The next great American theme park?

The Hunger Games is being made into a theme park.

Amazon is opening a brick-and-mortar book store.

It seems certain that the apocalypse is nigh.

Before that happens, though, I have some ideas for kid’s-book-based theme parks, too:

Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet

This park is particularly interactive because the price of admission is a loved one. Said loved one will be placed in a cell made entirely of two-way mirrors where they will wait for the park visitor to retrieve them. The park entrance looks like a cozy, New England farmhouse where visitors are seated on plush couches to watch the park’s musical show (which plays every two hours), The WWitches. Yes, two “w”s for the “W” ladies: Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which. A spinning ride is next, in which visitors are plunged into darkness, disoriented, and released into unfamiliar surroundings. Other highlights include the giant, pulsating-brain bouncy house; a virtual reality experience that simulates the exploding of a star; and a session of passive-aggressive berating to remind visitors how much smarter their sibling is.

Who wouldn’t want to visit?

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

Visitors enter Lyra’s Oxford where any women not wearing skirts are accused of being witches and subsequently burned. Those visitors who survive Oxford line up to receive their dæmons (physical manifestations of their souls in the shape of animals). They then wait in an hour long line for a rollercoaster called “Escape from the Panserbjørne,” in which riders power their car by lying as loudly as they can. For added ambiance, the smell of rotting fish and bear urine is piped in. Visitors who make it through “Escape” are then greeted by a pack of men who throw bags over their heads and bustle them off to the North (a large freezer, obviously). Here, park visitors are weighed, measured, given food, and then thrown into metal cages for medical experiments. Visitors can leave, but they have to kill their friends first.

Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy

The entrance to the park is a perfectly recreated Prague. Visitors can wander around the fully functional city, interact with street performers, and attend an art class or two. In order to see the other levels of the park, though, visitors must locate the door to Brimstone’s workshop on their own. Once the door is found, visitors are swept into a larger-than-life chimaera workshop. Around the workshop is a series of doors, each leading to a different adventure: visitors may open a door and find themselves lugging elephant tusks across a city, getting stabbed by an angry tooth dealer, or wandering in an alternate dimension populated by what looks like monsters. Activities for little ones include a “create your own chimaera” tooth necklace–making workshop; identify-the-avenging-angel game; and a puppet show.

Orson Scott Card’s Ender Quintet

A perfect model for a park, Ender’s Game will have some physical locations — home, where someone bigger than the visitor will scare him with threats of pain; school, where someone bigger than the visitor will scare him with threats of pain; and Battle School, where someone bigger than the visitor will scare him with threats of pain — but will be primarily virtual reality. Visitors can choose to be Ender (taking part in battle simulations to prepare for war with the buggers), Valentine (writing political treatises), or Peter (trying to take over the world). Visitors do not return home from this park.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

Waify, sick-looking children point at visitors and warn them of terrible things to come.

Terrible things come.

This post is part of our Hunger Games Week. Click on the tags Hunger Games Week and Hunger Games to see all posts.