Dying for amusement

Are we amusing ourselves to death? That’s the risk some of the characters run in Daniel Zomparelli’s metatextual novel, Super Castle Fun Park.

Zomparelli, a Los Angeles-based poet and award-winning short story writer, interweaves narratives both online and off through prose, in-game chats and a periodic chorus of the dead.

The characters interact in what is only referred to as “The Game,” a multiplayer fantasy platform of battles and side quests, and in real life. But not all point-of-view characters are created equal.

Dario (User: @FliporFlop) has the most scenes and is (nearly) the only first-person narrator. He takes up indefinite residence at the fantasy-themed hotel in the titular theme park while he attends to his ailing aunt.

His boyfriend back home, Jeremy (User: JerBear83), also has a sizable presence as he battles hallucinations of his own dead bodies and people he’d rather forget, as well as a condition called the Pattern.

There are multiple speculative elements at play in Zomparelli’s imaginative, often snarky and at times poignant novel, some more developed than others.

Jeremy’s condition, in which he has trouble navigating social interactions but relishes mastering systems and how they operate, seems autism-coded.

Others have the Storm, an apparent stand-in for anxiety or mania; or the Fog, akin to depression or dissociation.

But those are not as explicit as the literal ghosts that haunt some of the characters (and the reader, via outbursts from the Chorus).

That aside, the social observations ring true. As Jeremy awaits a food delivery, he “scrolls through his phone: terror, turmoil, famine, another oil spill in the ocean nearby, another car accident pileup. He scrolls and scrolls, circling the news like a vulture, picking up each sorrow to keep in his brain.”

There are other players, such as User: @MsLeFayte, a.k.a. Chelsea, who relishes repeatedly destroying Dario and Jeremy’s team online, while in real life she’s the resident spiritual medium at a casino, overwhelmed by other people’s ghosts.

But the spine of the story, and most complex character, is Dario. He cheats on Jeremy with a security guard at his hotel even as he lies about why he’s really in town. He strives to keep his aunt’s spirits up as her condition deteriorates, helping manage medical care and getting her food she can stomach.

Emotional intelligence isn’t his strong suit. “I zone out again,” he thinks when offered compassion from his aunt’s friend. “I’m trying, but a mixture of exhaustion and weariness about people perceiving me as sad takes me out.”

His dying aunt sees that keenly, even as she tries to ease the consequences of a family secret he sees as a betrayal. “Some memories are too hard to say aloud,” she tells him. “(W)e can either hold on to them too dearly and let them sink us, or we can do our best to move on and swim.”

In the end, there may be too many moving parts for it to all work — the other first-person narrative (User: Account Deleted) tells a complete story but only appears once, and the Chorus doesn’t always make sense (and perhaps isn’t supposed to, since the dead, per Chelsea, don’t necessarily know what’s going on either).

It is, however, a studied look at how amusements ostensibly meant to bring pleasure — amusement parks, multiplayer online games — are often isolating, and how the only real changes in people’s lives come when they spend enough time together to love, and challenge, each other.

As one of Jeremy’s hallucinatory corpses tells him, before dissolving and turning into a blanket on the floor, “(i)t’s not your fault. You know, you’re allowed to forgive yourself for past mistakes, or let go thing that you couldn’t control.”

David Jón Fuller is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His debut novel, Venue 13, will be published later this month by Turnstone Press.