“You attempt to climb it much as Hawaiians climb coconut trees.”

Ever wonder what it would be like to spend the night in a department store? Ever wonder if literally everything in the store might come to life and try to kill you in gruesome ways?

If you said “yes” twice, have I got a treat for you!

Part of me wishes I’d gotten my hands on this book as a kid, back when I was being scared senseless by Scary Stories for Sleepovers. Even as a young reader, I hated when a scary story intended for kids turned out to be not scary at all, or worse, downright silly. That’s why I never got into Goosebumps. If I wanted a good scare, I’d read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark or the classic EC Comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, etc). Even when my age was in the single digits, I could somehow tell when the author took his work seriously, and when he hated his own audience.

Nightmare Store puts us in the role of a dumb kid who goes to his local Wallenbergs by himself, on an exciting outing with no adult supervision. He then proceeds to fall asleep in a display chair watching all the TVs at once, and when he wakes up, it’s after hours, and Wallenbergs is closed, dark, and inexplicably haunted. What follows is a kaleidoscope of weird fates inside this weird department store. In one or two, we escape a horrible fate, or wake up and discover we were just dreaming.

In the vast majority of the endings, we suffer horrible, painful, nightmarish death.

The shortcomings of Nightmare Store—and possibly the Plot-Your-Own Horror Stories series as a whole, from what I gather—are myriad. I get the general sense that the “true” ending of this book is that we’re suffering a nightmare in the Wallenbergs. That’s the only explanation that connects the random grab-bag of spooky events we encounter during our misadventures in the store.

Otherwise the scares have no relation to one-another, and they occur for no reason whatever. A mattress randomly becomes a waterbed, which then turns out to be filled with acid when we pop it. Bed springs randomly become snakes, an iguana is suddenly a giant alligator, the floor is concrete one minute and quicksand the next, and just as suddenly the quicksand becomes a chute that leads straight to the furnace. The only way any of this could occur in the same story is by the impulsive nature of dreams.

To that end, the story has one up on Uncle Harry’s Scream Shack. But it’s still pretty weak objectively, simply giving the author license to throw a bunch of spooks into a single book to scare the kiddies.

The other major drawback is the inconsistent writing quality. There are tense issues and confusing turns of phrase abound, as if the book didn’t have a proofreader. The narrative will describe, for example, that as I touch an object with my hand, “it” becomes entangled in a string, but at first you don’t know if “it” refers to the hand or the object. So in the realms of story logic and sentence structure, Nightmare Store is a bit of a mess.

What saved the book for me—and would have saved it even if I’d read this as a kid—is the immersion. Hilary Milton takes the opposite approach of the Tenopia Island author by using narrative to immerse you in the events of the book. You get a real sense that you’re exploring a department store after hours, and there are many memorably spooky moments throughout, such as (spoiler alert!) when I freeze upon sighting a creepy woman staring at me from the dark, only to write it off as a mannequin without further investigation. I spent the rest of the book wondering if it really was a mannequin, or if I would be running into her again!

The book has an interesting layout, too. You’ll note that the top of each chapter heading refers to the preceding section, so you can actually read this book backwards at any point to see what led to a particular scene. It makes navigating the book much easier for those of us who like to get all of the paths.

Finally, this author does not care what parents think about the state of children’s entertainment. You die a lot in this book, and it’s usually pretty grim. I got crushed to a pulp, sacrificed to a monster by possessed holiday props, and consumed by a flesh-scalding coffee slime, just to name a few of my gruesome fates. I even got to watch myself die in real time on television!

There are a few lighthearted endings, of course, but it’s nice to know that Hilary Milton is more from the RC Welch School of Scaring the Pants off of Young’uns, rather than the RL Stine School of Spooky Goofery. When it ends badly in Goosebumps, you can hear the “womp-wommmp” punctuated with a slide-whistle. When it ends badly in Nightmare Store, they have to clean you off the walls with a sponge.

The artwork is next level, too. I think the artist is Stanley S Drate, because he gets the “designed by” credit for this book, but there’s no credit explicitly for artwork. Whatever. Those snakes are terrifying to behold. So is that robot who might otherwise strike one as endearing. And is that alligator being puked up by a ghost?!

So while I wouldn’t call Nightmare Store a good book per-se, I still recommend it for gamebook fans and young readers who like spooky stuff. The book is a mess without a doubt, but the author at least tries to immerse you to the point where you don’t care too much. Whether the other Plot-Your-Own Horror Stories books are up to the same quality, we have yet to see.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.