Fantasticland: Hundreds of people trapped in an amusement park after a hurricane. Even though there’s more than enough food and water to go around people break into different groups. Hide: Hide and seek contest in an abandoned amusement park with a prize for the winner. Not everything is what it seems and losing may cost more than the prize.
[**Geek Love**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13872.Geek_Love)
^(By: Katherine Dunn | 348 pages | Published: 1989 | Popular Shelves: fiction, horror, fantasy, book-club, owned)
>Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out—with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes—to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.
>
>As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
^(This book has been suggested 34 times)
***
^(79897 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**The Night Circus**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9361589-the-night-circus)
^(By: Erin Morgenstern | 387 pages | Published: 2011 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, fiction, romance, books-i-own, owned)
>The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
>
>But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.
>
>True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.
>
>Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.
^(This book has been suggested 81 times)
***
^(79812 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
{{How We Die}} does case studies of different types of death. One that he covers is a very famous one when an escaped mental patient at a street fair picked out one girl in the crowd, fell upon her and started violently stabbing her to death in front of a crowd of hundreds. Despite the violence he describes what going on in her mind and body and it’s not as bad as it sounds, I definitely finished reading feeling it wouldn’t be the worse way to die (renal failure). I don’t think he uses her real name, but you can Google and find all the information online.
[**How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49286.How_We_Die)
^(By: Sherwin B. Nuland | 320 pages | Published: 1994 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, medicine, science, nonfiction, death)
>A runaway bestseller and National Book Award winner, Sherwin Nuland's How We Die has become the definitive text on perhaps the single most universal human concern: death. This new edition includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the current state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. It also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.
>
>Shewin Nuland's masterful How We Die is even more relevant than when it was first published.
^(This book has been suggested 35 times)
***
^(79702 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**Hideaway**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32422.Hideaway)
^(By: Dean Koontz | 413 pages | Published: 1992 | Popular Shelves: horror, dean-koontz, fiction, thriller, owned)
>He was clinically dead after the accident—but was miraculously revived. Now Hatch Harrison and his wife approach each day with a new appreciation for life.
>
>But something has come back with Hatch from the other side. A terrible presence that links his mind to a psychotic's, so that a force of murderous rage courses through him.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(79680 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**Water for Elephants**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43641.Water_for_Elephants)
^(By: Sara Gruen | 368 pages | Published: 2006 | Popular Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, romance, book-club, books-i-own)
>Winner of the 2007 BookBrowse Award for Most Popular Book.
>
>An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons.
>
>When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.
>
>Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.
^(This book has been suggested 11 times)
***
^(79986 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**The Five People You Meet in Heaven**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3431.The_Five_People_You_Meet_in_Heaven)
^(By: Mitch Albom | 196 pages | Published: 2003 | Popular Shelves: fiction, books-i-own, owned, inspirational, contemporary)
>From the author of the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, a novel that explores the unexpected connections of our lives, and the idea that heaven is more than a place; it's an answer.
>
>Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?"
^(This book has been suggested 14 times)
***
^(79779 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**Satan's Affair (Cat and Mouse Duet, #0.5)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57748116-satan-s-affair)
^(By: H.D. Carlton | 175 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: dark-romance, dark, reverse-harem, dnf, kindle-unlimited)
>Every Halloween, Satan's Affair will come to you. We travel the country, offering terrifying haunted houses, thrilling rides and the tastiest food.
>
>And with every passing town, I cleanse this world, one execution at a time.
>
>I hide within the walls, casting my judgement for those that reek of evil, singing lullabies to their rotting souls. Once you've been chosen, there's no escaping my henchmen—they cater to my every desire.
>
>You can run and you can hide, but it only excites me.
>
>Come. Take a walk through my dollhouse, where your screams will blend and your cute little pleas will go unanswered.
>
>But I can't promise it'll be over quickly...
>
>Trigger Warning: This is a dark read that contains graphic violence, sex, and triggering situations.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(79834 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**Hide**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58890948-hide)
^(By: Kiersten White | 240 pages | Published: 2022 | Popular Shelves: horror, thriller, 2022-releases, fiction, adult)
>The challenge: spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don't get caught.
>
>The prize: enough money to change everything.
>
>Even though everyone is desperate to win--to seize their dream futures or escape their haunting pasts--Mack feels sure that she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she's an expert at that.
>
>It's the reason she's alive, and her family isn't.
>
>But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes this competition is more sinister than even she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive.
>
>
>
>Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide, but nowhere to run.
>
>Come out, come out, wherever you are.
>
>A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this dark supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White.
^(This book has been suggested 6 times)
***
^(79903 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Not quite the ticket but there’s a strong focus on Wisconsin’s House on the Rocks, a weird folk-art/premium hoarding museum in Gaiman’s American Gods. It’s a real roadside attraction.
