One of the most prolific adventure gamebook authors of the 1980s was J.H. Brennan. You may remember that his gamebooks were, in fact, the subject of the first ever post of this blog over five years ago. But to recap, he wrote three series of gamebooks at the height of the craze in the 80s: GrailQuest, which was set apart from most other series of the time by being incredibly funny; Sagas of the Demonspawn, which by contrast was played absolutely straight; and the Horror Classic Gamebooks, which fell somewhere inbetween those two extremes.
But, apart from the occasional cross-series reference, there was one thing which all three series had in common, and that was what happened when you died: you were directed to another section which described what happened afterwards. That section basically functioned as the gamebook's afterlife. Originating in GrailQuest as one of its many running jokes, this metatextual section was (at least in that series) always section 14, and was often referred to by the book as "the dreaded 14" whenever the player was directed there. You may think the use of the number 14 was a deliberate joke about how you'd expect the obvious number for such a section to be 13. And you'd probably be right. But if you look at how the idea was used in all three series you can, among other things, more or less prove that for certain. So here, then, are all the deep -- and not-so-deep -- hereafters that Brennan ever wrote.
