The fun's over
"Where Fun is Guaranteed"
Park Motto
Since the 1970s, FanatasticLand has been a place where “Fun is Guaranteed”, where employees are chosen not just for their qualifications but their go-getter attitude. But when a hurricane ravages Florida and traps them fun is last thing they find.
Isolated from the outside world, rescue finally comes over a month later to find a scene of horror: heads on pikes, blood and viscera in the streets, and over a hundred dead. Questions rise about the events that took place.
One journalist seeks to shed light on the truth behind the rumors and stories in the wake of the disaster and what led a group of mostly college-age students to such brutal and violent actions.
FanatasticLand is a 2016 thriller novel written by Mike Bockoven
, taking the premise of Lord of the Flies and having it take place in a Expy of Disney World. Through a series of first-person interviews, the reader learns of the circumstances and (sometimes twisted) perspectives that led to the horrific scene found when help finally arrived.
This pages show examples of:
- 0% Approval Rating: Sam Garliek was the First Shift Manager for the park and was left in charge of the employees who stayed behind. At first things were going well until he restricted access to the control room in the shelter to the disapproval of many and one girl, nicknamed Flynn by the others, in particular. Then Flynn was killed while the power in the shelter went out and everyone became convinced he did the deed. Things don't get much better for him once he escapes the park as he becomes greatly hated by the public for his failure to keep order
- 20 Minutes into the Future: A book published in October 2016 that talks about events taking place in late-September to early November 2017. The book itself In-Universe is supposed to be written a couple of years or so after the employees are rescued.
- Action Survivor: Of the 300 people left behind in the park, less then a third of the group have any useful survivor skills and are lucky they're in a place with plenty of food and water.
- Alternate History: FantasticLand was built in the 1970s and had grown to the point of being a serious competitor, in terms of theme parks, to the various Disney and Six Flags parks. It's actually considered an equal and marginally cheaper alternative to DisneyWorld and located in Florida.
- Amazon Brigade: The ShopGirls who controlled The Golden Road (the section visitors enter the park through), consisted of only girls who used actual bows and arrows. They were so named because a vast majority of members were actually those who worked the gift and novelty shops in that section.
- Ambiguous Situation: Because the reader is hearing a first-hand account of the events and not the events themselves its hard to see the line were truth ends and exaggerations begin. For example the Pirates are presented as the
Chaotic Evil tribe that constantly attacked other groups, kidnapped, murdered, and raped people. Yet of the only two who are interviewed, one was drafted and only spoke of his forced induction while the other presents the group as not as evil as the Pirates are made out to be, acting in self-defense and never raping anyone. Then, again he could just be protecting himself despite already cutting a deal with the prosecutor. - Amusement Park of Doom: The book is about how FantasticLand became this going from the family-friendly theme park to a battlefield between different tribes of employees fighting for resources.
- The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: Hurricane Sadie left millions of citizens in Florida homeless, short on food and water, and without electricity. Yet despite this, there were stories of people helping each other including some passing out from giving all their water to thirsty infants. The former head of the Red Cross branch actually points out that this is not uncommon but the media prefers the horror stories coming out of FantasticLand.
- Beleaguered Bureaucrat: Miranda Tots, the Red Cross director in charge of relief operations, recalls the sheer number of people displaced or missing by the hurricane and what led FantasticLand going so long without rescue. Reports of the employees having plenty of water, food, and power made it a "low priority."
- Closed Circle: FanatasticLand was built in the middle of nowhere and had only two access roads, the main entrance and the employee parking lot. Due to the way it was built, the rainnote caused two small lakes that keep those trapped inside from leaving. Further the loss of power means there's no wifi and no means to charge their devices if there was.
- Cosy Catastrophe: Jason Card, a retail cashier, was the only one out of 300 people to make the trek to one of the hotels near the park and spent almost the entire time there in relative comfort and out of the on-going conflicts between the tribes. The only reason he left was because the Warthogs ended up using the place to commit their murders and began to stalk him.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Because of a number of bad decisions made by those in authority, the survivors in FantasticLand were left to their own devices for over a month, leading to a lot of people either dead or wishing they were. To add salt to the wound, Sam Garliek somehow got his hands on one of three emergency satalite phones located in the park at some point and could've called for help at almost any point, only waiting until things were really bad.
