9. Fighting Fantasy (1982-present)
In 1989, my dad went to some sort of automotive rebuilders expo in Toronto and brought my mom and me along. Utterly uninterested in the car stuff, we decamped to The World’s Biggest Bookstore (RIP), a cavernous building with three floors of books that was, indeed, the largest I had ever seen – before this, “bookstore” meant “Waldenbooks in the mall,” so this was a place of awe. Within, I found an entire shelf of garish Fighting Fantasy paperbacks, their green trade dress oddly complimentary to the chartreuse floors. In my memory, there were hundreds of them, but at most there were forty or so different titles at that point. I was immediately obsessed. It was the art that hooked me: dark and gruesome in the black and white interiors, lurid and grotesque on the color covers. Perhaps unsure if we’d be able to find them in the States, I convinced my mom to buy half a dozen of them.
Most of them were adventure gamebooks, which marries the interactive narratives of choose your own adventure books with a light RPG system for combat, inventory management and occasional, spellcasting, effectively making them solitaire RPGs. One volume was a novel set in the same fantasy world as the gamebook, The Trolltooth Wars. It was illustrated by the legendary Russ Nicholson and is some of his best work: packed compositions featuring endless monsters doing battle with each other, his line work heavy and gritty. Splashes of black ink serve as blood and are all the more effective for their lack of color. Gruesome, violent, weirdly humorous: exactly the sort of poison my pre-teen mind craved.
