Books Illustrated by Craig White

25. Shop Till You Drop...Dead!
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrators: Craig White (cover), internal illustrator uncredited
First Published: January, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-39776-1
Length: 133 pages
Number of Endings: 27
Plot Summary: Your friend Reggie makes a bet that you and another friend named Julie can't survive the hour from midnight to one A.M. in his father's store, which he claims is cursed. You foolishly accept.
My Thoughts: This is the first book in the series to include a plot line that's largely non-linear and that uses inventory management to prevent the final battle from being won too quickly. Although not a total triumph (there's a continuity error or two that crop up if you do things in the wrong order), it's a decent gamebook, featuring some genuinely interesting gameplay. It sort of reminds me of the Megaman video games in that you have to conquer certain areas first in order to acquire special items which make victory attainable in later locations. The adventure is further enhanced by the fact that an effort has been made to make the little puzzles more interesting and challenging than usual -- the word search puzzle is somewhat unconventional, and the maze is both tricky and restricted by a time limit! The paths that don't lead to the non-linear part of the book aren't nearly as interesting, but they're certainly no worse than average for the series. This is a book worth reading, and if you enjoy it, be sure to also grab a copy of book 30, which does the same thing, only with even more success.

26. Alone in Snakebite Canyon
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: March, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-39997-7
Length: 137 pages
Number of Endings: 24
Plot Summary: While camping in the desert you find a shop and can buy one of two valuable items: a pair of magic snake eyes that will allow you to transform into different animals or a map to an old (and deadly) gold mine.
Translation: German
My Thoughts: I quite enjoyed this book... The animal transformation part of the book offers a lot of entertaining possibilities and the gold mine features a fun little riddle that actually requires a few moments of thought to solve. This is definitely one of the better books in this series.

27. Checkout Time at the Dead-End Hotel
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: April, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-39998-5
Length: 140 pages
Number of Endings: 21
Plot Summary: You and your friends get trapped in a hotel inhabited by ghosts and must find the only other human in the place in order to get out alive.
My Thoughts: This is definitely an above-average entry in the series. While the story is nothing special, the gameplay is quite challenging, requiring careful exploration and good luck to get through successfully. As a bonus, a solution to the first Give Yourself Goosebumps Special Edition adventure is included in the back of this book.

28. Night of a Thousand Claws
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: June, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-40034-7
Length: 137 pages
Number of Endings: 26
Plot Summary: Your family goes on vacation to Cat Cay, an isolated island with a decidedly unconventional feline population.
Translation: German
My Thoughts: After a few exceptional books in a row, the series has returned to average here. Only a few things seem notable about this volume. First of all, its atmosphere is a little closer to being genuinely creepy than is usual for the series... but it's still not nearly close enough. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that the adventure isn't as clearly partitioned into multiple unrelated stories as most of the other books in the series are. Usually, the first choice determines which storyline you encounter in a Give Yourself Goosebumps book. Here, though, there's no such clear partition between the book's storylines. However, just because the book isn't clearly partitioned, don't think that it's a united whole -- it has as much inconsistency as any volume in the series. Finally, there are a few gameplay gimmicks, but they're nothing special -- just some pointless randomization and a "how many words can you find in this phrase?" puzzle. This isn't a bad book, but it's also not really a special one. I am indifferent to it.

30. You're Plant Food
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: September, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-41974-9
Length: 136 pages
Number of Endings: 24
Plot Summary: Your class trip to the E. Ville Creeper Botanical Gardens turns out to be a bit more interesting than expected...
My Thoughts: This is quite an interesting little book. Like most of the volumes in the series, it contains two more or less unrelated adventures, and it has lots of inconsistencies of storyline. Nonetheless, its game design is remarkably sophisticated for such a simple book. As in book 25, one of the storylines included here is extremely non-linear and requires the player to figure out the best order for the actions to be carried out in. Inventory management is also essential in order for the book's mission to be successfully completed. The other storyline is more straightforward, but it still has the twist that if you fail to perform a particular action early on, you can't succeed at the end. This is definitely about as close to a "real" gamebook that you're going to get in this series, and it's a fairly entertaining read.

31. The Werewolf of Twisted Tree Lodge
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: November, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-46306-3
Length: 137 pages
Number of Endings: 25
Plot Summary: A bit of plagiarism has won you a spot at the Twisted Tree Lodge horror convention; alas, all is not as it seems....
My Thoughts: After the previous book's interesting game design, this one plunges back into the realm of totally random senselessness. There's absolutely no coherence whatsoever to the book; characters and circumstances change wildly depending on your choices, so there's no strategy involved, and the author throws around so many different styles and concepts that it's impossible to tell what's even supposed to be going on. There are a couple of ideas that might have been interesting if they had been developed consistently throughout the book, but since everything feels so half-finished, the whole thing is really just a waste of time.

