankenstein Memorial? Perhaps you never went looking for help to change your bandage. In that case, you are mistaken for a dead person and sliced into at the morgue, but was it all a dream? Maybe you should take it as a premonition and leave the hospital right now. Remain in the ER and you are tended to by Dr. Frank N. Stein, a ghoul of a man who immediately recommends surgery. Refuse, and Dr. Stein assaults you, using his monstrous strength in an attack that might prove fatal. Agree to the operation and you awaken with the ability to read minds, but your new gift doesn't offer a satisfying ending.

Most kids fear the hospital: painful treatments they don't understand the need for, mysterious symptoms which could be life-threatening, incurable disease that leads to suffering, and separation from loved ones over the short or long term. These scenarios worry patients of any age; why are kids in particular seized by medical phobia, so a book like Welcome to Horror Hospital resonates? I believe it's because kids have so little say in their own medical care. Parents and doctors decide on treatments that are often pure terror for a young patient; it's one thing to undergo an unpleasant procedure you agree to, but what if it's forced on you? Having no control over scary things done to your body is a horror most adults would fight against tooth and nail. That lack of autonomy is business as usual for kids in just about every area of life, and this book acknowledges the feeling.

Welcome to Horror Hospital may be the pinnacle of Choose Your Own Nightmare. Most of the series fails to live up to its promise of being scarier than your typical youth gamebook: the narrative paths are silly, unfocused, or lack real fear. Welcome to Horror Hospital cashes the check written by the creators of the series, fashioning a few endings that are darker and more violent than I dared expect. When modern children's literature removes the majority of intense fear, grief, and other emotion, rejecting the wisdom of thousands of years of storytellers who refused to coddle young readers, eventually you end up with a society that no longer reads. Sanitized stories don't grab the attention of kids, and then those kids don't have the influence of deep, challenging literature to prepare them for life's hardships. Welcome to Horror Hospital bucks the trend, and I love that. No gamebook affects me quite like this one.

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