 Hello everybody! E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about Mike Backevin's Fantastic Land. If you see any weird light anomalies, it's because I'm shooting this way early in the morning. I don't normally shoot at this time of day for this reason, but I'm going to be super busy all week. I'm trying to get these videos done before I get into my busyness. Busyness. Busyness. Anyways, so Fantastic Land. This comes highly, highly recommended by the horror community on my top horror novels not written by Stephen King, Liz, there's comments recommending this book. Every single time I bring up horror novels, modern horror novels, horror novels I didn't like. People point me in the direction of this one. It is the same way with The Last Days of Jack Sparks. I like this one much more than The Last Days of Jack Sparks, but it does have its issues. The issues I have with it are huge, spoilers for the story. Unfortunately, every single time the book got good, something happened that made me just, it's like no, that's not something that would happen, could happen or any number of things. It has nothing to do with the actual nuts and bolts of the story itself. In fact, there's one chapter in here that is amazing. It's brilliantly written, it changes the entire course of the story. I think it's chapter 14. I can't remember. If you follow me on Goodreads, or if you read my review over there once I get it written, you'll see in the notes that I posted, the updates when that happened. But still, again, I loved that, but it also changed the entire story for me. What I went in expecting was not exactly what I got. Now that it is bloody, it is gory, there's great action. The characters are a little one note in places. There are some really great characters that you feel have their own voice. The way the book is written is a series of interviews. Some of the interviews aren't quite believable because the interview would have hurt their court cases. I believe all of this stuff happens afterwards, so maybe not. Well, of course, all of these interviews happen after the court cases, so maybe not because you can't do double jeopardy. There could be civil lawsuits, like O.J. Simpson was convicted of not killing Nicole and Goldman. I can't remember who he killed, but his wife and that dude. But then he lost in civil court, I believe. I didn't feel that some of those were believable, that they would go into that much detail knowing that they could be brought to justice, so to speak. I mean, they wouldn't go to jail, but they would end up being sued to death. I think the main problem I have with this, other than the stuff that we're going to get into in the spoilers section, which will be after the outro, the main problem I have with this is that all these interviews pretty much sound the same. You had probably five or six out of, I think, it's well over a dozen people. Let me go through here real quick. Oh my gosh, there's 23, so there's almost two dozen people in here. And I can only remember the individual personalities of about five people. The leader of the shop girls, the guy that sounded like he was from the mafia, the obviously Southern, who was it? The guy that prosecuted the kids. There's so many people in here that sound the same, especially like there's another shop girl, there's an anonymous one that I thought for sure was the original one, just anonymous because she talks about murdering people. But with that one it wasn't her because toward the end of that chapter, reasoning is given. I guess that's a bit of a spoiler. So I don't feel like the book is as amazing as everyone makes it seem to be. It is a good book, it is a fun book, it is a well-written book. But I don't feel that it's amazing. So if you read Mike Bakovan's Fantastic Land, if you have, let me know down there in the comments below. If what you have to say is spoilery, please put a spoiler alert for this book. Please put spoiler alert at the top of your comments. If you didn't like it, let me know exactly what you didn't like. If you liked it, let me know exactly what you liked again. Please spoiler alert if you're going to be talking about spoilers. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye. So if you're here, if you're still hanging around after the outro, this is where I'm going to be talking about spoilers for Mike Bakovan's Fantastic Land. I did like the book, but these are the reasons why I knocked off a star. I almost knocked off another one, but I did enjoy it more than just, you know, more than just being in the middle. I know Goodread says three, you still, I mean, three I think is like it. Four is loved it. Five is amazing. So I liked it. I'm right there in the middle. I liked it. In fact, two might be I liked it. I'm not sure. I could never remember how Goodread does it, but I'm right there. I'm right there in the middle, but it bumped me over into the four category. But I don't want to say I loved it. I did love certain scenes and that's what we're going to talk about now. But there is that, but there are problems with these scenes. Okay. So first one we're going to talk about is the utterly asinine fact that the canon at this theme park works. Not only does the canon, a workable canon isn't that big of a deal for me. A workable canon that both has gunpowder and cannonballs to be able to shoot and kill people. I got to call bullshit. Before that, in fact, he even, he goes into it being a writer myself. I see these, the structural, how things are built. And there's certain times where I like that part right there. He added that part because someone told him or he realized himself that this is not going to work unless he makes up an excuse for it. And usually the excuse is that the owner of the park was a stickler for authenticity. There's absolutely no reason for there to be gunpowder in a theme park, none whatsoever. You could have a bag sitting there next to the canon that says gunpowder and nobody would tell the difference. It's not like you're going to be shooting off the canon and if you are shooting off the canon, you're definitely not using cannonballs. There's no, there's no reasoning for it. Another thing