Written in the form of a second-person point of view, the book “Nightmare Store” starts off the story telling you that you are from a small town in Mississippi visiting your Aunt & Uncle in Atlanta. It never gives away the gender of the main character because of the pre-tense that anyone can “choose their own adventure”. Since both Uncle Jerry and Aunt Louise will be out that evening, Uncle Jerry suggests you go shopping at “Wallenberg's”, the new department store. While in the television section, you dose off and fall asleep. This is where the story truly begins.

When referring to Marie-Laure Ryan's “Avatars of Story”, the textual architecture of the temporality of the plot can be described as a “Tree Diagram”, meaning that time is kept in a steady flow in one direction and different plot developments are “branched” out in different directions indicating different storylines and plot developments. Ryan describes 4 different types of interactivity in her book; external-exploratory, internal-exploratory, external-ontological, and internal-ontological interactivity. The kind of interactivity used in “Nightmare Store” is that of an external-ontological interactivity because the reader is situated in the outside world looking in and control the world from the outside (external) and the decisions of the reader creates different “paths” in the storyworld thereby determining which storyline will develop from their own decisions (ontological).

The way I went about reading this book is I peered towards the bottom of the page and would follow each page number until there was an ending. Some would call this “cheating” but I call it saving time, giving the assignment. I would mark down every ending and each page number to that ending so I can easily plot these structured storylines on my free-mind diagram. I would then choose the endings I wanted to take in order from top to bottom.

To my surprise there was no use of any aliens in this book, which is a prevalent choice of destiny in choose your own adventure books but it did have some interesting and very odd endings which let me truly guessing what could have happened. For instance, in the very last ending I chose to take your character is about to be thrown into an artificial fireplace by a live mannequin. You suddenly feel an artificial hearth on the ground which means you can either shove the mannequin into the blaze or find another route of escape. Should you decide to shove the mannequin into the blaze, the mannequin then blows up thereby throwing you out of the department store and landing on some thick, untrimmed bushes. You then decide to lay on a stretch of grass across form the department store. As you lie there, you're to tired to move or get up but when you turn your head, you find that there is no parking lot, no fire, and no building. There is nothing but a vast field of tall, thick grass. You see no lights, hear nothing, and feel nothing. You feel your face and there is no blood on your face anymore. It then says that as you stand there bewildered, vague names rush through your mind but the two names that aren't vague “Uncle Jerry and Aunt Louise” keep slipping in and out of consciousness but you don't know why. It appears as though you're dying, slowly becoming a ghost of some kind or slipping into some sort of coma but it is never fully explained. It is the most open-ended ending in the book.

Overall, it was a quick and interesting read but the genre itself can get very repetitive. Usually you die or have something extremely awful happening to you with some happy endings every now and then. But then again it is intended for a much younger audience which makes it more appealing at a certain age. I think this is a great way to have more children reading because it encourages kids to read through multiple paths in the story which in turn makes them want to read more. It is an interesting concept in itself and I don't see why they would stop being made.

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