You're everything I wish I could be

THRILLIST Nation

Friday Jun 6, 2008

You Are a Miserable Excuse For a Hero

The beauty of Choose Your Own Adventures is that any wrong decision can be fixed by flipping back a few pages -- but being for kids, their other life lessons all seem to involve magical dinosaurs. Jump into an age-appropriate story, with You Are a Miserable Excuse For a Hero!

Penned by comedian Bob Powers, Hero's variable-path narrative loyally apes the CYOA structure, but casts you as an angsty commitment-phobe who spends too much time in bars/under ex-girlfriends' sheets. After you get a call from guys who've kidnapped a girl you went on a single date with, you're faced with the horrifying possibility that things are getting serious too quickly. Deal with that, then encounter other everyman decisions like:

• If you want to try to alleviate the guilt by going to Gambler's anonymous meetings, go to page 187
• If you want to live with the guilt and drop out of your life and go sell candles and sh*t like that, go to page 50

• If you want to climb onto the fire escape to knock on the old Italian abortionist's window, go to page 141
• If you want to find out what life would have been like if you'd never been born, go to page 137

• If you want to track down whoever made this recording, go to page 158
• If you're curious what it's like to watch yourself masturbate and want to press play again, go to page 131

As you jump through chapters like "Be the Money Shot" and "Wedding Day at the Safe House", you'll encounter dead best friends, appear on the cover of People, and get tazed at an orgy en route to more than 30 endings -- some so horrifying, you'll wish you'd chosen to stick with magical dinosaurs.