Bullying is receiving much attention in the media, but it never had the repercussions that middle school bullies Bruce, Mark, and Charles will face. Trapped in a haunted school as their punishment, these bullies find their fates in the hands of their readers in Arthur Mills’ teen/young adult interactive novel The Crawl Space.

Bruce, Mark, and Charles have long been the school bullies, tormenting younger and weaker kids. But they go too far the day they try to make their fellow student, Johnny, enter the dreaded crawl space under the school cafeteria's stage. Everyone knows the crawl space is haunted by a boy who entered it and never returned, and Johnny is terrified. But fortunately, the school principal catches the boys before it's too late. As punishment, she offers them the choice of notes to their parents or spending the weekend cleaning out the crawl space. More scared of their parents than the rumor of a ghost, they choose the latter.

Once they are alone in the school, the boys discover that not only is the crawl space haunted, but so is the rest of the school. When the ghost gives the boys a riddle to solve, they must make many difficult choices to ensure their survival. However, the reader gets to make these choices, ranging from which hallway to go down to which key to open a mysterious chest. Whether the boys survive their punishment is as much the reader's responsibility as it is that of the boys themselves.

I wrote The Crawl Space because, as a kid, I hated when adults made decisions for me. I turned to books for escape, only to realize that authors were just as controlling, forcing readers to follow a single path with no say in the story. Now that I’m an author, I’ve made a promise to give readers control. In The Crawl Space, you’ll make up to twenty-four choices leading to eleven different endings. With over eighty-five illustrations bringing every supernatural, terrifying, and bizarre moment to life, the fate of the main characters—and whether they survive their weekend in a haunted middle school—is entirely in your hands.

In The Crawl Space, the illustrator brings key moments, clues, and choices to life, challenging readers to look deeper. The illustrations aren’t just there to support the text, they encourage analysis, reveal hidden details, and draw readers further into the experience. Each image holds a piece of the puzzle, making the reader an active part of the story.