Customer Reviews

Mazes and Monsters

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I haven't thought about this book in years. I was in elementary school when a made-for-TV version of it came out (if memory serves, Tom Hanks was in that, poor bastard...). I was about ten years old, I guess. Whatever the case, for some reason I became very interested in reading it. And I did. I have a vague memory of being proud of myself for reading a 'grown-up book' in a very short time, but the fact that a ten-year old could mow through this loser should tell you something, and in retrospect, I had nothing to be proud of. At the time, I was pretty much mystified by the whole thing. A guy who goes insane from playing the title game? D&D as the ultimate decadence for idle rich kids? It just left me a little confused back then, but reading these reviews brought a smile to my face, as I rethought what was obviously a cheap way to cash in on a headline-grabbing topic of years gone by.

So in retrospect (some 20 years later?), what you've got is indeed a WASPY, suburban, once-semi-pertinent, novel about some college kids who play a game, with (cue the scary music) dire consequences. Which is just as goofy as it sounds. Yep, it's pretty much a pointless warning to alarmist suburban moms, and it belongs firmly in the 'time capsule' department, right next to all the other sensitive treatments of problems that never quite seemed to materialize....

On the other hand, I learned the word 'coprolite' from this book, and for some reason remember something called the "Graven Eye of Timor(?)," that caused Tom Hanks some real problems. I think. And there's an expensive watch that plays an important role. I think. So obviously something stuck with me, even if it was just petrified dinosaur doo-doo. Rona Jaffe, you stink. In fact, you're nothing but a coprolite. And I swear it by the Vengeful Poobahs of Forgotten Mediocritus...

Whew. But seriously, it's easy to laugh now that the long national nightmare of D&D-induced insanity has finally come to an end. It cost an extraordinary number of lives, and we'll never forget the tragedy. Let's just be thankful that there continue to be authors brave enough to deal with genuine threats to the nation such as this. Run-- don't walk-- to your nearest Salvation Army outlet, and pick up a copy of the book that might have saved your child's life, had it actually had anything to do with actual threats to America's youth twenty-plus years ago!

I read this book a few years after it came it out. Granted, I haven't re-read it recently, but I disagree with some of the other, more-negative reviews.

I actually liked the character sketches that Jaffe used. Finding out about the characters' backgrounds, and those of their parents, did a good job of showing how they became the people they are in the present. And where some of their individual problems came from.

With regards to the social events that were going on at the time that this book was written, I have a few thoughts. What many "protect the child" groups miss--whether they're attacking heavy metal music, Dungeons and Dragons, or Harry Potter--is that people don't do bad things because of a book or a song. They do so because they make a conscious choice to act badly. And they arrive at this decision more as a result of their poor upbringing (not being taught right from wrong, plus concern for others) and their current environment (being bullied, being pressured to be an "A" student) than anything else.

"Mazes and Monsters" points out that the character of Robbie had problems before he played the game. And if it wasn't the game that acted as the catalyst for his break from reality, it would've been something else.

That's something I think that everybody missed.

Google "Dallas Egbert" if you want the inspiration for this unfortunate piece of fiction.

The problem with this book is not that it tries to turn a tragedy into a novel (... after all, that's how Shakespeare got "Romeo And Juliet" ...), but that it does so poorly. In this, I blame the editor, not the author; for an author may become so entranced with what to her may be a novel concept that she needs an editor to insist that the book also include plot, character and/or memorable language. This book has the mark of being rushed to print to suit the news; for example, about half the chapters are simply the character sketches that would have been helpful in planning the book but that should not have been included in it.

But do google "Dallas Egbert". Now THAT's an interesting story!

I think somebody should write a novel about a bunch of college students who get obsessed with the game "Monopoly" and one student ends up buying up real estate and charging his friends to stay in his newly acquired addresses. Or how about "Operation" where little kids start to operate on one another - for real! That would sure give a twist to the old ad where the mother walks in with grocery bags, looks at the camera and asks, "Operate?"

Considering that Rona Jaffe wrote this novel, it's clear that the target audience was not the young college students who were involved in role-playing games. This books follows the Jaffe formula established in "The Best of Everything": take multiple characters, throw them together and watch what happens; that sad thing is that it almost works. "Mazes and Monsters" is at its most incisive when Jaffe gives us background on the mothers of the main characters; these are women not far removed from those in "Everything", only this time Jaffe shows what happens after the girls get married and live "happily ever after." If Jaffe had focused more on that, perhaps an interesting novel could have come of it. But no, we get a novel shrewdly capitalizing on the "Dungeons and Dragons" paranoia of the early 80s. None of the four main characters - Robbie, Daniel, Kate or Jay Jay - come to life and their "Oh gosh, let's never play this cursed game again!" epiphany is forced and the stuff of Afterschool Specials, although the book was made into an infamous primetime TV movie in 1982.

