Ye’d Best Start Believin’ in Ghost Stories
Bloodbones
Jonathan Green
Wizard Books (240 pp, ₤5.99, CAN$12.00, April 2010)
In 1982, Puffin Books unleashed The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first in the Fighting Fantasy line of gamebooks. The book was conceived and written by Steve Jackson (the British one) and Ian Livingstone, co-founders of Games Workshop. Although predated by solitaire RPG scenarios, Fighting Fantasy combined a choose-your-own-adventure decision-tree structure with a simple dice mechanic to mimic an RPG experience. The quick-start rules, brisk pacing, and art by New Wavey fantasists like Iain McCraig, Chris Achilleos, and Richard Corben, all bundled in a mass-market paperback retailing for $1.95, made Fighting Fantasy wildly successful. The series ran until 1995, along the way spawning ancillary media like novels, computer games, even a full-blown Fighting Fantasy RPG. Fan enthusiasm still burns bright today, with a downloadable fanzine and its own wiki.
Screw Narnia; had I ever discovered some magic wardrobe, I would have jumped with both feet into Titan. As it was, chores were done and allowances scraped together in anticipation of infrequent family expeditions to the mall bookstore. There I could pay to wade through the mire of the Scorpion Swamp, survive Baron Sukumvit’s Deathtrap Dungeon, rally freed slaves to overcome the sinister Gonchong on the Island of the Lizard King. Now I’ve been playing the books all over again, this time with my young sons, imparting to them the same vital life lessons I learned as a young boy: don’t trust strangers; never put your hand in someplace you can’t see; and if you kill someone, you might as well go ahead and take his wallet.
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I have a friend who collects Star Wars paraphernalia. He travels around the country a few times a year attending mammoth SciFi conventions and comic trade shows, in the frenzied remainder of the hunting and gathering instinct that evolution allowed us to keep. The dedicated room in his house where this amazing assortment of merchandise is displayed has its own security system, in place at the request of the insurance company that covers it with a policy of biblical proportion. His Facebook page is a plethora of friends and fans who admire his every acquisition, seeking to purchase or swap rare treasures with their original packaging intact.
Sword and Sorceress I
One of my favorite books — among a host of many favorites, of course, many many favorites, collected over decades of careful reading in a wide variety of genres, it’s hard to choose, depends on the time of day, naturally, and what we’re talking about, whether you want to include non-fiction, and it’s difficult to judge pleasure reading against, you know, literature like The Sound and the Fury, which was great until the part where I quit reading and pretty much gave up. That Quentin character though, man, what a dick. Anyway. Where was I.