Rebe's Reviews > The Maze Runner

Warning: This review might give you a burning desire to read The Maze Runner to find out if it's really as awful as I say it is. (This has already happened to my friend Camille.) Read my review/rant about this book at your own risk.

The unsatisfying premise of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner is: (view spoiler)[there’s been a “Flare” that’s left the world in a post-apocalyptic state. A group called WICKED has taken it upon themselves to save humanity. (hide spoiler)]

The way this organization decides to save humanity, however, strikes me as illogical and implausible. They build a fake world, complete with a giant maze and engineered creatures called Grievers. They’re supposed to be scary monsters, but that was a fail. Mainly what I got out of the book was that even though they have weapon-arms, they’re squishy, slow, and clumsy and make noise way ahead of time so that you can always tell they’re coming and run away from them. They also squeal and clack and display limited intelligence.

But that’s not all! WICKED also installs an expensive irrigation system (because this whole huge place is indoors, with no rainfall), and the “Creators” (WICKED staff) go to the trouble of (view spoiler)[raising orphans and meddling with their minds to wipe their memories and control their bodies whenever convenient. (hide spoiler)] They invent a special Griever-delivered venom and give the Gladers (the protagonists) a supply of anti-venom to bring back select memories. For two whole years, the Gladers are expected to run around growing their own food and mapping out the Maze so they can eventually figure out its pattern and (view spoiler)[use the code to escape (hide spoiler)]. It’s two whole years of working to solve a (view spoiler)[meaningless (hide spoiler)] puzzle (while, in the outside world, time is probably of the essence), all so (view spoiler)[WICKED can see how the contestants respond to “variables.” (hide spoiler)] Yeah, right.

All of this represents a huge amount of effort, invention, and resources, and in the chaos of a post-apocalyptic setting, who would stop to do all this? I mean, really? It’d be a challenge to pull something like this off even in a healthy, prosperous society, let alone one where (view spoiler)[thousands are falling prey to some sort of plague. (hide spoiler)] It’d be wiser to go for something simple and resource-efficient. Instead, they basically create an extremely complex psychological game for a bunch of teenage boys who mostly seem pretty average to me, even though they were supposedly chosen for their above-average intelligence. I don’t get why these teens are supposed to be (view spoiler)[the ideal force to save humanity (hide spoiler)], but OK, let’s say they are the cream of the crop. So why did they have to go through a memory wipe and then the Maze? Dashner’s answer is that (view spoiler)[WICKED is training them and weeding out the weak from the strong. But why not just present them with the facts and send them through a straightforward training program, kind of like a police academy? Fail the weak ones and graduate the strong ones? Sidestep all the mind games and avoid a huge building project? (hide spoiler)]

These logical flaws are matched with a writing style so dull that I can't believe this is a bestseller. The melodramatic cliffhangers at the end of each chapter indicate that this is supposed to read like a thriller, with the reader glued to the page, constantly wondering if Thomas or one of his friends is about to die a gruesome death or make some useful discovery about the Maze. But I never felt a moment’s tension. I forced myself to keep reading, but there were some days where I got to the end of a chapter and put it down and didn’t pick it up again until two days later because I just didn’t care what happened to these characters.

And there’s a reason for that. Thomas and Minho were fairly well developed characters, but the others felt flat. They had different personalities, yes, but they were all one-dimensional. For example, Thomas’s enemy, Gally, is defined almost entirely through the fact that he hates and mistrusts Thomas. That’s literally all I know about his personality after reading this book. His character is never even remotely multifaceted; in every scene, he’s simply bitter/resentful and angry. Even his hatred of Thomas—his defining feature—is never given nuance; the question of whether Thomas deserves to be hated and whether Gally is thus a good guy or bad guy isn’t explored. His hatred is just a plot device, designed to make the reader wonder even more about Thomas’s life before the Glade, (view spoiler)[a.k.a. WICKED’s fake world (hide spoiler)]. He’s also never a serious threat to Thomas (view spoiler)[until the very end when he gets his hands on a huge knife (hide spoiler)], so their confrontations are kinda humdrum.

The relationships between important characters are also poorly developed in most cases. Thomas and Teresa, for example, have a really strong bond, but Dashner’s lazy about it. He just tells the reader that Thomas is drawn to Teresa instinctually (view spoiler)[because they knew each other before their memory wipes (hide spoiler)], and then they proceed to go from strangers to close friends without any kind of transition. There aren’t any scenes where they just hang out to talk about non-plot-related stuff, and that makes Teresa feel like Dashner’s pawn and not a real person. Teresa never earns the reader’s affection by being lovable/warm, brilliant (except for her telepathic skills, which aren’t that exciting), or unique. I can’t say Teresa is much more than a pretty face whose intelligence is alluded to sometimes, yet she’s a main character and (I’m guessing) Thomas’s future love interest.

Annoyingly, Teresa and Thomas are obviously special snowflakes, but they don’t struggle for it enough. They seem to have normal intelligence, the random ability of telepathy, and above average abilities to run long and fast, kill Grievers, and navigate mazes—all skills they never work to get better at. They’re just born being awesome at everything and conveniently remembering enough info at just the right time to save the day. Meanwhile, those around them come off as incompetent, cowardly, and not very creative.

I know I basically just ripped this book to shreds, but I can acknowledge that it has potential. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie, mostly because Dylan O’Brien is playing Thomas and he’s one of my favorite actors, but also because there’s enough excitement in this book that the movie will probably be entertaining. The set should be interesting to see as well, and I’d really like to know what exactly a Griever looks like. (I’ve been imagining it as a lumpy potato with slime and little wheels and disco lights and some random surgical instruments poking out in random places. I doubt that’s accurate. If it is, Dashner and I have vastly different definitions of ‘scary monster.’)

I can’t believe this book is as popular as it is, and I have zero curiosity about Book 2.

BONUS PET PEEVE: They randomly (and frequently) say made-up words like "klunk." No explanation for this. It feels like Dashner's just unnecessarily censoring himself against expletives because of his YA audience.

(EDIT: I was wrong about the movie. I was so wrong. I have now seen this movie and it just reminded me why I was so frustrated with the book. Even Dylan O'Brien couldn't salvage this movie for me.)