“In an on-going adventure to read one of these, I took a different tack. A real different one.
This one I read aloud to a group of about 75 5th grade boys. No, I didn’t have to capture/enslave a group of children as part of an angry quest to actually reach the end of one of these. They were there by choice, or at least as much choice as one gets at age 12.
It was a scout camp, which reminded me of my own days in the cub scouts when we would have our two-day camp that consisted of pitching tents in the shittiest public park in town and doing “activities”. I do not enjoy “activities” as a rule. “Projects” are fine, “Doing Drinking” is great, but “activities” almost always involve gluing something cheap to something crappy and then colorizing it poorly. I swear, every time I see some yarn glued to a paper plate I remember one of the best things about being childless and horribly alone.
Anyway, back to the book.
Basically you’re a kid detective, hot off a streak of solving some case about a haunted pancake factory or something. I don’t know. One of those kid mysteries. Rarely does a child sleuth begin by investigating a suspicious character at a candy store and end up busting up an eastern european prostitution ring. Usually it’s something like a guy at the carnival who is cheating people out of cash by using unbreakable balloons at the dart throw or something.
On the newest case you find a suspicious house built on the grounds of a former prison with what appear to chimps acting as guards. Yep. Guardian chimps, which IS suspicious, although that alone seems to be enough to get a posse going. And then it turns out the chimps are mere holograms used to discourage people from poking around too much.
So let me get this straight. You, a criminal mastermind, don’t want people snooping, so you figure the best plan is to go ahead and install a hologram generator and to generate fake chimps? Because that will ensure that no one is curious about what the fuck is going on? This would be like me trying to hide the fact that I have a weeping herpetic lesion by coating the entirety of my genitalia with metallic gold spray paint. The thought process behind these books is absolutely boggling.
That said, after my constant failure, a group of 75 12 year-olds, voting on each choice, navigated successfully to the end in about 5 minutes. That’s right. This is somewhere around my 10th CYA book, and the only way I’ve managed to make it to a positive ending is by putting it up to popular vote to a group of kids who moments ago were engaged in an attempt to break the world’s record for most armpit farts generated in 20 seconds. Granted, that was my idea, but I digress.
Perhaps these are perfectly pitched to grade school boys. Maybe that’s why I can’t do it. I’ve lost some of that boyhood wonder. Although that got me wondering, maybe I never had it in the first place. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a child detective. A grown-up detective, maybe. But not the kid version. I wanted to be Spider-Man, not some Kid Spidey. I wanted to be Batman, not Robin. Even as a kid, being a kid felt like bullshit. Like everything you did as a kid was just there because you had to wait a dozen years before you were really capable of doing anything.
That or I’m stupid as fuck.
“