Not So Fun Night in Funland: William Peden’s “Night in Funland”
David Pendery

“Look…over there; can’t you see the top of the Ferris wheel?”

With these words, a seemingly ordinary middle-class father identifies the central terror that awaits him and his recently ill daughter, Amanda, a wispy, outwardly cheerful little girl with “eyes sooty in the darkness,” dressed in blue and white clothing with an ethnic flavor. The Ferris wheel he espies will in only a few minutes introduce a gripping alarm and horror into his life, and pluck his adored daughter away into the night forever.

The story we are examining, “Night in Funland” by William Peden (1913-1999), conveys what is surely the darkest, most dreaded possibility that haunts any loving parents’ consciousness—the sheer terror of the loss of a child swept into nothingness, with no meaning or explanation of how the youth was taken away, and with death the likely finality—though in fact the parent, as in this story, may not exactly know if this dreadful outcome is true, hanging onto one last hope in the midst of his wild, terrified cries for his daughter to return. Little Amanda will board the spinning Ferris Wheel in Funland Amusement Park, rising and falling before her father’s adoring eyes, she smiling and tender, exhibiting all the love her father lavishes on her, before rising one last time and disappearing forever, simultaneously vanishing into the pleasurable, colored tendrils of Funland,, and the grim environment with nearby “crouching mountains,” “ragged darkness” and a “naked and blue…desert,” with “scattered…bones to the ends of the vanished watershed.” Here we see the shadow lands, black night, loss, and passing, so close to brightness, warm days, blessings, and life, all astir with definite indications of the death that stalks this father and daughter (demise spanning the past into the present). To be sure this disturbing, incongruous, side-by-side picture of the one positive and one negative view of life and awareness is a central feature of this entire story. The father in the story often asks the daughter to be clear about her own awareness, to confirm what she sees around her, sanctioning its validity and reality. At one point he asks her, “This is the nicest park ever. I have never been in a nicer park, have you, Amanda?” as if to endorse in his own mind and hers that things are not what they appear—they are in fact better than what they are actually perceiving. She agrees with his assessment, but in a word, the “hard gray ground” and “hard-packed grayish dirt”—to say nothing of the “naked and blue…desert,” littered with “scattered…bones” noted above—do not in fact appear to be the “clean and orderly” environment that the father or the daughter tries to envision.

I should warn readers now that there virtually no commentary has been written about this story, and very little about its author. Therefore, there are few external references included in this analysis. It has been said that Peden’s work exhibits “The presence of a consciousness larger than that of any of the characters of a particular story, an illumination above and beyond plot, setting, theme and incident” (Current-Garcia 1073). This same reviewer stated that “Night in Funland” is “a poignant tale of parental anguish whose uncluttered structure, deft pacing, and finely etched characterization bring both Chekhov and Joyce to mind” (Current-Garcia 1073; perhaps an overstatement reflecting on a story seven pages long, but so be it). On Peden as a writer, the Virginia Quarterly Review said that “His descriptions and characterizations are sharp and vivid; his style flexible,” while the Saturday Review stated that "Peden's stories charm us with their quiet and impeccable craftsmanship” (both from The New Orleans Review). There is little or no other commentary I can draw upon.

I was pleased and somewhat astonished to find that this story is available to all, free of charge, online. It is still provided by the original publisher, the University of New Mexico (which may have noted the small classic status of this story, and preserved it). See the Sources Cited for the location, and enjoy the read.

This analysis will be brief—as noted, “Night in Funland” itself is only seven pages long. It can be seen alongside my analysis of a similarly classic but overlooked tale of terror, “One Remarkable Day in August: William Fryer Harvey’s ‘August Heat,’” published in Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror in March 2023. This analysis was also brief, and also based on a very short story.

