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Choose Your Own Nightmare #16
Welcome to Horror Hospital
You can't believe your bad luck. In your first game as soccer goalie, you broke your arm. Now you're stuck spending the night in the hospital.
You tell yourself that it's no big deal. So what if you're stuck in a room with a weird mumbling guy? And the TV doesn't work. And the food is gross.
That's just the beginning. Because this hospital isn't like any other. It doesn't help you get better--it makes you worse!
You tell yourself that it's no big deal. So what if you're stuck in a room with a weird mumbling guy? And the TV doesn't work. And the food is gross.
That's just the beginning. Because this hospital isn't like any other. It doesn't help you get better--it makes you worse!
- GenresGamebooks
87 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 17, 2018
This is another CYON written by Laban Carrick Hill, who has proven to be my favorite writer in the series, delivering lots of solid entries so far. This was surprisingly dark at times, which was appropriate for the story (hospitals are a real fear for many adults as well as children). Hill illustrates that most chilling of fears - losing control of your body to strangers who have the potential to harm you. The story is pretty simple; you get kicked in the head and are wheeled to a hospital with a less-than-stellar record. It seems some of their patients disappear forever. The writing is quality, doing its job and staying out of the way, though I would have liked to see a little more description of scenes. There seemed to be more happy endings than usual, but the bad endings are dark enough to make up for this fact. Especially chilling is a scene in which you receive an impromptu surgery from an escaped psychopath. All in all, a quite solid book I'd recommend.
September 14, 2026
Just as the original Choose Your Own Adventure series at its best is defined by the works of Edward Packard, I'd say peak Choose Your Own Nightmare is given shape and form by Laban Carrick Hill. Not every entry he contributed is a winner—I can't pretend Watch Out for Room 13, The Evil Pen Pal, and The Toy Shop of Terror don't exist—but the two best books of the series are Bugged Out! and Welcome to Horror Hospital, both by Hill. Your big break as a player on your soccer team is coming today with your promotion to goalie, but the opponent, the Winston Kickers, aren't about to go easy on you. You make a gutsy save early in the game, but it costs you a serious head wound that is now gushing blood. Coach Duffy orders an ambulance to take you to Frankenstein Memorial Hospital, but you've heard rumors of gruesome experiments there and would rather receive treatment anywhere else. If only you hadn't asked your mother to stay away from the game today because she makes you nervous, she could be here to decide what happens next. Coach Duffy commands you to lie still and wait for transportation to Frankenstein Memorial, but must you do as he says?
If you fear hospitals badly enough, you stumble dizzily away from the soccer field insisting you won't go anywhere without your mom's approval. Not far from the field, you discover your mom is here after all; she drives you to your own physician, Dr. Berns, who believes you require hospitalization. Can you pass the test and say how many fingers he's holding up, despite crazy kaleidoscopic vision from your head injury? Guess correctly and your mom takes you home to recuperate on the couch, but next morning you awaken in unfamiliar surroundings. A woman's voice calls from another room; should you answer or run? Stick around to speak with her, and she claims to be your mother. Have you suffered amnesia? Should you let her take you to the hospital? Maybe you pretend you were joking about having amnesia, and hope to recover your memory quick enough so she'll believe it. If you accept your need for treatment, you may face a horrifying end at the hands of Dr. Ludwig von Frankenstein and his creepy assistant, Dr. Igor. If you exited the house as soon as you heard the unfamiliar woman's voice, your injuries cause you to drift into restless sleep on a public park bench. You regain consciousness in the worst part of the hospital, where you don't have your mom to guard you from unauthorized experimentations on your body and brain. If you failed Dr. Berns's finger test earlier, he refers you to Frankenstein Memorial. Undergo evaluation by Dr. Skinnard, and she unilaterally has you removed to Frankenstein Sanitarium for the Insane. Dr. Skinnard has diagnosed you with Munchausen's Syndrome, and claims you habitually harm yourself for attention; can you escape this hellish facility and find someone who believes you're not insane? Avoid ever being taken to Dr. Skinnard, and with luck you remain with your mom and never face the horrors deep in the bowels of Frankenstein Memorial. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than clever.