- Crazy-Prepared: FanatasticFun Inc, the company that owns the park, took measures for a disaster that included enough food for 300 people and shelters that could take a nuke. It's Deconstructed in an interesting way though as the former head of the Red Cross Florida Branch noted that having plenty of food and water caused them to have something to lose and actually led the employees to become divided. Further the safety protocols they created were back in the 1970s and never updated.
- Create Your Own Hero: The actions of The Pirates directly led to the creation of their three rival tribes the Shopgirls, the Deadpools and the Robots.
- A small patrol of employees from the superhero section Hero Haven went out on patrol the night they left the shelter and were attacked by the Pirates. They then dragged one of them back and made them [the future Deadpools] watch as they chopped off his hands and left for dead. A girl named Riley organized them and became the Deadpools.
- Elvis Springer and his girlfriend were simply exploring the park and getting a feel for the situation when they ran into the Pirates who attacked them unprovokednote and killed his girlfriend, hanging her from a lamppost. When he got back to the sci-fi section, he organized the those there into the Robots.
- The ShopGirls were a more indirect example: an employee called "Not-Batman" was climbing buildings and fooling around when he fell and was badly injured. When Brock Hockney, the leader of the Pirates, Mercy Killed him it caused the other employees to realize the life-or-death situation they were in. The leader of the ShopGirls ended up using the dead body as a rallying point to unite the girls.
- Create Your Own Villain: Possibly. Rumors surfaced around the park about two machete-wielding individuals in black and wearing masks. The leader of The Freaks called them the Warthogs and considers the possibility that the rumors the former intentionally created inspired the latter. Either by giving them the same idea to protect themselves or they bought into them too much and followed their lead becoming Serial Killers.
- Dark Is Not Evil: The Freaks, who occupied the circus-themed section World Circus, spawned numerous rumors of killing and cannibalism with heads on spikes. The heads were fake and they started the rumors to freak out the other tribes and keep them away.
- Dirty Coward: Sam Garliek, first shift manager, was a weasel with no leadership skills who spent the entire time after leaving the shelter in hiding. When the National Guard finally came, he had been hiding in an office and didn't leave for two straight weeks.
- Dramatic Irony: Tons as interviewees will give accounts of things and pose questions they wished answered, only for another to unintentionally give those answers while telling their stories.
- The Dreaded: The Freaks and the Pirates were the two most feared of the FantasticLand tribes though it worked out in different ways: the Freaks were a group of stoners whose leader came up with the idea to create a facade of being insane cannibals to keep the other tribes from attacking them. The Pirates are a legit group of nut-jobs who have fight clubs and rumored to have committed rape as well but rather than feared they're hated by everyone.
- Expy: FanatasticLand is a massive theme park located in Florida; the company that owns it is a multi-billion dollar corporation which appears to have its own fictional characters including comic book heroes.
- From Bad to Worse: Initially the employees were simply stuck in the park without their phones with tensions rising when Sam Garliek restricted access to the control room. Then the power went out and in the panic three people died one of whom was an open critic of Garliek.The lost of his credibility led the employees to splinter across the park forming their tribes. Things just escalated from there...
- Gone Horribly Right:
- The maintenance workers decided to knock over the Exclamation Point with some TNT they found, in the hopes that the park's main landmark falling over would get attention from the outside world and show something was wrong. But due to not being demolitions experts, they didn't realize how much TNT they actually had—the one guy who thought he knew what he was doing assumed it was quarter-pound blocks, it was one pound blocks. So they knock the Exclamation Point over, alright. Or more accurately, totally obliterate it and kill several people by accident. It did at least get noticed, though.
- Glenn, the leader of the Freaks thinks he's partially to blame for the violence in the park escalating because he made them seem too scary. The Freaks successfully terrified people into leaving them alone...but now the park was full of scared people who believed they might be eaten by cannibal torturers, and so felt they couldn't trust each other and needed to be armed.
