Book Review: The Kill Order by James Dashner (Audiobook - Narration by Mark Deakins)
Rating: 2.5 stars
Review: While traveling on the subway during an ordinary day, a natural disaster alters the future of humanity forever. Solar flares kill or maim most of the people on the surface in an instant, and those underground or deep inside buildings suddenly need to find ways to survive in an environment that is too harsh to live in directly due to radiation, and too violent to trust anyone outside the immediate groups that form as a defense against other groups doing the same. This is revealed in a series of flashbacks in nightmares experienced later by teenager Mark, who has settled into somewhat of a family group with two older, former military people and some younger like him, including his school crush from the "normal" times.
Unfortunately, the relief from terror was only temporary because now they face a new threat: some survivors have targeted the rest of the refugees and are attacking them from the air with darts that kill. As Mark and the others flee from the slaughter, their only thoughts are escape. But when some of their group begin to get sick as a secondary reaction without ever having been hit by a dart, Mark and his friends start connecting the events, and then they get angry. As they start searching out the source and reason for the attacks, they uncover a plan of survival desperation, with Mark and his new family on the wrong list.
Written after his popular Maze Runner series, this is meant to be an origin story of sorts for the events of that series. Though I haven't read the series, I was hoping that reading the prequel wouldn't require that I had. I don't know now if that was a good plan. My interest in the series has been tweaked, so I've now added it to my list for future reading but I wonder if I would have liked the prequel better if I'd read it after. I was surprised by the violence of this story, though perhaps in the era of Hunger Games popularity and other post-apocalyptic tales, I shouldn't have been. It felt a bit like we were moving from one fight to another, especially during the latter half; I wonder if it would have seemed different had I read it rather than listened to it.
The audiobook was read well, with slight alterations in tone and pitch to reflect differences in characters speaking, but I think it may have impacted my enjoyment of the story. I think part of the problem was the method of telling the start of the issue in flashbacks that were broken up by the "current" story. Since the prequel was already telling an origin story, having another origin story buried within it felt like too much bouncing around, especially as I was listening rather than reading it.
I didn't feel satisfied when the book ended, and I'm not sure why, but it felt a bit like the story wasn't fully told. Since this was apparently meant to do just that, provide some answers to how things got started before the Maze Runner events, I don't know that it was successful. Having read some reactions from people who read this after the series, I get the sense I'm feeling much the same that they did, so it doesn't seem to be just me. I'm still intrigued enough to keep the series on my radar for reading eventually, but I think I'll skip audiobook and try reading it directly.