Let’s play critical mad libs. I’ll give you a list of phrases, and you fill in the blanks to write a review about any movie, book, or game you want! Here are some popular ones:

“It’s like (title) meets (another title)!”
“Fans of (title) won’t want to miss this!”
“Picture (title), but on a (recreational drug) trip!”
“Come see this year’s (last year’s big success that nothing could ever possibly live up to)!”
“It’s (title) for (kids / grown-ups / the elderly / hamsters / guys who sell inflatable dolls at sex shops)!”

And if all those fail, you can’t go wrong with:

“Die Hard (on / in) a (vehicle / building / world heritage site / piece of furniture / inventory item from sex shop)!”

With this criteria laid out, my job becomes easy. “The Maze Runner is like Ender’s Game meets Total Recall, but for kids! Fans of Divergent won’t want to miss this. Picture Battle Royale, but on a heavy dose of pot. Come read this year’s Hunger Games. It’s like Die Hard in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi reproduction of the Cretan labyrinth!”

The point, of course, being that The Maze Runner might be a fun read, but it’s been done before.

The Maze Runner is your pretty standard, run-of-the-maze, dystopian teen murder porn. Thomas wakes up one day with a case of memory loss that would make Willie Nelson re-think his life choices (if he could remember them). Questioning the boys who find him, he learns that he’s been put in a sausage-fest hunger games in the middle of a labyrinth stocked with some spare Silent Hill monsters the game’s creators had lying around.* The boys have no clear objectives, and operate simply with a desire to map out the maze, whose walls change plans more often than the Trump administration’s, and to show up those Lord of the Flies douchebags by having a fully-functioning and ordered society.

*presumably, who were out of work after Silent Hills was canceled.

The book is okay, if you liked the Hunger Games but really didn’t like the way your head hurt after all that social relevance and critical thinking. Since the boys have the memories of a frat boy on Sunday morning, there’s no context for the maze. For all we know, the world could have become super-right-wing and wants to punish these kids for self-love, or it was destroyed in a nuclear war and the boys were stuffed away like heritage seeds by a confused biologist, or it could take place in modern times after The Bachelor ended and TV audiences ached for the next inane reality show to clear out all that pesky brain power growing in their heads. But without that, it’s kind of like being stuck on a bus in the middle of a traffic jam—the creatures around me are interesting in a grotesque can’t-look-away sort of way, and I definitely saw a lot of disturbing things that raised some weird questions, but I didn’t feel I was heading anywhere important, at least not any time soon.

The author tells us over and over that these kids are of above-average intelligence, which makes the book suffer from Ender’s Game Syndrome. Orson Scott Card kept repeating that Ender was intelligent like a younger sibling trying to get us to punch him in the face, but the only idea he ever gave us to support this idea was that Ender discovered a strategical advantage in beating and/or killing his enemies. Likewise, the Maze Runner constantly shows Thomas solving the mysteries of the maze through his brilliant strategy of having someone tell him the answers. Generally, if an author tells me a character is smart, I expect to see something clever that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. But Thomas never figures out anything on his own, and can’t even figure out what the mysterious acronym stands for when it is literally spelled out for him on a sign.

The book also fails to build up the gravity of the situation by not knowing who to kill or when to kill them. I’ve been more attached to red shirts from Star Trek than I have to the people who get taken by the maze monsters. I could tell you right now that they kill Adam without spoiling the story for you because after Thomas finds out that Adam is dead, the next line in the book literally tells us that Thomas didn’t know Adam and had never talked to him. Granted, you don’t want to swing to the George Martin extreme and build a world where characters drop dead like they dust their crops with anthrax, but a sudden death of an important character now and then might shatter the impression that running through the maze is about as dangerous as getting up to pee in the middle of the night.

I know I usually read through an entire series before reviewing it, but something told me this time around I needed to review the first book by itself. I think that was my brain’s way of telling me I needed to seriously think about whether I even want to read the rest of the series. Or maybe I could do something more productive like create a hedge maze in my backyard and re-create scenes from the movie. By which, I mean The Shining.