A good game can take you away from the real world, immersing you in a fantasy land full of adventures, challenges, and excitement. But at the end of the day, you can box it back up, put it on the shelf, and get back to your daily existence. This is not what happens when Jenny Thornton wanders into a slightly sketchy store called More Games, meets a demon named Julian, and finds herself and her friends drawn into the fantasy world of the Game he sells her, promising “Danger. Seduction. Fear … Secrets revealed. Desires unveiled” (17). Jenny’s looking for something extra special for her boyfriend Tom’s birthday party and this seems to be just the ticket (though the handsome boy doing the selling seems to be the real clincher on the deal). Jenny leaves the strange store, box in hand, and this impulse buy sets into motion the events of The Forbidden Game trilogy, which includes The Hunter, The Chase, and The Kill (all 1994) by L.J. Smith, who is best known for her Vampire Diaries series (1991-2011).
In The Hunter, Jenny, her boyfriend Tom, and their friends Dee, Audrey, Summer, Michael, and Zach set up the game Jenny has bought, which when assembled forms a model of “a three-foot-high Victorian house” (39). It is made of paper but quite elaborate: “It had three floors and a turret and was open in front like a dollhouse. The roof was removable. Sheet after sheet had to be cut out to make all the chimneys and cornices and balconies, but no one got tired of working, and only Michael complained” (39). The players themselves become the avatars, drawing their own faces and their darkest fears on the game pieces that complete the setup. The goal is to work their way from the first floor all the way to the top of the turret before dawn the next morning, while on the lookout for The Shadow Man, who is “lurking around inside, and if he catches you … He’ll ‘bring to life your darkest fantasies and make you confess your most secret fears’” (40). The illustration of The Shadow Man looks exactly like the mysterious boy Jenny met in the game store, and he is joined in the game by two monstrous characters called the Creeper and the Lurker, who are an enormous snake and a terrifying wolf. Jenny starts to have a bad feeling and some serious misgivings about the game, but everyone else thinks it’ll be fun—especially birthday boy Tom—so they forge on.
Before they even enter the dark alternate world of the Game’s house, there are some tensions in the friends’ relationships with one another. Tom and Jenny have been together since they were kids and while Tom seems like a nice enough guy, Jenny definitely lets her relationship with Tom and what he wants dictate too many of her decisions, including the way she dresses and wears her hair: the night of the party, she wears a long skirt to please Tom despite Audrey’s disapproval and “she pulled her hair back—the way Tom liked it—and anchored its silkiness with an elastic band” (31). Audrey is a relatively new addition to their friend group, the daughter of a diplomat who has had positions all over the world. She is cultured and cosmopolitan, which makes her dating Michael a bit surprising, since he’s just a regular guy, who is slightly overweight and a bit of a nerd. Audrey teases him quite a bit and tells the other girls that “He’s just keeping the seat warm until I decide who’s next. He’s a—a bookmark” (30). Dee and Jenny have been best friends pretty much their whole lives and Dee is a no-nonsense badass who does kung fu and whose grandmother is an artist and a treasure trove of African folktales and wisdom. Jenny is friends with both Dee and Audrey, but the two girls are very different and don’t get along well at all, constantly challenging, insulting, and competing with one another. The group is rounded out by Summer, who is kind and sweet, but the others all see her as kind of a ditz, and Jenny’s cousin Zach, an artistic guy who doesn’t say much.
When the group starts playing the Game and find themselves literally transported into the nightmare house, they take all of these conflicts and underlying stresses with them, which serve as a counterpoint to the fears they must face there, both individually and collectively. As they play, they find out more about themselves and one another. They initially gain successes as they conquer the fears they encounter—like Dee’s terror of aliens—but things quickly get darker and more dangerous. Jenny, Dee, and Audrey escape from Audrey’s nightmare of dark elves and defeat the creeping plants that take over Michael’s body. As they navigate these different threats, they also draw closer together, confessing their less tangible fears, like Dee’s terror of being physically powerless and Audrey’s self-conscious uncertainty about making new friends after spending her whole life moving from place to place.
