Choose Your Own Adventure

NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE

Beyond the Great Wall

The bomb never fell, but my bookshelves did. They came down on 23rd February, 2001, in a small flat I was renting in Brighton. Casualties were kept to a minimum, but they included a peanut butter sandwich (half-eaten), a nasty ceramic ashtray a friend had made me during an arts and crafts psychic-cleansing getaway, and a copy of Principia Mathematica, which dropped into a fish tank. No loss, as I only had it lying around in the hope that pretty ladies might one day mistakenly suspect that I had hidden depths. (Same for the fish tank, if I’m honest.)

The shelves came down because of all those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I’d lost my originals, of course, but to cut through the boredom, poverty and hovering dread of the university years, I’d taken to hunting through second hand stores for any I could locate, and buying them up in bulk. I’m a catch.

Some eluded me. I spent a lot of time looking for Beyond the Great Wall - which I still haven’t got, if anyone’s listening - but along the way I discovered plenty of other classics that I’d never originally been aware of. Classics like Inside UFO 54-40 with its weird structural experiment, or The Deadly Shadow in which Dimitrius, a man who looks suspiciously like Peter Molyneux, is turned into a human bomb with time travel capabilities, and, perhaps best of all, like The Horror of High Ridge.

If you want to read about THE HORROR OF HIGH RIDGE, go here.

If you want to hear about frightening STRUCTURAL EXPERIMENTS, go here.