Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack

  "Your twip to Cwete will now be vewy wough." I have mixed feelings about the first volume of Cretan Chronicles, Bloodfeud of Altheus . It manages to strike a perfect balance of great and terrible, and anyone who has read it will probably already know what I'm on about. This post will record my general impressions of the book and its contents, rather than a professionally organized review, since I try to avoid spoiling things too much for people who are interested in the books I blog about. Also because I tend to write these posts late in the evening before I go to bed. The most obvious plus about this series is that it eschews the tired old medieval European fantasy setting in favor of ancient Greece and Greek mythology. I can't stress enough just how refreshing this is, and as a mythology nerd I was thrilled when this trilogy finally arrived in the mail so I could sink my teeth into it.  In fact the story retcons a lot of myths so that you, the be-all catch-all cha...

You'd go great with syrup, if they can ever peel you off the wall. So I was planning to review an especially cool GI Joe gamebook next, but then I happened upon another Twistaplot book, and after riffing the last one I couldn't resist grabbing it. I know, I'm ignoring my own advice by not just reading it in the bookstore, but remind me which of us is the one blogging about these in detail. Yeah, that's what I thought. Unlike Crash Landing!,  the lucky 13th entry in the Twistaplot series managed to entertain, in that it made me laugh. Had I gone in expecting something that was actually scary, I would have yeeted this book across the room after the first couple pages. Right from the cover you can tell this is not an outing that takes itself seriously. The background is genuinely creepy, with an especially frightening face superimposed over the castle, but then when you see the blatant Universal movie monster lineup in the foreground, you know this is going to be a lighthe...