FantasticLand: A Novel

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it's told as a series of interviews from survivors, rescuers, people evacuated before it all went down, lawyers, the park's owner, etc. collected by a man writing a book on the incident, so it has the same general shape as World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, but on a smaller scale, where you get a piece of the puzzle; one perspective of the horror, before moving on to the next fresh hell. it's vivid, wonderfully gory, and as absurd as it seems on the surface - that people would deteriorate into Lord of the Flies lawlessness in under a month - given the circumstances, the participants, the escalation, the book does a good job making it seem like something that could totally happen. there's an afterword that's a little weak - some sort of too little, too late attempt to guilt the reader into a self-examination of why we are so entertained by violence that has been done, and much more elegantly, by so many others. 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. In all seriousness, I could have flooded this review with Florida crazy memes... there was just so much material....) 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. 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. I felt like, no matter how the situation itself came about, the way these kids dealt with everything seemed pretty real. 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. Hurricane Sadie ravaged the Florida coastline isolating the amusement park FantasticLand, which should have been far enough inland to avoid the destruction. Sadie was a real bitch though. 150 mile an hour wind. A million people left homeless. 10 million without power. 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.

Even though the hundreds of employees stranded there have everything they need to survive comfortably, shortly after the storm, they start forming these crazy groups and they engage in these bloody battles with each other. These two narrators are beyond good and I think this is one of those rare cases where the audio might be elevated by the voicing of the parts. I don't think this would have been as spellbinding if I read it, instead of listening to it. Insistent Terminology: They're "tribes" not gangs or groups and seemed to be the only thing the survivors could agree on.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. The Freaks successfully terrified people into leaving them alone...but now the park was full of scared people who believed they might be eaten by cannibal torturers, and so felt they couldn't trust each other and needed to be armed. Dark Is Not Evil: The Freaks, who occupied the circus-themed section World Circus, spawned numerous rumors of killing and cannibalism with heads on spikes. The heads were fake and they started the rumors to freak out the other tribes and keep them away. I loved Max Brooks’ interview style narrative that was woven through the narrative, which was global. If I have any innovation in me, I think the thing FantatasticLand did was take a really good idea that Max Brooks had and kind of boiled it down to a local setting.

Beleaguered Bureaucrat: Miranda Tots, the Red Cross director in charge of relief operations, recalls the sheer number of people displaced or missing by the hurricane and what led FantasticLand going so long without rescue. Reports of the employees having plenty of water, food, and power made it a "low priority."

What attracted me to this book was how it was done interview style. I really loved ” World War Z” and that book was also set up an interview format. I was intrigued by the plot I wondered where it would go. Normally, I only read paranormal horror so this novel was a gamble that paid off. 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. A lot of people criticized this book, saying it was ridiculous and wasn't realistic, and I think that was a critique of LORD OF THE FLIES, too. Personally, I thought it felt realistic, as people are herd animals who do utterly stupid things in crowds when they think the rest of the group's OK with it (see: Trump voters), and cruelty can sometimes be a more advanced and sociopathic byproduct of cruelty, so I bought it.