Read: The Death Cure, by James Dashner
This is the third of three books in a young adult trilogy (my review of the first; my review of the second), and was definitely the hardest to swallow. Not because it’s terrible, but because - well. Early on in the book, in one of many moments of frustration over the way the narrative was behaving, I had this brief exchange:
Which - yes - I wasn’t exactly a hive of positivity, but the level of snark in the author’s reply (he had to specifically hunt down that tweet too, given I didn’t mention him) tinged the rest of the book a little. You want to think that the people with big-money publishing deals are better than you, even if their writing isn’t. That was probably mistake number one.
But, okay - moving beyond that - I’m pretty sure that this book is frustratingly bad, regardless of personal issues. The Maze Runner trilogy works on the basis of a slow burn of information, a series of machine-gun revelations that are so aggressively full of twists and turns that you find yourself skimming over the sometimes-lazy characterisation and an almost complete lack of female characters (this is justified in the narrative by the revelation that a parallel experiment is being conducted on a group of girls elsewhere, but it sure is an easy excuse to make the female characters little more than ciphers), but in the third novel the formula is tested far beyond its breaking point.
Adding another insult is the ending, where (and spoilers follow here, obviously) Dashner avoids tying up his narrative and instead opts to create a magic door to paradise. It’s as if he saw the ending of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, ignored that everyone hated it, and chose to copy it. It’s not that there are unanswered questions - in terms of tying up the exposition, he does a pretty good job - but in providing such an undeserved and unprompted happy ending, there’s no personal reconciliation with the awful, traumatic shit that happens to the protagonist, Thomas. We’re told to focus on the fact that he’s finally found somewhere safe, rather than get to grips with the fact that a child has literally had to kill other human beings to survive.
I’ve got in trouble before for unfavourably comparing this to The Hunger Games trilogy, but it’s in this third book that the degree to which this book pales in comparison really shows. Thomas has lots of dreams, and passes out a lot, and gets stubborn from time to time, but in terms of an honest examination of the mental trauma caused by the things that happen to him, it’s painfully lazy. And Thomas is such an archetype - a cardboard cut-out of a hero, hardly ever doing anything inconsistent with the reader’s desires and often thinking in the sort of patterns that fit a fast-moving plot, but not a human mind.
None of this means that it’s terrible, of course. It’s not! Look - what this series does in terms of building a world is sometimes brilliant and almost always good, and in this novel Dashner really lets the world breathe by moving across multiple locations and adding a ton of neat flourishes that bring the environments to life. It’s clear that he’s spent time crafting the places the characters are dumped in, and quite often this redeems the exasperating plot. Even by the end of this book, I wanted to explore the world more. I just didn’t want to see it through the eyes of such an insufferably dull cast of characters.
Sorry, James. I know you have tons of teenage fans, and I’m sure you’re sleeping comfortably on your king-size bed made of money, but even after I tried to like this, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.