You give Old Baldie a swift kick in the shins.

Master of the Past does things better and worse than its predecessor, Carnival of Terror.

CoT had a single comprehensive narrative with lots of twists and turns, in the vein of a Hitchcockian thriller set during Mardi Gras in the Big Easy. It did a nice job creating a sense of atmosphere and peril with as few words as possible, and didn’t pull any punches with people getting bumped off.

MotP by contrast, due to its time travel premise, has several different narratives depending which time period you go to in the beginning. This makes the second Make It Happen more fun to replay. Re-reading Carnival of Terror amounts to resolving a Mardi Gras espionage plot in a different way; re-reading Master of the Past means going to a completely different setting every time, and experiencing a completely different storyline. It’s really cool that I can read the same book three times and get three different time travel adventures involving George Washington vs the redcoats, tussling with wild west gunslingers, and dinosaurs.

The artwork looks better this time around, too. The quality is more consistent and creates a lot of atmosphere. Some of it is downright funny, like seeing the mad scientist from the prologue in a leisure suit and pompador in 1976.

Where the story really drags is that prologue, and the premise in general. Carnival of Terror was a strong first entry in this short-lived series because it paced itself and built suspense. The first two pages of Master of the Past can be summarized like this: Golly gee, it sure is cool having a super cool scientist dad who just built a time machine, and Dad promised to risk permanent damage to our timeline by bringing me along with him for his first test run! Who’s that knocking at the door? Evil Rival Scientist who hates my dad and wants to steal his time machine? Crap, I just told him I was home alone, too. Better escape into the past so he doesn’t get his hands on it!

It could’ve been so easy to cook up a solid premise for this book that would have kept it on par with the first Make It Happen adventure. Kid is miffed that Time Travel Dad doesn’t trust him with time-travel yet. Time Travel Dad promises to take him on a journey through time when he feels he’s mature enough to earn it. Kid decides to try the machine out while Dad is at the office one day, and whoops! Caught in a time warp!

Super easy. Maybe the author was on a real time crunch. I dunno. Shame that the premise for this one is so weak, though.

Can’t help wishing there were more time periods to visit, and that the different plots could somehow cross, connect, or even loop, to make the time travel story more convoluted. It’s also kind of funny how nobody questions the fact that the hero is a tween (perfectly okay using him as a secret agent or selling him liquor), nor that he’s wearing future clothes. I can see him getting away with a t-shirt in 1976, but 1876?

Also, this kid wastes no time buying food and drinks in different time periods, with money that clearly doesn’t match the period he’s in! What would happen to the timeline when you flash a quarter from 1983 in the year 1976? Or buy sarsaparilla with a modern dollar? I guess that’s the trouble with time travel stories. You always end up picking them apart, except in the rare case when it gets time travel right, like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

And shockingly, (spoiler alert) there’s no resolution to the whole time machine thing. Clearly this project is dangerous and should be scrapped, but Time Travel Dad is determined to bring it to the mainstream or something. The plotlines just sort of end abruptly with no lesson to be learned about not screwing up the space-time continuum while dad is away on a business trip. If anything, they end on a “well, that was a close one!” note with the hero minimizing damage to his timeline by the skin of his teeth, and sometimes on accident.

I forgot to mention in the Carnival of Terror article that these books have a bad habit of featuring two-page spreads for important illustrations related to the story, but they occupy the two non-numbered pages after their respective chapter. So a lot of the time you’ll have no idea that there’s artwork connected to the chapter you just read unless you check out the next page before turning to the page indicated.

If you’re a gamebook geek and you want all the gamebooks, definitely pick this one up. It’s a short, fun read with some replayability and a few clever touches to the time-travel dilemma.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.