Fantastic Life: Or, Disney’s Dream Debased
On FantasticLand (2016), by Mike Bockoven

by J †Johnson

Some books are nouns. Novels named after a person, place, or thing bring their namesake into existence. Mary Shelley does this with Frankenstein, Samuel R. Delany does it with Dhalgren, Philip K. Dick does it with Ubik, and Mike Bockoven does it with FantasticLand. Place books have a two-way function: they bring the place to us, stash it in our world; they bring us to that place, stash us there. Usually we visit as ghosts, invisible to everyone else. Sometimes there are moments where we feel seen. FantasticLand is a place and a document—it’s documentary evidence of something that no longer exists, except in the oral history assembled by journalist Adam Jakes. It’s brought to us by Jakes, though he tries to erase himself (and his prompts) from most of the document. In the moments where interviewees address him directly, we might also feel addressed. Otherwise, we ghost along with Jakes, who also visits FantasticLand through the interviews. That those interviews don’t always or ever line up makes FantasticLand (as novel and place) the slippery thing it is.

What happened at FantasticLand in September 2017, after a massive hurricane hit the coast of Florida and trapped 326 park employees, is a matter of conjecture. We do know that 207 souls were evacuated after 35 days. An author’s note and afterword, 23 interviews with 22 people, and a letter from the Florida National Guard help us piece the demolished park back together, even if the fractures still show. And let’s pause for a moment to marvel at what we have here: a fantastic world, imperfectly rebuilt, unreliably narrated, at odds with itself, and somehow inhabitable in our imaginations. The so-called realistic novel offers us the illusion of a story we can visit without necessarily questioning the nature of existence. That realism is itself a fantasy that suggests we all live in the same world. The fantastic novel requires critical empathy and a leap of imagination. The fractured novel puts us in a broken world and shows us the fault lines and gaping holes. To shift metaphors, we see the seams where the story is sewn together.

The place novel also has the unique capacity to posit that place outside itself. In a literal and literary way, FantasticLand exists in and as the book in our hands or on our screen. Meanwhile, it indicates a place outside itself: over there. This fiction—that there is an over there—is disrupted by the fact (and fiction) that FantasticLand no longer exists after being destroyed three times: once by the storm, once by the people who turned it into something else by taking its premise literally, and once again by bulldozers. We can reassemble and revisit FantastLand any time we pick up the book, but we always and increasingly suspect there’s more to it than the literary simulacrum presents. We develop our own ideas about what FantasticLand is and what happened there.

An emergency plan, Operation Rapture, is in place before the storm. It’s an acknowledgement of the absurdity of building permanent structures on the Florida Coast, and it’s also an assertion of the exceptional, privileged reality of the park. Add in conditions of seasonal employment and semi-precarious labor, include dorms for college kids working the park in the summer, and we have a model contemporary company town. Project Rapture extends those conditions through park closure: in case of emergency, employees can volunteer to be locked in the park to maintain it and wait out the crisis on overtime pay. What could go wrong?

Like Disneyland or Universal Studios, FantasticLand is a small country with different regions that are distinguished in the typically reductive mode of amusement park difference: themeparks. Employees at FantasticLand belong to particular teams (Super Hero Land, World’s Circus, Pirate Land, Fairy Prairie, Fantastic Future World, etc.), and take on the group identities of the themepark to which they belong. In this environment, the people who work in concession shops and maintenance also have a sense of identity related to their positions and locations in the park. After lockdown, as people gravitate to particular regions and join a team, those teams are literalized. Groups like the Pirates become more piratical, and set a precedent for territorial aggression that warps the identities and behavior of groups around them. Members of Fantastic Future World become Robots, World’s Circus people become Freaks, so-called ShopGirls become warriors complete with archers, and the maintenance crew go underground as Mole Men. We also hear about a pair of masked killers, the Warthogs, who dance at the edges of park mythology wielding weapons of torture that vary by report and defy official attempts to cover up their bloody mess. Then there’s that weird chemical smell.

Here’s where this very specific population of young people, a few older maintenance workers and management, continually reinforced fantastic identification, group isolation, rumor and variant reportage find ideal conditions to calcify into hyper-reality. You aren’t just posing as a superhero or a pirate anymore, and now people in that group over there are looking at you funny. No matter that there is food, water, and shelter for everyone: a struggle to control resources, along with siege mentality and the frustrated desire to establish narrative coherence, lead to active hostility, ongoing conflict, and general confusion. 

The least satisfying theory about what happens here is that young people deprived of social media and with nothing better to do get desperately bored and start fighting each other. It’s a half truth that focuses on one aspect of conditions and loses track of just about everything else. This is not about phones, which after all become useless. It is, however, about a lack of purpose or connection beyond the ones established in daily routine: playing your part in a fantastic popular media simulacrum.

A better question than How did this happen? is maybe How could things have gone differently? That first question assumes what happened is a freak thing, or worse, lends itself to lazy or opportunistic explanations—the social media theory, or the idea that one particularly charismatic and possibly sociopathic individual can set everyone against each other. The second question takes the reality of this fiction seriously: alienation is fatally toxic and socially corrosive, and amusement parks, like any commercial space, are extractive environments not designed to be places where we can live.

Enter at your own risk: here be monsters and floods. Notice that musty smell, the warped pages, the rash on your hands.

Dedicated with gratitude to everyone in my spring 2025 Journalism Workshop at UPenn, where we read and discussed this novel as a form of fictional journalistic oral history.