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Item - Dungeon Demons

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Series: Plot-Your-Own Horror Stories — no. 8
Translated Into: Los demonios de las mazmorras (Spanish)
Author: Milton, Hilary
Illustrator: Frame, Paul
Date: 1985
ISBN: 0671544489 / 9780671544485
Length: 119 pages
Number of Endings: 29
LC Cataloging in Publication Summary: The reader must find a way of excaping from Duncarney Castle where he/she is surrounded by evil ogres, black knights, witches, and many other unsavory characters.
Demian's Thoughts:

This book is more or less indistinguishable from the rest of the series. It starts off with what might reasonably be the beginning of a story with an actual plot, but then it puts the reader on his or her own and plods through a succession of random and mostly meaningless events until eventually coming to a less-than-thrilling end. The writing is even more cringe-inducing than usual here thanks to some awful pseudo-medieval dialogue, and there's also a rather sloppy tense problem during the introductory pages. It's a shame, really -- I started reading this series expecting it to be above average (due mainly to dim childhood memories of Nightmare Store), but it turned out to be one weak disappointment after another. Oh well; it's over now, and I'm not exactly sad to see it go.

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Guillermo's Thoughts:

(review based on the Spanish translation)

This is my least favourite entry in the series, not because its gameplay is any different from the other entries, but because of the setting. The medieval horror used here resembles too much the plethora of medieval gamebooks already out there, and this book contributes little that is new or distinguishable from the rest of the series. I suppose that by this point the author had already exhausted the creative formula that led to his more successful works. You can skip this one without regret.

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Ted's Thoughts:

I had this book as a youngster. I remember really loving the illustrations, and between the ages of eight and twelve I read it enough times to know every path you could take in it.

Something I found very frustrating about it is that (in the edition I had, at least) there was a page to which you could not possibly navigate. I know this because it had an illustration that would catch my eye as I was flipping to whatever other page my path sent me to, and after several reads of trying to get to that illustrated page and failing I just went through the pages sequentially to find the ones that said "turn to page xx" and was disgusted to get to the end of the book without finding any!

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