Review--The Kill Order by James Dashner

They thought the end came in a flash.

Before WICKED was formed, before the Glade was built, before Thomas entered the Maze, sun flares hit the earth, killing most of the population.
 
The worst is yet to come.

Mark and Trina were there when it happened. They survived. But now a virus is spreading. A virus that fills humans with murderous rage.

There is no cure. No escape.

They’re convinced that there’s a way to save those who are left—if they can stay alive. Because in this new, devastated world, every life has a price. And to some you’re worth more dead than alive.

The end is only the beginning.

The Kill Order brings James Dashner's Maze Runner series to the very beginning of it all. Before Thomas entered the maze and all that stuff happened. Sadly, this didn't meet my expectations. I thought we would be seeing the people who built the maze in those beginning stages of it all. I thought we would get answers to all the things left unsaid in the entire series. We don't get that here at all.

Perhaps it's because they wanted this "prequel" to the prequel or something. There's supposedly another book coming out in 2016 that continues the prequel story, but I'm not sure where that will lead us.

Instead, The Kill Order follows the journey of Mark and his friend Trina, two teenagers who were there when the sun started spitting its fire out on the world. They endured all the terror of that day and the days to follow and were picked up by a group of people trying to survive. Alec and Lana used to be in the military and there are a few other teenagers amongst them as well. It's all about survival. This is purely a survival story.

We get flashbacks in dream format from Mark, who's our narrator and we learn about the dreadful day that caused all this chaos. Presently, the group continues to move forward and try to find a way to survive, but then people in Bergs come from the sky and start attacking people firing darts at them. Within hours and days, anyone who was hit has died. It's the start of The Flares, but Mark and the gang don't really comprehend this right away, only that something is causing people to slowly go insane to the extreme. In their struggle to survive the group picks up a child who remains unaffected by the disease that is rapidly moving around the country.

I kept expecting to see some familiar faces in this one. Some members of WICKED or its mysterious leader. But we don't get any of that. It's just about Mark and his friends and their struggle to survive. The very last chapter gives us a teeny, tiny peek into what could be the offset to the Maze Runner series at large, but that was it. It's just a glimpse. We still don't get any answers that were left over from the series. It was kind of disappointing on that front. I mean what was the point of these new characters and their story? I just wished we could've gotten something more to connect us to the first trilogy.

The book wasn't bad though on its own. If there were no knowledge of the Maze Runner series it would be an interesting read. I mean seeing the chaos from the beginning was intense. And there's still plenty of action and more intense moments in this read to make it engaging, but it was the fact that we knew this was a prequel to another epic trilogy, one that ended without giving us some answers. So one would expect to see the answers here in the beginning before the maze but that didn't happen. As I said, there is supposed to be at least one more prequel book and maybe that one will have a bit more of the answers we seek, but I can't say I'll be rushing out to buy it if there's no mentioning of WICKED or anything close to hinting at answers in its description.


Overall Rating 2.75/5 stars