Throughout the science fiction genre, many fictional stories and novels have been created, each giving unique stories and explorations into mass amounts of topics. These can be from anything like death games, and even human experiments. The novel series I will be diving into is The Maze Runner series, a famous series consisting of three novels created by James Dashner. Each novel has its own separate movie, which starts with The Maze Runner, then goes to The Scorch Trials, and finally ends with The Death Cure.

In the first book, The Maze Runner, a guy named Thomas wakes up and realizes that he’s in a world trapped by walls that close every night, and he must find a way to escape and find the world outside of the walls. He and the other characters work together to find a way out, and with the help of many people, as well as their sacrifices, they find the way outside of the maze, finally greeted with freedom. Throughout the book, the individual character’s development is what drives the story along. I personally loved the reliance of each other throughout this book, showing that the way to overcome difficult tasks such as these can be overcome by working with friends.

This transitions over to the 2nd book, The Scorch Trials. Thomas and the others are locked up inside of the facility. They suspect that the people running the place are not the kind and love giving people they want to appear as. Thomas ends up overseeing an incident where he walks into a room filled with people who he had thought had left but were locked into a tube, frozen solid. Thomas and the others dash out and escape the facility, running from the Rat Man, who is the so-called ruler of the facility. They soon realize that a disease is spreading throughout the world, called the Flare, which turns people into zombie-like creatures as time goes on. What I enjoyed throughout this book was the development of how bad of a situation the world and the other characters are in. The flare is overtaking the world at immense speeds, which leads to the quest of Thomas and the others looking for a safe haven. Overall, this book takes the bridge structure to lead the story into the pain problem with the real world, not just a man-made maze.

The final book, The Death Cure, begins here. Soon afterwards, Thomas and the others track down a train, which Minho is being transported on to another facility. They attempt to grab the part Minho is in but fail. They create another plan, and then head over to the facility, where they meet with Teressa again, who surprisingly decides to help them. They all work together, find Minho, and when all seems to be going well, the Rat Man comes back, and tries to kill Thomas. Thomas cleverly uses a weapon to break down the glass holding back a few of the cranks, who immediately begin mauling on the Rat Man. This book finally ends the series, but in such a sad way. Newt is one of the funniest and sweetest people in the series. Even when he was first infected, he hid it from others in order to stay with them for even a bit longer. So his death hits differently. This book truly shows that not all things stay good, with even Teressa dying. Although she was kind of a rude character most of the time, she still cared deeply for her friends and hid her true feelings in order to protect them.