An adult role-playing novel where the reader can choose different narrative options, resulting in very different plot resolutions.Movie pundit Kim Newman's first novel was the cinematic SF thriller The Night Mayor (1989). Life's Lottery is a tour-de-force construct, built like a "choose your own adventure" gamebook, whose 300 numbered sections explore many possible lives of protagonist Keith Marion--born, like Newman, in 1959. You, the reader, must make Marion's decision at each split in this garden of forking paths. Seemingly meaningless choices have unexpected consequences. The first branch-point is a school-playground question about the TV show The Man From UNCLE: "If you like Napoleon Solo, go to 3. If you like Illya Kuryakin, go to 4". Long life and happiness lurk along some paths; others end early with the death-sentence "Go to 0", or the flat epitaph "And so on", when life's choices have run out and nothing new awaits. Schoolmates reappear in new roles in different strands, often to ironic effect when alternate stories are compared. Occasional SF timeslip opportunities let you switch stories or rethink old decisions. Some lives are touched by spidery horror, featuring Newman's diabolical newspaper mogul Derek Leech ... see especially The Quorum, 1994. Others encounter magic, madness, cancer, violence or prison. It's a lottery--except that you can always turn back, perhaps noticing the scenes not reachable by any official route, and try again. Inventive, frustrating, compulsive. --David Langford