Submit to Coach Duffy's plan from the start and you're shuttled to Frankenstein Memorial, where you wait a long time in the emergency room while suffering blood loss and agonizing headache. Your bandage soaks through with blood; should you stagger around in search of a hospital employee to change the bandage? You might wander into an isolated wing of the hospital where a man demands you assist him in performing surgery...with an invisible scalpel, on an invisible patient. Is he an eccentric doctor, or a maniac from the psych ward? If you stayed out of that wing, you bump into your mom shrieking at hospital staff for losing track of you. Her impulse is to remove you from the premises at once, but your ghastly head wound continues to leak. Can you evade round two of torture in Frankenstein Memorial? Perhaps you never went looking for help to change your bloody bandages. In that case, you have a traumatic experience being mistaken for a dead person and sliced into at the morgue, but was it all a dream? Maybe you should take it as a premonition and leave the hospital now, concussion or no concussion. Remain in the ER and you are tended to by Dr. Frank N. Stein, a ghoulish physical specimen who immediately states you require surgery. Refuse to go under the knife without your mom's permission and Dr. Stein assaults you, using his monstrous strength in an attack that might prove fatal. Agree to the operation and you awaken with the ability to read minds, but such a gift doesn't offer the perfectly satisfying ending you expect.
Many if not most kids fear the hospital: painful treatments they don't understand the necessity of, catastrophic things happening to their body that could threaten their life, incurable disease that leads to endless suffering, and separation from their loved ones over the short or long term. Some of these fears affect patients of any age, but why are kids in particular seized by medical phobias, so a book like Welcome to Horror Hospital specially appeals to them? I believe it's because kids are allowed so little control over their own course of medical care. Parents and doctors decide seemingly on a whim to consent to treatments that are pure terror for the kid; it's one thing to undergo an unpleasant procedure when you agree to it, but how about if it's forced on you? Having no control over frightening things done to your own body is the real terror, one that most adults would be just as petrified by. That lack of autonomy is business as usual for kids in just about every area of their lives, and a book like this one crystallizes it into a catharsis that helps them live out the frustration in a compelling narrative. Ultimately, that is why this book is so gripping.
Welcome to Horror Hospital may be the finest of all Choose Your Own Nightmares, but why? Most of the series fails to live up to its implied promise of scarier stories than most youth gamebooks: the narrative paths are silly, unfocused, or lack real scares. Welcome to Horror Hospital is the only book that cashes the check written by the creators of the series, fashioning a few endings darker and more violent than I dared expect. In a modern world of sanitized children's literature that removes most intense fear, grief, or other emotion, rejecting the wisdom of thousands of years of storytellers who refused to coddle young readers, you end up with a society whose kids no longer read because no books grab their attention, and then those kids don't have the influence of deep, challenging art to prepare them for life's hardships. A book like Welcome to Horror Hospital does its best to buck that trend, and young readers are blessed by it. I've never read a gamebook that affects me quite like this one.
If you fear hospitals badly enough, you stumble dizzily away from the soccer field insisting you won't go anywhere without your mom's approval. Not far from the field, you discover your mom is here after all; she drives you to your own physician, Dr. Berns, who believes you require hospitalization. Can you pass the test and say how many fingers he's holding up, despite crazy kaleidoscopic vision from your head injury? Guess correctly and your mom takes you home to recuperate on the couch, but next morning you awaken in unfamiliar surroundings. A woman's voice calls from another room; should you answer or run? Stick around to speak with her, and she claims to be your mother. Have you suffered amnesia? Should you let her take you to the hospital? Maybe you pretend you were joking about having amnesia, and hope to recover your memory quick enough so she'll believe it. If you accept your need for treatment, you may face a horrifying end at the hands of Dr. Ludwig von Frankenstein and his creepy assistant, Dr. Igor. If you exited the house as soon as you heard the unfamiliar woman's voice, your injuries cause you to drift into restless sleep on a public park bench. You regain consciousness in the worst part of the hospital, where you don't have your mom to guard you from unauthorized experimentations on your body and brain. If you failed Dr. Berns's finger test earlier, he refers you to Frankenstein Memorial. Undergo evaluation by Dr. Skinnard, and she unilaterally has you removed to Frankenstein Sanitarium for the Insane. Dr. Skinnard has diagnosed you with Munchausen's Syndrome, and claims you habitually harm yourself for attention; can you escape this hellish facility and find someone who believes you're not insane? Avoid ever being taken to Dr. Skinnard, and with luck you remain with your mom and never face the horrors deep in the bowels of Frankenstein Memorial. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than clever.
