If you spent a day at Action Park you took your life in your hands

Before reading this book, the only thing I knew about Action Park was that it had lent its name to Shellac’s 1994 debut album At Action Park. Shellac, one of whose members is the notoriously contrarian music producer Steve Albini, play pummelling, hazardous, post-hardcore rock at ear-splitting volume and occasion much joy in anyone who chooses to attend one of their concerts, at which alcohol will be invariably consumed, pain endured and physical danger defied.

After reading it, I was struck by how fitting the title was both to the music Shellac play and the circumstances under which they play it, never mind that the group claim it’s a coincidence and that the drummer came up with the name ‘because it sounded cool’. Between 1978 and 1996, if you spent a day at Action Park, New Jersey, you took your life in your hands, after which you queued up to do it again. ‘The risk did not keep people away,’ observes Andy Mulvihill. ‘The risk is what drew them to us.’

Action Park was a Chessington World of Misadventures. It was founded by a go-ahead businessman called Gene Mulvihill, an entrepreneur who had no experience whatsoever of running an amusement operation. His son, whose memoir this book is, writes:

In contrast to Disney’s carefully conceived fantasy lands, my father pieced together a series of ambitious and often ill-advised attractions on the side of a ski mountain in rural New Jersey that he had come to own virtually by accident.

If you spent a day at Action Park you took your life in your hands, after which you queued up to do it again

Without the budget to compete with major players like Disneyland or SeaWorld, Gene became an unlikely pioneer in the industry into which he had not so much stumbled as crash-landed:

He set himself apart by promising guests they were in charge of their own thrills … ‘People like not being restricted,’ my father told reporters, who inevitably asked why his customers were bleeding.