Area author gives Lovecraft's ‘At the Mountains of Madness' a Choose Your Own Adventure sequel

For several generations of young readers, there were no books quite as captivating as the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. 

Offering readers the opportunity to make decisions that could change the course of the story as it unfolded, books such as "The Cave of Time," "Deadwood City" and "The Mystery of Chimney Rock" led readers on interactive journeys they could revisit over and over to explore different outcomes.

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Make the right decisions, and you - the story's protagonist - might survive or even become the tale's hero. Choose poorly, and any number of gruesome fates could bring an end to your story.

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"At the Mountains of Madness" by Jacopo della Quercia is on sale now.

Learn more about the Choose Your Own Adventure series at cyoa.com.

After an initial run in the 1980s and '90s that saw more than 250 million copies of Choose Your Own Adventure books sold under publisher Bantam Books, the series is experiencing another surge under new publisher Chooseco, with a fresh set of stories arriving on shelves. One of the most recent releases is "At the Mountains of Madness," an adventure inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft novella of the same name that puts the reader in the role of a camp counselor navigating eerie events at an isolated Antarctic base.

The author behind this iteration of "At the Mountains of Madness" is Jacopo della Quercia, the pen name of Little Falls-based writer and educator Giacomo Calabria. The book marks his first foray into the world of interactive fiction after penning several novels, a play and a multitude of academic papers and research articles for various universities.

"I'm the only person I know who writes fiction and nonfiction work under a pen name," laughed Calabria, who first adopted the pen name - borrowed from a Renaissance-era Italian sculptor - while he was working for Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. "Eventually, the success I enjoyed with my pen name completely eclipsed anything I created under my real name."

A prolific scholar and lecturer who crafts educational programs on various facets of history, art and literature, Calabria said the potential of interactive media as an instructional tool has always intrigued him. Along with introducing readers to various historical figures and concepts, the medium allows them to explore paths of learning at their own pace and in the directions that most interest them, he explained.

There are plenty of opportunities to reimagine classic works of literature for new audiences in fresh forms with many examples entering the public domain in recent years. According to Calabria, he approached Chooseco with a batch of public-domain stories that included "Treasure Island," "Moby Dick" and "Alice in Wonderland," among others, but it was his pitch for H.P. Lovecraft that sparked the publisher's interest.

"I thought I was going to adapt (Lovecraft's 1936 story 'At the Mountains of Madness') in his writing style - which was a very Edwardian writing style - so that it would read like H.P. Lovecraft wrote it," recalled Calabria, who has often written papers in the style of famous writers for academic projects. "I thought they wanted me to basically bring the bones of Lovecraft back from the dead, but my editor didn't want that. She wanted something written for kids today, set in Antarctica (like the original story)."

"I was able to find a way of not so much writing a faithful adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's work, but rather writing a modern-day sequel to it - a continuation of the Lovecraftian mythos set in the modern day, which marries itself faithfully to the entire collected works of H.P. Lovecraft," he said.

Of course, writing a singular story is one thing. As Calabria quickly learned, however, crafting a story that can branch out in multiple directions and parallel plot lines flexes an entirely different set of storytelling muscles.

"At heart, I'd probably say that this story had three main plots, each with a fully independent storyline with character development and some secrets we learn in one storyline that we don't learn in the others," he continued. "Do they stay in the building or do they leave the building? That's how we get to plot 'A' and plot 'B,' and then plot 'C' is only available in one of those two storylines. Each one is its own self-contained story."

Calabria initially thought he could keep track of the storylines in his head, only to discover how difficult it was to manage a trio of threads that, individually, were also branching off into new threads as they developed. Fortunately, Chooseco taught him the strategy for outlining "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories that has been in use since the original books were published.

Holding up a large piece of paper filled with short, handwritten blurbs of text connected by dotted or solid lines ("I have props!" he laughed), Calabria explained the story-tracking technique he used for "At the Mountains of Madness."

"You keep track of your story in what's called a 'plot map' or 'story map,'" he said, indicating the web of plot points and narrative threads tying them together. "What you see here is essentially the flowchart I needed to keep track of my book."

"I'm actually very proud I was able to do this without a ruler," he laughed. "(But) a ruler would have hindered me because that would have made me think there was a sense of order to this."

While "At the Mountains of Madness" offers readers myriad ways to end the story, Calabria teased the presence of a "golden ending" - to borrow a term from video games - that he considers the "correct" ending of the story. And it's that ending, he said, that would be the jump-off point for any potential sequel he'd be "delighted" to write.

"There's going to be disagreement over this. I want people to fight over what's the correct ending," he said. "I feel that's what a good book should do. When you're buying a book, you're not paying for five minutes of amusement. You're not paying for 100 very good sentences. You're paying for the whole thing.

"And no two people are ever going to read this book the same," he added, "because the main character is the reader."

This article originally published at Area author gives Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' a Choose Your Own Adventure sequel .