The Mourners

There is a grave at the bottom of the dark avenue with your name already cut on the plate, and it has been kept open for you. The Mourners opens in the cold rain outside a great burial-house lit low for a mourning that never ends, where every soul who could not bear to die unwept is grieved at last, wept over all the way down, and kept at the center of the weeping. You came in out of the rain because someone, finally, would break their heart over you. All you have to do is lie down, give it up, and let the keening take the end of every grief off your hands.

The Mourners is Book Eight 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 cold and borne and wept-over and patient with you. Bring the character you built in The Haunt, The Vigil, The Understudy, The Crossing, The Gallery, The Betrothed, and The Confessor, and the mourning 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 book of the dead or keep to the edge, a watcher and not one of the bereaved. Lie down and be wept over or keep your feet, 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 unmourned, no grave and no entry in the register and no one left who will ever weep for you, and go out the service gate into the cold a death that is wholly your own, unwept and alive.

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. 151 numbered sections, 32 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.