Choose Your Own Adventure #42: The Mystery of Echo Lodge By Louise Munro Foley

Be on the lookout! Echo Lodge is surrounded by danger. You may be attacked by a killer hawk, get trapped under a roaring avalanche, or save the day by solving the mystery! 

I truly appreciate that readers indulged my flight into the early 90s with Generation X two weeks ago- this week we are back to our core competencies, and it involves weird 1980s PBS series, The Bookmobile and highly commercial paperbacks targeted at young readers.

Background: The brainchild of writers Edward Packard and R. A. Montgomery, the Choose Your Own Adventure series was first published locally in Vermont in the mid-1970s; when they sold the concept to Bantam in 1979 the series blew up, becoming inescapable at school libraries, book fairs and bookstores.

“You’re the star of the story! Choose from (#) possible endings!” famously proclaimed the covers, luring readers into the second-person narratives in which every few pages the reader would be asked to make a choice (“If you warn the guests, turn to page 37. If you start scrubbing potatoes, turn to page 105”) and live with the consequences of your actions, “creating” a totally different plot upon each reading.

An Annoying Autobiographical Pause: I came to CYOA through that bastion of 70s and 80s weirdness: daytime programming on my local Public Broadcasting Station. I feel like maybe we have forgotten exactly how, by turn, strange, radical and cheap-looking PBS kids programing was originally. While the kids I babysat for now fondly recall Wishbone and Ghostwriter… you have to belong to a very different and specific generational cohort to wake up in a cold sweat yelling “Palabra jot! Palabra jot!”

But I digress.

One of these strange, cheap-looking series was hosted by illustrator (and former teacher) John Robbins- it appeared under various titles starting as Cover to Cover in 1965, and subsequently appeared under several other titles, including Readit, but the format remained pretty much the same: a chapter from a children’s book would be read aloud while Robbins created illustrations depicting the events. Often ending on a cliffhanger, Robbins would then directly address the camera, urging the viewer to head to the local library and read the whole book.

The Mystery of Echo Lodge was featured on an episode of Robbins’s show, and being highly susceptible to this marketing, I immediately followed his instructions. Except in that 1985, my family lived in an apartment complex considered so rural that I had to wait for the semi-monthly appearance of The Bookmobile, a now mostly-extinct public service that sent an RV full of books from the main library directly to underserved populations. The Bookmobile librarian handed over Echo Lodge, but also insisted that I take Iggie’s House by Judy Blume and Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary, which would be both literally life-changing and pretty much a straight line to how I got here today.

I bring this all up because I know I have some veteran teachers and librarians amongst my readers and am curious how CYOA books were regarded at the time- I kind of have the feeling that they were considered the literary equivalent of junk food.  I did turn up a 1987 article from The English Journal entitled “Multiple-Storyline Books for Young Adults: Why?” which certainly believes this to be the case (as well suggesting classroom activities to suck the fun right out of reading them). I can certainly at least  understand the impulse of the Bookmobile librarian to push something more substantial when I see students who seem to only read books based on Minecraft or Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Packard and Montgomery wrote the vast majority of the titles, and they were all-in on the second-person narrative gimmick, occasionally coming into conflict with Bantam, who wanted to primarily market the series to boys and insisted that in terms of illustrations, the main character be depicted as male… but even into the 80s a lot of pre-teens were wearing the Kristy MacNichol/Matt Dillon look, so a lot of the time the YOU comes off looking pretty androgynous after all. In Echo Lodge YOU are referred to as “city kid” and “my niece’s child” to get around gendering, which does seem kind of ahead of its time.

The volumes covered a wide variety of genres of Genre Fiction: sci-fi, westerns, mysteries, pulpy adventure stories… and yes, included settings and characters that even at the time were outdated stereotypes (By Balloon to the Sahara? The Lost Jewels of Nabooti? I am looking at you).

The Plot: I have dwelled so much on the origins of the series (and my own experience as an actual child) because actually reading this one was kind of a snooze. The success of the series was predicated on reader engagement, getting kids to keep doubling back, 1. staying in the game as long as possible and 2. scoring a good ending. And “good” meant one thing: dying as grisly a death as possible.

The cover promises me 23 possible endings, and I stuck with this one through 17 of them, having the same problem that I did as a kid: eventually I would get bottlenecked and not be able to read my way into a new branch of plot.

The set up for this one is that YOU are spending your winter vacation working at your Great-Aunt Sadie’s ski lodge near Lake Tahoe, but upon your arrival you learn that her business is in trouble because of rumors of “The Paiute Jinx,” a curse placed on Sadie after she built an expansion on a local Native American tribe’s sacred burial ground.

While there are (allegedly) 23 different possible stories, they basically fall into one of two categories. In scenario A, it is revealed that Sadie’s business rivals are behind the troubles, variously spreading rumors about the curse, causing bad publicity through a series of robberies, and blowing up the Olympic ski team; in scenario B, there are actual supernatural forces at work.

Figuring into both of these plots are Sadie’s two loyal employees, Russell, the Bell Captain, and Heidi, the House Detective, a mistress of disguise and ex-INTERPOL agent.

My general disenchantment with this volume started with my first read-through, in which I get a “bad” ending, falling down the stairs of the hotel and breaking my leg my leg about five minutes after my arrival, the adventure ending with me boringly in the hospital.

Attempt #2 sends me first to the switchboard where I overhear someone plotting to sabotage the ski team due to arrive the next day, but nothing comes of that because I next get sent to work in the kitchen, where I overhear a plot to drug the guests’ soup and rob them, then I get kidnapped by the owners of a rival ski lodge, then I try and fail to escape the kidnappers, who drive me into a motorboat out into the middle of Lake Tahoe, where I take a chance a try to swim to shore:

Hypothermia is swift. You sink quietly to the icy depths of the lake that is six thousand feet above sea level and surrounded by the grandeur of the Sierra Nevada range.

The morning sun breaks in glorious color on Tahoe, “Lake of the Deep Water.” But you don’t see it.

That’s more like it!

For the third attempt I heroically discover the bomb in the ski team’s van on the way back from the airport and throw it over a cliff just in time. Very heroic, but yaaaaaaaaawn. I came for the curses.

Fourth attempt I foil a plot to kidnap Heidi by Aunt Sadie’s rivals by jumping off a ski lift, ending up with another broken leg. Borrrrrring.

By the fifth attempt I am getting very passive-aggressive with the book and choose the “immediately go home” option, hitching a ride with a chicken farmer. Luckily on the way back to the bus station I see Heidi being kidnapped and foil the kidnappers by setting the chickens loose. Again, I am a hero, but this is so boring.

For #6 I am forced to eat drugged chicken soup along with all of the other guests, who have their jewels burgled once they pass out, but a wealthy countess who doesn’t eat lunch later identifies the robbers and their getaway car.

#7 Heidi is kidnapped, but Russell goes to rescue her, making them the only survivors when a mysterious avalanche destroys the lodge later that night.

#8 we finally get some curse action when Russell tells you that the business rival is a “shaman” who can take the form of a hawk, and when you follow Russell up to the summit of Echo Mountain you get harassed by a hawk and are killed in the avalanche when you try to escape.

I then got bogged down in several plots that involved Mr. Hawkins, the owner of the rival lodge who may also be a shape-shifting shaman, leaving cursed rattlesnake rattles around the lodge, which Russell (who is now also a shape-shifting shaman) informs me have to be destroyed in a special ceremony on Echo Mountain. Now we’re talking! Finally, the gruesome deaths I long for. When I fail to complete the ceremony, I die variously:

• Choking to death on a chicken bone

“It’s strange,” the doctor later testifies at the coroner’s inquest. “But I never saw a chicken bone that looked like this. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a rattlesnake rattle.”

• Being warned by Russell if I don’t return to complete the job I will die… if I can even make it through rest of the day.
• Forced off a cliff by an attacking hawk
• Following the hawk into the woods where I wander in circles until  

By the time you’re found, you have lost your mind.

• And at last, after eating the drugged soup and escaping the kidnappers I am killed in a hit-and-run and it is revealed that the Mr. Hawkins has been working with the kitchen help to take over Aunt Sadie’s lodge all along.

Ah-ha! Department: Packard would later admit that some volumes contained deliberately recursive plots (where the reader would get stuck in a loop, unable to escape or end a story) and endings that were inaccessible unless the reader cheated and deliberately flipped to them outside of the structured plot.

Which makes me feel better about being a child/adult who can’t figure out how to successfully get to every ending. And I read a ton of these in grade school: we only stayed at the complex served by the Bookmobile for a year, moving “into town” and two doors down from the public library, which provided me with an endless supply of CYOA (…and Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume!)

While I read a ton of these, I never actually owned any, spending my precious book-dollars elsewhere on titles that were more re-readable. I mention all of this because I was thinking about the one volume I never even bothered to bring home from the library, Packard’s Hyperspace, because it seemed to be suspiciously math-oriented. So, I was pretty excited to see that a lot of Goodreads reviewers also had a pretty negative reaction to this one, including an especially disgruntled reviewer who suspects that its creation involved either a psychotic break or cocaine.

Weird 1980s PBS Shows Department: While I was not able to find the Echo Lodge episode of Robbins’s show, YouTube does have the episode where he illustrates Deadwood City and Third Planet from Altair, both shown in pre-Bantam hardcover editions!