Planet of Terror
Author: Don Wulffson
Illustrators: Serge Michaels (cover), Neal Yamamoto (interior)
First Published: 1995
ISBN: 0-8431-3860-2
Length: 126 pages
Number of Endings: 24
Library of Congress Summary: The reader's choices determine the
outcome of a young person's nightmare which requires that he or she either
escape from danger or fight the Molers who conquered earth in the war of
2051.
My Thoughts: In terms of gameplay, this book isn't very interesting.
The choices tend to lead to arbitrary death, and there's very little strategy
involved. Still, this isn't a bad book. It takes itself quite seriously
most of the time (unlike most interactive horror stories of its era) and has
some fairly disturbing moments. The setting is also fairly effectively
described. Of course, this praise doesn't mean the book is particularly
original; it has just as derivative a story as most gamebooks do.
Cave of Fear
Author: Don Wulffson
Illustrators: Mia Tavonatti (cover), Neal Yamamoto (interior)
First Published: 1995
ISBN: 0-8431-3861-0
Length: 126 pages
Number of Endings: 21
Library of Congress Summary: While on a camping trip, the reader gets
lost in a cave and makes choices which determine the story's outcome.
My Thoughts: This definitely isn't as good as the previous book in
the series. First of all, the introductory material (instructions and
background information) is rather redundant, making the first section of the
story tedious since most of its content is already known. While I like the
idea of a setting description and character list, it's pointless to provide
these things if they're just repeated in the main text anyway. I also have
trouble getting interested in a story that I know from the start is just a
dream -- this kills any real sense of danger or urgency. As before, the
gameplay is more or less nonexistent and the story isn't exactly original.
While there are a few moments of genuine horror, they don't really make this
book worth wasting much time on.
Castle of Horror
Author: Don Wulffson
Illustrator: Dominick Domingo
First Published: 1995
ISBN: 0-8431-3862-9
Length: 126 pages
Number of Endings: 21
Library of Congress Summary: The reader's decisions control the
outcome of a stay in a nightmarish castle in Scotland.
My Thoughts: This is an above-average entry in the series, though it
still failed to hold my attention very well. It suffers from the series'
usual problems of redundancy in the introductory material and aimlessness in
the narrative, but some of the strange and random events that take place
during the course of the story are at least marginally creative and
unusual -- an encounter with a demented sorcerer in a room full of plague
victims is particularly memorable. The book is far from brilliant, but it
has enough strangeness in it to be worth playing through at least a couple of
times -- though not necessarily much more than that. For the most part, I
like the tone of this series; too bad the writing and game design never quite
manage to support it properly.
Valley of the Screaming Statues
Author: Don Wulffson
Illustrator: Dominick Domingo
First Published: 1995
ISBN: 0-8431-3863-7
Length: 126 pages
Number of Endings: 21
Library of Congress Summary: The reader chooses the outcome of a
teenage boy's nightmare in which he searches a Malaysian jungle for his
missing brother and anthropologist father.
My Thoughts: Like other books in the series, this one suffers from
redundant introductory material, and the fact that the reader knows from the
start that it's all just a dream trivializes the whole storyline. The
adventure at least deserves some points for being (like the rest of this
series) considerably more genuinely horrific than the more popular but
distressingly light-weight Give Yourself
Goosebumps books, but this isn't really very strong praise -- although
the book tosses around words like "mucuslike" and occasionally
features situations that might be considered genuinely frightening, its
horror isn't very clever and its text isn't particularly well-written. The
plot is aimless and random (in keeping with the "it's only a dream"
theme), and the characters are incredibly shallow, only barely showing off
the personality quirks attributed to them in the character list at the start
of the book. The basic premise of the book appeals to me (a mysterious
valley filled with screaming statues located deep in the jungle) and the
adventure hook (searching for lost relatives) seems workable, but the book
totally fails to live up to its potential in execution -- if the geography of
the jungle were more consistently developed and the story were more
mission-oriented, this could have been a memorable story leading up to a
satisfying conclusion. Alas, in reality it is far from satisfying or
memorable, and despite a few moments of mild creepiness, I can't really
recommend it.