While the first two Plot Your Own Horror Story gamebooks never seemed to get beyond the 'old town' part of Tunbridge Wells (at least until a second-hand copy of Nightmare Store turned up in a charity shop near the precinct last decade), the next couple were more widespread, and were actually the first books in the series that I ever saw. I wasn't all that interested in them by comparison with the likes of Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Grail Quest and Falcon, but I took the odd look at one of them, and became quite familiar with it after one of my sisters got a copy.
For some reason I didn't engage much with the other, released in the UK as Grand Hotel of Horror (perhaps because the original title, Horror Hotel!, was so similar to the British title of the first book in the series), but during a school trip to London, when we went into a bookshop at one point and that was the only unknown-to-me gamebook on the shelves, I did give it a little attention, winding up on the ending that has the viewpoint character falling into the piranha-infested pond.
That was the entirety of my history with GHoH until a few Decembers ago, when I chanced upon a copy on eBay and bought it. What with Christmas and related activities and acquisitions, I didn't give the book any real attention after it came in the post, so this will be my first proper attempt at it.
My family is taking a break at the Cliff's Edge Hotel in Colorado, and while my parents get settled in the room, I check out the nearby shops for souvenirs, buying a packet of photographic slides (wonder if they'll have any significance later on) and picking up a pamphlet about legends associated with the hotel. A sudden downpour discourages me from heading straight back to the hotel, and to pass the time until the rain eases off, I read the pamphlet.
According to the pamphlet, a gold prospector who'd struck it lucky had the hotel built at the turn of the century, but the place soon gained a bad reputation. One of the stone cutters working on its construction fell to his death, and on the hotel's opening night a honeymooning bride threw herself off a balcony. A maid tumbled into a laundry chute and was never seen again, a baby disappeared without explanation, and within a year the establishment was closed down and the owner moved away.
A while after that, the building was temporarily used to incarcerate convicts while a proper prison was being built, during which time three escaping felons had a fatal fall and a visiting spouse wandered into a closet and vanished. Around a decade after that the place became a girls' school, which initially did quite well, but was closed down after four of the pupils went missing.
Almost fourteen years later a doctor bought the Cliff's Edge and converted it into a 'special' hospital, but had difficulties retaining staff. Rumours spread concerning bizarre medical experiments performed on some of the patients, and another closure soon followed. After that the place remained abandoned until its current owners acquired it in the late 1970s. Extensive renovations preceded its reopening as a hotel, and five years have passed without any noteworthy incidents.
Some of the older locals are still dubious about the place, and assert that it contains a network of hidden stairways and a secret elevator that goes all the way down to the river (at least some of which you'd expect to have been discovered while the building was being renovated and the new central heating system was installed, but you can't always expect logic from gossip, gamebooks or horror stories, so anything is possible).
Suddenly I become aware that it's getting dark outside, and the rain has stopped. I hurry back uphill to the hotel, observing that surprisingly few lights are on it, and there are no cars parked outside - not even the one in which my parents and I travelled here. Though somewhat perturbed, I still go inside, and cannot find anyone else in the building. Not at the reception desk, not in the coffee bar, not in room 309, where my family is staying...
The malleability of reality that is a feature of this series of books immediately comes into play, as the first decision offered by the text requires me to determine whether the hotel has been evacuated or something strange has happened to me. Despite what I said about logic a couple of paragraphs back, I find the evacuation option that bit too implausible owing to the lack of any kind of cordon around the hotel or the hill, so I'll go with the unspecified weirdness.
Not only are my parents absent from the room, but none of our stuff is in there either. I resume my search for other people, trying the dining room since a meal is imminent. Also empty, so I carry on into the kitchen, and for the first time since I got back here, I see people. Two men stand by a table, and I approach them, but when they turn around, I realise that something is wrong. Even if I discard the frankly bigoted suggestion that nobody with facial scars would be employed in a hotel kitchen, the unsanitary stench of the first man indicates that he ought not to be in a food preparation area.
Backing away, I trip on an uneven tile. The men approach, one of them brandishing a knife. The other tells me I have no place here, and produces a rusty pair of handcuffs. He gets a cuff around one of my wrists before some semblance of narrative control returns to me, allowing me to choose whether or not I can escape from this situation. A twinge of déjà vu leads me to suspect that getting away may take me from the frying pans to the fish, so I risk seeing what happens if I fail to get away.
Well, either my memory played me false or I'd blundered into one of the 'all options lead to death' situations that can be found at times in these books. Once the cuffs are in place, the man drags me over to the walk-in freezer and uses the cuffs to suspend me from a meathook alongside several sides of beef.
The book doesn't confirm whether or not the light goes out when the door is closed.
Since writing the above I've had several more goes at the book, thereby establishing that my memory was not completely reliable. Escaping from the men in the kitchen does not lead directly to another bad ending (and the piranha death isn't even on the same branch as the convicts in the kitchen). Nevertheless, at another stage of the adventure, picking what appeared to be the worse of the possible developments was what led to the first 'good' ending I reached, so allowing seemingly bad things to happen isn't always a bad idea in this book.
As of yet, there's been no mention of the photographic slides (beyond the initial purchase) on any of the routes I've taken through the book, so maybe they never become a Chekhov's pistol. Mind you, the back cover of the book mentions a gravestone with my name on, and I haven't seen any sign of that, either, so there's still potential for me to spot a clue or a nasty twist in one of the transparencies on a currently unexplored path...
No comments:
Post a Comment