CYOA books for adults: nine branching titles worth a shelf
By John S.6 min read
Choose your own adventure grew up with its readers. There are branching books now about office drudgery, Regency courtship, celebrity memoir and the zombie apocalypse. Every title below was checked against a library catalogue, the publisher or an encyclopedia entry, and where the sources say how a book branches, I note it, because the shape of a gamebook tells you more than its blurb.
What makes a CYOA book adult
Mostly the problems. Adult CYOA books are about rent, careers, courtship, bad decisions and dark humour rather than dragons and treasure maps. Few are explicit, and most titles here sit at the funny or romantic end. If you want a story whose heat you set yourself, the CYOA generator starts one from a single line.
Two classic series close the list. They were originally sold to a general audience, but plenty of grown-up readers still play them, and they show the mechanics at their purest. Heat and tone notes below come from publisher and catalogue descriptions, not a page-by-page read.
Romance and whole lives
Two books built around the biggest choices people make: who to love, and what to do with a life.
My Lady's Choosing
My Lady's Choosing by Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris (Quirk Books, 2018) is an interactive Regency romance. You play a clever, penniless gentlewoman at the start of courtship season, and the suitors on offer include a baronet, a Highland captain, a brooding nobleman and an adventurous lady, with a wildcard path besides. Several routes end happily and a few end in comic disaster.
Its storylines intertwine rather than running in parallel, and illustrations turn up along the way. The tone is witty and flirtatious, with real affection for Austen-style fiction. If you want one adult CYOA that is mainly a romance, start here.
Pretty Little Mistakes
Pretty Little Mistakes by Heather McElhatton (HarperCollins, 2007) branches across an entire adult life, choice by choice. Its catalogue description promises more than 150 endings, ranging from great wealth to ruin to a quiet life in Japan. Library records also file it partly under erotica, so expect some frank grown-up turns.
With that many endings it fans out wide, which suits a book about how small decisions compound. A sequel, Million Little Mistakes (2010), asks what you would do with $22 million in lottery winnings.
Comedy and memoir
The funniest corner of the shelf, and the one where the form gets bent the most.
To Be or Not To Be
To Be or Not To Be by Ryan North (Breadpig, 2013) retells Hamlet as a chooseable-path adventure in mostly modern language. You can play as Hamlet, Ophelia or the ghost of Hamlet's father. It runs to 740 pages with 110 endings, each illustrated by one of a long list of artists. It began as a Kickstarter that set out to raise $20,000 and closed at roughly $580,000, at the time the most-funded publishing project on the platform.
It is one of the best arguments that a branching book can be literary and silly in the same breath.
Choose Your Own Autobiography
Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography (Crown Archetype, 2014) is the actor's memoir, structured like a choose your own adventure book, so the reader steers through his life and career. It spent two weeks on the New York Times best seller list, and he reads the audiobook himself. Pick it up if you like celebrity memoirs and want to see how far the form bends.
Choose Your Own Misery
Choose Your Own Misery: The Office Adventure by Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon (Diversion Books, 2016) parodies the gamebooks of the 1980s and 1990s by dropping you into a dreary workday. The choices are about sick days, vacation time and the dental plan, and the humour comes from how grey it all is. It was written for readers who grew up on the originals, and a holiday volume followed the same year.
Choose Your Own Disaster
Choose Your Own Disaster by Dana Schwartz (Grand Central Publishing, 2018) is the edge case on this list. It is a memoir of her early twenties built out of quizzes and personality tests rather than numbered branches. Read it if the quiz format appeals; look elsewhere if you want a real map.
Thrillers and horror
For readers who like their choices to come with a body count.
Click Your Poison
James Schannep's Click Your Poison series puts you inside genre disasters. Infected (2012) drops you into a zombie outbreak, Murdered makes you a lost tourist in Brazil who stumbles on a body, and the series carries on through Superpowered, Pathogens, Marooned, Spied and Haunted. Schannep, a former military officer, writes them as ebooks in which each link is a choice, and they come in paperback too.
Murdered advertises three separate storylines and more than 50 endings, so there is plenty to replay. Expect violence and dark humour rather than romance.
The classics, still worth playing
Both series below were originally sold to a general audience. They earn their place because the mechanics still hold up, and because a gamebook with rules adds a pleasure that plain choosing does not.
Sorcery!
Sorcery! by Steve Jackson is four linked books published between 1983 and 1985: The Shamutanti Hills, Kharé: Cityport of Traps, The Seven Serpents and The Crown of Kings. It belongs to the Fighting Fantasy line, with art by John Blanche, and a separate spell book goes with it. Penguin published the first editions and Wizard Books reissued the series in 2003.
If you would rather play it on a screen, inkle adapted all four parts, and by 2016 they were out on phones and on Steam.
Lone Wolf
Lone Wolf by Joe Dever began in 1984 with Flight from the Dark and grew into one long saga with recurring characters and a combat system of its own. Dever wrote the first 29 books; after his death, his son Ben Dever and Vincent Lazzari continued the series. Gary Chalk illustrated the first editions of books one to eight.
A fan group called Project Aon has turned most of the books into free online editions with Dever's permission, so the first one costs nothing to try.
Which one should you start with?
| Title | Author | Year | Best if you want |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Lady's Choosing | Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris | 2018 | Romance with jokes |
| Pretty Little Mistakes | Heather McElhatton | 2007 | A whole life of what-ifs |
| To Be or Not To Be | Ryan North | 2013 | Shakespeare, but silly |
| Choose Your Own Autobiography | Neil Patrick Harris | 2014 | A celebrity memoir with forks |
| Choose Your Own Misery: The Office Adventure | Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon | 2016 | Office satire |
| Choose Your Own Disaster | Dana Schwartz | 2018 | A memoir in quizzes |
| Click Your Poison series | James Schannep | From 2012 | Thrillers and horror |
| Sorcery! | Steve Jackson | 1983 to 1985 | Classic fantasy with spells |
| Lone Wolf | Joe Dever | From 1984 | A long fantasy saga |
If you finish a few of these and want the same thing on a screen, the places in interactive CYOA are a good next stop. And if one of them makes you want to write your own, start with how to write a choose your own adventure.
Questions
Are there choose your own adventure books for adults?
Yes. Interactive romance, comedy, memoir and thriller titles are written for grown-up readers, from Regency courtship in My Lady's Choosing to zombie survival in the Click Your Poison series.
Which adult CYOA book should I start with?
For romance, My Lady's Choosing. For comedy, To Be or Not To Be. For a thriller, Murdered from the Click Your Poison series. All three have many endings to replay.
Are gamebooks like Lone Wolf the same as CYOA books?
They are close relatives. Gamebooks such as Lone Wolf add a combat system and other rules to the choosing, while a classic CYOA book is choices alone.