“Night in Funland” begins with the father and daughter traveling west—into the coming darkness, with its sense of mortality, a “little death” (Cardinal Directions), and the father explicitly saying they are not traveling east—into the light of day, joy, hope, birth, renewal. How true these symbolic realities will soon become. As they near the park, there is talk of the past, a previous journey, perhaps to the same location. In fact, throughout the story the references to past life and lived experience give rise to feelings of what might have been hope and faith, though always with an uncomfortable feeling of pain, possible loss, and forfeiture. Such references include, “Of course it is, Amanda, don’t you remember? You will remember,” “…how glad he was that she was so much better,” “the old days,” “I have never been in a nicer park, have you, Amanda?”, “No, it is the nicest ever,” “I have been worried about you. I do not want you to get sick again, ever.” I will refer to these statements again in this analysis, and in this light note here that at one point the father queerly extolls Amanda, “you must remember this is the first time…” (emphasis added), contradicting what had just been said about “remembering” the park from a prior visit, creating the dichotomous feeling of past and the present overlapping one another, with both happiness and sadness present. All of this creates an uncomfortable feeling of an ill fit of time having passed, having been experienced, but then again no, of not having passed at all, with no evocation of actual lived experience, all in fact a “first time.” This feeling suffuses the action throughout the story, even as the father continues to hang onto the past.

Amanda asks if they are in fact traveling in the right direction (east or west), to the right location. She is assured they are, and they arrive at Funland, which is immediately recognized as “fun” by Amanda, and on its surface, appears to be “so clean and orderly”, “a clean bright place on the mesa,” with “no freak tents with greenish two-headed babies in discolored alcohol-filled jars.” “This is the nicest park ever,” the father says, “I have never been in a nicer park, have you, Amanda?” “No,” she answers, “it is the nicest ever.” They will repeat this appraisal. Attractive, pleasing rides abound, tasty treats await, and the father wants to “pull her close to him and kiss her and pat her thin hair and tell her how glad he was that she was so much better and they could go on a spree together as they had in the old days.” Here is the first mention of the illness that had recently stricken Amanda, which is haunting the father’s consciousness—early in the story, in a seemingly calm moment, he finds “his heart…thumping and the palms of his hands were damp,” a sign of the anxiety that torments him constantly. Soon he will brusquely pull Amanda’s fingers out of a snow cone, not wishing her to cool her fingers, with the apology and reproof, “1 am so sorry, honey, but I have been worried about you. You must not mind when I act like this. It is only because I love you so much, and I do not want you to get sick again, ever.” Later he will fret about children clambering off a train, and that “one of them might cough on her or something; it wouldn’t help her, god knows, to catch a cold or something just now.” Even at this point, with their “return” to the park and life seemingly returning to normal, he finds that her “thinness as like a blow” (Amanda’s “thin hair” was also noted). This illness is never identified in the story, and readers are left to wonder what childhood or adult malady Amanda may have had, and just how serious it may have been.

Even the snow cone itself has dark forebodings, with Amanda first announcing, “Isn’t it good? It gets sweeter as it goes down,” and the father bleakly wondering “how few things were sweeter as they got down.” They then walk about and encounter a chimpanzee in a cage, “Rollo. Just Recently Arrived from the Belgian Congo Region of West Africa. A two-year old chimpanzee, just four and a half months in captivity.” Amanda is immediately attracted to what she calls “an anth ... anthropoid,” and the brightly dressed animal gnaws food with “tiny-nailed hands” and it “gaze[s] at the child with stone-dark eyes, like small pools of night in his clean tan face.” The animal “dropped like a sunbeam to the floor,” and “he opened his great lips, and smiled” at Amanda. The chimpanzee provides a measure of pleasure and animalistic amiability that is in the main missing in the rest of the story. Rollo even “glided noiselessly on his well-oiled skates, skating surely and competently and enjoying himself.”