Submit to Coach Duffy's plan from the start and you're shuttled to Frankenstein Memorial, where you wait a long time in the emergency room while suffering blood loss and agonizing headache. Your bandage soaks through with blood; should you stagger around in search of a hospital employee to change the bandage? You might wander into an isolated wing of the hospital where a man demands you assist him in performing surgery...with an invisible scalpel, on an invisible patient. Is he an eccentric doctor, or a maniac from the psych ward? If you stayed out of that wing, you bump into your mom shrieking at hospital staff for losing track of you. Her impulse is to remove you from the premises at once, but your ghastly head wound continues to leak. Can you evade round two of torture in Frankenstein Memorial? Perhaps you never went looking for help to change your bloody bandages. In that case, you have a traumatic experience being mistaken for a dead person and sliced into at the morgue, but was it all a dream? Maybe you should take it as a premonition and leave the hospital now, concussion or no concussion. Remain in the ER and you are tended to by Dr. Frank N. Stein, a ghoulish physical specimen who immediately states you require surgery. Refuse to go under the knife without your mom's permission and Dr. Stein assaults you, using his monstrous strength in an attack that might prove fatal. Agree to the operation and you awaken with the ability to read minds, but such a gift doesn't offer the perfectly satisfying ending you expect.
Many if not most kids fear the hospital: painful treatments they don't understand the necessity of, catastrophic things happening to their body that could threaten their life, incurable disease that leads to endless suffering, and separation from their loved ones over the short or long term. Some of these fears affect patients of any age, but why are kids in particular seized by medical phobias, so a book like Welcome to Horror Hospital specially appeals to them? I believe it's because kids are allowed so little control over their own course of medical care. Parents and doctors decide seemingly on a whim to consent to treatments that are pure terror for the kid; it's one thing to undergo an unpleasant procedure when you agree to it, but how about if it's forced on you? Having no control over frightening things done to your own body is the real terror, one that most adults would be just as petrified by. That lack of autonomy is business as usual for kids in just about every area of their lives, and a book like this one crystallizes it into a catharsis that helps them live out the frustration in a compelling narrative. Ultimately, that is why this book is so gripping.
Welcome to Horror Hospital may be the finest of all Choose Your Own Nightmares, but why? Most of the series fails to live up to its implied promise of scarier stories than most youth gamebooks: the narrative paths are silly, unfocused, or lack real scares. Welcome to Horror Hospital is the only book that cashes the check written by the creators of the series, fashioning a few endings darker and more violent than I dared expect. In a modern world of sanitized children's literature that removes most intense fear, grief, or other emotion, rejecting the wisdom of thousands of years of storytellers who refused to coddle young readers, you end up with a society whose kids no longer read because no books grab their attention, and then those kids don't have the influence of deep, challenging art to prepare them for life's hardships. A book like Welcome to Horror Hospital does its best to buck that trend, and young readers are blessed by it. I've never read a gamebook that affects me quite like this one.
April 14, 2018
Algo así como los Escalofríos de R. L. Stein, pero con finales alternativos. Es muy confortable leer este tipo de historias de hospital cuando uno esta en rehabilitación.
El Hospital del Terror es un relato de horror para niños y jóvenes, con la posibilidad de cambiar la estructura y el final de la historia.
RECOMENDABLE SI:
- Gustas del terror para niños.
- Te gustan las portadas con sexis enfermeras.
- Te gustan los relatos con finales alternativos.
El Hospital del Terror es un relato de horror para niños y jóvenes, con la posibilidad de cambiar la estructura y el final de la historia.
RECOMENDABLE SI:
- Gustas del terror para niños.
- Te gustan las portadas con sexis enfermeras.
- Te gustan los relatos con finales alternativos.
February 8, 2022
6.5/10
it has Only 2 bad endings
2 bittersweet
5 Good ending
it has Only 2 bad endings
2 bittersweet
5 Good ending
November 7, 2022
Loved it read it in middle school
October 23, 2015
good reading for lower grades
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews