Title The Maze Runner Author James Dashner Cover Art Philip Straub Publisher Delacorte Press - 2011 First Printing Delacorte Press - 2009
	Title The Scorch Trials Author James Dashner Cover Art Philip Straub Publisher Delacorte Press - 2010 First Printing Delacorte Press - 2010
	Title The Death Cure Author James Dashner Cover Art Philip Straub Publisher Delacorte Press - 2011 First Printing Delacorte Press - 2011
	Title Kill Order Author James Dashner Cover Art Philip Straub Publisher Delacorte Press - 2013 First Printing Delacorte Press - 2012
	Title Fever Code Author James Dashner Cover Art Philip Straub Publisher Delacorte Press - 2017 First Printing Delacorte Press - 2016
	Title Thomas’s First Memory of the Flare Author James Dashner Cover Art --- Publisher Delacorte Press - 2013 First Printing Books-A-Million - 2011
	Title The Maze Runner Files Author James Dashner Cover Art --- Publisher Delacorte Press - 2013 First Printing Delacorte Press - 2013
	Title Crank Palace Author James Dashner Cover Art --- Publisher Quest - 2020 First Printing Quest - 2020
	Title The Maze Cutter Author James Dashner Cover Art --- Publisher Akashic Media Enterprises - 2022 First Printing Akashic Media Enterprises - 2022
	Title The Godhead Complex Author James Dashner Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Title The Maze Runner Graphic Novel Prelude Author --- Illustrator --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Title The Scorch Trials Graphic Novel Prelude Author --- Illustrator --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Title The Death Cure Graphic Novel Prelude Author Eric Carrasco Illustrator Kendall Goode Publisher KaBOOM! - 2017 First Printing KaBOOM! - 2017
	Category Young Adult Warnings Violence, swearing Main Characters Thomas, Chuck, Teresa, Minho, Alby, Newt, Brenda, Jorge, Mark, Trina, Alec, Deedee, Sadina, Isaac, Jackie, Alexandra, Minho #2 Main Elements Dystopia, Post-Apocalypse Website ---

The Maze Runner

The Scorch Trials

The Death Cure

The Kill Order

The Fever Code

Thomas’s First Memory of the Flare

The Maze Runner Files

Crank Palace

The Maze Cutter

The Death Cure: The Official Graphic Novel Prelude

I'll give you a heads up, the first book does not explain what on Earth is going on, and I think that bugged me a little. See when I read The Hunger Games or Divergent, those are dystopias I could envision, I understood why they existed, what their goal was, and so forth. In the Maze Runner though it was just so very, very weird and random. Which is ok, mysteries are good...but you get through the entire book and other than answering one of very many questions (what is the maze), it just tossed more questions onto the pile. You do learn something about a pandemic...but how does putting a bunch of boys into a monster filled maze help find a cure? If that was the point of the maze of course. And then near the end, where one boy is forced to kill another boy...whyyyyyyy????

Also why is there only one girl? Is there maybe a girl maze somewhere, separate to keep these hormonal teenagers from accidentally reproducing? Or is the takeaway that there are whole bunch of really smart boys worthy of this challenge and none of the girls were up to par? Or its just a book directed at a males so no girl cooties allowed? :o)

Now I'm not really someone to give up on a series I've started, also I have three others of the books, so I will continue the rest. I'm told the second book is better.

The Scorch Trials - the girl thing got explained so that's good (thus the answer is, this is a boy book so don't need girl cooties, one's enough). And of course a whole bunch of hints being dropped but still not enough to explain what is going on.

While in the first book I was a bit disappointed not to find out what was going on, I got used to the idea by the second. I got through the Heroes TV series first season talking with co-workers trying to figure out what was going on so I'm trying to mentally treat these books the same way (without anyone to discuss ideas with unfortunately) and thus I'm liking it a bit more. It is super violent though and the deaths feel pretty gratuitous and graphic, especially since it suffers a lot from Red Shirt syndrome. Sure there was the one boy I mentioned above, but he was chubby and cute so he wasn't going to survive anyway, most of the rest Thomas even says he didn't learn their names (and didn't bother to rectify the issue after thinking that thought). It results in your not caring about anyone else, their sacrifices have no value, and you know the protagonists will make it no matter what crazy stuff they go through. They are even told they are the best candidates and while not a guarantee of survival, it does mean scientists want them to make it.

Finally in the third we get to see what the rest of society look liked, kind of a COVID pandemic to the extreme with masking and testing. We also get to run around the WICKED headquarters and meet some of the people who work there. There are lies buried in other lies, but also a desperation to find a cure, given that people that run WICKED have a vested interest in finding a cure since they themselves are at risk. One problem I have with the series as a whole is the "character takes a beating then gets up and keeps going like nothing happened" trope. The Dresden Files had it too, but at least he's a wizard so we can just say "eh, its magic". But that doesn't work here. Like Thomas gets sliced in the back by a knife and nobody stops to bind his wounds or even to ask if he's ok. He's probably bleeding to death but the wound is never mentioned again, like the wound was useful to add a dramatic moment to that particular scene, but then dealing with it would slow things down in the next chapter so just pretend it didn't happen.