Amanda claps her hands and Rollo leaps about happily, and other visitors stop to watch. A rude man then tosses food to Rollo, who almost stumbles, and Amanda barks at him “You’ve frightened him. You’ve frightened him.” He angrily shouts back, and stalks off. “What a horrid, nasty man,” Amanda says. “Can’t we see Rollo again?”, she asks her father. “Won’t he come out again?”. Rollo will indeed make a final appearance in the story.

From here Amanda approaches the fated Ferris Wheel. Amanda gazes at “its swift smoothness, sparkling, a small circle of lights winking near the hub, and a larger circle glowing in the middle, and the whole great machine alive with an outline of red and blue and green neon tubing.” The wheel’s carriages are colored red and black, and “swam miraculously into the cool dry blackness of the starless night.” All seems well. Children and adults are seated in the carriages, some singing happily, some clasping each other, boys “clowning and roaring.” The wheel’s operator competently stops and starts the machine.

“Must we ride this now, Amanda?” the father worriedly asks. “Oh yes,” she replies. “Can I, oh can I go all alone like you promised when I was sick?”

“Let me go with you,” he says.

“Don’t be a meanie,” she says. “Please, Daddy, remember, you promised.”

Here again we see references to the past, which constantly hang about Amanda and her father.

“All right/’ her father says. “All right, but you must be very, very careful. You must promise to sit right in the middle of the seat, and you must keep your hands tight on the bar all the time. Do you promise?”. The father always attending to his child’s safety.

“Brownie’s honor,” she promises, and then quickly kisses him—Amanda, always loving and cheerful.

Amanda boards the Ferris Wheel, with her father further telling her to take care and sit squarely in the middle.

“Oh Daddy,” she says, a last note of reproach and insistence not to worry. She boards, and rises for the first time into the night sky, the father anxiously watching from below, she “disappearing into the darkness.” Suddenly his first fear surfaces, and “his scrotum tightened. as he thought of her, up there alone in the dark.” He then envisions the bleak landscape, as described above, and “the city swimming in a blob of red and blue and green and orange and white lights.”

Amanda “in a black carriage” reappears, rises again, and is then again seen below and rising. “This was no fly-by-night carnival,” thinks the father, lighting a cigarette and feeling his last sense of permanence and safety.

He continues viewing the carriages as they glide before his line of sight, “one red then one black, then another red and another black.” And then the worst happens, he loses sight of Amanda, and “Suddenly, painfully, a hard ball of fear exploded in his throat.” That fast he has realized that an emergency has arisen. He realizes that he cannot remember which carriage Amanda had been in, red or black (it had been described as black). This is an absurdity, he thinks, and “He forced himself to stand still and look with studied calm at the swiftly turning wheel.” He finds his hands shaking as he realizes that Amanda can no longer be seen on the wheel “Sweat drenched his back and upper legs. With an effort as conscious and deliberate as holding his breath under water he controlled himself. This is ridiculous, he thought. This is an optical illusion…I will count each carriage very carefully as it goes past, and then I will see her, and soon the wheel will stop, and she will get out, and we will have a very good laugh about this.”

The father continues to count the carriages as they swing by, noting various adults and children in their seats. One last empty carriage swings by, and “his heart suddenly soared like a geyser only to sink hideously.” He has espied one child, but it was not Amanda. Then he views other passengers, but still no Amanda. “With a cry like an animal’s” he leaps over the steel railing and clutches at the attendant’s arm. “Stop it. For God’s sake, stop the wheel.” The attendant does so, and he sees one last “empty black carriage [swinging] like a dry leaf above his head.”

“My daughter,” he gasps “the little one with the black hair…For the love of God, where is my daughter? I think it is time you let the little girl off. The one with the black hair. She has on a blue suit and a cap. You remember.”

“Yes sir,” the attendant says, and a note of relief surges through the father.

“I lost sight of her for a moment. In the dark. My eyes. It gave me a turn, for a moment.”

