It Ended Badly
Categories: Fiction
At a certain point in the days of my youth, Choose-your-own-Adventure books enjoyed a surge in popularity. I must admit I was one of the many in my generation who paged frantically back and forth exploring another planet or trying to find the lost treasure. I also have to admit that more often than not I was bitten by a poisonous creature or perished in a pit trap.
I have to admit that my decision making, at least in novels of this sort, has a certain exuberance that overrides my common sense. Offered the phrase You see a dark wood door; from behind it comes the sound of uncanny howling. Do you:
- Open the Door (turn to page 58)
- Go back down the passage (turn to page 84)
I'm going to almost always turn to page 58. I've also now verified that this trait has continued into adulthood with my recent thumbing through several of the hundreds of available plots in Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes.
Pretty Little Mistakes promises more than 150 possible endings, but I think I only made it to about 12. After dying of hepititis, being shanked in prison, murdered by a serial killer, and several other more or less terrible fates I wondered if there were any good outcomes to be had in the book. Well, I finally ended up with the plot that leaves me dying a millionaire in a happy house full of grandchildren in the French countryside. I guess that's supposed to be the lost treasure of this particular adventure, but it was not a particularly straight or virtuous path to get there.
A lot of the endings in the book weren't what I'd call great endings. Some were a little too pat, some a bit far-fetched, and most of them were terribly depressing. However, Pretty Little Mistakes is all about the journey and works pretty well as a grown up riff on the Choose-your-own-adventure story. Choices that seem wrong end up having lucrative consequences. Decisions that seem right sometimes are, and sometimes lead down dark paths anyway. Like life, I guess, which could be the point of the book.