32. It's Only a Nightmare!
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: December, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-76785-2
Length: 137 pages
Number of Endings: 40
Plot Summary: You're trying to sleep while visiting an inn with your parents; this is a little difficult since your bed's headboard is covered in creepy gargoyles and you have recurring nightmares about a strange being who calls himself the Sleep Master.
My Thoughts: I think that I probably would have enjoyed this book had I read it when I was younger; since it's about dreaming, it covers a broad variety of scenarios, many of them not even attempting to be horrific in any way. It's fast-paced and surreal, and it just feels a little different from the average book in this series. It lacks substance and direction, though, and being different doesn't really save it from being mediocre. It's a change of pace, but it's not an especially worthwhile one, nor does it come close to living up to its potential -- the Sleep Master could have been much creepier, and most of the dream scenarios lack originality and miss opportunities for both scares and laughs.

33. It Came from the Internet
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrators: Craig White (cover), internal illustrator uncredited
First Published: February, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-51665-5
Length: 135 pages
Number of Endings: 22
Plot Summary: You've installed some new web crawling software, and now your computer has a virus... a rather unusual one, at that.
My Thoughts: With my computer science background, few things annoy me more than ludicrously stupid portrayals of computer technology in popular culture. For this reason, I braced myself to really hate this book. Rather to my surprise, it didn't bother me too much. Obviously, there's not a great degree of realism on display here, what with computer viruses that can pop out of the monitor and bite people, but enough sense of reality underlies the fantasy that I could suspend my disbelief and accept it without cringing. Also good is the fact that the book largely focuses on a single plotline. There are some stupid deaths and pointless asides, but after the last two books of disjointed random wandering, it was nice to see some degree of consistency again. Add a gratuitous maze to keep things interesting and you have an unexceptional but entirely readable adventure which explores some technological themes that are too new to have been explored during the height of gamebooks in the eighties.

34. Elevator to Nowhere
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrators: Craig White (cover), internal illustrator uncredited
First Published: March, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-51670-1
Length: 136 pages
Number of Endings: 23
Plot Summary: You visit your science fair partner's uncle, an inventor, and get mixed up in adventures involving an elevator that leads to other dimensions.
My Thoughts: There sure are a lot of strange scientist uncles in gamebook-land; the first few pages of this book felt awfully familiar to me. Indeed, there are a lot of familiar plot devices on display here, but I found the book to be a lot more fun than I expected. There's a clear mission to accomplish, a variety of places to explore, multiple paths to victory, and a sense of continuity nearly unprecedented in this series -- I was actually able to use something I learned from my first play-through to avoid getting killed during a later adventure. The book is also fairly well-written, having a certain sense of fun while still taking itself relatively seriously and, for better or worse, being surprisingly violent. This obviously isn't a classic, but it's another unexpectedly respectable entry in a series that I never thought I'd hold any respect for whatsoever.

1. Into the Jaws of Doom
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: February, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-39777-X
Length: 238 sections (plus 10 pages of introductory material and rules)
Number of Endings: 39
Plot Summary: You lag behind the rest of your class during a field trip to the museum and end up getting trapped by an insane Super Computer that wants you dead!
My Thoughts: When I first opened this book, I nearly let out an audible gasp. It has several sections per page, it requires the reader to keep track of inventory, and it even uses dice! The only thing that keeps it from being a "real" gamebook is its lack of character statistics like strength or hit points. This is remarkable, especially for a mass-market book published in 1998! Alas, the book isn't all it could be -- the design is rather spoiled by the die rolling. All of the die rolls in the text are pure tests of luck, and since many of them are completely unavoidable, it becomes increasingly likely that you'll lose due to bad luck the farther into the story you get. For what it's worth, things seem to get easier as you go, but the die-rolling still makes replaying without cheating very tedious and is simply a bad design practice. It's unfortunate that a point-based character creation system wasn't added to the rules -- this could have offered a way for players to strategically avoid death by poor die rolls, assuming that different rolls were adjusted by different abilities. Oh well; I guess you can't have everything. Despite its flaws, it's a nice change of pace from the more traditional Give Yourself Goosebumps series, and its style of gameplay certainly suggests that R. L. Stine hasn't forgotten about his classic Hark series.

