Basilisk - I

The content is unrelentingly dark. The world of Basilisk is one of oppressive despair.

Originally posted on Vintage Books and Games: They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore! discussion board of the DenOfDungeoneers.com forum by user [REDACTED], 10/19/2005 22:09:04 UTC

My uncle John died in 1990. I was ten at the time. We lived in Seattle. He lived in Chicago. I saw him once a year at most, which means I probably only saw him ten times in my life. Even then, for most of those years, I was too young to have concrete memories of him. The guy was basically a stranger I got birthday and Christmas gifts in the mail from once a year, so I wasn’t effected much when my mom told me the news. I think my first reaction was disappointment solely because, when he did send me gifts, they were always the coolest toys and video games and not the usual sweaters or clothes I got from other family members. I remember my mom couldn’t stop crying when she told me. My father didn’t cry, but I’d never seen him so torn up before in my life. It all made me feel as if I should have felt worse than I really did.

My parents flew to Chicago for the funeral while we stayed in Seattle with my mother’s parents. It made me feel even worse that I was excited about it, since I always loved getting to stay with my grandparents out at their beach house in Annacortes.

I felt ashamed by that. I thought something had to be wrong with me.

My dad stayed in Chicago for a few weeks after the funeral to help the rest of the family clear out my uncle’s stuff and settle the last of his business. John had died young, unexpectedly, and without a will. He had no spouse. No children. But he had a lot of money. Later, I’d learn that there was some serious arguments between his brothers about who would get what, which is part of why the whole affair dragged on for so long. Before my dad got back, he sent three boxes full of books that was specifically addressed to me. I’ve always been big on reading and, since no one else had wanted them or saw any value in them, he sent them to me.

John had been an eclectic guy, to say the least. He was a computer programmer by trade who had worked in video games pretty much his entire career. I didn’t learn any of this until much later, but he’d worked with Origin Systems, Interplay, and, when he’d died, he’d been working with a new game development company that I can’t remember the name of to save my life. At all these companies, he worked on role-playing games. Those were his life’s passion. He loved role-playing games. He loved fantasy. My dad said that, when John was in high school, he’d spend most of his time in the basement, tooling around with games on Apple II computer he’d scrimped and saved to buy or playing Dungeons and Dragons with his friends. Apparently, he’d even programmed a few games of his own, which is how he got hired with Origin Systems.

It was no real shock that most of the books I got were all fantasy-related in some way. There were a few sci-fi novels, some educational texts on biology, religion, world mythology, and computer programming that got tossed in, but the majority of them were paperback fantasy novels, fantasy magazines, or role-playing game handbooks. Even though I was ten, I was reading at a level that was far above most of my peers, so I managed to get through some of them. Others I tried to read and didn’t make it too far. I especially liked the role-playing game handbooks, though. Even when I didn’t quite understand what they said, I could flip through them and marvel at the illustrations of monsters, warriors, and more than a few pretty women in impractically skimpy armor. That may or may not have been the same reason I really enjoyed skimming through the many issues of Heavy Metal magazine that were in one of the boxes.

But those boxes of books and magazines weren’t the only thing I got from John. In a lot of ways, I owe John a debt of gratitude. These days, I’m a huge fantasy buff myself. Movies, books, games, I love it all. Especially the darker stuff. I regularly host Dungeons and Dragons games myself for my friends, and we always have a good time. Being introduced to those books made me the man I am today. For better or worse. It’s a shame he had to die to make it happen. I think we would have gotten along great.

When my father got back from Chicago, he didn’t come empty handed. He brought with himself a bag with even more books. He said that they’d found them in a box while cleaning out John’s closet, stowed away in the very back. I can only assume they thought that they were magazines of a more explicit sort at first, but, after a brief look over, they’d found that they were just more old fantasy books. My father assumed they had been rare, valuable, or both, and that's why they were hidden. He still gave them to me.

