Books - Mazes & Monsters

Well, having watched the film, and grown to love it, I thought I'd read the book. Luckily my local council has a good library service (of which I am but a tiny overlooked cog), so they had it in their bookstore. Mazes & Monsters was written by Rhona Jaffe, a successful novelist who wrote some 15 novels across a career spanning almost half a century and seems to have pre-empted the Sex and The City culture with her books, especially her breakthrough novel 'The Best of Everything' from 1958 which was her first book to became a movie. Rhona Jaffe died in 2005.

Mazes and Monsters the novel follows the basic plot of the film quite closely (or rather the film follows the book), with the characters very recognisable by name and personality. Where the book diverges is during the vacation, where for the middle of the book, the characters return home and we explore their home lives, and then each of their mothers gets a chapter where we learn about their dashed hopes and missed opportunities. A good third of the book has nothing much to do with the real story, but then this book wasn't aimed at students and gamers, it was aimed at their mothers. So let's give her credit for appealing to her target audience by providing them with a look at the different lives of these women in addition to the mess their children get into with 'the game'. And of course their parents' life decisions have a big impact on their children and are just about relevant to the story.

The book slightly sensationalises role-playing, but Ms Jaffe has done her homework. We do learn a little more about the characters, but much of what is in the book makes it to the screen. And I think that's what surprises me most, is that the TV film was a very good adaptation. It skipped a lot of the darker elements such as Kate's incident in the Laundry Room and Robbie stabbing a man who is trying to procure him for favours while thinking he is the Holy Man Pardieu. It also greatly cuts down the vacation scenes and is a little less hysterical and a touch more warm. But it's almost all in the book.

The book remains an interesting curio, but we should be grateful Rhona Jaffe wrote it. It was written to be popular, and there haven't been many novels about role-players (I imagine most of the fear of the game has gone in all but the most die hard religious groups) so Mazes & Monsters remains an important book in the history of gaming. Overall I would recommend the film over the book, the film tells the main story more clearly and uses the detail from the novel well.

As you can see, the book's best years were in the eighties and I was the first person to get it out for 7 years.