While these battles draw the friends closer together, there are fights they can’t win and when they collectively face Summer’s nightmare—her messy bedroom taken to monstrous extremes—they fall short and Summer dies, trapped within her own darkest fear. And Jenny’s own nightmare opens the door on other horrors from her past that she has long forgotten: she knows something terrible happened in her grandfather’s basement when she was five years old, but what she has blocked out is how her grandfather was a demon hunter, which kind of makes sense because no one else in her family seems to have known his secret. He had several of these beings imprisoned in his basement closet, held with a sealing rune on the door. Jenny opened the door, released the demons, and when they threatened to consume her, her grandfather sacrificed himself in her place (though since no one else in the family knows he’s a demon hunter, they all believe he tried to hurt Jenny and then ran away, which definitely tarnishes his legacy and makes her feel even more guilty when she remembers the truth). She has always known that something bad happened but blocked out exactly what it was and her own role in the tragedy of her grandfather’s loss.
Jenny is also fighting her own private battle separate from these fears, as she repeatedly finds herself transported away from these collective struggles and trapped alone with Julian. Jenny’s appearance in the game store wasn’t a coincidence, as Julian tells her “Suppose the devil was just quietly minding his own business—when he saw this girl. A girl who made him forget everything. There’ve been other girls more beautiful, of course, but this girl had something. A goodness, a sweetness about her. An innocence” (101, emphasis original). Julian has been watching and admiring Jenny for years and the Game is a tool of both terror and seduction as he draws her into his world. Jenny doesn’t want to be attracted to Julian, constantly reminding herself of how much she loves Tom, but there’s something irresistible when they’re close to one another: “His voice seemed to steal the bones from her body. She was aware of shaking her head slightly, as much in response to the new feelings as to his question. She didn’t know what was happening to her. Tom made her feel safe, but this—this made her feel weak inside, as if her stomach were falling” (100).
Tom’s biggest fear is losing Jenny and as the Game draws toward its conclusion, it looks like he might actually have to face it. As terrifying as their time in the nightmare house has been and as upset as Jenny is about losing Summer, there is something alluring and liberating about giving in to her darker side and the desires that Julian has awakened in her. She has discovered that she’s stronger and braver than she ever thought she could be, and she pledges herself to Julian and promises to stay with him, ceremonially swearing “All I refuse and thee I choose” (233), as long as he’ll let her surviving friends go back to their real world. Jenny indulges in these desires, including an intense kiss with Julian, as her friends flee toward safety, then she turns the tables, shoving Julian into a closet, sealing it with the same rune her grandfather had used all those years ago, and fleeing to drive her friends on to safety. She has chosen Tom and her friends and the real world, but her attraction to Julian wasn’t just a ruse and part of her still hesitates, longing for the Shadow World, along with the freedom and pleasure it offers.
The second book, The Chase, picks up in the immediate and messy aftermath of The Hunter. While Jenny and the rest of their friends make it back to the real world, Summer is still dead and her body missing, with Jenny and the others suspected of having hurt or killed her. Two young men named P.C. and Slug, who were stalking Jenny near the game store and who have heard the siren’s call of the Game, steal it and meet a bad end, which leaves the Game dangerously at large and Julian loose in their world, along with the Creeper and the Lurker.
While the breakdown of the separation between the world of the Game and the teens’ real world is plenty scary, the continued tension in their relationships causes additional problems, particularly between Jenny and Tom. Tom is bothered by two lingering effects of the time they spent in the nightmare house with Julian. The first is plain and simple jealousy: he feels threatened by Julian and thinking of the demon’s charm, he wonders “How could Jenny resist that? Especially being as innocent as she was … He’d seen them together, seen Julian’s eyes when he looked at her. He’d seen the kind of spell Julian could cast. When Julian came for Jenny next time, Tom was going to lose” (285). The second problem Tom is wrestling with has more to do with his own sense of insecurity and his discomfort with Jenny’s newfound strength, as he reflects on how “He’d seen her in that Other Place, inside that paper house that turned real. She’d been so brave and so beautiful it made his throat hurt. She’d functioned absolutely perfectly without him” (284, emphasis original). Tom can’t provide for Jenny or be the indispensable support he has always been for her in their relationship, and rather than adjusting to these new dynamics, he keeps Jenny at a distance and watches over her from the shadows, as he wrestles with his own feelings of inadequacy.
