Liam Reviews “Maze”

Maia Station says it best when describing J.M. McDermott’s Maze at the very beginning of the book. She talks of everything being, “…disjointed, wrapped in silver gauze…” and also “…sand ground away at her mind…”  Maze is truly a piece of human art and each layer is peeled back like skin to show the bloody tissue and bone beneath the surface.

The stories of those living inside the maze are formed by what at first appears to be a jumbled mass of hodgepodge characters. Maia Station is a scientist from the future somehow sucked into this bleak and unforgiving world. Joseph lives in a similar time stream to us, just in a more apocalyptic world before birthing a Djinni from his flesh and then is dragged through pipes into the Maze. Wang Xin is a young boy turned fearless warrior, who sees all his paths laid out before him by the water Djinni splashed into his eye. Then finally, there is Julie Station, born inside the Maze by Maia and her closing chapter. This diverse group of characters and different periods of time, are all interconnected as we weave through the maze, one life at a time.

Life in the Maze is cruel, harsh, and only those with a strong desire to survive can flesh out a meager existence for themselves. Feast on maggots, berries, vultures, or even minotaurs and harpies to quench the ache of hunger in your stomach. McDermott knows the very depths humans can go to in order to survive. Joseph’s story is particularly graceful in his downward spiral for survival.  Just an average guy who finds love at a high school reunion, except for the ball of light he sucked into his lungs and births from his chest. A creature known as Jenny, who rips his life and that of his loves apart when it spits them out into the hostile world of the maze.

Each page you turn grabs hold of your hands and yanks you deeper into its clutches until you’re so far entrenched in the Maze you can’t find your way back out. Each of our characters hopes to carve out a better life for themselves and possibly gain some understanding of the maze along the way, all the while each of them are somehow linked together by a bond of blood.

I won’t claim to fully understand the circular closure in the novel, but I do appreciate McDermott’s story-telling prowess. Not often am I left in a dark tunnel with a glimmering light dangling in front of me and I totter after it on uneasy steps. Maze did that to me. If you want to lose yourself into a hostile world with only a small chance of survival and comprehension, then I dare you to step into the Maze.

Find out more about Maze and J. M. McDermott: Blog | Twitter

Life is a Maze – J.M. McDermott

Tread carefully, today presents us with this fantastic guest post by J.M. McDermott!

Traveling through most major cities outside the East Coast on foot is a terrible idea. I lived in Fort Worth for a while and I tried to walk and ride a bike as much as I could, but it meant dressing in long jeans and a denim jacket even in high summer for the brambles and trickling weeds. There aren’t safe paths for foot traffic since everyone drives. Pedestrians are dangerous. They must be vagrants and criminals and folks that don’t belong.

We have forgotten what hills and valleys mean, mostly. Living in hills used to mean climbing them all day, every day. Living in mountains was a physical act, not just a view. The material reality of 40,000 years of human history isn’t lost completely for us, who ride the top of human slavery by any other name in this world of ours, but that is a topic for another day. I was watching a fantasy film too much, observing the way we imagine a more interesting world, with goblins and kings and a labyrinth of stone. The film was Henson’s Labyrinth. I have seen it so many times, I could play it scene-by-scene, line-by-line in my memory. But, materiality of things: If I set foot in such a place, I would die long before I ever found the goblin city.

Heroic heroes are actually very dull. Childhood is heroic and someone will win top of the class, a trophy, a race and a game. Adulthood is the realm of confusion, mixed blessings, failure, the long, slow decline. My book is more interested in the muddle and confusion of living, because my only hope in the maze is to find other survivors there, form tribes, hold what place we can against the monsters that are always around the next curve in the stones.

Maze is a book of survivors, lost but hanging on together. Most of them are human enough.

There is a material reality that is hard to imagine when every night we sleep on a full stomach in an air conditioned room. Imagine walking off into the dark where all doors and windows are closed against you, and every turn in the path is a mystery and a menace. Life is a maze, and we fight for our place in the known spaces, with what magic spells we muster to hold dominion where we stand.

 About the author: J.M. McDermott is the author of Last Dragon, Disintegration Visions, The Dogsland Trilogy, and Women and Monsters. He holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Program from the University of Southern Maine. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Maze is his new weird/dark fantasy novel published by Apex Book Company. It is available now.

J.M. McDermott can be found on Twitter and over at his Blog.