Escape from the Haunted Warehouse (Choose Your Own Adventure)

awesome

This is a fun book if you like to read creepy stories. I do! The characters are from well known myths that the readers may not know but will get a somewhat more gentle introduction to them. I loved reading all the different story alternatives. Enjoy reading the book with your kids! Disclaimer: I received an arc of this book free from the author/publisher. I was not obliged to write a favorable review, or even any review at all. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.

This book is the stuff of Legends. I mean, after all, a luminary no less than Jeopardy-star Ken Jennings calls this his most-desired book. Sadly, I have to report this book is not from the "lost archives." I wonder if the book existed at all until recently. This is a not a big secret, since there is a lot of talk in some threads about your cell phone flashlight. It is copyrighted 2015. But that doesn't really matter. How is the story? Well, it's not great. Often, you will make a choice, and then you are immersed in an entirely new world with no explanation. Other times, you will be introduced to things like a screaming haunted sink, and the reader wonders why the book version of me can just take this in stride so easily. The best thing about this book is its creepy tone. There are nods to the Shining (the movie), as well as other horror movies, and even a hint of Hunger Games. The writing is supposed to be deliberately disorienting, and it definitely succeeds in that. Sometimes you are magically transported to Japan, or California, or 7 years in the future, where your younger brother is now older than you, because you didn't age. You have confrontations with ghosts, one of which allows you to "see dead people" which is of course another scary-movie-allusion. You can manage to be entertained in most threads, even if you don't fully understand what is going on. I found the exposition after I chose to be the leader of my HR team building exercises particularly confusing. My favorite ending, and the one that actually made the most sense, is when I figure out that this warehouse is all an exercise to help me cope with being dead, which I didn't know I was, and it may be Beelzebub himself who clues me in about it. (Similar again to that Bruce Willis movie -- I forget what it's called with the seeing dead people, but with a bit of a fresh perspective.) Actually, according to the haunted index, the boss is Mr. Purgatory. (Tom Perga). I guess they just had to crowbar in a story around this mysterious title about the warehouse. But the warehouse is really not much of a factor in the story. It didn't need to be a warehouse, and the idea of the warehouse is not consistent throughout. This is not a flaw though. Honestly, it was a little frustrating, because the book could have been better, I think, with a little more time, and a little more editing. The art was actually quite good, and very consistent with the creepy, disorienting tone of the story. This is another book that, without the art, would not been incomplete, and not nearly as good. I also liked the chart on the back, showing you the flow of the stories from your first choice. It points out a dual ending, where you have to use a clue in the text to turn to a page without a specific choice. The code is super easy, a backwards sentence. However, to get "9696 mroF" your must turn to "81 egap" but when you get to page 18, you ask for From 9696 -- the only thing not backwards. I actually considered that it was somewhat ribald, making the code 6969, but I doubt that is actually the case. Just another case of not the most thorough editing job. Anyway, this book is not really for kids. One thing I did find annoying is my refrain in several stories "I'm just a kid" which I'm clearly not, since I applied for this summer job working overnights in a warehouse, and had to apply in person between 11:00pm and 3:30am. Not a job suited to kids. And I have a car. I generally disfavor the magicky books, but I didn't mind the mystical stuff in this one so much, except for the one where I disappeared for 7 years, and I turned up being the same age while my family aged 7 years -- weren't some leading scientists pretty curious about this phenomenon? Not that I could tell. I also learned that RA Montgomery has died recently, which I found to be a sad fact, and that his son Ramsey died before him. This was sad news to me, but reading a little more about the family, it is interesting to see what wealth apparently brought to them, which appears to be something much less frivolous than we often hear about. The vague sentences and hinted at mysteries concocted by RA Montgomery are likely to be known by at least one more generation of children. The loss of a legend, himself. An interestingly, to the people who waited years to find out what a book about a Haunted Warehouse could possibly be like, you still don't fully have all the answers, which is a fitting tribute to this capstone book. An interesting entry into the series, for a variety of reasons. Thanks for the memories, Packard family, Montgomery family, and the various other authors who have dipped a toe into this genre.

My son, eleven, said it was a little too scary/evil/dark.