The other day, friend of the blog John Hoare wrote this - on how he found, and indeed finds, the life force meter on Knightmare the most terrifying thing on the world. And it has prompted me to share my own traumatic memory of interactive fantasy nominally aimed at children.
The seventh book in the Lone Wolf series of adventure gamebooks, Castle Death, originally published in 1986 and given a lease of life across future generations of children by turning up in charity shops for ever after. In the Maze of Zahda, Lone Wolf comes across a disembodied hand on a plinth, an evil sentient being known as the Rahkos, which lives off only one form of nourishment - living human brain. Even as the fight begins, the text is grim, describing how you escape its initial attack "with scratches to your scalp" and that you "cannot help but fear that your life is soon to end". Should you kill the Rahkos and then immediately turn your back on it, you are treated to the most grisly death in gamebook history:
A searing pain explodes behind your eyes as the hand clamps itself to your head. As the decaying fingers pierce your scalp, forcing their way through your skull, your vision turns red and your body shakes uncontrollably. The hideous claw burrows deeper, feeding on the only source of nourishment that can sustain its existence: living human brain.
A really horrible end, especially for a book primarily read by children aged 10 to 13. And an unusually horrible end too - I can't think of any other ways to die in Lone Wolf that are anywhere near as graphic as this. If he went for gory ways to die, Dever tended to leave more to the imagination. This is surely a part of why it sticks in the memory of so many who read the books as a child - it is telling that on the Nightmare Fuel page for the series on TV Tropes, this is the only way to die to be mentioned. I certainly think this has a claim to being the most nightmare-inducing death in any gamebook of the 1980s - its only competitors come from Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, and that was a series expressly aimed at adults, not children.
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A Diversion on the Marketing of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Which Would Probably Not Make a Good Blog Post By Itself
SJS! was explicitly aimed at adults, as this advertisement makes clear (taken from Demian's Gamebook Webpage). To that end, it was published by Penguin Books, whereas the main Fighting Fantasy series was handled by their children's imprint, Puffin. The original covers for the books lacked the Fighting Fantasy logo - or indeed anything else to mark them as an adventure gamebook apart from the back cover blurb - completely. But before the series even finished being written, there were revisions to bring the covers in line with the parent series, adding the FF logo and 'Adventure Gamebooks' banner, although they were still being published by Puffin. Finally, for Wizard Books' noughties revival, they made no differentiation at all and just folded the series completely into the main FF range with no changes to the text at all, which Scholastic also did when they won the rights to the series (although the latter, as with the rest of the Scholastic books, replaced the illustrations with appalling new ones). And that is how quite a few children probably ended up mildly traumatised by unwittingly reading a gamebook that wasn't really aimed at them.
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Anyway, I remember being so scared by this as a child that I was frightened by the prospect of continuing to have the book on my shelf, although obviously the gamebook collector in me won out, as that same edition is still with me today. But I still get a little unnerved every time I read it back, and it is no surprise that when talking about things in works nominally aimed at children that really freaked you out, it was the first - if not only - thing that came to mind...
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