The Death Cure
Delacorte, 336 pages, $17.99 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $10.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-385-73877-4
Meanwhile, over in the young adult arena, James Dashner has been writing an SF thriller trilogy that is just as suited to adults as to teens. If you like suspense and thrills, you’ll totally enjoy reading these books—and you can impress your teenaged relatives and friends with your knowledge of them.
It’s a century or three in the future, and solar flares have scorched most of the Earth’s surface. The remaining population is ravaged by a virus called “the Flare,” which leaves its victims as violent cannibals preying on the healthy.
Yeah, yeah, post-apocalyptic future with roving zombies. Yawn. What else ya got for us, Dashner?
In the first book, The Maze Runner, a young man named Thomas awakes without his memory in “the Glade,” a huge enclosed bucolic paradise. Other boys, also amnesiac, have made a working society (some have been there as long as two years, although a new boy arrives roughly every month). The Glade is surrounded by an enormous labyrinth teeming with hostiles.
Then a telepathic girl arrives, and she and Thomas team up to lead the others out of the maze at last.
In the second volume, The Scorch Trials, Thomas and his friends discover that the surviving governments of the world have formed an organization they call WICKED, and WICKED is in control. The escaped Gladers are told that they are the key to the world’s survival, and the maze was the first of several trials they must undergo before they meet their destiny. The second trial requires them to survive a trek across a hundred miles of scorched wilderness beset by cannibal zombies . . . all while they’re infected with the Flare. At the end, it is promised, they will be cured.
Now, in The Death Cure, all the trials are over. It’s time for Thomas and his friends to receive their memories back, to find out what WICKED is up to, and complete a final cure for the Flare.
All three books are page-turners, brimming with suspense. There’s a fair amount of violence, especially with the zombies—although it serves the plot, so I can’t really call it excessive. If this were a movie, it would be R-rated. Fair warning: The Death Cure is supposed to be the last book of the series, but there are enough loose ends left over that I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of this world.