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FantasticLand

A Novel

ebook
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0 of 3 copies available
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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.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 29, 2016
      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.

    • Booklist

      October 1, 2016
      The premise here is an intriguing one: the unprecedented Hurricane Sadie demolishes a Florida coast, and although most of the visitors to the amusement park Fantasticland are evacuated, many employees are left behind to hold down the fort and wait for rescue. After all, there's plenty of food and water, but after being stranded for more than a month, it's obvious that all the supplies in the world wouldn't really matter in the end. Almost immediately, the employees separate into tribes the most vicious, the Pirates, led by psychopath Brock Hockney. Soon after Brock mercy kills a teen who's fallen from a great height, the door is open for more brazen attacks, driven mostly by the Pirates. However, the other groups start to adapt, and the violence only escalates. The story is told through a series of interviews conducted by a journalist hoping to find meaning in the terrible event, and the juxtaposition of such senseless violence against the backdrop of what should be a place of joy makes this exploration of the evil that lives in us all that much more terrifying.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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