that they bring up as far as authenticity is concerned is in the pirate section they have actual jail cells that will lock and you can lock people away inside of them. This blew my mind. I don't, I don't understand, well I do understand because it's a plot point. I know this is going to annoy some of you. I'm sorry, the sun's moving, but yeah, the light is bothering me. The canon, the working jail cells that they are able to lock people away in and they can't get out of. All this stuff, there's no way in hell this company would get insurance. There's no way whatsoever. The only believable, the only believable section as far as like the violence is concerned and the destruction is concerned is maybe he gets away with the C4 toward the end of the book when they destroy the exclamation point. Because they are talking about their, they need to do demolition in the park. I still, I'm still on the fence about that one though, them needing C4. I just can't imagine being at Disneyland and hearing boom, you know, while they're doing that and they're not going to do it at night because people around that area it'll keep people awake, that kind of thing. But most importantly, no working canon. I couldn't believe that section. Now, the section, the aftermath of the canon was amazing writing. I understand why these choices were made by Bachman. I understand that, but I can't, I'm too overly critical and yes, maybe it's nitpicking here, but I'm too overly critical to sit there and go, oh sure, yeah, a theme park is going to have a working canon with gunpowder and cannonballs so that somebody can maybe come along and fuck some shit up. It just, it doesn't, it doesn't ring true to me and it ruined that section. There's, there's a part in a hotel room in a $450 a night hotel room where somebody opens a window and escapes out of the window. I've been in a lot of expensive hotels, a lot of expensive hotels and I have never once been in one that lets you open up a window. This is a problem that happens a lot in horror fiction because people are always having to escape and now it's down here. Can I scoot? That's a little better. People are always having to escape and people are always climbing out of windows that they shouldn't be able to climb out of, hospital windows or people are jumping out of windows that, or jumping through windows that they can't. It is a storytelling device, but it's, it's a problem and especially in the horror genre it's a problem. I don't read too many thrillers. I suspect that it'd probably be a problem in thrillers, but these are sections of the book that took me completely out of the story. And that's just not something you want in a book. You don't want to be sitting there questioning whether or not something would happen. Whereas with, I'm only bringing this up. I know I'm a Stephen King fanboy, but I'm only bringing this up because in the Institute, I'm sure that there's some issues there as far as with plot or whatnot, but my, my disbelief was adequately suspended. I never once thought about how these kids with mind powers were doing what they were doing or rada rada rada, so on and so forth. This is a story that happens in reality and I question this more than I questioned the speculative fiction aspects of the Institute. This is a good book though. I'm not going to sit here and say it's not. It is a good book, but I don't understand how anyone could go through this and not find those issues, um, any who. So those are, those are the, those are the things that really, really bothered me. Unfortunately, there's a lot of stuff like that in this book. And I just want to talk about those key elements. There were sections that were entirely believable, especially the, the reasoning for why the kids devolved so quickly, why they went crazy so quickly. The section, we're in the spoiler section. So once again, the, the bit, I think it's, I, I want to say it's chapter 14. But in chapter, I'm going to, I, I don't know, but in this certain chapter, the, the reasoning for the kids going crazy, them seeing all the stuff at the carnival, certain, or the circus area, um, going in there, finding the bodies hanging all around, finding all this gore and everything splattered all over the place, uh, that was fantastic. But then you find out that it's all stage production, basically. They have used fake bodies, fake blood, fake viscera, all that stuff. And the beginning of that chapter starts with the person involved in the person responsible for it saying, this is probably all my fault. I didn't kill anyone, rada, rada, rada, but this whole thing is probably my fault. Because what they did to protect themselves by decorating the circus like that is they, they terrified the other tribes. That's what they're called in here. The pirates, the shop girls, so on and so forth. They terrified, uh, these people to the point that they felt like they needed to, uh, the Brock Hockney pirates, that's a whole different thing. But they terrified this whole, the, all these other tribes, the Deadpool's, the shop, shop girl, all of them terrified them to the point where they felt like they absolutely had to defend themselves. That, I think that was a brilliant piece of writing. To go, okay, nothing really happened. No one was hurt or maimed or murdered to, to spark all this. What happened is these were terrified kids who suffered fight or flight. Some of them ran. In fact, the hotel scene's amazing up until he escapes out the window. This is what I'm talking about here. This whole book is full of scenes that are absolutely amazing until the author uses an author device, a storytelling device to try and save himself. And you know, you see it on the page. You're like, this wouldn't happen. He tries to, he tries to say that the hotel window only rolled out a little bit. They don't open it all. Once you, I don't know about lower floors, but especially not upon the 18th floor, the windows just do not open. I want to love this book, but here we are at every single scene that I saw, every single scene that I saw that was amazing. And I know that by this point I'm just repeating myself. Every single amazing scene had a problem with it.