Choose Your Own Zombocalypse
Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read as a kid? Devouring them breathlessly with multiple fingers stuck in the pages so you could navigate your way back if things went south? Pulling out your hair trying to get to that damned cloud city ending (spoiler alert: you couldn’t) in “Inside UFO 54-40″? Checking one out from the school library and trying to convince your teacher to let you use it for a book report? Man, I loved those things.
I’m not going to lie to you here. I wrote Zombocalypse Now. It’s not like the reviews on this site are supposed to be impartial or anything, but when faced with the options of trying to fly this under the radar, forcing one of my friends to write the review, or (god forbid) not plugging my book at all, I decided to lay my cards on the table. It does kind of beg the question, though: is my own book really one of my favorite things ever? And if so, what kind of author does that make me? What kind of human being?
Well, as a writer all you can really do is write for yourself. So I wrote the Choose Your Own Adventure book that I always wanted to read. It’s novel-length, with fully 112 different endings, and there’s a choice to make on almost every page. You start off on a blind internet date, and of course your date winds up being a zombie, but you can’t tell at first because it’s indistinguishable from every other blind internet date you’ve ever had. You can choose to leave a pesky teenage couple on the side of the road to die. You can choose to just keep drinking until you pass out. Or you can choose to cowboy up and try to find out what’s causing the zombie infestation (although 105 of the endings result in your horrifying death, so you’ll probably be at it for a little while).
Oh, and you’ll also be playing the part of a pink stuffed bunny. That’s just kind of a running gag, though. It doesn’t actually figure into the plot terribly frequently.
Zombocalypse Now isn’t some kind of a parody of the original Choose Your Own Adventure series. It’s a shrine to it. It’s me trying to rewrite the books I loved as a child for the person I am today. It’s gory and ridiculous and I really, genuinely adore it.
If you’re as big a nerd as I am, you might get a kick out of it too.
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
All time favorite Choose Your Own Adventure: WAR WITH THE EVIL POWER MASTER. Now there’s a guy who knows what he stands for.
My friend bought me this book as a gift after I had finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (spoiler alert: PP&Z is a horrible book) (double spoiler alert: Zombocalypse is an F***ing awesome book)
I was cracking up from the very beginning of this book. I died about 9 times before i finally survived and it felt great. Mad props to the writer! I heart Daryl…you have to read the book to find out who that is.
that is all. I said good day.
I said GOOD DAY!!!!