Book review: The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Let me sum this book up in one word: moronic. At this point, I think my continual efforts to read YA dystopias are like some kind of latent masochistic streak because the vast majority I’ve trudged through are painfully stupid. But The Maze Runner breaks all new levels of dystopian stupid. I stuck with it, but I can’t really say there was much point to doing so.

Setting aside all my other problems, the biggest problem I had with the book was the baby talk cuss words. Klunk, shuck, slint-head and so on. Every single time someone spoke in this ridiculous way, it pulled me out of the story. It doesn’t help that much later on, characters begin using proper faux cuss words like crap and freakin’, or the phrase “hurts like a mother.” Which makes me ask, if they could use those words in the first place, why in the fuck were they inventing words like klunk? (Which is explained as being a bad word because “that’s the sound poo makes when it hits the water.”)

I don’t even get why the baby talk was needed when the characters are mostly teens. It might be argued that the book’s intended audience is supposed to be the 12-13 boy’s market, but if that’s the case, there’s a lot of pseudo cuss words that could have been used, like crap, darn, dang, heck, and so on. So yes, this one thing bothers me even more than the gaping plot holes in the story. It’s even more grating because of the other words used later, and because the book gets so fucking gory in the final chapters. It’s a massive tonal shift that had me asking “dafuq?” every few pages.

But let’s talk about some of the bigger problems. First of all, there’s Thomas, who upon arrival to the glade just knows he’s meant to be a maze runner. He’s not interested in helping do any other jobs, and when given any actual work, he quickly collapses from fatigue. Yet during a rescue out in the maze, he suddenly gains super strength and the ability to haul someone bigger than him up the side of a wall and tie them up using vines. Then after this herculean effort, he’s still got plenty of energy to fight a monster and run the maze with another boy. No, y’all, I just don’t buy it. Once he’s a maze runner, he has amazing powers of recuperation that come out of nowhere. No, man. I Don’t. Fucking. Believe. It.

Aside from Thomas, no one else has anything resembling character development. Even Chuck, who’s Thomas’ sidekick of sorts, is given just enough lines and scene time to be established as a helpless nobody. Nobody else even gets that much. They’re all just paraded into the scenes for Thomas to form a rashly made up opinion about them, and then they’re gone again. Hell Teresa, who’s supposedly so vital to the plot, spends half the fucking book in a coma.

All these bland and uninteresting characters are tasked with solving this killer maze, but even after the secret of the maze is revealed, there’s really no point to it. The damn thing is a MacGuffin of the most annoying variety. The same could be said of the monsters lurking in the maze, the grievers, and with their toxin granting certain characters the return of select memories. I might not be so annoyed if someone among the creators could have at least spent a few paragraphs explaining the logic of how murdering children in a maze was going to cure all the world’s ills. Even then it would have been bullshit, considering how fucked the world is revealed to be, but I’d at least have appreciated some fucking effort, you know? But the ending is as clear as mud, and doesn’t make me want to continue on into book two.

The other thing that’s stuck with me is how all these boys selected to be in this maze are supposedly geniuses. But that’s not shown in the writing at all. The entire group, Thomas included, come off as incredibly stupid. But this I consider to be a staple of YA dystopias. The characters’ actions describe them one way while the story insists they’re really super awesome people with mad skills for survival. But in truth, I can’t see any of these dimwits lasting a week on their own. It’s only by the grace of god (AKA the writer) that these people can breath without written instructions.

The story concludes on some weak ass world building and absolutely no explanation for why putting these dumb asses in a maze would somehow lead to a cure for the world’s problems. Maybe there’s some brilliant answer in book three, but I can’t raise my give-a-fuck meter past meh and don’t really care what happens to these bland cardboard cutout morons. Or put in the lingo of this dreck, the book is a piece of klunk, and the slint-head who wrote it is a shucking moron.

I give The Maze Runner 1 star, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I feel like I wasted my time, and I want that time back, damn it.