James Dashner

James Dashner is an American author best known for The Maze Runner series, a young-adult dystopian saga following a group of teenagers trapped in a vast, shifting maze with no memory of their past lives, who gradually uncover the larger conspiracy behind their imprisonment. Beginning with The Maze Runner in 2009, the series became a major commercial success and was adapted into a film trilogy (The Maze Runner, The Scorch Trials, and The Death Cure) starring Dylan O'Brien, cementing Dashner's place alongside other prominent YA dystopian authors of the era.

Before The Maze Runner, Dashner wrote the middle-grade fantasy series The 13th Reality, and he later wrote the Mortality Doctrine science-fiction trilogy for young-adult readers, exploring virtual-reality and artificial-intelligence themes. His work is generally characterized by high-concept, puzzle-box premises revealed gradually to both protagonists and readers, and by fast-moving, cliffhanger-driven plotting aimed at a young-adult audience. New readers should start with The Maze Runner itself, since the mysteries of the maze and the wider world are deliberately doled out in sequence across the trilogy and its prequel novels, The Kill Order and The Fever Code.