I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books, and the fact that that's far from a unique statement is less of an indictment of me and more of a testament to how amazing this giant collection of you-shape-the-stories was/is.

It feels nearly pointless to describe what they were, but assuming that there is even a single reader who never soaked in a CYOA book at some point, it worked like this: Read a page or two, and you'd be given options as to what the book's star character should do next. If you wanted to do "Action A," you turned to "Page X." If you wanted to do "Action B," you turned to "Page XX." Rinse and repeat that for many pages, and what you had were these great, strange little stories with multiple endings, ranging from the mediocre to the ultra-happy, and even including a few where poor decisions caused your character to die in horrible ways.

The novelty of turning books into games notwithstanding, CYOA titles could be equally championed for the broad range of eerie and awesome topics they covered. In one book, your character attended a Halloween party in a house that may or may not have been filled with flesh-eating monsters. In another, you ran marathons with the Abominable Snowman. There were plenty of titles with lighter themes, but I always viewed the CYOA franchise as being my first introduction to "unsettling reading."

If you forced me to pick a favorite, I wouldn't have much trouble. Meet Gorga!

Gorga, The Space Monster was one of the "young reader" CYOA books, with more pictures, less pages and increased spacing between letters. I picked it up from the Troll Book Club during grade school and read it no less than 15,000 times. The story involves a young boy who finds a car-sized, three-eyed purple space monster in his backyard, which grows larger and larger throughout the book. Depending on which "actions" you chose to take, Gorga would be portrayed as everything from a befuddled pet to an out-of-control, planet-destroying maniac.

There wasn't a definitive strategy involved with finding your way to one of the "good endings." Not that it mattered much: If you ended up with a bad one, all you had to do was flip back to the original page and pick the other action. (Technically, this was cheating, but who was going to admonish you? Gorga? Gorga was paper; he couldn't do shit.) Despite your decision-making process adding up to a crapshoot, it was still smart to avoid actions that seemed to be in bad taste:

This trick didn't work universally, but more often than not, being a "nice kid" usually paved way for happier endings. In the case shown above, hitting poor Gorga over the head with a log brought forth an abrupt ending in which the monster...well, ate you. The "abrupt bad ending" was the worst thing that could happen to a CYOA reader. It was like walking into a Goomba on Level 1-1.

Happier endings involved the lead character successfully keeping Gorga safe from gun-toting officials, but in a way, I preferred the vaguely horrific bad endings. When I sat on Gorga's back and flew him safely into space, yeah, I did good, but I didn't really think about the story after closing the book. When something bad happened, it stuck with me for a little longer. See below.

I wouldn't say that I actively sought out bad endings (I wanted to "win" more than I wanted Gorga to eat me and my family), but when you're a kid and you're just entering the wild world of books that aren't 85% pictures, this kind of creepy stuff has a lasting effect.

The Choose Your Own Adventure series was enormously successful. Debuting in 1979 and still running today in some form or another, it's amassed hundreds of titles with several printings. Course, I don't want you to mistake this entry as a random tribute to CYOA, as I'm really only here to point to the obvious deity that is Gorga the space monster. I loved him!

Purple, porcine and triple-eyed, Gorga was easy to draw and fun to color. And, in one version of the story, he grew large enough to eat a passenger train. These are the traits of something worth sacrificing a live chicken to. Gorga deserves at least one Google hit that sends people to something other than a used book storefront, and if it's my destiny to make that happen, I can now retire with my head held high.

Posted by Matt on 01/31/2008. E-mail me!