- Hated by All: The Pirates were hated by all the other tribes for their brutality and acts of violence against the other groups. Near the end the Robots, ShopGirls, and Deadpools took any chance to fight and kill them including one group ganging up and beating one of the Pirates to death.
- Hormone-Addled Teenager: A lot of the employees paired up during the early days trapped in the park but stopped at actually having sex due to having no protection. One of the interviewees actually gives the theory that a "lack of release" was one of the factors that caused the situation to devolve so quickly.
- Horrifying the Horror: Brock Hockney is a sadistic asshole running the most hated faction in the park in the form of the Pirates, but he is freaked out enough by the Freaks that he warns his people away from them. Just as Planned of course.
- Hufflepuff House: The Fairies were less of a tribe and a loose collection of people that had settled in the Fairy Prairie. Their disorganization made them easy pickings for the Pirates and only lasted around a week or so before most of their members were killed or kidnapped/drafted by the Pirates.
- Insistent Terminology: They're "tribes" not gangs or groups and seemed to be the only thing the survivors could agree on.
- Irony: The deteriorating situation in FanatasticLand wasn’t the result of poor preparation on the CEOs’ part but rather an abundance of preparation. The CFO of the company at the time had a very in-depth emergency plan in place; the problem was it was made in the 70s, never updated, and for the park as whole and not individual sections. There was also plenty of food and clean water which the Red Cross was told about, making FantasticLand a low priority for relief efforts.
- Karma Houdini: In-Universe. One of the interviewees is a former member of The Pirates who were the Chaotic Evil tribe of FantasticLand and guilty of murder and (possibly) rape. They all apparently got a deal from the prosecutor partly due to the circumstances surrounding the case. Thankfully Subverted with Brock Hockney who ended up in jail where he belongs and Sam Garliek, who may or may not have killed someone and won't go to jail but the court of public opinion will make him wish he was.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Both in and out of universe since the events in FantasticLand are only known second-hand from eyewitnesses as there's no video evidence. For example? There were a pair of serial killers loose in the park and no-one even believe they exist beyond rumors besides one person who receives postcards every month despite moving three times.
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: The Freaks, the tribe that settled in the circus themed section, have many horrific rumors surrounding them including cannibalism. They were really a group of stoners who used the Halloween decorations for the park to trick the other factions into leaving them alone, making this an Invoked trope.
- The Pirates, at least Brock Hockney and the only other who was interviewed, try to present themselves as this claiming that the other tribes exaggerated their crimes and cruelty. The fact the former is all but implied to be a sociopath and the other sounds like a dedicated cult-like follower doesn't help their case though.
- The Place: FantasticLand for which the name of the book comes from.
- Poor Communication Kills: Reason why the employees were trapped in FantasticLand for over a month. One of the company's executives told the Red Cross the emergency measures in place and the Red Cross in turn were swamped and so didn't bother checking with anyone else including the company's owner. Because Sam Garliek didn't fully explain why he was restricting access to the control, when his most vocal critic died everyone assumed he killed her leading to the group splintering once they left the shelter. The employees were so busy fighting each other none of them thought to make any sign they needed help and the Red Cross thought the situation under control as a result.
- Refuge in Audacity: The Freaks had taken over the circus section which had decorations prepared for their Halloween celebration. They took it and made their territory as scary as possible and spread rumors of horrific actions to keep the other tribes away. The end result was they had the least number of casualties when rescue finally came.
- The Pirates ambushed the other tribe leaders at the "peace summit" by arriving before any of them and hiding a working cannon beneath a table with a tablecloth on top. He then doubled back and made it appear he was the last to arrive. The icing on the cake was that literally no-one thought to even ask about the table not even the guy who called the meeting.
