Billionaire developer Sheldon Rice has created an amusement park simply titled The Park. But, its an unusual place with three levels sitting on top of thousands of acres of rural California. The niche is that most of the park features robots as the themes – robot spiders, soldiers, creatures, etc. I was getting hints of the 1970s sci-fi flick Westworld going into the book.
To celebrate The Park's grand-opening, a Willy Wonka type of promotional gig is provided that invites a handful of troubled teens to the dazzling entertainment mecca to experience all of the thrills for the very first time.
Wallace presents the narrative in third-person with a variety of characters. In any given chapter the book may be from the perspective of Rice, his engineer, the park's doctor, and the variety of kids that make up the park's attendance. I found that the constant changes made for a bumpy ride through the plot-development and action. Motion sickness is my weakness, but trumping the shiftiness was the book's plodding progress.
It takes almost 200 pages for the kids to arrive at the park. There's 388 total pages which beefed up the book's first-half narrative with tons of backstory and the various maintenance and creation that Davison, the park engineer, is constructing or finishing. Each kid has a chapter of history and predicament but none of it really mattered.
Inside the park I was hoping for Die Hard with kids being slaughtered by runaway robots (Chopping Mall!) as they attempt to free themselves from the billionaire's faulty new toy. None of that really happens. Sure, there is the occasional broken bone, severe laceration, and death, but it isn't a sizable portion of the book's payoff. The substitute is a bunch of malarkey about an old Native American who feels that the land is cursed and that Rise is receiving his comeuppance for building there.
Thrill sucks. Period. Don't waste your time.
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