FantasticLand: A Novel

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If you know of any other (ideally non-zombie) horror novels that take the 'oral history' approach, tell me! the characters are mostly late-teen, early-twenties, and the whole "we are separating ourselves into groups based on really superficial characteristics" is pure YA-adventure trope. 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. Personally, I thought it felt realistic, as people are herd animals who do utterly stupid things in crowds when they think the rest of the group's OK with it (see: Trump voters), and cruelty can sometimes be a more advanced and sociopathic byproduct of cruelty, so I bought it.

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. 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.

They then dragged one of them back and made them [the future Deadpools] watch as they chopped off his hands and left for dead. I love my phone but if I'm stuck somewhere where I would probably die, I couldn't think about my social media or my fucking phone. When the National Guard finally came, he had been hiding in an office and didn't leave for two straight weeks.

Nearly every character exists in that morally gray space that I love my book characters to exist in. I guess if your cell phone is dead and you can’t play Clash of Clans you might as well do it for real. 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.They took it and made their territory as scary as possible and spread rumors of horrific actions to keep the other tribes away. Through interviews with subjects ranging from a 'FantasticLand historian' to the notorious leader of the Pirate tribe, journalist Adam Jakes assembles a loosely chronological account of what went so horribly wrong.

Seriously, you had to wonder how long these young adults had been plotting imaginary murders in their heads, they took to it so quickly.I've just read the whole description on the Goodreads page, and I think the idea of this being a novel which 'probes the consequences of a social civilisation built online' is overemphasised.