been reading some Lord of the Flies Adjacent Literature over the past few weeks (i.e. “books similar to lord of the flies” -> google) because lord of the flies is one of my favorite books, so I’ll do some reviews and rank each of them.
Ranked from best to worst:
1. The Troop by Nick Cutter
2. House of Stairs by William Sleator
3. FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven
4. The Long Walk by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
5. The Laws of the Skies by Gregoire Courtois
6. The Butterfly Revolution by William Butler
Reviews (there will be vague spoilers):
The Troop
(Short summary for those who haven’t read: 5 boy scouts & their scout leader go on a trip to an island that’s completely deserted except for 1 starving man infected with genetically modified worms that consume a person from the inside, and of course the worms spread to the campers & most of them die.)
I liked this book the most, and it’s overall the strongest pick considering that it’s got an interesting story with the scifi/horror elements surrounding the killer worms, the characters are pretty good, and the book still feels relevant to our current era (published 2014). [I also kind of have to like this book because of all the worm content considering that my blog name is worm themed* - the book also references the “guess I’ll go eat worms” song several times, which has been in my blog description/title for idk maybe a few years now.]
Initially I thought the characters weren't that good because most of them fit into a cliche stereotype (jock, nerd, psychopath, funny guy, normal guy), but this was the first book I read out of the 6, so after the rest of them, I have to retract my judgement and admit that this book had the best written characters - it goes the most in depth into each character's psychology & background and is way more character focused than most of the other books. This sometimes gets in the way of the story though - the book often goes on tangents about a character’s background in order to make some metaphorical comparison to an element or emotion felt in the current scene, which tends to slow down the pace and make the book less compelling to read. I wouldn’t really consider this much of an issue though, since the characters are one of the strongest parts of the book - if they were more generic, the book wouldn’t be worth reading.
But in my opinion, the best parts of the book are all the gore and horror elements. The way the worms kill people/animals is pretty gruesome, and all the body horror stuff is memorable and repulsive (in a good way because this is horror) - I’m still thinking about the scene where one of the humans eats the huge dead worm carcass (yumm!!!!). There's also a good amount of animal abuse in this book that might be tough to read. The chimpanzee and turtle scenes are pretty brutal, and there's also kitten and insect murder & torture, though I think the author really held back on the kitten murder compared to what he was willing to write for the others. I liked the deaths of the campers the most though, and out of the other 5 books this one does character death the best - the characters are interesting and likeable, so it has more of an emotional impact when they die, and the gore isn’t too excessive without much reason or skimmed over like in some of the other books.
[*If I’m being honest I had no real reason to call this blog wormmurder and I don’t feel that strongly about worms either way, so it’s kind of an empty signifier - but I’ll play along and say that I like this book because of all the worms in it. The real reason I like this book is because of the self-immolation scene, which was peak.]
House of Stairs
(Summary: 5 orphans are stuck in a place that resembles an MC Escher painting - no apparent exit/walls/floors, only stairs - and in order to receive food, they figure out they have to perform specific actions - a choreographed type of dance and eventually cruelty towards each other.)
I really liked this book a lot, which was surprising to me because I didn’t expect much from a YA book written in the 70’s. It would have been my top choice if it weren’t for some outdated stuff, like how it follows the trope of villainizing and mocking fat characters, though this seems common for its time period given how much it appears in Roald Dahl’s stories and even still persists in more modern stuff, like the Harry Potter books. I also think this trope is used for a metaphorical reason, for the character to be a representation of the greed of the wealthy upper class, since the story and characters are metaphorical in nature.
The symbolic aspects of the book definitely made me want to think about this book the most, because it feels like there’s a clear point that it’s trying to make, in a way that’s more direct than the other books. The characters are placed in an unfamiliar situation where their only orders are being pavlovian trained into them by a machine, which presents the moral dilemma of choosing to obey the system and be cruel towards one another to get food, or disobey orders and starve to death. Their choices imply that people who conform to social norms are more susceptible to being controlled by authority, which is influenced by a person’s background/identity; the characters that find it easier to fit in to society - the fat character who comes from a wealthy background and the heterosexual coded boy & girl - are the ones who conform and try to enforce the system, while the outsider characters - the sensitive boy and rebellious girl, who are pretty clearly gay & lesbian coded - refuse to go along with the cruelty.
The book is mainly about nonconformity and the potential cruelty of human nature & authority, which makes the book’s message still relevant to current society as long as war still exists. It also seems to come from a place of frustration with compulsory heterosexuality from the way the heterosexual couple’s relationship quickly becomes abusive and how it’s more sympathetic to the gay/lesbian characters, which is surprising for a book from the 70’s. At one point I was afraid there would be a forced romantic subplot for the two leads, but no, it’s only gay-lesbian solidarity in the end, which was good to see. The message of the book and the interesting setting made the book pretty memorable, so I’ll probably be thinking about this one for a while.
Fantasticland
(Summary: A hurricane causes a few hundred employees to be stranded at the theme park they work at for a few weeks, most of them are young/college age, and they eventually split up into tribes and start killing each other.)
This book was a really fun read, probably the most entertaining of the 6. It’s written as a series of interviews from several important personnel related to or involved in the theme park murders after the fact, so the conversational style and fast pacing made it the most compelling to continue reading. The setting and concept behind it is really fun as well, it kind of reminds me of some SCP stories, particularly the one about being trapped in an ikea. It’s good for what it is, though I think it’s limited by its genre; it focuses on the facts of the case and figuring out the truth much like a true crime documentary - and like a true crime documentary, no matter how well it’s made, it always feels like it lacks something compared to other works that are considered great pieces of art, which I’d attribute to how the format approaches the subject from an impersonal distance that tends to make everything have less of an emotional impact.
Some other minor problems I had with the book have to do with the characters; overall a lot of them talk in the same style in the interviews, which makes none of them really stand out as a unique voice, outside of what is told about their actions in the theme park. There’s also a huge emphasis on the younger generation’s overreliance on social media, which feels out of touch. It doesn’t feel like the work has a good grasp on character motivations or psychology, especially with the interview with the main perpetrator at the end, which honestly should have been omitted because it made him seem cartoonishly bad and uninteresting, instead of more nuanced and morally gray, like how his actions were implied to be earlier in the book.
It’s still a pretty enjoyable book to read though. The interviews flow together really well, there’s a good amount of rootable characters, and it’s interesting to analyze each narrator to figure out how unreliable or truthful they are. There’s also a really good scene where a guy is being hunted down in an empty hotel by two people wearing warthog masks, that was well executed and maybe the only scene in any of these 6 books that felt actually scary for a moment.
The Long Walk
(Summary: 100 boys compete in a gameshow where they have to walk at a continuous 4mph speed without stopping or else they get shot, which goes on until 1 winner is left.)
This book was alright, though its main problem is that the story is pretty boring and that there’s a lot of attention paid to describing the setting by necessity of there being not much else to talk about plotwise, which gets dull and repetitive. There’s also the logistical issue that it just doesn’t seem realistic that anyone at any age could maintain a 4 mph walking speed over the course of 2-3 days without a single break, but I’ll put that aside because it’s fiction. My nonissue with it that I’m irrationally judging it for is that it’s not very similar to Lord of Flies, since there’s always authority figures present to enforce the rules even though they don’t interact much with the contestants; it’s more similar to the Hunger Games or Battle Royale, but way less exciting - all the contestants do is walk and talk to each other.
So with a boring plot like that, the dialogue and character interactions would have to be pretty interesting to make up for it. And it’s true; the characters were pretty good, though I get the feeling that this isn’t Stephen King’s best character work, based on some of the film adaptations of his books that I’ve seen and what little I’ve read of his other books. But still, learning about the characters’ backstories and seeing the friendships that develop made the book compelling enough to want to finish it, it was kind of like a morbid roadtrip where they all die on the way.
