“I can’t just leave all these leaves here! I’ve got to have some!”

I was convinced that this was a horror gamebook I’d read as a kid, which I distinctly remembered being terrible and suffering from repetitively written bad endings. I was looking forward to roasting that book on the internet–the life goal of EVERY well-adjusted adult.

Then I began reading Island of Doom, and quickly began to realize, “Wait, this is actually decently written. This can’t be it!”

So I guess I’m roasting this book instead.

This is going to sound like someone else’s travel blog crashed into my nerdy gamebook blog, but bear with me. My aunt and uncle once rented a local air B&B when they came down to visit from Michigan, and they picked this one particular house because it had a sweet swimming pool for all the guests to use. As they sealed the deal, the house’s owner said, “Oh, by the way, it’s normal for the water to be green, so don’t worry about it.” They got to the house, and discovered that what he meant by “pool” was “jumbo sized petri dish.” That pool hadn’t been cleaned, shocked, nor swum in since the mesozoic era.

That’s the sort of vacation setting we get in Island of Doom. We, our sister Betsy, and our neglectful parents are traveling to a little-known vacation spot in the Caribbean called Alura. Mom and Dad got the tickets for a bargain price, and no one’s ever heard of Alura, so they figured it must be “the best-kept secret in the Caribbean!”

Cue the run-down, deserted hotel; the beach with the “jellyfish migration in progress” sign; and the general feeling that we’ve just walked into a Garfield animated special.

Oh yeah, and there’s cannibalistic ghosts, too.

Or so the hotel staff claims. But while a good haunting couldn’t possibly make this vacation any worse, asking Betsy to pee on my jellyfish sting certainly will. So let’s go, Ghost-buuu-sterrrrs, LETS GO!

So the book is actually off to a pretty good start, and takes its time setting the scene. In fact, throughout the story there are a number of spooky and even grisly moments. But it was here, while exploring the lame beaches of Alura, that I realized the narrative had long forgotten that it was supposed to be a choice book.

And it continues to forget this important point for several more chapters. We get ping-ponged back and forth all over the book with only the occasional choice granted to us, and it doesn’t begin to feel like an actual gamebook until maybe halfway through, when we finally get somewhat regular opportunities to affect the outcome of the story. The choices make sense at least, but they’re too few and far between, especially for the first stretch of the book. I don’t mind when the author spends a few chapters to build immersion, but 13 pages is a bit much. You could spin a whole short story in 13 pages, and I betcha it wouldn’t make you go back and forth from page 14 to page 69, then to page 24, then to page 39, then page 6, ad infinitum in the process, neither.

Anyway, the internal continuity isn’t consistent here. Sometimes the ghosts are indeed ghosts, and sometimes they’re Scooby Doo villains trying to scare people away from the resort. And sometimes it’s all just a dream brought on by boredom thanks to the lamest tropical vacation ever.

The bad endings are a mixed bag as well, though sometimes they have gruesome implications, which I have to appreciate. Getting eaten by a giant flytrap would be a rotten way to go. But the protagonists can be such boneheads that there are times when I’m rooting for them to bite the dust. I might not make fun of a kid for having a leaf collection, but I’ll certainly give him the razz if he’s obsessing over leaf collecting while the volcanic island under his feet is actively erupting all around him.

I did enjoy the bit with the fruit, though. If you find yourself in the jungle on a tropical island, and you come across weird, unknown fruit, you’d be an idiot to eat them. These kids are idiots, so I made them eat the purple fruits that gave them a few moments’ enjoyment… right before they’re swarmed by millions of bloodsucking insects, which were drawn to the fruit juices they’d just ingested. The most important thing in comedy is timing.

The art is entertaining, but in the wrong ways. It’s nicely detailed, but half the time the expressions seem…inappropriate at best. Is that kid angry that the flytrap is grinning at him? He looks like he’s hollering at his sister to quit hogging the phone.

We had to share a phone back in the days before iphones, kids. It was plugged into the wall by a cord, too, so you couldn’t take it more than halfway across the room. We couldn’t even play Doom on it. Weird, huh?

Our music was better, though, so quit gawking.

Richard Brightfield’s writing does a good job establishing a sense of setting and mood, so I can’t fault him for that. But Island of Doom falls short in a lot of other areas, the biggest one being long stretches of linear narrative with no choices, and the ping-ponging back and forth from one end of the book to the other. The undead natives aren’t as scary as they could be, and some of the bad endings fall flat. But there are some decent spooky moments here and there, and I love the “vacation letdown” setup. And there IS a payoff related to the cover art, which was a relief.

So I guess if you’re looking for spooky gamebooks, you could do better, but you could do worse, too. I’ll give it four and a half Betsys out of ten.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.