Mazes and Monsters

Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe, 329 pages

They are four very different people.  Jay Jay is an eccentric child prodigy with wealthy parents who dreams of becoming an actor.  Daniel is a computer genius who is, contrary to stereotype, exceedingly handsome and successful with women.  Kate is an aspiring writer whose father traded in her mother for a younger model.  Robbie should be so lucky - his parents never stop fighting, and the older brother he idolized ran away from home years ago and hasn't been heard from since.  They all have a couple of things in common - they are all undergraduates at Grant University, and they all share a passion for the role-playing game Mazes and Monsters.  In the game, they can be whatever they want to be: popular, a hero, a fighter, a savior.  For one of them, however, the game will slowly take over his life, and what he thought was an innocent escape will turn into a nightmare he cannot escape.

When it is remembered at all, Mazes and Monsters is remembered today as part of the '80s Satanic panic and for its TV movie adaptation starring a young Tom Hanks (as well as Wendy Crewson, who went straight from it to Skullduggery), making it the equivalent of Reefer Madness for gamers.  Not that there's any Satanism in Mazes and Monsters - Jaffe is far too sophisticated to worry about such things.  Her focus is on the psychodramatic dimension, connecting the players' invention of their characters to their self-invention in college, their confrontations with fictional monsters to their struggles with the burdens of social and parental expectations.  

The book would be more interesting if it was a lurid tale about a diabolical game that seduces players and drives them mad - as it is, Jaffe ultimately blames no one and nothing for what happens.  The kind of irony and insight Judith Rossner used to examine the New York singles scene and connect it to larger social trends in Looking for Mr Goodbar is entirely absent here - not that Jaffe falls short, but that she doesn't even try.  Young people will go to college, it seems, and some will be exceptional but most of them will be ordinary, there they will study, party, and fall in and out of love, most of them will move on to dull futures, others will have bright futures, and some will simply fall apart entirely, more frequently into drugs and sex than into fantasy role-playing games, but that's just the way it is.  Not only does the book avoid both social commentary and exploitative chills and thrills, it also avoids any kind of subtlety.  Jaffe continually drops large paragraphs of exposition detailing personal histories and explaining precisely how a character feels, the dialogue often serving merely to link one expository paragraph to another.  Mazes and Monsters may be "a far-out game," as one character famously puts it, but Mazes and Monsters is a bland, pointless waste of time.