Help! You're Shrinking
In a genre full of bizarre plots and baffling ends 'Help! You're Shrinking' stands out as especially crazy.
Starring yourself, obviously, and your best pal Dusty, 'Help!' begins as a walk in the park, but what should you find there? An uncapped bottle half full of a strange blue liquid. It says its dangerous, don't touch, and could you return it to a Dr. Riga - do you pick it up and go to page 2, or do you not pick it up and go to 4? How can you return the bottle and NOT touch it anyway?
There's little good that's going to happen to you here, if you try to avoid the danger poor Dusty would lap it up anyway. This was a C.Y.O.A. meant for younger readers and the endings reflect a more delicate mindset, but only to a certain extent. The author shows no mercy:
You shrink, you grow, you drown in chocolate pudding (you in fact drown several times), a bird kidnaps you, the bumbling Dr. Riga gets involved, so does the family vet, and your MOM. The best outcome (as in neither you nor Dusty are dead or physically altered/harmed) is when you even wake up and realize it was all a dream because the bottle only contained sleeping potion - nothing weird there, I find that shit in the park all the time. Thank you 1980s!
Packard also lets you philosophize: "What will happen to you? How small, you wonder, can anything be?"
These are a lot of fun, especially with the illustrations. I have a small pile of fantasy gamebooks to go through, but I'll be picking up some more authentic C.Y.O.A.'s whenever I can.
