#glenn guignol is my favorite to no one’s surprise

[raraeavesmoriendi]

I just finished last night and I have some questions for people who have read mike bockoven’s fantasticland -

[for those who have not:

- take a climate change-charged hurricane that’s the worst noaa has seen in recent memory and the first to hit daytona beach since 1960

- throw it at a Not-Disney-World Florida theme park with major national nostalgia, where a bunch of the Not-Disney College Program kids and some adult staff have opted to get paid extra to stay inside the park through the storm to prevent looting

- watch as people trapped within the park for more than a month - still with plenty of food and water, mind you - lose their minds, fragment into factions, and begin going full battle royale/lord of the flies on each other

- tell the whole thing testimonial style with different witnesses interviewed each chapter, a la World War Z, with some insanely unreliable narrators to boot

if that sounds like your kind of horror novel, give it a go. it’s not perfect (especially when they call the factions ‘tribes,’ which. yikes.) but I tore through it in like, two days.]

okay, questions below, spoilers for the novel:

1. …is the pirate who comforted the little boy who was evacuating, in interview three with the kansas city dad, Brock Hockley? am I reading too much into that?

like. I don’t remember that we ever get a description of him, so I don’t know about the “weird beard/mustache thing” the dad describes, but just. the emphasis put on “I’d like to shake his hand. I might even give him a hug.” feels so purposeful. part of me wonders if that’s supposed to add some further hindsight horror to what happened in the park and then his prison interview. he says early that he found making little kids happy a fulfilling and rewarding part of his job as a character actor in the park, and we know other people found him charismatic enough to follow, not just because they were scared but bc he could have these moments of surface-level charm or rationality (the code, etc.)

idk, I just thought it felt a bit too one-off to read it as Just Some Guy. but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I could be wrong.

2. we never get any hint as to the identity of the warthog couple, right? I remember the FNG found their masks discarded outside the World Circus, they’re first mentioned in the book as hanging around/inside the circus, and the guy from the Dreamland Hotel interview talks about still getting postcards from them whenever he moves (scariest part of the whole book for me ngl), so we can assume they were walked out with the rest of the survivors. I just wasn’t sure if there was anything else to do with them that I missed.

I’m still thinking about the fact that they turned the Dreamland lobby into a torture theater. like… who was that for? just for them, or did they have an audience? probably not, right? since they weren’t affiliated with anyone? but still. also, who were they taking there, just people they could pick off???

hmm. I wonder if any casualties thought to be faction-related were actually theirs.

3. in Travis’s interview (the guy with the body camera), do we know who the girl is that they found in the crawlspace of the employee locker room? the one whispering “Mommy” over and over? there were enough survivors left that she could be someone we didn’t encounter before, but I just thought I’d check that there wasn’t some other interview where someone describes a girl running off to hide. the Anonymous shopgirl mentioned one of the girls disappeared during the cannon raid on Pirate turf with the Deadpool soldiers before they turned on each other, so I wondered if it could be her.

4. Brock in his interview mentions that Sam Garlieck’s people were terrorizing others during the power outage in the storm shelter, specifically mentioning an instance of sexual assault. does anyone else corroborate this in their interview? Adam Jakes sounds skeptical, saying his research would have turned that up by now, but the only people we really hear from about that period are Sam himself (obviously an unreliable narrator, like, duh) and Stuart Dietz, who mentioned that Sam definitely killed Maria Flynn. did anyone see any other mentions of this anywhere, or did we just move straight out of the storm shelters and never talk about them again once we get to the park? is this just Brock being an unreliable narrator himself to justify how things went down? (but then why would he need to be, when Bryce definitely died?? although he himself says that wasn’t as big a motivator as people writing about him want it to be, so maybe that’s moot)

5. not really a question just an observation: Stuart Dietz, the maintenance guy/Mole Man, is the only person to get two interviews in the entire novel. Not Sam, not Jill, not Brock. I don’t know, I just find that really interesting why he was selected to come back twice. I know part of it is to describe the botched demolition, but I’m also wondering what effect it has on the novel that the only person we hear from multiple times is an older dude from one of the pointedly non-aggressive factions.

6. in looking through posts already in the tag, I don’t quite follow some readers’ comments that there was an attempt at a “cell phones bad!!” message here. I feel like every time it’s come up, it’s been shown by Adam Jakes (author stand-in) to be minimizing what really happened and looking for an easy scapegoat. I don’t think that was part of the intended story at all, I think it’s just been stated over and over as people using an excuse to not think themselves capable of similar violence. just wanted to put that out there.

anyway. one of my favorite things about novels with multi-witness perspectives is finding threads that leave off in one person’s story and pick up in another, so I’m going through my digital copy and highlighting all the places two different interviews tie together (Austin’s fate, the guy who botched branding Adrienne as part of his Pirate initiation, etc.)

if anyone else has noticed anything interesting, I’m all ears 👀