Dee is the one who unpacks the shifting mechanics of this new game, explaining to the others that while their experience in the nightmare house was “a race game [where] the point is to get from the start to the goal in a certain amount of time—or before everybody else does” (394), this new one, where Julian and his minions are in the real world, is a different kind of game, a “hunting game … the oldest games of all” (395), as Julian takes Jenny’s friends one by one and she has to try to stop him and free them before it’s too late. As Jenny’s friends are taken, a paper avatar, like those from their first game, are left in their place and in the end, Jenny has to face off against Julian on her own, with her friends’ survival at stake, as she once again tries to navigate her complex, intermingled feelings of terror and desire.
Jenny resists Julian’s temptation and discovers a portal to her friends’ prison through one of her cousin Zach’s photographs, this one featuring a surreal image of their school cafeteria, though when Jenny tries to lead them out, they find themselves surrounded by a ring of imprisoning fire. Jenny thinks through the challenge they’re facing, remembering how Julian turned their own fears and perceptions against them in the paper house, and reassuring her friends that they can simply walk out of the flaming cafeteria and back into their normal lives because “The fire isn’t real! It’s a model our brains are making” (487). The comfort of this realization is compromised by the fact that the fire can actually burn them, though Jenny tells them that it’s only “because you believe it’s hot” (488, emphasis original). However hard they try, they can’t completely free themselves from these perceptions but they’re able to believe enough to walk through the fire and out of Julian’s shadow realm, singed but alive … except for Tom and Zach, who lost track of the others along the way and are trapped as the portal between the worlds burns. But Jenny does get one last message from Julian before everything goes up in flames: “Your friends are with me—in the Shadow World. If you want them, come on a treasure hunt. But remember: If you lose, there’s the devil to pay” (503, emphasis original).
Like all the best trilogies, the third book of The Forbidden Game series, The Kill, draws Jenny and her friends back to the beginning, in this case, to Jenny’s grandfather’s basement and the notes and knowledge he left behind. They steal money from their parents and book tickets on a cross-country red eye flight to head back to Jenny’s childhood home, only to find that they can’t get the key to the house from her grandfather’s former housekeeper (and now caretaker of his empty home) until that evening. With time to kill, Jenny takes her friends to Joyland Park, an amusement park she fondly remembers from her childhood visits there, though their visit now is an underwhelming and ineffective distraction from their troubles.
When they’re finally able to get into Jenny’s grandfather’s house and its basement full of secrets, they find the notes and Jenny is able to absorb and use her grandfather’s knowledge, carrying his legacy forward. They find and carve the rune designs that they need to reopen a door to Julian’s world, but when the door opens … they find themselves back in Joyland Park, which is an uncanny reproduction that has grown dark and terrifying. While the first game was a race and the second game was a hunt, this third game is—as Julian’s invitation promised—a treasure hunt. In the real world, there’s a new attraction opening at Joyland Park this summer called Treasure Island, which is on an island in the middle of the park. Visitors who find gold doubloons hidden in the park prior to the attraction’s opening win early admission and the challenge laid before Jenny and her friends is similar: find three gold doubloons to gain entry to the park’s island, where they can find and reclaim Tom and Zach.
But of course, it’s never that easy and the teens’ treasure hunt has a couple of horrifying complications: first, while Julian has previously been the only demon they’ve had to contend with, now that they’re in the larger Shadow World a whole host of demons are hunting them. This has particularly profound consequences for Jenny because while Julian frequently terrorized her in their previous interactions, he could never actually bring himself to hurt her. The other demons have no such hesitancy and Jenny almost drowns in a cavern of the park’s mine ride before she realizes that the rules of the game have fundamentally changed. The presence of these other demons also provides some larger context for how Jenny (and to a lesser extent, the others) see and understand Julian: right now, he’s quite handsome and human in appearance but that’s because he’s the youngest of the demons. Jenny and her friends encounter several of the other demons, who are monstrous and subhuman, as they make their way through the park, with Jenny slowly coming to the realization that this is what Julian will one day become as he ages and transforms, following his true nature. She stubbornly clings to the hope that she could save him or change him, but once she realizes this is fundamentally impossible, it’s a deal breaker. A demon that looks like a cute teenage boy is one thing, but a demon that will eventually look like a deformed monster baby is another thing entirely, and definitely takes some of the romance and shine off the Shadow World for Jenny.
