Choose Your Own Adventure ostensibly asks the reader to take stock of her surroundings and make the best-informed choices possible. But perhaps because they were written in the 1970s and 1980s, the Choose Your Own Adventure books have no shortage of bad endings. In fact, just about every judgment you make can lead to death or ruin. Choose incorrectly, and you turn the page, and there they are, beneath a block of text, the bone-shaking words The End. You die. Sometimes in horrible ways. There’s even a blog, You Chose Wrong, documenting all the grisly ways these books end.

The Choose Your Own Adventure books terrified me because they made it so clear that choices are either right or wrong. In the book Inside UFO 54-40, for example, the wrong choice leads you to solitary confinement on a spaceship until you become disoriented by the “incredible loneliness of outer space” and lose “all will to survive” (The End). In House of Danger, you can be devoured by a pack of snarling chimpanzees. In The Cave of Time, a misstep can transport you to the middle of a war, with bombs exploding all around. You could awake to a boa constrictor wrapped around your neck, or sink with the Titanic.

One of the original authors of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Edward Packard, ended up writing a book for adults called All It Takes: The 3 Keys to Making Wise Decisions and Not Making Stupid Ones. (The three keys: Have the right state of mind, think clearly, and keep decisions under surveillance.) But in the actual books, it’s almost impossible to know, before you turn the page, what is a wise decision and what isn’t. In The Cave of Time, for instance, you’re stuck as a fisherman in medieval times, when you hear about a cave in the bottom of a lake where a monster lives. If you decide to seek it out and dive to the bottom of the lake (because it might lead you back to your time), you end up safe and sound back where you began at Snake Canyon. If, as any sensible person would do, you decide not to dive to the bottom of a lake that houses a monster, you end up devoured by the Loch Ness monster. How is any child going to learn about rational choices from that sequence of events?

Of course, one of the best parts about Choose Your Own Adventure was the ability to cheat. Turn down the corner of a page that asks you to make a tough choice, and then, if those terrible words, The End, pop up when you turn the page, just go back and choose the other thing. In this way, young readers learn that no decision is final, and that if you don’t get what you want, you can always go back and have a do-over. I distinctly remember keeping my finger on one page and going over all the various ends until I found the one that I thought was best. Perhaps this gave me unreasonable expectations for getting it right every single time, or trained me to think that I had more control over my life than I actually did.

The Cave of Time / Bantam

To be sure, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were works of fiction, and it probably wasn’t reasonable of me to take away such deep life lessons from a book like The Cave of Time, which has both a spaceship and cavemen on the cover. But as a child who read a lot of books, including Holocaust stories in which the wrong choice could indeed be fatal, I learned to face every choice with the knowledge that there are terrible outcomes possible. “There is never a day in which you are not confronted with choice. Some seemingly small choices can determine the path of the rest of your life,” one of the Choose Your Own Adventure authors, R.A. Montgomery, has said. No pressure or anything.