Like the very first title I reviewed from the Books of Horror Go To List, Cassandra Khaw's 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth', this is a highly polarising read. However, it's not Bockoven's characters and style that cause some readers problems; it's whether what he does here fits into their worldview. If it doesn't, then those readers can't buy into the basic concept and either don't finish or dish out a 1/5 rating. If it does, then this is magnetic stuff with a huge amount of social commentary.

The basic idea is that there's a third amusement park in Florida to sit alongside Disneyworld and Universal Studios and it's called FantasticLand. It's done very well, thank you very much, and the three parks have continually borrowed ideas from each other. Like Disneyworld, FantasticLand is divided up into different themed areas, one that's dedicated to pirates, another to Hallowe'en, a third to fairies and so on. Unlike Disneyworld, as far as I'm aware, these areas are kept utterly separate, down to having different smells piped in.

Into this stable environment comes something inherently unstable but quintessentially Florida: a hurricane and a really big one. Hurricane Sadie doesn't hit Florida where hurricanes traditionally do and it doesn't let up until it's quite a way from the water, far beyond FantasticLand which sits a tasty view away from the coastline. While it's a big one, it's not really the problem here; it's what makes the problem apparent. The folk who run FantasticLand are well-prepared, so there's lots of shelter available, including a sprawling underground tunnel system, and plenty of food and water.

In fact, they're so prepared that they have a protocol in place to keep a staff on site during such a natural disaster as a hurricane, so that they can protect against looters and vandals. The problem is in which staff members are signed up for this protocol and here's where we get to whether your worldview is going to accept this setup, because the entire book unfolds as if it's non-fiction, with chapters devoted to interviews with different people who primarily aim to explain their part in an absolute horror show that everyone struggles to accept.

Long story short, while many younger readers are comparing this to 'The Hunger Games', maybe 'Battle Royale', the real comparison to be made is to 'Lord of the Flies'. In that classic novel, kids find themselves stuck on an island after a plane crash and have to make the most of it until they can be rescued, only for them to quickly descend into savagery. The author, William Golding wrote it as a response to R. M. Ballantyne's 'The Coral Island', which he found to be unrealistic, so chose to write children how he believed they would actually behave.

Here, a bunch of young adults are just as effectively isolated by Hurricane Sadie and have to make the most of it until they can be rescued—which isn't going to happen any time soon because the Red Cross has them classified as a low priority, given that they're all theoretically safe, prepared and well-equipped to survive, only for them to quickly descend into savagery. Bockoven may or may not have written this in response to something else, but he seems to me to be very much on Golding's wavelength.

The social commentary here is deep. The people who volunteer for FantasticLand's protocol are a primarily twentysomething bunch, because they aren't tied down to family. They'll happily spend a couple of weeks underground knowing that they're permanently on the clock and earning good money. They're also reliant on a permanent connection to the outside world through phones and social media, which is taken away when Sadie destroys the infrastructure needed to support that. What's more, the few supervisors left are weak and inconsequential, so they decide on their own leaders and inherit their goals, some of which are positive, others perhaps well-intentioned but problematic in a host of ways.

What that means is that they split into tribes that roughly correspond to the sections of the park, each with their own mission to accomplish, their own ways of doing that and their own fears as to how well they'll be able to do so given who else is still in the park. The early chapters are told by a variety of people who weren't actually there, but have information useful to us, like a historian of the park, the head of personnel at FantasticLand and a former regional director of the Red Cross. They set the stage for us well, telling us that things went horribly wrong in the park, with bodies hanging from signs and heads mounted on spikes, but without the ability to explain how they got from point A to point batshit crazy.

That comes as the interviews escalate, because we hear from Sam Garliek, the first shift manager whose ineptitude arguably set the stage for this calamity; then members of some of the tribes, a Mole Man and a Deadpool; gradually building up to tribal leaders, like Elvis Springer who led the Robots and Clara Ann Clark who led the ShopGirls, and more. By that point, we've firmly learned that the employee we want to hear from most is Brock Hockney, the leader of the Pirates, and we do, but there are plenty of others in between, each adding something extra to the big picture we think we learned early on and which evolves with each interview.

I did have some problems with this book, but I guess I'm enough of a pessimist to buy into how this all goes down. The author—meaning Adam Jakes, the fictional journalist who conducts all these interviews and collates them into book form, rather than Mike Bockoven, the real author who put all this together—tries to answer the fundamental question of how but fails, mostly because the answer isn't one thing and never can be.

It's partly Garliek's inability to lead; partly a mixture of Hockney's twisted mindset and charisma and partly the need for the twentysomethings of America to belong. Bockoven keeps bringing up social media as if these people can't function without that connection and I don't buy that to the same degree he does. Sure, there might be some addiction-related chemicals having problems in the brains of some of these employees, but I can't see it remotely explaining this.

To me, what does is that he taps into some topics that are only becoming more apparent with the passage of time. He doesn't use the word "incel", but it was clear to me that many of the Pirates fit that description perfectly. I don't think he uses "radicalised" either, but I've seen how easy it is to fall into a way of thinking that ought to be alien just because a charismatic leader presents it. He doesn't use "critical thinking" either, but that's the heart of the book for me. We're polarised because the collective we can't see through spin and fake news, because the powers-that-be have no intention of allowing the voting population to be able to think critically.

So I'm on board with Bockoven's rather traumatic worldview, if not for the reasons he raises. The problem I have comes back to that "incel" population. There's some sex in this book, though none of it is ever depicted explicitly or gratuitously; the trigger warnings should all be about violence. However, it's all consensual because there's no rape, even though the Pirates are keen to acquire young ladies from other tribes in exactly the way that pirates have traditionally done. Yet are we supposed to truly buy into Hockney, given all the evil that he does, both banning rape in his code of conduct and enforcing it? I know I didn't.

That's a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things though, almost an attempt to keep this wild descent into savagery family friendly enough to count as YA. I found that the book carried a huge punch that really makes it fall under general fiction rather than horror. Yes, it's horrific but it's a very realistic horrific, if you buy into this worldview. There's nothing supernatural going on, what evil manifests in this scenario all entirely human in origin. And the biggest impact the book has is to make us apply this to the reality we know. What do we recognise here in the people around us and the leaders we work for and vote for? That's the scariest facet of all. I recognised a lot. ~~ Hal C F Astell