A contemporary horror/dark fantasy novella with a strong grounding in its setting
Riley is a Jersey Girl. She lives near the Shore, and has a season badge at Asbury Park. She has been drifting since before she graduated from high school, because her best friend Tara disappeared months ago. The last place she was seen was Thrill Park, a family-owned amusement park. And Riley is determined to find out what happened to her. Even if she has to become part of the staff of Thrill Park to do it.
This is Amusement Park Arcana by Jennifer R. Donohue.
One of the book’s strongest points is the voice. We get a first-person point of view from Riley, full of her opinions, determinations, fears and doubts. She has been devastated by losing Tara, and trying to find her is what keeps her going. Even as strange things happen to her at the park, she keeps that drive, that internal voice, that forward momentum going. Riley feels authentic, and we get to understand her deal in a short space thanks to the author’s writing. It shows just how broken a person Riley has become since Tara’s disappearance.
Another strength is the grounded worldbuilding. The book is set in coastal New Jersey and expertly captures the feel of a place I didn’t grow up in, but visited often enough to find the sense of place to be in accord with my memories. There are a couple of comparisons and allusions to an infamous amusement park, Action Park. Having been to Action Park several times growing up in the area, this was an excellent reference point for me to really get a sense of how Thrill Park compares, or doesn’t. The horror and real life dangers of Action Park are different from the more supernatural ones of Thrill Park, although there is an attraction in the fictional Thrill Park that definitively evoked its Action Park counterpart.
That handling of the mundane elements is strong, perhaps almost too dominant a flavor in the novella. I think I would have liked more of the supernatural elements, which were applied with a lighter touch than most of the fantasy fiction I read. But perhaps that is part of the point this story. The mundanity of Riley coming to terms with Tara’s fate and processing her feelings about it has more narrative weight.
That said, I was darkly amused by what was for me the central supernatural element, that the penumbra of mundane space coincidentally leans into a hot topic in horror and fantasy: liminal spaces. And of course, the recent movie Backrooms. The worker and employee spaces in an amusement park are a backrooms-like liminal space if someone not of that public (or someone new to it, like Riley) should stumble into it. It’s a space that we don’t normally see, but logically they exist.¹
And that brings me to the title of the book and what the author focuses on, and what I focused on. The title of the book is Amusement Park Arcana, and there is a tarot reading as a centerpiece and a station on the Riley’s path to find out what happened to Tara. At the point it happens we’ve already had a weird/fantastic note. And the tarot reading leads Riley to get into the liminal space where she finds out what really happened to Tara. That reading, given the title, is a big sign.
Perhaps it’s because of my lack of real knowledge of the tarot that I didn’t focus on the details when I was reading it, but looking back now, my focus on the liminal space, dictated by recent media, led me to not realizing that the tarot reading is the real focus of this story. Riley’s reading has her embody the card she represents: the Knight of Swords. This card, I am given to understand, is an energetic, driven figure, who wants to accomplish their goals at any and all costs. That certainly is Riley, who has responded to her best friend disappearing at an amusement park by charging in and signing up to be hired by the park so that she can investigate it herself. Rushing in where angels fear to tread is this archetype.
That, indeed, is Riley. Rushing and determined. Sort of like the story itself, come to think of it.
Thus, Amusement Park Arcana rushes by, in a similar manner, quickly. I am not sure about the ending; it felt a little underwhelming to me. But the story up to that part, for its relative balance of mundane versus supernatural, is solid. It flows well and quickly, and as I think about it in retrospect a week later, especially as noted above with the tarot implications, my initial hard feelings about the ending have softened. It’s not as much of a resolution as I might have liked, but for other readers, it might be enough.
Highlights:
- Great sense of place in New Jersey
- Good use of tarot as magic and central theme
- Strong first-person POV protagonist
Reference: Donohue, Jennifer R. Amusement Park Arcana [self-published, 2026].
¹ Now thinking back to my days of working in a supermarket, and not really realizing at the time how I was often in spaces that we would now consider liminal. I know the backrooms of Pathmark (rest in peace) and can walk them in my mind to this day. But a stranger thrust into that space would be at sea.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