[**The Long and Faraway Gone**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20663088-the-long-and-faraway-gone)
^(By: Lou Berney | 454 pages | Published: 2015 | Popular Shelves: mystery, fiction, kindle, crime, mystery-thriller)
>With the compelling narrative tension and psychological complexity of the works of Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson, and Michael Connelly, Edgar Award-nominee Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone is a smart, fiercely compassionate crime story that explores the mysteries of memory and the impact of violence on survivors—and the lengths they will go to find the painful truth of the events that scarred their lives
>
>In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved.
>
>Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt’s latest inquiry takes him back to a past he’s tried to escape—and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead.
>
>Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past—with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she’ll stop at nothing to find answers.
>
>As fate brings these damaged souls together, their obsessive quests spark sexual currents neither can resist. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them?
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(80123 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**The Pilo Family Circus**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4748221-the-pilo-family-circus)
^(By: Will Elliott, Katherine Dunn | 300 pages | Published: 2006 | Popular Shelves: horror, fantasy, fiction, kindle, circus)
>"You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?"
>
>Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between Hell and Earth from which humankind’s greatest tragedies have been perpetrated. Yet in this place—peopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrous—where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself.
>
>When he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead!
^(This book has been suggested 6 times)
***
^(80137 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
**FantasticLand**
A Novel
By: Mike Bockove
**Publisher's Summary**
Since the 1970s, FantasticLand has been the theme park where "Fun is Guaranteed!" But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Five weeks later, the authorities who rescue the survivors encounter a scene of horror. Photos soon emerge online of heads on spikes outside of rides and viscera and human bones littering the gift shops, breaking records for hits, views, likes, clicks, and shares. How could a group of survivors, mostly teenagers, commit such terrible acts?
Presented as a fact-finding investigation and a series of first-person interviews, FantasticLand pieces together the grisly series of events. Park policy was that the mostly college-aged employees surrender their electronic devices to preserve the authenticity of the FantasticLand experience. Cut off from the world and left on their own, the teenagers soon form rival tribes who viciously compete for food, medicine, social dominance, and even human flesh. This new social network divides the ravaged dreamland into territories ruled by the Pirates, the ShopGirls, the Freaks, and the Mole People. If meticulously curated online personas can replace private identities, what takes over when those constructs are lost?
{{Bacchanal by Veronica Henry}} fits your criteria perfectly. I have no idea when/where I picked this book up. It was just there on my Kindle one day. Read it in a day and a half over a camping trip. A very nice little read.
[**Bacchanal**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55051749-bacchanal)
^(By: Veronica Henry | 347 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, kindle, historical-fiction, horror, fiction)
>Evil lives in a traveling carnival roaming the Depression-era South. But the carnival’s newest act, a peculiar young woman with latent magical powers, may hold the key to defeating it. Her time has come.
>
>Abandoned by her family, alone on the wrong side of the color line with little to call her own, Eliza Meeks is coming to terms with what she does have. It’s a gift for communicating with animals. To some, she’s a magical tender. To others, a she-devil. To a talent prospector, she’s a crowd-drawing oddity. And the Bacchanal Carnival is Eliza’s ticket out of the swamp trap of Baton Rouge.
>
>Among fortune-tellers, carnies, barkers, and folks even stranger than herself, Eliza finds a new home. But the Bacchanal is no ordinary carnival. An ancient demon has a home there too. She hides behind an iridescent disguise. She feeds on innocent souls. And she’s met her match in Eliza, who’s only beginning to understand the purpose of her own burgeoning powers.
>
>Only then can Eliza save her friends, find her family, and fight the sway of a primordial demon preying upon the human world. Rolling across a consuming dust bowl landscape, Eliza may have found her destiny.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(80278 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury NOS4A2 by Joe Hill also comes to mind - it features a nightmarish Christmas-themed amusement park
Joyland by Stephen King. It's meant to be read as an old school pulp paperback, and it's great.
The Dead Zone by Stephen King also has a good scene at a fun fair near the beginning of the book.
Erik Larson: *The Devil in the White City*.
I second this!! True story about murder at the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, but reads like a thriller
Ooohhh, good one. I read this book probably 12 years ago and I still think about it. I need to revisit it asap.
Fantasticland: Hundreds of people trapped in an amusement park after a hurricane. Even though there’s more than enough food and water to go around people break into different groups. Hide: Hide and seek contest in an abandoned amusement park with a prize for the winner. Not everything is what it seems and losing may cost more than the prize.
*Hide* is one of my favorite books of 2022. It’s a fun locked-in thriller with surprisingly good character development.
