FantasticLand: A Novel

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I was completely engrossed and couldn't stop reading, so feel free to ignore this review and go right ahead and read it. FantasticLand was the name for Florida's infamous theme park until a hurricane arrived and left many individuals, who were working and visiting the park, stranded inside of it. Presented as a fact-finding investigation and a series of first-person interviews, FantasticLand pieces together the grisly series of events.

I guess if your cell phone is dead and you can’t play Clash of Clans you might as well do it for real. One of the interviewees is a former member of The Pirates who were the Chaotic Evil tribe of FantasticLand and guilty of murder and (possibly) rape. The book even deals with this a bit in the final chapters where they're looking back at the events in the park. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. Mike Bockoven has made something at once merciless, terrifying, and curiously humane; but you should probably not go there after dark.Fantasticland (think Disney World) is a popular kid's theme park in Florida that is rendered isolated after a hurricane. You'd be amazed how quickly rumors can grow and get out of hand when kids don't have the constant distraction of their phones to check every twelve seconds. A small patrol of employees from the superhero section Hero Haven went out on patrol the night they left the shelter and were attacked by the Pirates. I thought that there must have been some strange thing about hurricane Sadie that drove people mad, because why else would they start killing each other off in the most gruesome ways possible? People taking charge, people cowering, people trying to remain neutral, people just wanting to keep to themselves and stay safe, people trying to pretend it was all a bad dream.

It's no secret this is written like World War Z in interview format, and it is that first-person non-omniscient perspective that makes it so terrifying, you only know what the people themselves know and sometimes the stories are conflicting; so like most real world tragedies, the reader is left to decipher, with not all of the information or facts, what actually happened. This whole Found Footage or Podcast or "Reality" or Mockumentary style of horror writing has been done to death already. I made the mistake of reading this late at night and ended up staying up until midnight on a work night because I wanted to find out what happened next. And 300+ employees of FantasticLand, low on the rescue priority list because they had plenty of food, water and shelter, left to fend for themselves and await help to arrive. I've just read the whole description on the Goodreads page, and I think the idea of this being a novel which 'probes the consequences of a social civilisation built online' is overemphasised.Told in a series of interviews, there were plenty of characters to go around and the narration really added depth to the interview style format.

They all apparently got a deal from the prosecutor partly due to the circumstances surrounding the case.The violence was insane, but as soon as it was told by someone who experienced it first-hand it suddenly seemed more tame, or more reasonable.

I LOVED the format, and it made the audio that much more entertaining, because you get so many different voices and perspectives of what went down, and you get the classic variations that come from different people telling the same story, and I honestly didn't care that it all seemed a bit far fetched. It’s not a bad life, but when one of the group members goes astray, it sets in motion a series of events that will threaten to destroy the delicate balance that has kept Dave and his clan off the radar. Hurricane Sadie ravaged the Florida coastline isolating the amusement park FantasticLand, which should have been far enough inland to avoid the destruction. Yet the only ones who could have committed these savage and horrible acts were the college-aged employees. When online personas take the place of private identities, what happens when those societal constructs disappear?This paragraph is a bit apropos-of-nothing, but I'm putting it in because I think the blurb makes FantasticLand sound a bit like a tedious anti-social-media parable. Then Flynn was killed while the power in the shelter went out and everyone became convinced he did the deed. it's mentioned, and there are assumptions, because the pirates are grabbing girls from other groups and taking them back to their lair, but while they are totally okay with killing people, the pirate leader does not condone rape, however, his reasons are only because of stds and babies. There was also plenty of food and clean water which the Red Cross was told about, making FantasticLand a low priority for relief efforts.