The other horrifying danger the friends have to contend with is that everyone they have lost is returned to them in Joyland Park, often in horrifying fashion. They are attacked by Slug’s decapitated and decomposing body in the Fish Pond carnival game, and later in the arcade, they find Slug and P.C.’s heads bobbing in a cabinet that invites them to “SPEAK TO THE SPIRITS. ASK ANY YES OR NO QUESTION, 10¢” (640). There are more horrors in the arcade and when Jenny puts a dime in the animatronic fortune teller’s cabinet, she’s devastated to see her grandfather’s trapped eyes staring out at her and a fortune card that says “HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME” (637) over and over again. Their terror reaches an all-time high when they find Summer in the park’s funhouse. Jenny is frozen, thinking how “She’d seen that dying in the Shadow World didn’t mean you got buried and disappeared” (650), and that on some level as they continued playing these games, she knew “they were looking for Summer, however transformed, however defiled Summer might be” (650, emphasis original). She walks toward her friend’s body, anticipating “Summer’s head falling off when Jenny took her by the shoulder, or … some Rosemary’s Baby-type monster looking up with crafty, glee-filled eyes” (650). But whether because of Julian’s intercession or Summer’s innate innocence, she is returned to them unchanged. She remembers the paper house and her nightmare bedroom, but after that, everything’s lost and she tells them “I don’t remember it. Just that it was bad. Did I get hurt? Did I faint?” (654, emphasis original). Summer has been dead and lost to them for weeks, but as far she knows, she’s just had a bit of a nap.
The final ordeal the friends must face is on the Tunnel of Love ride, though it has now been transformed into “the Tunnel of Love—and Despair” (675), where all of their most hurtful secrets come out. Dee has told everyone that she doesn’t plan to go to college and Julian berates her, telling her “Maybe you’re just too stupid to learn … That’s the real reason you don’t want to go to college, isn’t it?” taunting her with the suggestion that “All this athletic stuff is just a front” (677, emphasis original) to try to cover her intellectual deficiencies. He tells Michael to “Ask your girlfriend if she’s ever called you ‘Tubby’ behind your back” (680), which forces Audrey to confess that she had said that “A long time ago … Before I found out I loved you” (681), though that doesn’t make this cruelty and betrayal hurt much less. Julian torments Audrey with the prediction that “You’re going to turn out like your mother, you know—a shrill and contentious bitch. Your father’s words, I believe. You’re afraid that you’re not capable of having real feelings like other people” (683). In each case, the teens work together and encourage one another, enabling them to rise above Julian’s taunts, reaffirmed in who they are and who they love.
When the teens best Julian and head toward the island to save Tom and Zach, their adventure becomes briefly cosmic, as they glimpse the various other Shadow Lands that they are passing over and through, an interconnected web of other worlds and “other bridges, delicate and airy, some fiery, some that looked like ice. They led to clumps of land that looked like islands floating in space” (701). While Tom had been intimidated by Jenny’s newfound strength, when the group finally arrives at Treasure Island, he looks upon her with fresh eyes as his rescuer, “As if she were something infinitely precious, something that bewildered him, but amazed him—something he didn’t deserve, but trusted” (712).
The game is finally over and while Jenny can’t save Julian, there is some complicated comfort when the other demons “unmake” (797) Julian by destroying his rune symbol as punishment for not letting them kill Jenny and the others. Jenny mourns his loss, thinking that “The truth was that Julian had probably been too dangerous to live. The universe would be a much safer place without him … But poorer. And more boring. Definitely more boring” (746). Though Julian is gone, Jenny and her friends all carry his influence and legacy with them: they have all been changed, transformed by their interactions with Julian and the battles they fought and won within his Shadow World. Jenny and her friends got a lot more than they bargained for when she bought a game for Tom’s birthday party, but along with the horrors they encountered, they found their deepest strengths, the truth of themselves and one another.