A review by _ren
The Kill Order by James Dashner

adventurous dark emotional sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

The thing that caught me off guard is that this book is is not about Thomas, Teresa, or any of the cast members we have heard about in the main trilogy. It is about a completely new set of main characters; Mark, Alec, Trisa, Lana, and Deedee. I do not like this sudden change in casting for many reasons, but the main ones would be the lack of contribution they give to the main trilogy lore, and something that I personally noticed; the change in writing style from character-based writing to plot-based writing.

The change in writing style isn't necessarily bad in of itself, but coupled with thee lack of main trilogy lore that you would read the prequel for-- I would say that the book is definitely one that you could skip, and go right to reading the second prequel, "The Fever Code", since it actually does talk about the main cast and trilogy lore.

Although, if you are stubborn on understanding the basic lore that took place in a time before WICKED, but after the sun flares, I have written a paragraph worth of it below.

Lore You Might Need to Know...


The book introduces two new organizations we have not heard of that were in place before WICKED, with the two being the Post-Flares Coalition (PFC) and the Population Control Committee (PCC). The PFC is an organization that is comprised of the remaining government workers after the sun flares, and their job is to decide how to manage the world after its demise due to the sun flares. The PCC is the organization that initiated 'The Kill Order', which is what the main conflict in the story is about. 'The Kill Order' was initially a plan to, as peacefully as it could, kill off populations of people outside of major cities in order to save survival resources. Basically, they would scout out, in bergs, the remaining villages outside of the major cities, and would shoot every single one of their community members with syringes full of what they presumed to be a peaceful and slow-killing virus. In reality, it turned most people into cranks, and now the PCC and PFC have decided to switch their plans to finding immunes to find a cure for the virus. I believe that this switch in plans leads to the WICKED organization being officially created.

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And yeah, that's literally all the lore you'd possibly need to know before moving on to the Fever Code. Although, I have not yet moved on to reading the Fever Code, so this lore may be completely useless to people who don't completely care about the main organizations before WICKED.
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