And in conclusion...I think the final solution made no sense. Well, it did make a lot of sense on the one hand, it was a solution I had thought of already. But given they killed off most of the people they needed to make that solution work (talking of the killing...why does it take like half an hour to set of a bunch of bombs?), dunno...inbreeding? So I was disappointed even by that which otherwise might have been reasonable ending.

It's basically a kind of Hunger Games, where teenagers have to do extreme things to survive, and a zombie apocalypse on the side. There's tons of action, lots of mysteries to solve but...I don't know if when you peel away the plot to try to make actual sense of it (in Hunger Games at least it's a form of oppression, you know WHY), it fails to do so. So read it for the fun, but don't think about it too hard.

Now on to the prequels. The Kill Order didn't impress me because once again, it made no sense. If you want to wipe out part of a population without taking out the entirety of it, use something like bullets. They had to shoot people with the virus anyway, and viruses mutate, and don't respect borders, and dude! You didn't even have a cure or antidote for yourself!!! Heck, nature will take care of population control in the end anyway, don't really need to do it yourself. And then there is Mark. Here he is walking around saying his head hurts and he's worried that he's infected...but dude, for a good half to two thirds of the book he's had people punching/kicking/pounding on that head. He's dehydrated, starving and sleep deprived. I get headaches if I sit at the compuer too long, or if its gets too hot. Of COURSE his head hurts. And that's the bit I really hated. He was injured so badly so many times but he doesn't even stop for a band-aid. I mean come on, that's not even remotely believable. At least I kind of liked Alec, and it didn't take me long to figure out who Deedee was.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. This is a few weeks after the flare that scorched the earth, on occassion they talk about how hot it was, and yet they run around all over the place in broad daylight. They should be fried, remember the book The Scorch Trials? That book took place years later when things should have started cooling off. And I loved how the forest was so dry that it was easy to start a forest fire but at the same time they had no trouble finding water, so much so they mentioned it was easy to find water. Umm...you can't have it both ways?

But you know what, I think The Fever Code was my favorite book of them all, maybe because people weren't dying in ridiculous ways all the way through. Of course it probably wouldn't work if you hadn't read the other books in the series and didn't know any of the characters, and would badly spoiler the series itself (it might chronologically come first but I always read books in publishing order to avoid knowing stuff you weren't supposed to know going into the series). In fact I've got a very different view of Teresa now.

And after that I found there were some graphic novels. The library only had The Death Cure and I thought that'd be fine since I just read the book...except not sure there was much connection to the books. It seems they were tied to the movies and the movies must have diverged from the books a LOT. There were familiar names but virtually nothing familiar. Also its not meant to be the graphic novelization of the book, I think its supposed to fill in gaps between movies perhaps. Can't quite say as I haven't seen the movies, so was a strange confusing experience reading it but might work just fine for someone faimilar with the true context.

Next is the Maze Runner Files (which includes Thomas’s First Memory of the Flare). About half of it was probably inside of The Fever Code already, definitely not something to spend a lot of time hunting for or spending money on but if your library has it and you love the series, there are a few interesting bits in there.

The tale of the maze runners doesn't stop with the first trilogy. Seventy years later you have the Maze Cutter. Unfortunately Dashner has a way of writing a lot of, well, nothing. Just some people wandering across the abandoned landscape of the western U.S. There is of course more going on, but like in the original trilogy, Dashner refuses to provide any information to his readers. There's even a scene were one character says "I'll explain everything" then the chapter ends and well guess the explanation wasn't all that good since the character that received the explanation still seemed clueless about everything. On the other hand, it was interesting to have at first a trilogy of books about a worldwide disaster, and then another set of books about what happens decades after, what is getting built after everything else was destroyed. The only downside is we see so very very little of this new world. There is one character who is part of this new world intimately, but because she's a part of it, she doesn't spend time explaining things to herself in her thoughts. There's a group of scientists in L.A. but our charcters get abducted before getting there. There's a group of radicals called the Remanant Nation, and we know they kill Cranks (but they also keep the as a sort of weapon, as well as some sort of in between Crank) so everything one character actually knows about his own people is probably wrong. And then there is the group of descendants from the survivors of the original trilogy, kind of naive thinking they are going on a grand adventure to see the rest of the world but instead become the pawns of everyone else. Normally I'd expect the next books to provide answers but given how the first trilogy never explained things to my satisfaction I'm not holding my breath.

Also the library doesn't have the next book...not sure if that's a sign that readers in general are losing interest?