“FantasticLand is a place where, fun is guaranteed.”
Not.
This book… I don’t know how to review this book. It kinda sucked, but enjoyably at first. You know, like terrible good movies like The Room. Then sucked all the way.
I’m a person who is a sucker for horror, not extremely picky about it and doesn’t mind some cheesiness. The one thing I don’t enjoy that much in horror is gore. I don’t find it scary, it’s just disgusting. For example, the first Saw movie was pretty good. Gory, but with hints of thought in it. I thought the rest of the series was terrible because all the focus was on gore (I watched the second and maybe half of the third movie, that’s all)
I picked FantasticLand because I got the impression that this book offers a healthy mix of psychological horror and gore. Its Goodreads reviews are quite good, and it being an Audible included certainly helped.
FantasticLand is about a group of young people who get stuck in the theme park FantasticLand during Hurricane Sadie.
I liked the writing style. That’s one of the good things I can say about FantasticLand. Author Mike Bockoven did great with the interview style. The writer interviews people who were involved with the stuff that happened during their time in the park. I enjoyed that. Kudos to Mr. Bockoven.
I listened to the audiobook, and the quality, honestly, was great. Narrators Angela Dawe and Luke Daniels brought everybody to life with all their emotions and distinct characters. I gotta give the credit to them; they did a phenomenal job.. Dawe and Daniels were the primary reason I stuck with the book.
That’s about all the positive things I can say about FantasticLand.
The plot is unbelievably far-fetched. Given the brief time and the freaking reason in the conclusion (Buckoven mentions it a few times before, but I refused to comprehend) for the violence perpetrated is absurd beyond question. Even I didn’t think it was possible.
Ok, now I gotta rant and I’m going to spoil things
An amusement park, like one of the biggest in the USA, should be a great place to get stuck, right? You have everything!! You have food, shelter, resources, even comfort. All you need to do is stick together and wait to be rescued. You are safe just wait goddammit!! But no. No, the first thing that comes to their mind is to split into multiple tribes and kill each other. Why!!!! You know why? Because they are away from social media and if they can’t share, they don’t know what to do. Also, one of the tribe leaders is a mental case. What? Who hires these people? They handle safety and stuff. Really? My god, that was stupid.
Ok, I am calmer now. If this story was set in a post-apocalyptic environment, maybe a few or more months passed since the event, I could find it believable but not like this. I could believe that Freddy Krueger will find and kill me in my dream, but not this. I didn’t buy a single character’s motivations, and there are many.
In the end, I gave it two stars because of the narration and the well-executed interview-style structure but other than that, despite all my efforts to close my mind and enjoy the carnage, I couldn’t ignore how far from reality what happened in the story was.
2/5 stars.
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