Ellen Raskin: The children's writer as game designer

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For almost three decades I've lived with the memory of a building that wasn't quite right. Dim and flickering, I see it waiting for me at the edge of a vast, silver lake. "The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!" How did this oddball phrasing take root? Last year, I gave in and googled it. What I found was treasure.
Ellen Raskin spent the majority of her career as an illustrator. She had over a thousand book jackets to her name, and you can see a handful of the best here. They're both striking and playful, direct and yet somehow unexpected. She created illustrated children's books too, and then, in the last 15 years of her life, she wrote largely un-illustrated children's novels. Four of them, published between 1971 and 1978, which she described collectively as puzzle-mysteries.
That might give you the impression that they were game books of some kind - books where you control the direction of the story by hopping from one numbered paragraph to the next, or in which you roll dice to battle monsters. They're not anything like that. They're purer, but also less formal in their playfulness. They're absolutely novels, and they're absolutely games. More importantly, I think they have a lot to say about games - and even about the place that video games are at today. Raskin the illustrator was never happy defining herself as Raskin the writer, I gather. I wonder if she'd have been happier with the idea that she had become, in a strange, circuitous manner, more of a designer. Would she had found that label harmonious?
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