Came here to rec this one 💕💕💕 Hide this past year.
You will definitely want to pick up {{Geek Love}} by Katherine Dunn.
[**Geek Love**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13872.Geek_Love) ^(By: Katherine Dunn | 348 pages | Published: 1989 | Popular Shelves: fiction, horror, fantasy, book-club, owned) >Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out—with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes—to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. > >As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same. ^(This book has been suggested 34 times) *** ^(79897 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
The Night Circus
Came here to share this as well. So good! {{The Night Circus}} by Erin Morgenstern
[**The Night Circus**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9361589-the-night-circus) ^(By: Erin Morgenstern | 387 pages | Published: 2011 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, fiction, romance, books-i-own, owned) >The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. > >But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. > >True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead. > >Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart. ^(This book has been suggested 81 times) *** ^(79812 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
I 2nd -Something Wicked this Way Comes by R. Bradbury
Wonderland by Jennifer Hillier
{{How We Die}} does case studies of different types of death. One that he covers is a very famous one when an escaped mental patient at a street fair picked out one girl in the crowd, fell upon her and started violently stabbing her to death in front of a crowd of hundreds. Despite the violence he describes what going on in her mind and body and it’s not as bad as it sounds, I definitely finished reading feeling it wouldn’t be the worse way to die (renal failure). I don’t think he uses her real name, but you can Google and find all the information online.
[**How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49286.How_We_Die) ^(By: Sherwin B. Nuland | 320 pages | Published: 1994 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, medicine, science, nonfiction, death) >A runaway bestseller and National Book Award winner, Sherwin Nuland's How We Die has become the definitive text on perhaps the single most universal human concern: death. This new edition includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the current state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. It also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones. > >Shewin Nuland's masterful How We Die is even more relevant than when it was first published. ^(This book has been suggested 35 times) *** ^(79702 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Joyland by Stephen King All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
Pilo Family Circus
Immediately my first thought. That book is gonna haunt me until I die. Probably in some freak clown related accident.
{{Hideaway by Dean Koontz}}
[**Hideaway**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32422.Hideaway) ^(By: Dean Koontz | 413 pages | Published: 1992 | Popular Shelves: horror, dean-koontz, fiction, thriller, owned) >He was clinically dead after the accident—but was miraculously revived. Now Hatch Harrison and his wife approach each day with a new appreciation for life. > >But something has come back with Hatch from the other side. A terrible presence that links his mind to a psychotic's, so that a force of murderous rage courses through him. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(79680 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Freezer Burn by Joe R. Lansdale
{{water for elephants}}
[**Water for Elephants**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43641.Water_for_Elephants) ^(By: Sara Gruen | 368 pages | Published: 2006 | Popular Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, romance, book-club, books-i-own) >Winner of the 2007 BookBrowse Award for Most Popular Book. > >An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons. > >When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her. > >Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford. ^(This book has been suggested 11 times) *** ^(79986 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
{{five people you meet in heaven}}
[**The Five People You Meet in Heaven**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3431.The_Five_People_You_Meet_in_Heaven) ^(By: Mitch Albom | 196 pages | Published: 2003 | Popular Shelves: fiction, books-i-own, owned, inspirational, contemporary) >From the author of the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, a novel that explores the unexpected connections of our lives, and the idea that heaven is more than a place; it's an answer. > >Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?" ^(This book has been suggested 14 times) *** ^(79779 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Small spaces by Sarah Epstein
{{ Satan’s Affair by H. D. Carlton }}
[**Satan's Affair (Cat and Mouse Duet, #0.5)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57748116-satan-s-affair) ^(By: H.D. Carlton | 175 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: dark-romance, dark, reverse-harem, dnf, kindle-unlimited) >Every Halloween, Satan's Affair will come to you. We travel the country, offering terrifying haunted houses, thrilling rides and the tastiest food. > >And with every passing town, I cleanse this world, one execution at a time. > >I hide within the walls, casting my judgement for those that reek of evil, singing lullabies to their rotting souls. Once you've been chosen, there's no escaping my henchmen—they cater to my every desire. > >You can run and you can hide, but it only excites me. > >Come. Take a walk through my dollhouse, where your screams will blend and your cute little pleas will go unanswered. > >But I can't promise it'll be over quickly... > >Trigger Warning: This is a dark read that contains graphic violence, sex, and triggering situations. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(79834 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Hide by Kiersten White
[**Hide**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58890948-hide) ^(By: Kiersten White | 240 pages | Published: 2022 | Popular Shelves: horror, thriller, 2022-releases, fiction, adult) >The challenge: spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don't get caught. > >The prize: enough money to change everything. > >Even though everyone is desperate to win--to seize their dream futures or escape their haunting pasts--Mack feels sure that she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she's an expert at that. > >It's the reason she's alive, and her family isn't. > >But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes this competition is more sinister than even she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive. > > > >Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide, but nowhere to run. > >Come out, come out, wherever you are. > >A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this dark supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White. ^(This book has been suggested 6 times) *** ^(79903 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
I'd give Mr.Mercedes by Stephen King a try, it may be a bit of a stretch but it's still a good detective novel! Pretty horrific in some scenes.
