The Confessor

There is a booth at the end of the dark nave with a screen worn smooth, and it has been kept warm for you. The Confessor opens in the cold street outside a great cathedral lit low for a confession that never ends, where every soul who could not bear to die unknown is heard at last, read all the way down, and kept at the center of the listening. You came in out of the cold because someone, finally, would hear you to the bottom. All you have to do is kneel, give it up, and let the even voice take the end of every sentence off your hands.

The Confessor is Book Seven of ENCORE, a choose-your-path horror. The same Curator keeps the house; the same company of the dead is recast into a new production, this one hushed and close and patient with you. Bring the character you built in The Haunt, The Vigil, The Understudy, The Crossing, The Gallery, and The Betrothed, and the confession remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Give your name to the penitents’ book or keep to the edge, a watcher and not a penitent. Kneel and be heard or keep moving, a visitor passing through. Your choices decide which of the book’s endings the house gives you, and the way out, the true one, asks whether you can walk away unknown, no confession and no entry in the register and no one left who has heard you to the bottom, and go out the vestry door into the cold street a closed book, unread and alive and your own.

If you like Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure, if you like interactive horror, if you like the cold anthology dread of American Horror Story, this is built for you.

▶ Play it free in your browser, then keep the ebook or paperback. 166 numbered sections, 40 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.