“He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.”

From James Dashner’s The Maze Runner.

A boy wakes up in a small room with no idea where he is, how he got there, or even who he is. The room turns out to be an elevator going up, and the boy is quickly deposited into a strang world: a nice piece of land surrounded on all sides by huge walls. Living in this “glade” are dozens of teenage boys who greet the boy in the elevator like it’s a normal event. The boy soon comes to remember that his name is Thomas, but he is still unable to remember anything else from before he woke up in the elevator. Thomas is partnered up with a young boy named Chuck and given a job; the leaders of the group (Alby, Newt, and Minho) also give Thomas strict orders to never go out past the walls, especially after dark. Thomas may not be able to remember much about himself, but it doesn’t stop him from pushing the other boys for answers about the world beyond the walls. This world is quickly explained to Thomas; every month a teenage boy is delivered in the elevator with a month’s worth of supplies, the boys mainly live in the glade where there is a crude village, the walls are part of a giant maze filled with murderous creatures called Grievers, and there’s a group of boys that run the maze each day to map an escape out for everyone. Thomas’ arrival is unsettling for some of the other boys, and his life is even threatened several times, but Thomas pushes to become a runner because he feels some sense of urgency about the entire situation. Things really fall apart when the elevator makes an unscheduled delivery of a new glader: a girl named Teresa who somehow seems to know Thomas. Thomas must rise up with the other boys to figure out how to escape the maze, learn who Teresa is, remember who he is, and beat whoever it is that put the kids in the maze.

James Dashner’s first book in the Maze Runner series begins with a solid start to a complex series. While the story does seem a bit slow at first, it is really just to introduce Thomas as the main character and to prepare the reader for the non-stop details, action, and gore that will soon be played out through he rest of the book. The boys of the Glade are diverse and complex; which allows the reader to sympathize with Thomas’ emotions as he struggles to find answers to his many questions. The book reads as an action-packed adventure with bits of science fiction, monster horror, and post-apocalyptic elements thrown in (genre-wise, it doesn’t differ much from the movie adaptation). The book walks the line between senseless violence and character development moments; enough violence to propel the story forward while not making the violence the centerpiece of the book. While the setting overall in this dystopian world is fictional, the characters and settings feel believable to the reader. The reader can easily feel the pain, terror, heartbreak, and joy of the lives printed on the page. The Maze Runner is an adventure that takes off and never lets go; it’s definitely not a book to be missed.