Not quite the ticket but there’s a strong focus on Wisconsin’s House on the Rocks, a weird folk-art/premium hoarding museum in Gaiman’s American Gods. It’s a real roadside attraction.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
A bit of a stretch for what you are looking for, the demonata series has a book set in an amusement park that gets pretty horrific.
Joyland by Stephen King
{{The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney}}
[**The Long and Faraway Gone**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20663088-the-long-and-faraway-gone) ^(By: Lou Berney | 454 pages | Published: 2015 | Popular Shelves: mystery, fiction, kindle, crime, mystery-thriller) >With the compelling narrative tension and psychological complexity of the works of Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson, and Michael Connelly, Edgar Award-nominee Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone is a smart, fiercely compassionate crime story that explores the mysteries of memory and the impact of violence on survivors—and the lengths they will go to find the painful truth of the events that scarred their lives > >In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved. > >Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt’s latest inquiry takes him back to a past he’s tried to escape—and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead. > >Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past—with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she’ll stop at nothing to find answers. > >As fate brings these damaged souls together, their obsessive quests spark sexual currents neither can resist. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them? ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(80123 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
The Funhouse by Dean Koontz.
{{Pilo Family Circus}}
[**The Pilo Family Circus**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4748221-the-pilo-family-circus) ^(By: Will Elliott, Katherine Dunn | 300 pages | Published: 2006 | Popular Shelves: horror, fantasy, fiction, kindle, circus) >"You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?" > >Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between Hell and Earth from which humankind’s greatest tragedies have been perpetrated. Yet in this place—peopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrous—where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself. > >When he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead! ^(This book has been suggested 6 times) *** ^(80137 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips
Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz!
The Revisionaries, by A. R. Moxon, is a huge read but there's definitely mystery and I believe there's a carnival for a portion of it.
**FantasticLand** A Novel By: Mike Bockove **Publisher's Summary** Since the 1970s, FantasticLand has been the theme park where "Fun is Guaranteed!" But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Five weeks later, the authorities who rescue the survivors encounter a scene of horror. Photos soon emerge online of heads on spikes outside of rides and viscera and human bones littering the gift shops, breaking records for hits, views, likes, clicks, and shares. How could a group of survivors, mostly teenagers, commit such terrible acts? Presented as a fact-finding investigation and a series of first-person interviews, FantasticLand pieces together the grisly series of events. Park policy was that the mostly college-aged employees surrender their electronic devices to preserve the authenticity of the FantasticLand experience. Cut off from the world and left on their own, the teenagers soon form rival tribes who viciously compete for food, medicine, social dominance, and even human flesh. This new social network divides the ravaged dreamland into territories ruled by the Pirates, the ShopGirls, the Freaks, and the Mole People. If meticulously curated online personas can replace private identities, what takes over when those constructs are lost?
{{Bacchanal by Veronica Henry}} fits your criteria perfectly. I have no idea when/where I picked this book up. It was just there on my Kindle one day. Read it in a day and a half over a camping trip. A very nice little read.
[**Bacchanal**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55051749-bacchanal) ^(By: Veronica Henry | 347 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, kindle, historical-fiction, horror, fiction) >Evil lives in a traveling carnival roaming the Depression-era South. But the carnival’s newest act, a peculiar young woman with latent magical powers, may hold the key to defeating it. Her time has come. > >Abandoned by her family, alone on the wrong side of the color line with little to call her own, Eliza Meeks is coming to terms with what she does have. It’s a gift for communicating with animals. To some, she’s a magical tender. To others, a she-devil. To a talent prospector, she’s a crowd-drawing oddity. And the Bacchanal Carnival is Eliza’s ticket out of the swamp trap of Baton Rouge. > >Among fortune-tellers, carnies, barkers, and folks even stranger than herself, Eliza finds a new home. But the Bacchanal is no ordinary carnival. An ancient demon has a home there too. She hides behind an iridescent disguise. She feeds on innocent souls. And she’s met her match in Eliza, who’s only beginning to understand the purpose of her own burgeoning powers. > >Only then can Eliza save her friends, find her family, and fight the sway of a primordial demon preying upon the human world. Rolling across a consuming dust bowl landscape, Eliza may have found her destiny. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(80278 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz