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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...
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Halloween Storytime: The Goat Lady

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'Wow... this seems much more... remote than you made it sound,' my partner, Ricky, said in a hushed tone as we dragged our luggage over the rutted dirt road. The area still bustled with life despite the late hour; stray dogs, untethered chickens and barefoot children roamed under the patchy streetlights. Colourful motorised tricycles passing by to larger towns guttered past explosively, stirring dust and still-hot air. I hadn't visited my grandparents' home in the tiny settlement (it wasn't large or defined enough to quite classify as a village or a town) in Abuyod, Philippines for almost 10 years, and I'd forgotten how otherworldly the area could feel to an outsider – and, despite my mixed race and the ready warmth of my relatives, I, too, was an outsider of sorts. The haphazard arrangement of modest self-built houses and improvised wooden structures among the vibrant tropical trees contrasted sharply with the uniform brickwork streets and fenced-in gardens we...
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Halloween Storytime: Knock to Enter

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While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door — Only this, and nothing more.' – 'The Raven', Edgar Allen Poe After spending several years of my early childhood sharing a bedroom with two brothers, coming into a bedroom all of my own was a momentous event. It might have been little more than a glorified closet with hot-pink pebbledash walls (a misguided effort by my parents to designate it the 'girl's' room), but for the first time I had my own space. I filled the little shelves in my space-saving cabin bed with Choose Your Own Adventure and Goosebumps books carefully curated from local charity shops and hunkered in the cubby hole under my desk with friends conspiratorially as though it were a secret hideout. Apparently drunk on the sudden power of establishing my tiny empire, on my first day in residence, ...
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Halloween Storytime: The Intruder

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Enter if you will, gentle reader, pull up a stuffed armchair by the fireside and join me in a true tale of small-town terror. As young teenagers, one of the biggest and most important obstacles my friends and I faced was convincing all our parents to allow us to stage spontaneous sugar-fuelled sleepovers and backyard 'campouts'. We would listen to cheese-rock ballads on a temperamental Walkman, play pass-the-buck-style dramatic storytelling games, conjecture wildly about our dream futures and generally achieve little to no sleep.
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