2. Return to Terror Tower
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrators: Craig White (cover), internal illustrator uncredited
First Published: May, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-39999-3
Length: 136 pages
Number of Endings: 26
Plot Summary: Eddie and Sue, the main characters of the 27th non-interactive Goosebumps book, escort you back 800 years in time to save England from a tyrannical threat.
My Thoughts: This is considerably more simplistic than the previous book. We're back to the usual numbered pages rather than numbered sections, and there's no use of dice; the only game mechanic retained is the inventory management, and it isn't exactly ground-breaking. The game design doesn't seem bad at first, allowing you to explore a number of medieval locations in a non-linear fashion, but its flaws show through rather quickly. The worst is a nasty continuity problem -- if you go to the forest, you have an important encounter. If you then go to the village, it's entirely possible that you'll end up having that very same encounter again due to the way the paths converge. Very sloppy! Other problems include the fact that there's little strategy involved in play (death often comes seemingly at random) and the incredible stupidity of the player character -- when you come across a bunch of signs which match the illustrations on your map, you're still supposedly puzzled about what they could mean... And when you follow the path leading to one tower, you believe for some reason that it leads to the other one! Perhaps the author intended for the book's drawings to be less obvious than what the illustrator ultimately created, but as it stands, it's kind of annoying. This book should have been much better, and it's a shame that the series lost its complexity after only one relatively interesting book was published.

4. One Night in Payne House
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrators: Craig White (cover), internal illustrator uncredited
First Published: October, 1998
ISBN: 0-590-43378-4
Length: 135 pages
Number of Endings: 23
Plot Summary: You and your friend Trevor have dared each other to spend a night in Payne House, the setting of a horror movie you've seen many times. Predictably enough, the movie is all too real....
My Thoughts: This book uses the same item-picking game system as the last book, though it adds the ability to pick up additional items; there are a couple things in the house that you can grab for later use. The adventure is also considerably more challenging than the last -- there are quite a few red herrings, and only after you've died many times, receiving hints and knowledge of the house in the process, do you have much hope of winning. There challenge is further enhanced by a "figure out a number and then turn to that page" puzzle along with a clever method of ensuring that the reader has visited a particular location and grabbed a necessary inventory item. All in all, the book has a fairly decent design, since it allows the reader to experience most of the story before winning, though it ultimately feels kind of hollow -- there's really no skill involved in winning; it's just process of elimination combined with luck. It also seems unfair that a reader who weighs under sixty pounds is completely doomed and can't win without cheating. Of course, what more should I expect from a Goosebumps book? Taken in the context of the series, this is pretty good. Taken out of that context, it's mediocre, though not entirely without redeeming features.
Errata: The second choice on page 71 should probably read "If you didn't bring the bat, or if you don't wish to use it, turn to PAGE 113." Otherwise, it would be impossible for the reader to ever make use of the bat later on in the story, since as things stand, the story only advances if you don't have the bat.

5. The Curse of the Cave Creatures
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrators: Craig White (cover), internal illustrator uncredited
First Published: January, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-18734-1
Length: 136 pages
Number of Endings: 28
Plot Summary: While hiking through the desert, you find a cave. All too quickly, you manage to break an ancient skull and release a dangerous spirit, and it's now your job to undo the damage you have done!
My Thoughts: It seems that R. L. Stine (or whatever author was borrowing his name for the purposes of writing this book) was feeling a bit nostalgic for Wizards, Warriors & You when the concept for this adventure was devised. The first choice you are faced with is whether to be a hunter or a spellcaster, and depending on your decision, you must then pick out a selection of weapons or spells to bring along on your mission. This, combined with the fairly promising-sounding plot, raised my hopes that this would be an entertaining adventure. Unfortunately, it fell far short of its potential. The weapon and spell choosing is rather pointless since in each case you get to pick three items from a list of only four, and there's not much strategy to actually using the things you choose, especially if you become a hunter. Similarly pointless are the pair of puzzles found in the book -- although the word transformation puzzle is used in what could almost (but not quite) be called a clever manner, I really can't comprehend the point of the color-in-the-squares thingie on page 120. Things are made much worse by the fact that the writing is well below par (and par is pretty low when you consider that we're talking about Goosebumps here). The overall tone is light, but not humorous, thus undermining the horror and inducing apathy in the reader. There are lots of pointless sentence fragments (my favorite was the gramatically nightmarish "Let him show itself."), and descriptions often go too far overboard in attempting to be impressive (a Pterosaur as big as a tree?!). Add at least one dumb factual error (tarantulas and scorpions aren't insects, and most people know that by now), and you've got quite a mess. It's not very challenging either, and the title doesn't feel quite appropriate. Definitely the low point of the series thus far.

