FantasticLand

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.

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.)