Killing Hitler With Praise And Fire: Choose Your Own Horrible History

by Matthew Hutchins

Killing Hitler With Praise And Fire is a choose your own adventure type game about killing or eliminating Hitler to make the world a better place. There are a myriad of options available, though the choice is up to you. Some of the options include infantcide, homicide, altering his preferences in partners, biological warfare, art school, raptor nazis and of course the most cruel, getting him hitched him with lots of kids thereby putting to sleep his dreams like he did so many others.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure, Fiction, Gamebooks, Historical, Games

324 pages, Paperback

First published May 9, 2014

About the author

Matthew Hutchins is a novice Australian writer having so far released two books, Ulfus and Killing Hitler With Praise And Fire, the first in a line of choose your own horrible history books. By day he works in a Government department, plotting his escape route for when the Nazi Zombies come.

Reviews

[Jeremy Moore · Rating 1 out of 5]

You can accuse me of punching down DNFing and hating a Choose Your Own Adventure about killing Hitler; I don't care. There's nothing innate about the format or the topic that mandates the literature is low quality garbage. I was over the moon about the possibility that such a fun idea would be well-written enough to enjoy. Serious writers don't write CYOA? Why? What's wrong with a book format that changes the game and is out to have fun? Stephen King wrote 1000 pages about an interdimensional clown spider to persuade his children not to lose their sense of wonder, and I'm the crazy one for thinking this book should be legible?

Aside from just not having good sentences or ideas (I would accuse this book of being written by ChatGPT if it wasn't too old to be so), this book makes two major mistakes:

1. It's trying to do too much. There are too many portals to too many years and too many choices when you get there. None of them get fleshed out as a result; two choices end in the same result on the same page multiple times.

2. The entire idea is half baked. Why? Is there a historical period more researched by professionals and amateurs alike than WWII? Do your research! Play out the thought experiment! How would murdering baby Hitler be different than WWI friendly fire than a WWII assassination attempt gone right? Every thread ends with either "you killed Hitler!" or "you didn't kill Hitler" - would none of these scenarios change present day in different ways? This book only has a premise - there's no effort into the rest of it.

I honestly might try to rewrite this book myself.

[Tasha Mellins-Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband, brothers-in-law, father-in-law and I fought over this book. It's a fabulous throwback to our love of choose-your-own adventures 30+ years ago. Probably the most fun we've had with a book in a decade! The only thing stopping this from receiving five stars is the desperate need for a good, thorough editor.

*Goodreads First Read Review*

[Virginia · Rating 2 out of 5]

In great need of an editor. In some paths it is a given that you speak German and can socialize, in some others the opposite happens. Wrong dates and other mistakes. As for the choices, too often they don't make sense and the control is taken away from the reader, as unexpected extra choices (or a change of your own choice) are made right after you turn the page. The endings were disappointing and the story in general was neither fun neither engaging. If what it is told it is true, it was at least informative?

[Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I appreciated what the author was trying to do with this story, but it was so badly edited that at times it became difficult to read. I'm a very forgiving reader, but in this case it was just too much to get past. The layout was also particularly bad, in that at some points the text overlapped the surrounding artwork on each page. As for the story itself, it has some good bits in it, but the tone veers wildly from comedy to drama to the point where it almost feels written by committee.