My love for scary stories spawned from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series.  I had every book he wrote and devoured them like candy.  Then Scholastic decided to switch it up on me and developed the “Choose Your Own Adventure” feature.  Instead of regular stories where you followed the protagonist through slime and muck fighting monsters and ghosts, these stories would split.  Little Billy would come to a fork in the road and R.L. Stine then asked the reader: “right or left?”

This was a huge problem for me.  I was thrilled by the idea that there were multiple endings, almost everything resulting in gruesome death for the reader, but once the narrator died that branch of the story ended! I was aghast, I wanted to keep my options open in case my storyline ended.  All I wanted was to know every single outcome in its fullest detail - I couldn’t commit to choosing.  I would end up reading these books with all ten fingers jammed into the pages, holding spots so that once I died I could retrace my steps all the way back to the first fork that led me astray.  It was harrowing and stressful and took all the enjoyment out of these once simple and beloved horror stories.

This may seem like a overly cheesy metaphor for the choicester generation, but it’s how I feel at this pivotal point.  I want to hold each spot, keep every option open.  I am horrified that I am expected to commit to something that could possibly end in decapitation by a troll’s axe, figuratively of course.

I eventually gave up on these books, I think if I saw them now I would avoid them to save myself that inevitable frustration that comes from being forced into directions blindly.  Instead I will stick to my straightforward tales that let the reader just read, and swallow my fear of commitment when faced with life choices.

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