As far as Jaffe's career goes, this book has become a footnote but at the same time, is the book that perhaps stirred the most controversy. Quite the paradox.

"Mazes and Monsters" reminds me somewhat of Frederic Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocent." At the time it was written, roleplaying games, especially Dungeons & Dragons, were, depending on who you listened to, being used to brainwash our children into becoming homicidal maniacs, junkies, Satanists, or homosexuals. "60 Minutes" even did a piece where they tried to prove that D&D was making kids commit suicide. "Mazes and Monsters" was Ms. Jaffe's attempt to cash in on this hysteria with a fictionalized accounting of a real incident and it shows. The characters are cardboard cutouts and the plot boring and predictable. She apparently couldn't even be bothered to do enough research to get the basic facts of the case straight or else chose to ignore them in order to make the story more sensationalistic. Do yourself a favor and pass on this book. If you really want to read something along this vein, John Coyne's "Hobgoblin" is far superior. He didn't get the game details right either but at least his characters aren't as cliched as Jaffe's and his storyline is much more interesting and involving.

I read this book, plus Jaffe's "Reunion" books, years ago, as a high school student devouring any book I could get my hands on. Taste and discrimination (a word that used to have positive connotations) would come later.

Jaffe specializes in the sort of mass-market novels that, unfortunately, are thought of as "women's fiction," just as "Cosmopolitan" and similar magazines are thought of as "women's magazines." These categories work if you believe that all American women like to read long, drawn-out novels that are all about relationships and feelings.

Myself, I'd rather read S/F and fantasy, plus non-fiction (and I don't mean "self-help" books). But since my sub-demographic is smaller, and I don't buy all that hairspray and makeup, I don't think my opinion counts for much with the marketers.

Anyway, as the other negative reviews have said, this book was a cheap attempt to cash in on the hysteria surrounding "Dungeons & Dragons." The target audience is the "Cosmo gal," or the subscriber to "Good Housekeeping" ... a stereotypically feminine woman who doesn't get into all that icky geek stuff and finds it somewhat threatening, so is relieved to have her suspicions confirmed that there's something inherently unhealthy about it. Many such women are "soccer moms" and other mothers who seem to want the world purged of all dangers for The Sake of Da Chyldrun!. Once upon a time, there was a word for this: "overprotective." Notice how you never hear it used much anymore?

The parallels between D&D 20 years ago and the Internet today are hard to miss. Then, as now, it was mostly those who were ignorant of the new phenonmenon who screamed the loudest about its "dangers." And, just like video games and billiards before it, D&D now seems almost quaint. Lots of D&D players are upwards of 40 and hold down very steady and respectable jobs; many have kids themselves.

Even more ironic, all those soccer moms who are so terrified of "the Internet" leaping into their living rooms and molesting their chyyyyllldruuun are now online! Except they mainly keep to their own little forums in which they can exchange their inane sentiments, complete with endless rows of exclamation points, sappy MIDIs, and saccharine animated GIFs.

Stay there, please, and leave the rest of us alone.

This book qualifies as one of the most inaccurate portrayals of gamers and Role-Playing Games ever. Quite simply, gamers are quite able to distinguish between reality and fantasy, unlike as portrayed in this book (even in the portions which are supposed to be realistic).

Rona Jaffe seems to know very little about roleplaying games and roleplayers and this translates over to her story. It is really sad that she stooped so low in joining an assault on a game, what a shame.

Wow, yet another attempt to scapegoat yet another subject. When will people stop attempting to blame their problems on outside sources, when the blame for their personal problems rests squarely upon their shoulders, and nowhere else.

When people go out and commit murder and blame it on the deity of their world famous relgion, do we hear any calls to ban that religion? No. That would be *ridiculous*. So is everything written in this book from cover to cover.

I read this book while I was in college, when I did dabble a bit in Dungeons & Dragons in my fraternity, which was coed. I never thought of this book as trying to cash in on the D&D hysteria that might have been hyped in the mid 80s. This book transcends all of that. The D&D simplification is too sophomoric. The insanity, or as the Spanish have a word for it, "ensimismamiento," although it seems irreversible for one of the characters at the end, parallels "Catcher in the Rye." Both stories convey despair and hope simultaneously, as life becomes a parallax. I was entranced with this book 18 years ago, and I'm on line at amazon.com buying the used copy. Don't buy the oversimplifications of some of the tweaked-out D&D naysayers. Read this book and decide for yourself.