Maze Runner Series (5 Book Series)

Genre: Science Fiction
Sub Genre: Dystopian

I am writing this is two sections.  The first three books in the series read like a three book trilogy wrapping things up fairly neatly at the end of the third book, whereas books four and five are both prequels to book one.

Book One (The Maze Runner) begins with our protagonist Thomas, waking up in an elevator with no memory of who he is or how he came to be in the situation he is in.  Eventually the doors of the elevator open and he finds himself in the center of a large maze with around fifty other boys.  The other boys also have no idea who they are or why any of them at there.  At night the walls in the maze shift and seal the boys inside the ‘glade’ but outside there are terrible creatures that roam the halls hunting them.  The day after Thomas arrives, the first girl ever arrives in the elevator and quickly the maze they are in begins to deteriorate.  The members of the glade must rapidly find a way out of the maze they are trapped in while also trying not to die in the process.  The book actually gets fairly gruesome in this part with lots of teenagers being killed fighting to escape.  Eventually they all do get out to find that they are in one large experiment run by a group called WICKED.  The world has been ravaged by freak solar flares that killed much of the population and vegetation.  After that, a virus (‘The Flare’) was released which was very contagious and turns everyone into zombies.  Thomas and his friends discover they are all part of a large trial to attempt to find a cure for the Flare by allowing their brains to be subjected to different situations to it supposedly giving the researchers data on how to cure the disease. 

Book Two (The Scorch Trials) follows Thomas and the rest of the Gladers as they find themselves in another trial in the real world, sort of.  The researchers at WICKED have created all sorts of obstacles to further test the group in their ongoing attempt to find a cure.  It was somewhere through this book I started having trouble with the concept of the entire series.  The thought that the world would ever get to place where ‘researchers’ would monitor the brain activity of teens while putting them in situations where they are killed in horrific ways is disturbing, to put it mildly.  They never explain exactly how the virus works or why mapping out the brains reactions to things will help find a cure, but on we go anyway.

Book Three (The Death Cure) Is very much where the series starts getting out of control.  Thomas and his friends differ on if they want their prior memories back, how to save the world, if it can be saved, and the whole thing is one jump from chaos to the next.  We find out more backstory but things start diverging from what we learned in Maze Runner in a very contradictory way.  The book ends with all of the immune escaping through a portal to a mystery location to restart the population at earth.  This all could have happened earlier, quicker, and with many more people and resources had they started there in the first place, but at least the books finally make it to that point.

Overall I did enjoy the trilogy, although I found it struggled as many Trilogies do with the first book being groundbreaking, and the other two never quite living up to it.  I would recommend reading it, but also do not expect a terrible amount of depth.  It’s entertaining, but did not cause me to question myself or views on the world.

Now the two prequel books (The Kill Order & The Fever Code) are another entirely.  My recommendation would be to simply not read them.  If you choose to do so here are my thoughts on them. 

Book Four (The Kill Order) is set 12 years before book one and features a group of individuals we have never met before living just after the apocalypse has happened.  This if problematic in that in book one we are told flares are from long, long ago, but anyway, now it was 12 years prior.  Through the book we find out that the Flare was deliberately released to limit the size on the population that was left to reduce resource consumption, but through this they find one girl who is immune.  The book does not follow what we’re told later about how the Flare causes people to react, the timeline, and overall is very inconsistent to the story line. 

Book Five (The Fever Code) takes place where the Kill Order lets off and is the biggest contradiction to the first book.   It follows a young Thomas as he is raised by Wicked in isolation where they study him and the other children to find out why they are immune, prior to the later trials.  Thomas is vastly different then the flashbacks older Thomas has in book one which really put me off to the entire thing.  I believe the author feared the character he had created and tried to scale him back to something else, but it hurt the story line in the process.  There are also a lot of contradictions as to who was running what, what memories were and weren’t destroyed, and so on.  Ultimately, it was difficult to follow and left a bad taste for me for the entire series. 

Buy the books here:
#1 The Maze Runner
#2 The Scorch Trials

#3 The Death Cure

#4 The Kill Order

#5 The Fever Code