I don’t know if we can ever be totally certain how we become haunt and horror fans. I know I always liked monsters and fantasy and things that were a little off center when I was growing up, and I have decided to explore some of those things in a series of articles. If you have ideas of things that you think contributed to your early HorrorBuzz please feel free to write and we will try and write about them as well.

Bantam Books – Choose Your Own Adventure Series

Back in the day, one of the most exciting school events was the Scholastic Book Fair.  The teachers would lovingly remind us to take the paper flyers home and cry/yell/beg/generally force our parents to cough up their well earned cash, all in the name of “improving our reading skills.”

At one such book fair I discovered a real personal pre-cursor to my love of both horror and haunts, the Choose Your Own Adventure Book series.

From my first volume – The Cave of Time:

“Will You Become Trapped In Time ?

You are hiking in Snake Canyon when you find yourself lost in the strange, dimly lit Cave of Time. Gradually you can make out two passageways. One curves downward to the right; the other leads upward to the left. It occurs to you that the one leading down may go to the past and the one leading up may go to the future. Which way will you choose?

If you take the left branch, turn to page 20. If you take the right branch, turn to page 61. If you walk outside the cave, turn to page 21. Be careful! In the Cave of Time you might meet up with a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex, or be lured aboard an alien spaceship!”

Here in my  hands at 10 years old was adventure with up to 40 different endings.  Monsters, villains,  primeval worlds.

It was all I could do not to write in the tiny pages and leave myself warnings which branches I had already visited, and which one’s lead to certain horrific doom.

The series itself was very popular and among my treasured additional volumes were Journey Under The Sea, Mystery of the Maya, The Forbidden Castle, and Inside UFO 54-40 and many others.  Through them I faced dangers both real and imaginary, in this dimension and across many others.  Science Fiction and Horror in my 10 year old hands and the seeming master of my own destiny.  We weren’t rich, and so each new volume was greeted with joy and countless hours of repeated peril.

The original run of books included more than 180 volumes and were published from 1979 to 1998.  Obviously the first person video game would quickly replace the hunger for adventure and exploration in many of us, but these books were definitely a piece of my personal horror history and very much play into my desire to explore darkened passages every October.

Can you remember reading any of these?  Still have some yellowing dog-eared copies hidden away?