Freida McFadden’s The Dinner Party employs a branching narrative structure that recalls the “Choose Your Own Adventure” gamebooks. This series, created by Edward Packard and primarily published by Bantam Books, reached peak popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, empowering young readers with narrative control (“The Rise & Fall & Rise of Choose Your Own Adventure Books.” YouTube, uploaded by Secret Galaxy, 21 Oct. 2021). Its return fits within a broader wave of millennial nostalgia, as familiar childhood formats and franchises from the same era continue to be revived, reworked, and marketed to adults.

In recent years, branching storytelling has been adapted across different media for both younger and mature audiences. Netflix’s 2018 interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch brought branching storytelling to mainstream streaming audiences as part of a broader wave of interactive media titles released in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Around the same period, Netflix released several choice-based specials for different audiences, including Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale, Minecraft: Story Mode, Captain Underpants Epic Choice-o-Rama, and Escape the Undertaker. Video games have used similar structures for much longer, with role-playing series like Bioware’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect and XBox Game Studios’ Fable allowing player choices to shape relationships, moral outcomes, and endings. Horror games such as Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn adapt this approach to build suspense, making each decision feel potentially life-or-death.

McFadden’s The Dinner Party brings this familiar choice-based structure back into a print thriller intended for adult readers. The “Pick Your Poison” style makes the reader responsible for Sloan’s deaths, escapes, and romances. The novel’s introductory warning, “DO NOT READ THIS BOOK FROM BEGINNING TO END!” (v), explicitly signals this departure from conventional reading. By offering 22 distinct endings and forcing the reader to constantly make decisions, McFadden gives the reader control over the narrative.

This game-like structure also connects The Dinner Party to contemporary absurdist genre satire, including works such as Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, where survival depends on navigating strange rules, sudden violence, and darkly comic consequences. Like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, McFadden’s novel uses absurdity to make danger feel both horrifying and ridiculous. However, The Dinner Party makes this logic more explicitly interactive. Its branching paths, instant deaths, and multiple endings borrow from LitRPG and video-game design, turning Sloan’s survival into a darkly humorous series of outcomes.

The novel also draws on familiar horror and suspense traditions rather than relying only on its interactive structure. The Wentworth Estate storyline echoes Richard Connell’s 1924 story “The Most Dangerous Game,” about a wealthy hunter who turns humans into prey on a remote island. The novel makes this premise darkly comic through the Adventurous Eaters Club, whose wealthy members hunt and consume exotic creatures before deciding on Sloan as their intended main course. Other branches borrow from (and subvert) monster fiction and folklore: Robert, the abominable snowman, becomes a protector, while Carson’s werewolf transformation turns a romantic hero into a supernatural threat and love interest simultaneously. The multiple paths allow the novel to shift between survival horror, monster comedy, cannibal thriller, and paranormal romance. The result is a remix of familiar tropes made interactive through the reader’s choices.