SERIES Interactive adventure books grow up with adult tales

These are not the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books from the '80s.
By SAMANTHA GROSS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- Like many young professionals, Eric Bone, 33, enjoys childhood memories of braving a haunted castle, exploring the Pyramids and venturing to the bottom of the ocean.
Sometimes his adventures took a dangerous turn and he died, but he always got to start over -- at Page 1.
In the era before video games took hold, the second-person storytelling in "Choose Your Own Adventure" books provided children with low-tech virtual reality. Readers lived out their fantasies by making decisions for the book's main character as the story progressed, eventually arriving at one of many possible endings.
The children who made the Bantam Books series so popular in the 1980s have grown up, and a new wave of choose-your-own-adventure titles show that their fantasies have matured as well.
The tales today are more "Sex and the City" than "Nancy Drew." Readers can vicariously marry a millionaire, stave off drag queens, become a rock star or work as a stripper -- all without facing any real-life consequences.
Pageant shenanigans
In "Beauty Queen Blowout," published in September to coincide with the Miss America Pageant, readers can dodge lecherous judges and cheating divas while vying for a fictional national beauty title.
Written by sisters Lilla and Nora Zuckerman, the book is the second in Fireside's "Miss Adventure" series, following the Zuckermans' debauchery-filled "Tangle in Tijuana." Like the other new choose-your-own-adventure books for adults, it is not affiliated with the original Bantam series.
In every story line, the ambitious and worldly Miss Vermont plays the electric guitar for her talent competition. All other details depend on readers' choices: Will Miss Vermont abandon the pageant to pose for Playboy? Or will she head a feminist movement against the objectification of women?
Tongue-in-cheek plots
These adult choose-your-own-adventure books are decidedly tongue-in-cheek. Both of Quirk Books' "Date With Destiny Adventure" books poke fun at the conventions of Bantam's children's series, which included more than 180 titles, most of them now out of print.
In Quirk's "Night of a Thousand Boyfriends," readers who make a wrong choice can end up trapped in a never-ending loop, listening to their roommate's awful poetry.
The campy "Escape From Fire Island" features comic-book illustrations of well-muscled men attending poolside parties on the island, a traditionally gay hot spot just off Long Island, New York. The drawings also highlight the book's bad guys -- zombie drag queens who have attacked Fire Island and plan to take over the world.
The publisher sees the "Date With Destiny Adventures" as "quintessential B-treats," said Jason Mitchell, Quirk's marketing and publicity manager.
Many of the "big kids" for whom these books are intended are still getting used to dealing with real-life responsibilities. For them, playing pretend again is a welcome reprieve.
Erotic fantasies
Readers who are not interested in regressing may enjoy Gotham Books' "Create Your Own Erotic Fantasy" series, which could make even the most mature reader blush.
In "Kathryn in the City," readers assume the role of a small-town girl who moves to New York in search of a sexual awakening. "The Classics Professor" has a more sophisticated tone, with the male professor at the center of the book making clever jokes in Latin between escapades.
Bone thinks that choose-your-own-adventure books fit well with postmodern theory. "Meaning exists in the interaction between the reader and the piece of art," he said.
Ultimately, Bone said, the appeal of the books remains the same. "It makes you feel really empowered to pick outcomes and feel like you're interacting with a book or a story rather than it just happening to you."