FantasticLand: A Novel

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My biggest problem with this book was that I often found myself thinking there has to be some supernatural stuff coming up. Yet the only ones who could have committed these savage and horrible acts were the college-aged employees. Then within an hour of leaving the shelters they group up and start doing heinous shit to each other, like cutting off hands. So, read this book for the killyness and bloody fun, but then get on Google and check out the Florida crime memes.

Can you imagine the upbeat, positive, kid-friendly employees of Disney all turning into bloodthirsty murderers if left alone to their own devices? I did have a few minor problems that kept me from tacking on that fifth star: all characters seemed to possess about the same intelligence level, and spoke using virtually the same voice, AND, there was no real big smackdown before the National Guard arrived. Glenn, the leader of the Freaks thinks he's partially to blame for the violence in the park escalating because he made them seem too scary. For those five weeks the workers of FantasticLand commit war crimes and atrocities against one another.The scariest part is no-one knows who they were, why they went off the deep end, and what happened to them afterwards. Like attracted like and many soon proved they could not be trusted - with food and water sources and with the lives of the stranded others around them. In my view, if a bunch of people stuck in somewhere for about a month, they will stay together and try to survive. I don't know what this says about me, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to know, but I LOVE books about people behaving badly in the face of a crisis. Dirty Coward: Sam Garliek, first shift manager, was a weasel with no leadership skills who spent the entire time after leaving the shelter in hiding.

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. Action Survivor: Of the 300 people left behind in the park, less then a third of the group have any useful survivor skills and are lucky they're in a place with plenty of food and water. Kids are getting their hands cut off but let me just mention how annoyed Sally is because she can't check Facebook".I couldn't help but think that in a situation like this, where a group of people are left stranded somewhere for a long time, the logical thing to do is stay together, then find shelter, food and water. Meta: As noted above the book has been described as Lord of the Flies tranplanted to Walt Disney World Disney World]].

But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Hufflepuff House: The Fairies were less of a tribe and a loose collection of people that had settled in the Fairy Prairie.The Dreaded: The Freaks and the Pirates were the two most feared of the FantasticLand tribes though it worked out in different ways: the Freaks were a group of stoners whose leader came up with the idea to create a facade of being insane cannibals to keep the other tribes from attacking them. While reading their story, hearing their side of things, the new narrator is actually the only one doing good, the only sane one, the only one keeping things together. this is not a book that should be trying to stimulate moral unrest in the reader - this should just be a straight-up romp of blood and brain matter. Yet of the only two who are interviewed, one was drafted and only spoke of his forced induction while the other presents the group as not as evil as the Pirates are made out to be, acting in self-defense and never raping anyone. Ambiguous Situation: Because the reader is hearing a first-hand account of the events and not the events themselves its hard to see the line were truth ends and exaggerations begin.

The book is a series of interviews, and the good stuff starts coming hard and fast once we get to the interviews of those who found themselves as part of one of the 'tribes' that formed during the FantasticLand fiasco. Management's decision to leave mostly young adults there with no power or cellphones was not a wise decision. He asked all concerned parties what and why that happened, and everybody tells their own point of view. One of the company's executives told the Red Cross the emergency measures in place and the Red Cross in turn were swamped and so didn't bother checking with anyone else including the company's owner. They've got plenty of food and water, and they're supposed to be looking after the park, but things don't quite go to the plan of the exhaustive safety manual designed for this specific kind of scenario.Cosy Catastrophe: Jason Card, a retail cashier, was the only one out of 300 people to make the trek to one of the hotels near the park and spent almost the entire time there in relative comfort and out of the on-going conflicts between the tribes. 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. This book will completely suck you in and make you believe in FantasticLand and the tragic events that unfolded there.