Book 20 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! On track with my reading! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

This book was a two-fer for me: I got to continue catching up on the works of my friend Jendia Gammon and also continue my exploration of modern “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, a series that I grew up with! So yesterday I finished reading Dungeon Crawl at the Haunted Mall (2026), by Jendia Gammon. (I also like mixing up light reads with some of my heavier reads, and CYOA books are definitely a fast read!)

This book was a blast! The title tells you broadly what you’re in for, adventure-wise, but it doesn’t fully convey a lot of the nostalgic silliness that comes with the story.

In the book, you take the role of Mica Pierce, a kid in her early teens who opts to lead her group of friends to explore the abandoned Sunset River Mall for internet video fodder. The mall has been abandoned since the 1980s when a toxic flood contaminated the structure and took the lives of nearly a dozen people. The story begins as your group of friends assemble outside the mall, ready to start filming, but one of the group has not arrived — is she late, did she go into the mall already, or is something more sinister happening?

What follows is a silly adventure that wends through both horror and 1980s camp! Your group can meet a horrific end or they can fight spirits with the most cringey 1980s trends — of course the choice is yours!

Gammon clearly had a lot of fun with 1980s nostalgia and viewing it through the eyes of today’s youth. You will find references to parachute pants, 80s fitness trends, and Day-Glo colors, among many others, often woven directly into the plot. Those who wandered malls in the 1980s will also find a lot of familiar scenes, such as the ever-present mall popcorn and strange impractical novelty shops.

The illustrations by Elena Dall’Aglio are also great and capture the whimsy of the story and the overal CYOA genre perfectly, and they add nicely to the atmosphere of the book.

I had a great time wandering the Haunted Mall with Jendia Gammon, and look forward to exploring even more of her work in the future!

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