FantasticLand
A Novel
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4.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
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.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bockoven's first novel, a high-concept riff on The Lord of the Flies and The Warriors, has plenty of gonzo potential but degenerates into a polemic against social media and millennials. When North Florida's FantasticLand theme park is cut off thanks to a storm, the workers in the various areas, such as Pirate Cove and World's Circus, have a decent amount of supplies at first, but each area soon devolves into its own faction (with names that include the Deadpools for the folks from the superhero area, Mole Men for maintenance workers in the tunnels, and Shopgirls for the retail employees), and things get bloody extremely quickly. Told in the format of a series of interviews conducted by a reporter, each narrative slowly introduces the core characters, most notably Pirate Cove employee Brock Hockney and Sam Garliek, the manager on duty at the time who goes power-mad when the disaster strikes. Cookie-cutter narrative voices and characters who are generally uninteresting and unlikable make for a ride that's less than thrilling.