- Sanity Slippage: Played out as a slow burn where aside from the Pirates, the tribes more or less got along. However, after the Council of Pieces, the other tribes, beside the Freaks and Mole Men, united and began to fight back more and more viciously as tensions rise and rescue takes takes more time
- Serial Killer: A rumor/urban legend that surfaced amongst the employees were a pair of individuals who walked around the park, wearing masks with bones on them and called the Warthogs. Almost none of them believed it but one employee confirms their existence and they killed at least three people. The scariest part is no-one knows who they were, why they went off the deep end, and what happened to them afterwards.
- Shout-Out: As these are personal interviews of employees, most in college, they used pop culture references in relation to the events of the book.
- "Not-Batman" was an unnamed kid who climbed on top various buildings and would quote The Dark Knight in a gravelly voice.
- The Shopgirls have actual working compact bows and arrows that the park had in stock to sell due to a increasing popularity of archery, particularly films involving "badass girl archers".
- The Superhero section of the park includes a comic book shop with a life-size statue of Deadpool in the entrance crashing out of a wall. The tribe from there named themselves after it becoming the Deadpools. They considered the Justice League and The Avengers before someone suggested it.
- One of the things most often mentioned by the interviewees is that the loss of power and wi-fi meant the few phones they had were useless particularly as they couldn't use social media.
- Meta: As noted above the book has been described as Lord of the Flies tranplanted to Walt Disney World Disney World]]. The format has been compared to World War Z.
- Spotting the Thread: Averted. There were multiple threads that showed the Freaks' act was just that, an act, but nobody pulled them because they were too frightened and off-kilter, something Glenn points out in his interview. Not a single person remembered Fantasticland was scheduled to run a horror-themed event, or put together that the Freaks would have access to those props. Nor did anyone realize that the note which "confirmed" the Freaks as cannibals—supposedly a cry for help from a prisoner who was being carved up one finger and toe at a time, and was nearly out of small body parts to lose—made no sense, as a person with all their fingers chopped off wouldn't be able to write. (And given the unsanitary conditions and lack of real medical care, this hypothetical prisoner wouldn't have survived past losing finger two.)
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- A video was released of the National Guard entering the park by one of the soldiers for money and was dishonorably discharged. Not that he cares as he got a lot of money that his daughter can go to college. There was also the survivors' reaction; soon as the National Guard show up they end up basically shutting down and surrendering with no residence, even the Pirates.
- The controversy and stories surrounding FantasticLand has resulted in the park being permanently shut down and sold for pennies on the dollar. Even the new owners who bought it are tearing it down because it's unsalvageable. That said, they actually considered remaking it into an experience like place where the situation was recreated only to realize what a stupendiously stupid idea it was.
- Karma Houdini is in full effect for everyone, good and bad. There's no hard evidence of who killed who and everyone defended everyone else who had charges brought against them. Only Brock Hockney was prosecuted because Sam Garliek provided video evidence of his attack on the Council of Pieces in exchange for a plea deal.
- Minor example but according the 300 employees left behind in the park were a fraction of the actual number of employees that work therenote . Most of them only know a handful of each other by name and end up gravitating towards each other.
- Only two people of those left behind had any medical training and only in First Aid; there were no antibiotics or strong pain medicines. A large number of those who died was because of infections from wounds inflicted on each other and themselves.
- Teenage Wasteland: Downplayed. Most of the employees who work for the park are college students with some just out of high school and referred to by the few older employees as "kids".
- Unreliable Narrator: As typical of eyewitness accounts, which can be very unreliable, the interviewed employees give conflicting versions of some events and can only speculate about things they didn't actually witness themselves.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Events in the book show that the actions of some seemingly unrelated people have bigger consequences down the line with some never knowing about it after the fact.
- What Did You Expect When You Named It ____?: The plan to leave behind a skeleton crew in the park with plenty of food and water to ride out the hurricane and its aftermath was called "Operation Rapture".
- Zero-Approval Gambit: The Florida prosecutor assigned to the FantasticLand cases makes a deal with Sam Garliek to give Garliek much lighter charges and sentencing in order to get evidence that will conclusively convict Brock Hockney. This amounts to torching his career and reputation, but it's a small price to pay to make sure Hockney goes to prison and stays there. (As he points out in his interview, the one is merely a petty asshole, the other is really, truly dangerous.)
