Was he intelligent? A pulp-meister offering Z-movie fluff in book format? Since I already leaked my answer, all you need do is trust it. What most drew me in, beyond the promise of a well-told story, was a compulsion to see what this Bockoven guy was made of.
This collage-like weave provides camera-eye urgency-and spares us nothing. But we aren’t granted that relative comfort, for FantasticLand gives us the complete blow-by-blow via journalist Adam Jakes, whose fact-finding interviews with the survivors immerse us into personal perspectives, whether we like that or not. Given Bockoven’s narrative tension, deep mining of psychological triggers and clinical prose, the novel might very well have succeeded. When Hurricane Sadie hits the Daytona Beach area, storm surge isolating the park, the workers project their inner fantasies and fright onto outer darkness.Īt this point, the author might have opted to tell the story from some remove-like third-person POV. Admin policy forbids employees, most of whom are twenty-somethings, from carrying electronic devices.
Some 264 pages later, I found I had run out of text.įantasticLand chronicles 35 days of hell on Earth in the eponymous theme park, a Disneyesque icon opened in 1970s Florida. With FantasticLand described as “… Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale…” I took a deep breath, sighed, and began reading. Usually-when promotional materials originate with mid-size to large publishers-the author has no hand in the matter. Having read FantasticLand, I’ll not forget the name.Īs someone who reads and reviews a lot of books, I’ve learned that press releases, synopses, back-cover copy and the like are not reliable indicators of quality. Prior to receiving his debut novel, I’d not heard of Mike Bockoven.
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