FantasticLand

Mike Bockoven's FantasticLand is told entirely as a journalistic oral history of the worst incident in American amusement park history. When Hurricane Sadie devastates Florida's coast, a corporate decision leaves roughly three hundred young employees stranded inside FantasticLand, a Disney style resort, with promised rescue that never comes. Five weeks later, when the National Guard finally reaches the park, what they find is a wasteland of corpses, looted gift shops, and tribal warfare among the surviving staff. The novel reconstructs the descent through interviews with survivors, investigators, executives, and outside observers, charting how teenagers in pirate costumes and animatronic operators organized themselves into rival factions like the ShopGirls, Pirates, and Mole People. Bockoven uses the format to interrogate corporate negligence, social media incentives, and the ease with which young workers can be radicalized when authority disappears, building a Lord of the Flies for the influencer era that reads as both horror novel and labor parable.