In The 400-Pound CEO, an overweight and bullied worker kills his boss and takes over the company, but his victory is short-lived. He allows us to hope that things are going to improve for this motley collection of people, but it rarely does. His characters in this collection are down-trodden – disaffected workers with mean bosses, horrible colleagues and unforgiving spouses. Saunders has a propensity towards the dark side of humour. He tries to be polite but he’s pretty mad about the future I denied him He’s scariest when he does real kid things, like picking his nose and wiping it on the side of his sneaker When he tries to be scary he gets it all wrong. The unfortunate child got caught in a wave machine at the theme park when the narrator wasn’t paying attention and now they are locked together in a mutually unhappy relationship.Įven though he’s dead, he’s basically still a kid. The protagonist of The Wavemaker Falters is also haunted by a ghost, this time, by the ghost of a boy he killed. When Civilwarland’s decline comes, it comes fast. The narrator is scared of losing his menial job in the park, so keeps to himself the fact that he is haunted by the ghosts of the McKinnon family who used to work the land and stays quiet when a Vietnam veteran is hired to take care of the gangs of teenage drinkers in the park, with live ammunition. But in the midst of a budget crunch one can’t necessarily hang the moon. I’ve argued and argued that we need to update. The helmets we distribute look like bowls and the paint’s peeling off. When visitors first come in there’s this cornball part where they sit in this kind of spaceship and supposedly get blasted into space and travel faster than the speed of light and end up in 1865.

The title story is set in Civilwarland – a park that simulates life in the mid-19 th century, but could do with a revamp. If this all sounds a little heavy and serious, it may be, but this is also a wickedly funny collection – sharp, witty, stylised and incredibly clever.

Not for the workers, the different, the Flawed. These theme parks, pastoral compounds of the past, promise refuge and safety from the chaos of the outside world, but only for those who own them or use them. George Saunders collection of short stories and a novella feature an America of the future – an America of historical theme parks, environmental disaster, deformed outcasts and a tyrannical government.

Reading Civilwarland in Bad Decline last week felt worryingly prophetic.

Civilwarland in bad decline