Nightmare Fuel / Gamebooks

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The entire gamebook genre is so well known for Nightmare Fuel that entire series such as Give Yourself Goosebumps and Choose Your Own Nightmare were created to capitalize on it. Most of the time, the nightmare fuel comes from the endings where your character dies or meets a Fate Worse than Death. Entire blogs and websites, such as You Chose Wrong and Lose Your Own Adventure have been created to showcase some of the worst endings across the genre. This blog features a healthy dose of nightmarish illustrations from the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

Sub-pages:

• Freeway Warrior
• Lone Wolf
• Nintendo Adventure Books

Examples:

• Choose Your Own Adventure:
  • The scariest illustrations tend to fall under several categories:
    • Your character giving an Oh, Crap! look as you are seconds away from being killed. Anything illustrated by Judith Mitchell will invoke this multiple times, even on some of the pages that don't have bad endings. Paul Granger has done a few of these illustrations as well, one of the most memorable being from Journey Under the Sea just as you are literally about to become shark bait.
    • Your character is Eaten Alive. If the book is illustrated by Paul Granger, the illustration will feature a hideously large, detailed, close-up illustration of the animal about to eat you (a sabertooth tiger in The Cave of Time and in Return to the Cave of Time, a giant grouper in Journey Under the Sea, a Bengal tiger in The Abominable Snowman, the cat after you are shrunken in The Mystery of Chimney Rock, or a giant rat beast in The Third Planet from Altair).
    • The The Adventures of You version of Third Planet illustrated by Barbara Carter is just as bad if not worse, showing the giant rat leaping out at you from your POV.
    • In addition to the tiger ending, The Cave of Time takes things a step further and shows you in the act of being devoured by none other than the Loch Ness Monster.
    • Giant full- or even two-page illustrations (such as the one on this page) with one line of text.
  • The textual examples:
    • Cruel Twist Endings.
    • The last sentence having you face-to-face with someone or something about to kill you (generally illustrated as described above).
    • And I Must Scream, where you are transformed into something else, fully conscious, yet cannot do anything about it or cry for help^note Or see anything.
    • "You are never heard from again" or "Those are the last words you ever say."
    • The Nonstandard Game Overs, especially those in The Mystery of Chimney Rock as described on the main page and multiple other places on this wiki.
  • Endings where you have the sheer bad luck to cross paths with something that you had no way of knowing about or avoiding beforehand. These are basically the series's versions of a One-Hit Kill.
• Star Challenge, including illustrations (but just of one page at best) in the same way too as in Choose Your Own Adventure.
  • Pretty much those of above, including but not limited to:
    • Sent to the (up to very, in cosmological terms) distant past or future.
    • Telefragged in one form or in other.
    • Ending in another dimension, usually followed by something beyond simple death.
    • Thrown Out the Airlock.
    • Not dying, nor And I Must Scream, but instead spending your (often short) remaining life imprisoned in one way or other.
    • Probably the nastiest one, in Dimension of Doom, is basically to suffer a Grand Theft Me with the only lifeform in an alternate dimension you're exploring and being condemned to stay there forever.