The operator brings the carriages down one by one, children muttering and complaining. The father is then screaming, “Amanda! Good God, good God. Where are you, baby?” He screeches and roars as others watch him and gaze “questioningly at the Ferris wheel glowing in the distance.” “Amanda,” he continues to cry, and “the sound tore and twisted its way above the clanking of the scenic railway and the put-put-put of the miniature tractors and the wheezing of the merry-go-round.” The end has come for this distraught, terrified father.

And then, finally, no less than Rollo eerily reappears, the curtains of his cage opening “noiselessly,” the light flowing in. The chimp climbs silently down from his high chair and “He listened intently to the wild broken cries in the night.” He then looks up, “his tan face against the bars and gazed with comprehending eyes at the dark figure with uplifted head outlined like a corpse against the spokes of the great wheel blazing in the night.” With this glimpse into the unknown, this tale of terrifying loss concludes. A worried and attentive father has been looking after his “recently ill” daughter with constant vigilance, and his attentiveness has culminated in this horror, with an “anthropoid” looking up into what almost appears to be—almost—a better, “uplifted” reality—but stained with apparent death, Amanda apparently now a “corpse.” But think again. The “dark figure” seen by Rollo may certainly refer to Amanda’s own “darkness,” that is, her black hair and “the shadows beneath her sooty eyes”—but we might wonder, is what Rollo sees in fact her father? For no doubt by this time he probably looks and feels like a dead man. This may be an unanswered question alongside another huge unanswered question that this story poses: What has actually happened to Amanda? Parents everywhere who read this story will pause, a bit bewildered, stunned by the horror they have witnessed, in awe of just what can go terribly wrong in the midst of what appears to be, almost, but is never quite, a very normal life.

As noted above, during this story, orientations of past life and lived experience combine with that which is present and lived now, giving rise to feelings of what might have been optimism and belief—though always with an excruciating feeling of discomfort, illness and amercement. Looking across time, this may be to ask, what exactly was the status of little Amanda in all of this tale? Learning of her apparently serious illness, could it be possible that in fact she was not actually alive during any of this action, that she had in fact died before (which certainly seems like a possibility in light of the father’s constant discomfort and feelings of loss and injury), that her life and presence is entirely remembered and retrieved from the past by her father, brought into his consciousness with a trip to a location he had visited more than once with his daughter, this man wanting some note of hope in his disappointed and anguished life after the tragic loss of his daughter—a tragic loss from the past, brought to brilliant and distressing light in the present at the end of the story?

All of the above gives rise to a combined feeling of the past annexing itself onto the present, the two life phases intermingling in the consciousness of characters (that is, primarily, the father), creating an “illumination above and beyond plot, setting, theme and incident.” This is probably a common thematic approach in much literature and memoir (and this story has the slight feeling of being just that, a true-life account of lived experience). Again, all is stained with anxiety and what might have been near death—or as noted above, actual death. The ultimate message is clear, sad, heartrending—life at its worst can be a terror, with loss, bereavement, deprivation and veritable calamity lurking behind any corner, across any passage, around any bend—and, terrifyingly, at the high point of any rise. We hope and pray that Amanda cannot be gone, cannot have disappeared into thin air, cannot have exited our existence. We miss her presence as we look skyward, achingly desiring her return, her descent, her re-arrival into our lives and arms.

Sources Cited

“Cardinal Directions: West Symbolism & Meaning,” What is my Spirit Animal.com, located at https://whatismyspiritanimal.com/cardinal-directions/west-symbolism-meaning/.

Current-Garcia, Eugene, 1968.? “Night in Funland (Book Review).” The Southern Review; Vol. 4, Issue 4. Located at https://thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Autumn-1968/136/.

The New Orleans Review, Loyola University of the South, Vol. 1, No. l, Fall 1968. Located at https://www.neworleansreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/nor_1_1.pdf.

Peden, William, 1959. “Night in Funland,” the University of New Mexico Quarterly, Volume 29, Issue. 4.
Located at https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3785&context=nmq.

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