The thing I liked about the book that wasn’t much present in the others was that it really makes you contemplate what it would be like to die; the characters have to confront the inevitability of their death and come to terms with their disillusionment of not being able to win (they all participate willingly at the start to attempt to win the prize money & reward), which means they spend a lot of time imagining their death and fearing it every second of the way - it’s psychological torture as well as physical torture from being forced to walk unendingly. I also really liked one death scene with one of the more notable minor characters, where the guy’s guts spill out and it takes longer for him to die than anyone else. I would rate that the second best death scene in the 6 books, behind the best death scene in the Troop (death by self-immolation).
The Laws of the Skies
(Summary: A group of 12 first graders + 3 chaperones go on a camping trip and they all die.)
I didn’t like this one that much because it felt like it didn’t really do anything new or interesting with its ideas or characters, even though it came out recently in 2019. The book tells you right off the bat that everyone going on the trip is going to die, so it feels like you’re just reading to find out how each kid or adult is going to get killed, and there’s not much else to it than that. The deaths also don’t seem very realistic; I know the kids are supposed to be six but they die with all the fragility of a teapot shattering on the ground, it’s like they trip or get punched by another 6 year old and it’s instant death for them.
One thing I did like was how the book does a direct callback to the pig killing scene in Lord of the Flies, though it does the exact inverse of it, as in the hog kills the human instead, rape metaphor included and the pig literally tries to eat the kid. But damn is that scene gory. The kid had it coming, but I felt sorry for him because it was so brutal, and the scene kept going on for so long that it almost felt like the point of the book was the brutality against a 6 year old, even if he was a murderous psychopath. So 10/10 for the gore in that scene, but overall the story and characters aren’t that good, which makes the deaths not really that enjoyable or interesting - though weirdly most of the deaths seemed kind of comedic, so I’d compare this book to like a mid slasher movie.
The Butterfly Revolution
(Summary: A boy joins a summer camp and becomes caught up in a revolution where the campers revolt and imprison the counselors running it, establishing a governing system and trying to run things themselves without being discovered by authorities, which eventually leads to a few people being killed.)
This was ok. It’s probably a better work of literature than The Laws of the Skies, but it goes last because it’s incredibly dated and kind of boring. It’s told in the format of diary entries from one 13 year old boy attending the summer camp, so it’s limited to a perspective that is often ignorant to what’s actually going on and only contains reflections after the fact, which makes a lot of the action and deaths feel unimpactful, like it’s happening off-screen.
Also, it’s literally advertised that this book is similar to Lord of the Flies on the cover, but honestly it seems more thematically similar to something like Animal Farm, since the deaths are more like calculated political assassinations from a corrupt leader rather than something that occurs as a result of society & order devolving into chaos. It’s clearly commenting on McCarthyism and the Red Scare with the communist implications of their revolution, and I would suspect it’s doing something similar to Animal Farm with its one-to-one comparisons to political events/figures, but I’m not familiar enough with 1960’s era politics to make those connections, and it doesn’t really interest me to figure it out.
One thing the book has going for it is that the main character is occasionally kind of funny. Overall I probably laughed the most reading this book compared to the other 5, so it says a lot that I still found the main character pretty unlikeable in the end. He’s kind of an annoying stickler to certain rules that feel pointless and he acts subservient to older students that are clearly lying and trying to manipulate him, so it’s difficult to even root for him. The only actually brave thing he considers doing that may have redeemed him in my eyes - trying to kill the leader of the revolution - becomes unnecessary by authorities resolving everything for him before he can attempt an actual rebellion; in the end he remains an unheroic follower.
— — — — — — — — — —
Last thoughts on all the books: I think the real standout here is House of Stairs, but it’s hard to recommend it since it’s a bit dated and kind of obviously geared towards a younger audience. I did like the Troop the most, but at the same time I feel like it takes a lot of inspiration from Stephen King’s works and though I haven’t read a lot of his stuff, I would bet that he’s written several books better than the Troop. But even still, I’m not that interested in reading more of Stephen King because I find his works kind of tedious.
That’s about it, I pretty much enjoyed reading all of the books, but I’ve read a lot better books than these, so it’s kind of hard to recommend any of them unless there’s someone else out there who also really likes Lord of the Flies.
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