The Crawl Space: Interactive Ghost Story for Ages 10-18

The Crawl Space, published in 2012, is an interactive ghost story you steer. It plays like an ordinary haunted-school tale until the story stops cold and makes you choose. Take the Nightmare Corridor or the long way around it. Whatever you pick, the book flips you to a different page, and the pages don't all end the same way.

The story opens with three boys who run their school. Bruce, Mark, and Charles call themselves "The Unholy Three," and they've settled on a target: a quiet kid named Johnny. Their idea of fun is to lock him in the crawl space, the dark room under the cafeteria stage that the rest of the school has learned to leave alone. The plan comes apart, and the three of them end up down there with a bucket and rags, cleaning the crawl space as punishment. That's when the room starts paying attention to them.

Spoiler Alert. A few plot details follow.

How the Interactive Ghost Story Works

I could have written this as a straight line, page one to a single ending everyone reaches. I didn't. The whole story is one bad choice after another, starting with three bullies who corner a smaller kid for sport. Everything that happens to them down there grows out of that first one. I didn't want the reader off to the side watching it happen, so I built it so the reader does the choosing.

The book runs on the old turn-to-page system. You reach a fork, you make a call, and a line tells you where to flip. There are dozens of these forks, which means there's no single path through the book and no way to read it the same way twice.

Here, try one. The boys are digging through decades of junk the school threw down there, and Mark turns up three old keys in the dust, one shiny, one rusty, one dull. Then Charles finds a wooden chest. Only one key opens it. Pick.

Say you reach for the rusty one. Bruce turns it, the lock gives a heavy thud, and the crawl space door swings shut behind them. He grabs the lever. It won't turn. Neither will the shiny key or the dull one now, because you already used your key. Whatever's in that chest, the boys are opening it in the dark, and they can't get out until they do.

That's the rusty key. The shiny one and the dull one send them somewhere else. You don't get to see where unless you're the one holding the book.

Bullying at the Center of the Story

The structure is the point. A bully makes a run of small choices and tells himself each one is nothing. Lock the kid in for a minute. It's just a joke. He'll be fine. The reader, flipping pages and picking doors, does a smaller version of the same thing, and some of those picks lead somewhere they'd rather not have gone. By the time a path closes on you, you helped put yourself there. That comes closer to how consequences work than any lecture I could write.

Later in the book, you pick between three doors, one for Charles, one for Bruce, one for Mark. You're deciding which boy to follow into the dark, and the door you open changes whose story you get and how far it goes. Choose wrong, and the page you turn to will let you know.

Building a Branching Ghost Story

Building it was its own puzzle. Every branch has to lead somewhere that pays off, which means every dead end and wrong turn needs a reason to be there. I kept a map of the paths while I wrote, because it's easy to send a reader through a door and forget to build the room behind it. The endings were the hard part. A branching book only holds together if the reader believes each finish was theirs to reach or avoid. If one ending feels arbitrary, the reader stops trusting the rest.

It has the usual furniture of a ghost story. Cold air, footsteps with no owner, a light that won't stay on. The scares keep you turning pages, but they aren't what the book is about. Underneath them is guilt, and the plain fact that the first wrong move almost never looks like much while you're making it.

An Interactive Book for Ages 10 to 18

I wrote The Crawl Space for readers 10 to 18, and the younger kids seem to take to it fastest. Kids understand the crawl space on sight. Most of them have already stood at the edge of a group deciding whether to go along with something they knew was wrong. The book moves that moment into a dark room and adds a skeleton.

The scares come from being trapped and watched. There's no gore. It's a real ghost story, tense enough to keep a light on, but the dread is built on the situation the boys are stuck in. What surprises parents most is that a kid who stalls out on regular books tends to finish this one. Putting it down means leaving the three boys wherever they left them, and most readers want to know how it ends before they'll do that.

There's more than one way out, and more than one ending. Which one you reach depends on the doors you open. That's why a book like this has to be steered instead of read straight through. You don't watch the three boys reach the end. You open the door that takes them there.

Teachers get a second use out of it. Every fork is a small test of whether you go along with the group, and a class rarely lands on the same door twice. The argument over which pick was the right one runs itself.

You can find The Crawl Space on Amazon. Give it to a reader who swears they don't like books, and see how far they get before they have to know what's behind the next door.