What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower

[Кал]

Отзив в Goodreads:

The plentiful "lost in translation" jokes lightened up what might have otherwise been a gruesome experience.

Spoiler

(Including a grue-induced death.)

My favorite moments:

~ This must be the best early ending for cop-out protagonists I've seen in a gamebook:

The next noon you awake, your head set afire by the toxins of vice, your palms bearing clear marks where your nails had dug in. You don your hat and begin to walk to the library. You need a book to read, to be certain, but not this one.
The End

~ Nah, this one's even better:

The fiend of the underworld transforms into a hideous manticore—which is just some ugly mix-match of annoying animals like humans and lions and scorpions—and kills you in a rather painful way, one that honestly you probably wouldn’t want to hear about. You see, if I told you how it was that you were killed, you might, I don’t know, have a sense of adventure. And clearly, that isn’t what you want. So you’re just dead.
The End

~ In my first "proper" ending,

Spoiler

my head asploded due to inappropriate substance intake,

and in my second one,

Spoiler

I was exhibited in a zoo as a "pacifist": "the most rare and least capable of nature’s creatures."

I'm unhappy.

~ But when I run into such passages, I'm happy again:

(...) soon you find yourself in front of a menacing set of steel doors. They’re larger than any you’d ever seen or imagined—although to be fair, you don’t spend much of your time fantasizing about doors and the potential upper limits of their size (...)

“(...) your gnome friend here was a bit creative in his translations of your speech. I didn’t hear you use the phrases ‘glorious worker’s utopia’ or ‘communist state under the dictatorship of the proletariat.’”
“Hey, English is like my fourth language,” A’gog replies, “okay? I just got flustered with so many people listening. (...)”

~ Linguistics mixes well with black humor:

You continue in this way for the better part of ten minutes, confusing the officers and occasionally tossing in words that you are certain they will not know.
“It’s very important that I beguile you,” you say to the officers.
“What is beguile? Why have they sent you if you do not speak Kabouter?” the officer asks.
“Because they understand how important it is to me to find a terminal solution to the continued impediment that is presented by your existence,” you say.
“I don’t understand you at all! Guards!”