6. Revenge of the Body Squeezers
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: June, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-51674-4
Length: 134 pages
Number of Endings: 23
Plot Summary: You return from a trip to find out that your friend Jack has just fended off an alien invasion -- and a second one is just beginning!
My Thoughts: This book doesn't really seem to belong in this series; there's nothing special about it to make it a Special Edition -- no gimmicks, no rules, no extra-high challenge level. The only justification I can think of is the fact that it's a sequel to a non-interactive Goosebumps 2000 novel, though that doesn't seem like a very good reason to me. Even if I didn't feel the need to complain about its inappropriate classification, though, I still would have a lot to gripe about -- this is a mediocre effort at best. As in the last book, the writing is pretty awful, being filled with annoying sentence fragments that seem to be meant to make things more exciting but which actually serve only to distract the reader. Like practically everything bearing the Goosebumps label, the adventure lacks originality and intelligence. Surprisingly, though, there is one small but amusing sign of creativity in the book: in probably the most bizarre scene in the whole series, you attempt to save Los Angeles from an alien squeeze-bomb by attacking Leonard Nimoy's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a pick-ax! Alas, the execution of this wonderfully bizarre idea isn't as good as it should have been, but the idea alone made me laugh, and that's more than I can say for most members of the Give Yourself Goosebumps family. This is a pretty lousy book, but it deserves a little credit for being more outrageously odd than most of its kin.

7. Trick or... Trapped!
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: October, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-99393-3
Length: 135 pages
Number of Endings: 27
Plot Summary: It's Halloween, and your classmate Nathan has just tipped you off to a great place to acquire loads of candy!
My Thoughts: This book is at least a bit more special than the last one -- this time there is a gimmick, namely inventory management. As you explore the book, you also have to keep track of the candy and other items that you pick up. Sounds interesting enough, but it's seriously underused. Books with inventory management work best when you can either use the items strategically or when the book itself feels like a puzzle. Obviously, in a book without attributes or hit points, strategic item use doesn't figure into the mix, and this book doesn't manage to inspire the puzzle feeling since no items are essential for victory... there isn't even an end score for them to contribute to! So ultimately, the whole thing feels empty; lots of random, pseudo-horrific events combined a few pointless items to pick up do not make a very successful gamebook. It's not entirely awful, but it doesn't have enough distinguishing features to make it worth wasting time on.
Errata: Page 38 should really offer an "If you have neither item, turn to..." option. I guess the author was just desperate to sucker people into falling for the cheater trap on page 92.

8. Weekend at Poison Lake
Author: R. L. Stine
Illustrator: Craig White (cover), no internal illustrations
First Published: December, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-99652-5
Length: 135 pages
Number of Endings: 23
Plot Summary: In four mostly unrelated but somewhat parallel stories, your trip to Poison Lake turns out to be a decidedly horrific event.
My Thoughts: As I understand it, the Goosebumps books were nearly the doom of Scholastic; lots of money was invested into the series, but then it suddenly dropped in popularity, leaving contractual obligations to be fulfilled but little public interest in more books. If not for the timely appearance of Harry Potter, the publisher would probably be in considerably worse shape than it actually is today. In any case, I say all this to justify my theory that the use of the phrase "Last Chance" on the cover of this, the last Special Edition Give Yourself Goosebumps book, is not a coincidence -- in fact, there was likely some temptation to put "Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish" somewhere on the book's exterior. Anyway, publishing industry disasters aside, this is a pretty pitiful ending to a series that started out by exceeding all expectations. The gimmick here is that you pick a lucky number at the start of the book, and this lucky number determines which of the four unrelated stories you end up participating in. At numerous times during each adventure, you have chances to use your lucky number to get out of bad situations. If this were something like the "Test Your Luck" situations in Fighting Fantasy, it might be interesting. Unfortunately, there's no pattern to the way your lucky number works, so it acts mainly as an excuse for the author to include random story branches without having to devise actual meaningful choices. It almost goes without saying that the writing isn't good enough to compensate for the frustratingly pointless game design. Although I was pretty displeased with this book, I could see its basic format working well in more capable hands -- it normally frustrates me when gamebook plot lines deviate as wildly as the plots do here, but the difference is that most gamebooks have one introductory passage from which all plots diverge. In this book, however, the first choice comes before any plot is introduced, and thus each storyline has its own distinct beginning. Imagine an interactive collection of short stories, running parallel with one another and sharing the same themes but being otherwise distinct (except, perhaps, for occasional opportunities for the reader to cross over from one into another). I think it could be fascinating if done correctly.