FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven is a book I came across while browsing for something a little different to read. I don’t read much horror these days (though I loved the old Point Horror books from my youth), and aside from Stephen King’s releases I don’t tend to find the urge to add them to my reading. To be honest, and considering my taste in movies, I’m surprised I don’t read more of the genre. Still, every now and then something crosses my path that immediately piques my interest, and FantasticLand, with its eerie cover and chilling premise, came along at just the right time to suit my mood.
Since the 1970s, FantasticLand has been the theme park where “Fun is Guaranteed!” But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Five weeks later, the authorities who rescue the survivors encounter a scene of horror. Photos soon emerge online of heads on spikes outside of rides and viscera and human bones littering the gift shops, breaking records for hits, views, likes, clicks, and shares. How could a group of survivors, mostly teenagers, commit such terrible acts?
Presented as a fact-finding investigation and a series of first-person interviews, FantasticLand pieces together the grisly series of events. Park policy was that the mostly college-aged employees surrender their electronic devices to preserve the authenticity of the FantasticLand experience. Cut off from the world and left on their own, the teenagers soon form rival tribes who viciously compete for food, medicine, social dominance, and even human flesh. This new social network divides the ravaged dreamland into territories ruled by the Pirates, the ShopGirls, the Freaks, and the Mole People. If meticulously curated online personas can replace private identities, what takes over when those constructs are lost?
FantasticLand is a modern take on Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale that probes the consequences of a social civilization built online.
The premise is simple: a severe hurricane hits Florida and the amusement park of FantasticLand is cut off. But not to worry, the management let the authorities and rescue groups know that it’s self-sufficient and the staff left behind will be able to survive just fine for weeks before rescue: it’s not a priority. Reality, however, is very different. With the evacuation of the park visitors it’s only the staff that are left behind, and following the worst of the storm they emerge from the shelters and drift into their usual work groups. From there events start to take a turn for the worst, starting with a mercy killing on a man that is injured beyond help. The various groups head to their places in the park and they settle in to their territory and resources, as all the while incidents start to escalate. Before long it’s each group to their own, and the horror of what people will do in this situation, cut off from the world, starts to rear its ugly head…
Told through a series of interviews with survivors from FantasticLand, with one or two from outside sources, Bockoven makes this an immediately engrossing novel. This isn’t a new format in which to tell a story – think Brooks’ World War Z and Neuvel’s Themis Files – but it’s one that works, and works well when done right. Bockoven hits the ground running, not messing around and letting us into the events almost immediately. However, the way in which he structures these interviews and accounts build events to their ultimate climax, all the while keeping the information coming, and making us want to read on to discover more behind the various offhand comments of the narrators.
And speaking of the narrators, each feels unique and interesting. They tell their story well, focusing on the parts that normal people would, and as each of them talk more about the escalating events it feels perfectly plausible. Perhaps the only real comment I have on this is that it happens a touch too quickly, only a couple of days rather than a little longer I would have imagined. But then it is down to the personalities in the park, and the way they approach the situation. Some aspects come across as particularly vile so early, yet as the interviews continue it’s somewhat sobering to discover the truth behind such actions. It’s also particularly difficult to read some interviews simply because of the nature of their contents, but it’s things that need to be heard for the novel as whole to work as well as it does.
If, like me, you get drawn into this chilling tale of events you’ll be pleased to know that it finishes as strongly as it starts, and with few aspects left unresolved. I have my personal favourites among these interviews, and I suspect every reader will find something different that draws them into FantasticLand, yet all will want to know just what happened during those weeks it was cut off from the world…
A chilling novel that comes across as an all-too-plausible examination of what people could actually do in this situation, FantasticLand manages to execute the idea just right. It’s entertaining in that can’t-look-away sense, and chilling in its often blunt delivery. Highly recommended.
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Author: Mike Bockoven
October 2016, 272 Pages
Hardcover, ISBN: 9781510709447
Review from purchased copy
© 2018 Mark Chitty | @chitman13
