Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Things is a direct homage to the 1980s. Among those “things” are films — E.T., The Goonies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind—but the popular middle-grade book series Choose Your Own Adventure, which allowed readers to follow different plotlines depending on their preferences, was also a huge influence.

When Shannon Gilligan, CYOA publisher, was cold-called by the Random House licensing department last year, it didn’t take long for Chooseco to sign on to the project of a Stranger Things–Choose Your Own Adventure book. “It was a perfect fit. But we did need to find ‘just the right writer’ for the project. We have found that poets do well with CYOA plots,” Gilligan explains, “because they’re open to jumping around and fracturing the narrative. Fortunately, we had already worked with poet Rana Tahir on a spy-focused CYOA about the British-Pakistani woman Noor Inayat Khan, and she had a break in her schedule that allowed her to spend some time on this new book.”

The Stranger Things CYOA will be the longest CYOA book to date, “almost three times longer than a regular Choose Your Own Adventure book,” Gilligan says. Titled Heroes and Monsters, it will have more than 25 endings, which is also a big number for a CYOA title. “Season Four of Stranger Things is a very rich story, and [Random House] wanted the book to be based on it, but not necessarily to cover it in its entirety,” Gilligan says. Some parts of the TV show, which was released last summer, contain mature content that wouldn’t work for the CYOA audience, for instance.

Stranger Things: Heroes and Monsters will be released on April 18 by Random House Books for Young Readers. “All of us at Chooseco are huge fans of the show ourselves,” says Gilligan. “Our marketing director Dottie Greene’s son even went as uber-villain Vecna for Halloween this year.” She adds that her experience working with Random House, which owns the Stranger Things license, was excellent: “They were so easy to work with and open to many of our suggestions as we outlined the book.”

In preparing the new title, Chooseco and Random House were careful that the cover stay true to the series' roots. “It’s been just as important to the Duffers and to Netflix that the book look like an original 1980s CYOA title, which it absolutely does.”

While there are no plans yet for a season five tie-in to Stranger Things, anything can happen in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.