Review: The Maw by Taylor Zajonc

The Maw by Taylor Zajonc

Having enjoyed a bit of caving in my high school years, I have always appreciated a good thriller set in an underground environment. The Maw is that and more. Milo is an historian who has all but killed his career by pushing a theory about how explorer Lord Riley DeWar met his end and getting involved in a romantic relationship with one of his students. Now he has a bizarre chance to fix both of these errors by joining a top secret expedition exploring a super cave in Tanzania. The expedition’s billionaire funder has a theory that, contrary to popular belief, DeWar met his end in this cave. More important to Milo, the student he had the relationship, now a well-respect physician, is also going on the expedition.

 

So Milo, with no experience in caving, joins a trip that is figuratively going to the center of the earth and everything goes wrong right from the beginning. The billionaire has not shared all of his information with his team. Another expedition between DeWar’s and their own has found the cave and tried to seal it with explosives. There is also evidence that native peoples with stone-age level technology have impossibly found their way thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface millennia before the current expedition. Something unusual exists in this cave and it is changing the explorers in ways that are both exciting and terrifying. Cut off from the surface both by a hemorrhagic disease infecting the camp and a huge storm, the explorers find themselves seeking to understand a mystery that dates back to the beginning of the human species while surviving tremendous challenges thousands of feet below the surface in utter darkness.

 

This sort of novel usually promises more than it can provide, but not in this case. Zajonc has put together a remarkable mystery that truly does explain why humans are different than all the other species on this planet. And he accomplishes this while conveying the claustrophobic terror of trying to survive without support deep in the bowels of the earth. It’s a truly remarkable accomplishment.

 

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.