The Maze Runner Trilogy by James Dashner

                CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENDINGS OF BOOKS ONE AND TWO

If I were to post a review like this on YouTube or really anywhere else online, it would rattle the monkey cage pretty well; I don’t like this trilogy. The Maze Runner is a series about Thomas, a boy whose memory is erased. When he wakes up he finds himself trapped in a maze with about 50 other boys, shifting walls, and deadly monsters that are found at night. He and his friends escape the maze then are taken to another facility, and this is when book two starts. They have to travel 100 miles north to a “safe haven” across an uninhabitable desert known as the scorch. There is also a pandemic happening which quite literally hijacks people’s brains and drives them insane. This is where book three starts and Thomas and his friends are now in the headquarters of WICKED, an organization which as you may have guessed is considered the “bad guys'' by Thomas and his friends. Thomas and two of his friends escape WICKED’s headquarters, and join a group called the right arm, which intends to destroy WICKED, and that is where I’ll end this summary.

First, I should say what is good about this series as little as there is. As relatively linear and simple as it is, the plot is decent and very unpredictable. The worldbuilding is alright with a lot of unique ideas and is one of the best parts of this series. However, the best part of this series is a difficult to describe sense of immersion in the first half of the first book. Immersion is usually a term used when describing video games, but this book manages to replicate it to an extent. What I mean is that Thomas is both a character and a vessel through which the reader sees and interacts with the world. This is most likely due to Thomas not hiding anything he sees from the reader at the beginning, and his memory being erased.

As I said, this “immersion” lasts for roughly the first half of the first book until it feels like Thomas is hiding something he saw from the reader. It may not even be that he’s hiding something, just that he summarized what he saw instead of showing it to the reader is enough to break the sense of “immersion” the book had built up. As well, you know how I said the plot was very unpredictable? Dashner has managed to take unpredictability to a fault. There are a few points in the series where my predictions probably would’ve been better than what actually happened. Another problem with the plot is that it’s unnaturally fast paced, and there is barely any down time at all for characters to reflect or do anything. Finally, the worldbuilding, while interesting, is often delivered in exposition dumps which get old quickly.

However, my main problem with this series is it’s characters. They’re excessively edgy and snappy especially considering they’re teens, and they constantly have these “superhero lines” which don’t belong anywhere in this series. Another problem is something I mentioned in my previous post when talking about The Three Musketeers: cringey romantic subplots. There is a girl named Teressa, and every time she and Thomas speak to each other I want to stop reading. As well, there’s this despicable love triangle that Dashner keeps killing off and then bringing back like he can’t decide whether or not to keep it, and finally at the very end of the series he decides to keep it.

As much as there is to like about this series: the ideas, the world, that sense of immersion at the beginning, there is a lot more to dislike about it. The overly edgy characters, the exposition dumps, the unnaturally fast plot, the cringey romantic subplots, the abominable love triangle, and more which I don’t have space to mention, is all too much for me to give this series a higher rating. I give it a 2/5

-Ben