I think most of them had more of a sentimental value to John than anything. His well-worn boxed set of a first edition Dungeons and Dragons was in there. There were a few other dog-eared novels and role-playing guides, too, most of where filled with John’s extensive scribbling in the margins. There was even a few old, yellowed notebooks detailing the elaborate campaigns he’d once conducted with them, as well as what seemed to be some notebooks he was using to document the development of games. At least, that’s what I always thought it was. There’s pages and pages of notes, code, and doodles. John’s handwriting was what could generously be called chicken scratch and deciphering some of it remains a daunting task I’ve never really devoted much time to. To me, it was a treasure trove of material. I still have it all today.

But, among these old books, there was one in particular that caught my eye.

It was one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I’m sure most of you had a few yourselves when you were kids, or at least read some. There’s an entire series and brand called Choose Your Own Adventure that have been published since the late seventies, but this one wasn’t part of that series or published by the company that put them out. I had a few of them on my bookshelf and this one wasn’t just much, much thicker than those, but markedly different in almost every way. It was old and worn, more so than any other book in my uncle’s collection. It looked older than it should have been, like it had been printed decades before the first Choose Your Own Adventure book had ever been published. The pages were yellow, crisp, and wrinkled. The front cover faded and the corners grayed and feathered. The spine was nearly worn away from being opened and closed so many times. The original Choose Your Own Adventure series books have a pretty iconic cover format that’s white with elaborate fantasy illustrations on the front in a red frame.

This one had a black cover with an illustration in emerald green frame. Even though the illustration on the front was very well done and richly detailed as most of that old fantasy art was, it didn’t depict any muscle-bound barbarian warriors, wizards in flowing robes shooting lightning from their fingertips, or attractive women in risque harem-wear. The illustration was just of a woman in a black cloak and a witch’s hat, tipped low over her face so all you could see was a single eye and a smirking set of pale lips. Behind her was the face of… something. I remember thinking it was a dragon, but the more I studied the drawing, it looked more like a snake mixed with a crocodile, with a long, blunted snout covered in dark scales, lined with wickedly sharp teeth. It was looming in the darkness behind the woman, with most of its monstrous head obscured in shadows. All you could really see were a pair of eyes with slitted pupils, growing a sickly green in the shadows.

It was simple, but it was striking. More so, it was haunting. I remember seeing the cover and being immediately and intensely creeped out by it. It was a multitude of factors. The malicious bend of the witch’s grin and the look in her eye that’s both sinister and beckoning, as if daring you to open the book and see what’s inside. The monster lurked behind her, too obscured to make out much except for the fact that it was both dangerous and awful. The way the monster’s eyes were illustrated… something about it was so visceral, so realistic, you could swear that something was actually looking at you. Like the book’s cover wasn’t an illustration but a window, and that thing was gazing at you from the other side.

I hated it. I put it back in the box without even opening it. For nights afterwards, I laid in bed and it felt like every time I was just about to fall asleep, I’d think about it and get so unnerved I’d wake back up. It was just so strange. The black cover. The creepy illustration. Some nights I'd stare at the darkness of my closet and just wait to see those green eyes open up and start glowing in the shadows. Even the name of the book itself would just appear in my head like an echo and pulse in a quiet room while I laid there, unable to not think about the book’s cover.

It was a simple title. Just one word.

Basilisk.

It was printed in a simple but bold font the same green color as what I assumed was the eponymous monster’s eyes. And it was impossible to forget.

For as much as I disliked the book, I couldn’t stay away from it. After a few days of trying to force myself to forget about it, curiosity drew me back in. I swallowed my reservations about the cover and forced myself to try and read it. I was somewhat relieved when I quickly came to realize that it was not written at a level I could really comprehend at ten or eleven. So, I put it away in my own closet, away from my other books, and tried to forget about it again.

I never could.

Every now and then, I’d dig it up and see if I could penetrate the dense, almost poetic prose. Every time, I’d make it a little further than before, but either my patience would always give out before I got anywhere substantial with it, or something else would demand my attention. It sat there in the back of my closet for years, both in my closet and in the back of my mind, lurking like the beast on the cover - hidden, but ever-present, and unignorable.

It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I think I finally began to read the thing in earnest.

The world is dying¹.

