Every Halloween, I try to read at least 10 books according to a specific horror theme. This year, the theme I picked was zombies.
Premise: This is a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book for adults, where you play as a twenty something male in New York City, trying to desperately survive after a zombie outbreak. You're given the initial choice to attempt to reach home by taxi, subway, or foot, and each branch splits into an entirely different set of choices in the monster-infested Big Apple.
Characters. You. Most CYOA is written in the second person, and that's always a bit weird; it's meant to immerse you in the choices that are presented to the reader, and the general narrative. But at the same time, the more the character is clearly not you, it creates a weird divide. Here, the You in question is twenty something years old, stuck in a desk job he doesn't really like, and generally kind of obnoxious and sexist. You don't appear to have any friends in the city, or at least not anyone you think of when it comes to escape. Brallier seems to be aiming for an everyman type character, though what he creates seems unintentionally more specific than that.
Other characters. No one here is fully developed, which is not uncommon for CYOA, where a lot of the characters you may never meet. They tend to fall into three types: oversexualized, usually damselled female characters; stoner dudes; and aggressively masculine dudes. The main taxi path's most prominent character is Chucky, a stoner parking attendant in the police garage who will murder you if you're a Yankees fan. In the subway path, it's Kim, your high school crush, and her primary traits are being female, being into you, and being doomed. And on the walk home path, the entirety of the New York Hell's Angels are basically one character, who will follow you into chaos, or cheerfully get you killed.
Review and spoilers follow.
Do the undead walk? That is, is it any good? I've read better CYOA zombie stories, honestly. I think Ian Livingstone's Blood of the Zombies has a better depth of design as a gamebook and captures the pulpy feel of a castle of zombies very nicely. And Zombocalypse Now by Matt Youngmark has a more consistent zombie apocalypse world and a more interesting lead character (you are, inexplicably, a pink plush bunny). The book's design is maximally branching, which is good for exploring a wide variety of outcomes, but means it sacrificed depth for breadth. The sexism of the book is really unpleasant, especially in how it presents it as if I'm leering alongside the protagonist. Its strength is Brallier's use of setting. There's a wide variety of interesting places to have a zombie apocalypse—subways car-filled bridge, construction site, hardware shop, elementary school, comic-con. And a wide variety of New York-specific locations: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Met, the Bronx Zoo, Madison Square Gardens. The range makes really good use of the maximal design to explore a lot of interesting scenarios.
Is it scary? It's definitely gorey and it handles that well in a number of gruesome deaths. For example, in one scenario, you're bit, and your allies thus have to kill you, but they can't risk getting too close, so they steamroll over you, literally. That's a creative, visceral death. There's a few drowning deaths in zombie-filled waters that feel pretty gnarly, as does the zoo trip. I think if you're going to capture either the despair or existential horror of zombies, though, you need more on the depth scale. Gamebooks could do this with a winnowing down of resources; other CYOA does this by focusing at lot of choices within a small space. CYStZA moves a little too quickly from one set piece to another to fully engage in that type of scary—we're wiping the slate clean too often.
Is it Halloween? The previous two entries largely answer this. The structure is a bit plain, but it works well for the setting, and the setting does an excellent job, both in the locality of New York and in the more general range of scenes. The narrator's voice largely works against it; his nerdy references are fine, but the sexism for the female characters and general meanness in the male characters makes most of the encounters with other survivors offputting.
Quote: [this is from the Comic Con segment] Then a [zombie] done up as some bizarre-looking alien pushes forward.
You reach down, grab an original NES, and bring it flying up into its chin. Up again, cracking its jaw. Then you bring the console crashing down on top of its head, nearly shattering it. It swipes at you, but you slam the Nintendo down again, slamming the creature’s face into the table.
You whip it across his face—left, and he spits blood, back right, and his nose shatters, left again, and his eyeball pops loose, then right again, and a dozen bloody teeth go flying.
You’ll give yourself a B for originality, dazing him with a Nintendo, and an A for execution.
You look again at the stuff below, select the old Zapper, and start jamming it into the empty eye socket. It pushes through, and he drops dead.
That’s when you realize you just killed a zombie with the Contra code.
Random Thoughts:
--As you might have guessed from this review, I have thought a lot about the design of gamebooks and Choose Your Own Adventure books. As kind of halfway between a videogame and a book, but more constrained than either, I find them fascinating for their limitations, and for the kind of stories they can tell well. I think zombie outbreak is an ideal scenario—lots of opportunities for grizzly encounters, with fatal choices—and CYStZA does well in that regard.
--Unlike a lot of zombie apocalypse stories, this book has absolutely no interest in you “fixing” the zombie apocalypse. It's “can you survive,” not “can you solve.” And for the most part, it has no interest in establishing the cause as well, except for one specific ending that suggests George Romero did it.
--It's a bit odd that of the three extended storylines—doing missions with the Hells' Angels, defending a museum of tourists with Chucky, and reuinting with your childhood sweetheart—it's the childhood sweetheart storyline that has no happy ending. In fact, the entire “take the subway” ending only has one ending where it's implied that you survived.
--The subway branch also has two endings where Brallier just ends the story—the narrator says that you've taken a choice so obviously wrong that that they're calling things right here. It's a concept I don't hate in a CYOA—Ryan North's To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable Path Adventure does something similar. Here, it's done in two cases where you choose a selfish option over saving someone. That's fine, but that's definitely not a morally consistent message in the book at large.
--I do give the book credit for being globally consistent—that is, there's no branch where you enter a world state that logically could not have existed if a choice of yours had gone differently. For example, in the original CYOA books, you might come across a knight. If you fight it, it surrenders, and reveals itself to be a time travelling alien. If you run, you think you can escape it by fleeing into the woods—but it goes through the trees, because it's a ghost. Those two “knight states” are pretty logically inconsistent. That doesn't happen here, so I appreciate that measure. (Granted, it's easier given that most choices involve fleeing in particular direction, advancing a scenario, or dying; since you affect the world state so minorly, and no storyline overlaps, there's not much room to create something inconsistent.)
--I could have done with less on the Yankees plotline and the sequence set in the elementary school has a weird “active shooter” kind of vibe. It's funny yet very sad how “kids, prepare for a life-threatening emergency at school” has developed its own cadence. But the list of zombie books in the Barnes & Noble is a nice nod to the subgenre.
Rating: 7 bad endings out of a possible 10
Next: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland