Book Review: Dungeon Crawl at the Haunted Mall

I'm a big fan of "choose your own adventure" (coya) stories, so when I came across Jendia Gammon's new (2026) book in the ur-text series, it was an instant purchase. But Dungeon Crawl at the Haunted Mall is no throw-back. It is very contemporary in its language and setting. It's all about a group of kids exploring an abandoned '80s shopping mall that is, as you may have guessed from the title, haunted. Gammon's prose milks the decade's theme in all the right ways. Descriptions of turquoise decor, pay phones, and leg warmers made me smile. But true to my advancing age, I stumbled over a character with an unexpected non-gendered pronoun. (It was good for me.) The story has ten possible endings. The only flaw that I found was that my first several choices were very linear and led me to multiple dead ends. However, after experiencing a couple of the endings, I backed up and found most of the others. All of them were satisfying. Tip: When I read a book like this, I use two bookmarks. One,…