Those are the first words of the book.

What or where this world is is never specified, but it’s made explicitly clear from the jump that it is a bleak, hopeless, and haunted place. The landscape is littered with the moldering ruins of once-great civilizations and the colossal, butchered corpses of old gods. Lone survivors in rusted, ancient armor wander the vast stretches of unforgiving, inhospitable wilderness between the last remaining and crumbling vestiges of society, traveling beneath a sun that hangs both odiously low and glows a dim orange. The moon, too, sits low in the sky at night, stained a mysterious and wicked green that pollutes the world below with a subtle and sublime evil light that seems to seep into the very soil of the earth itself. While plenty of dangers are present during the scant few daylight hours, horrible beasts, some living, some dead, and some something else entirely, stalk the land by moonlight. This all unfolds beneath the distant, watchful eyes of powerful and enigmatic sorceresses known simply as Witches.

What catastrophe befell this world is uncertain. Was there a war between humanity and the divine? Was there a war between the gods themselves? Did the very world itself rise up in rebellion against the debauched humans and decadent gods to wipe clean the slate of history? Or did the mysterious cabal of witches orchestrate it all in a bid to claim domain over the ashes of the old world? Multiple explanations are posed, but no definitive answer is ever given.

And the titular Basilisk? It’s not what you’re probably thinking it is. I’ll just tell you that.

You read from the perspective of one of these lost, wandering souls in the wasteland. What you do is entirely up to you. The first choice is as simple as coming to a fork in a path, and from there, there are quite literally hundreds of diverging paths to take. The book is both incredibly long and dense.

One of, if not the most intriguing and unique elements of Basilisk‘s setting is the Witches. The word is always capitalized. Depending on how you read the book and the choices you make, you can encounter a good number of them. Even though they appear superficially human, it’s abundantly clear that they’re anything but.

Like much of the world of Basilisk, their origins are unclear, but one of them offers the possible explanation that that they are living fragments of a singular goddess who was not killed but shattered at some point in the distant past. It’s why they’re exclusively female. It’s why they refer to each other as sisters. It’s why each of them only has access and mastery over a singular aspect of magic, and why they're the only ones in this world that can perform sorcery at all. In a way, they're all demi-gods themselves. The closest thing to the divine still left in that fallen world. This shattering of the goddess is even another event that is alluded to have possibly brought about the ultimate calamity that brought the world to its current state.

The Witches themselves vary greatly. Some are sequestered away, alone, in great and ruined keeps in remote places. Others have more humble dwellings. A few of them also wander the land like anyone else might. Some are only capable of performing magic on par with parlor tricks. Others possess the ability to turn mountains to rubble or boil the sea. The only unifying traits they all seem to have is a taste for long coats or cloaks and distinctive hats, and that they’re all dangerously capricious.

You can encounter a great many characters throughout the book, but some of the Witches are among the most striking and memorable figures in the book. One is described as having her lips sewn together for unknown reasons and constantly repairing the damage to her body with any fabric she can find as it rapidly decays, leaving her to exist like some sort of grotesque human ragdoll. Another is only a child who hides in what had once been a foundry, who will bring your story to a gruesome end if not bribed with sweets. I remember one that particularly disturbed me was described as having a broken face; she seems kind at first, but if you don’t find a way to slip away from her, the last thing you see is her eating your entrails. Some other ones that I remember sticking out was one with weeping black fungus growing from wounds along her body (gruesomely including one of her eyes). One was a living porcelain doll riven with cracks, living in the ruins of an opulent porcelain palace. There was one particularly tragic Witch that was cursed to restless sleep wracked with nightmares for years on end; being asleep for so long left her horribly malnourished and her muscles so withered and atrophied that she could scarcely move during what little time she was awake. They were all as intriguing as they were creatively designed.

There’s many more of them. Too many to talk about all of them. One of the Witches - a scholarly young woman who dwells alone in a sepulchral, city-sized library - even states that she’s unaware of how many of them there could be. It’s implied that there could be no end to them.

If you couldn’t tell, the book was not intended for a juvenile audience. The content is unrelentingly dark. The world of Basilisk is one of oppressive despair.

