Bookmoss

"Bookmoss" is an entertaining short story about a moss with the power of sending people into works of fiction. Or non-fiction, depending on what piece of written work the moss is currently on. It's told in chapters alternating between the viewpoints of a teenaged girl and her father as the latter gets sent back to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "old manse".

There's not a lot of variation in the storyline, though there is a bit. Choices don't allow for much deviation, mostly being about getting in some extra action (possibly just a page of it) on the way to a predetermined page. The exceptions to this are the chapters in which the father, Jon, is exploring the old manse: there, we have a completely open structure more reminiscent of parser fiction, in which we can travel from any location to an adjacent one, examining more closely those objects that appear as hyperlinks in the text. But again, these explorations only flesh out the experience and don't actually matter to the development of the story.

There are a couple of missed opportunities there, I think. If we choose to have the daughter, Gina, take a nap on the drive to the library and then again while waiting for Jon in the exhibition room, we get two dreams of rising dread and menace that could have coloured the story in a very different way without having to substantially change any of the plot events. Likewise, it might have been nice if Jon's discovery of the entryways to "Young Goodman Brown" had some effect on the conclusion. (Or perhaps there actually is? I don't think I tried a playthrough in which Gina had those dreams and Jon entered the story every time he could.)

Still, it's entertaining, and the dialogue feels natural. The "adventure curators", Jeff and Carla, are endearingly exasperating as all magical mentors (see Willy Wonka) should be. I'm not really getting a good feel for who Jon is, though Gina seems well-characterised enough.

If this were breakfast, it might be apple cake and marmalade, with chicory tea, all served on white bone china with gleaming silverware. There's something old-fashioned about it, but I suspect an oncoming rise in hipster-retro popularity.