Can you trust these men? Who’s telling the truth here, anyway?

Given the freaky clown face on the cover and my recent trend of reading spooky gamebooks, imagine my surprise when I went into Carnival of Terror expecting Rob Zombie and got Alfred Hitchcock instead!

Make It Happen was a very, very short-lived gamebook series, lasting only two volumes before vanishing from the shelves in the mid-80s. No idea why this was the case, but if this first volume is any indication, it’s a shame.

Carnival of Terror is written for the same age group as CYOA and most of the other books we’ve covered here (more or less), but whereas Journey Under the Sea and Castle of No Return supplied just enough narrative to set the stage, this book spices things up a bit. The author’s voice has a bit more verve and tries to tell an engaging story rather than just painting a basic picture. For a kid’s book, the first chapter does a decent job bringing Mardi Gras to life, and there’s a constant sense of danger starting from the first couple pages.

Occasionally it does drop the ball into R. L. Stine’s “Welcome to Goofy Narrative” territory, but here it’s usually not quite as distracting. You’re often told to turn to the next chapter with a hilarious sense of urgency, and one time when I had disguised myself as a pirate, it got pretty cute:

But sometimes it goes the Twistaplot route of leaving my choices to be decided by things like whether or not I like action movies with car chases. Unlike Twistaplot, it’s not the norm for Make It Happen. At least not with this volume. The second volume, Master of the Past, I have yet to read, and it comes highly recommended, and half the time when a gamebook comes highly recommended, I find out the hard way that the person who recommended it was a Goosebumps fan as a kid (I much preferred Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories for Sleepovers, which were actually scary).

The art is…sketchy, for lack of a better word. But in a couple of spots it managed to be really moody and got my approval wholeheartedly, like this awesome Jonny Quest-esque shot of our hero hiding in a gun cabinet.

And his ninja run is pretty dope, too.

Carnival of Terror is a fun ride with lots of branching paths to take, and the Hitchcockian “caught in the wrong place at the wrong time” plot is refreshing. And it pulls no punches, too. The bad guys shot me in the head execution style in one path, and not in a silly Stine-esque way. I always respect kids’ books that don’t baby their audience, so this one gets a pass from me. Good for a bit of light reading, maybe while riding the bus to school.