And I was obsessed with it.

I would say I still am. I slept with that book on my bedside table for years. I think I read it almost every night before I went to bed for a while. I would constantly go back to the book over the years, again and again, enthralled by the many different paths, always discovering something new, whether it was some small but crucial detail that completely recontextualizes something I thought I knew, or a new branching path in the story that I could take. The way the stories are told, too… it’s unlike any other book of it’s kind. The prose isn’t just engaging or richly detailed or poetic. It’s all those things, but it has this strange, almost hypnotic quality to it. When you read it, you can almost hear the voice of a narrator in your head, speaking it aloud in a commanding tone. It reads less like a book and more like a Greek epic poetry. There’s a mythic quality to it. It almost makes you feel as if you really are hearing someone tell you the story of a damned world by firelight.

It took me years to work my way through the whole thing, following all the diverging threads and reaching the end of every possible plot. To be totally honest, I’m not sure I actually did finish every single story path. I think I have, but it’s hard to tell. There’s no table of contents or guide or any information at all that spells out all the different branching paths and how to complete them all. It bothers me to think that I haven’t. It bothers me even more to think that I never will.

When I went off to college, I thought for sure that it was one of the books I brought with me. I was legitimately distraught when I got to campus over half-a-country away and found that it wasn’t. I wasn’t just upset, I was mad at myself for having left it behind and depriving myself of all the material that could have been in there that I had still yet to find. I am not exaggerating when I say I thought about it every fucking day until I got back home months later.

I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t on my bedside table. It wasn’t on my bookshelf. My parents hadn’t touched my room since I left and not a single thing was out of place except for the one thing I wanted to find. I didn’t just tear my room apart looking for it, I turned the whole house upside in a desperate attempt to locate it. I went through every box in the attic. I interrogated my family about where it might have gone to, as if any of them would have had even the slightest interest in such a book. I even suspected my brother of having stolen it, hoping that it might be worth something if he sold it. Which I know he didn’t, and he wouldn’t do that, but it’s a thought I had.

I’ve tried to find another copy. Believe me, I have. I’ve combed used bookstores all over western Washington. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours slogging through every result on every search engine for information. I habitually check various resale sites like eBay for a copy. Even before this happened, I was always trying to find out more about the book, the author, and the publishing company. Even before we had a computer with internet access in my house, I would go to the local library and do research there. In college, I’d do the same thing.

I don’t remember the publication information. For as obsessed with the book as I was, I never thought to even look at it. I know the author is a woman named Gretchen Gray. The publisher was a company called Laurel Wreath Press. Right at the start of the book, there was even one of those, Check out our other great titles pages that had a whole list of other books written by Gretchen Grey. I don’t remember all of them, but I’ve tried to search for the ones I can recall. Of course, I’ve found nothing.

Recently, I’ve started making calls to other publishing houses or people I could track down who worked in the industry, just to see if they happened to know anything about the book, the author, or Laurel Wreath Press. Someone said that it might have been a pitch product that was never picked up by a big company that my uncle, in his feverish quest to collect all the fantasy books he could, somehow acquired. I told a friend about all of this and he went so far as to suggest that Gretchen Gray was a pen name my uncle John used and that he wrote the thing himself as a vanity project. I’ve had veterans in the community and industry who claim to have read every gamebook ever put to print tell me there is no such publishing house or a Gretchen Gray. I’m beginning to think they might be right.

I know it’s ridiculous to care so much about about some obscure old gamebook, but I can’t shake the feeling that I absolutely need to find it again.

I still do. And that’s why I’m making this post. I’ve made it on several similar sites but I’ve had no success. But, I keep telling myself that there is an answer, somewhere. If I just keep following these different paths, one of them will lead me back to Basilisk.

On the off chance anyone here has ever heard of Basilisk, or Laurel Wreath Press, or Gretchen Gray, please let me know. If you have any questions or need any other information that might help, I can try and provide answers as best I can.

Thanks in advance.

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You ever just get pulled in by a good book?

1. Recommended listening.