Comparison of Nancy Farmer’s Book, The House of The Scorpion, and James Dashner’s, The Maze Runner

What makes an evil plan truly evil? Is it the number of people harmed? Or is it the quality of your harming? The House of the Scorpion is a novel about Matt, a young man who is a clone, living in a dystopian society under the control of a terrible drug lord that has the plan to take Matt’s organs. The Maze Runner is a story about a teenage boy named Thomas, which wakes up in the middle of a maze with little to no memory. Even though their basic plots showed distinctively different ideas, a closer investigation shows the astonishing resemblance. Both The House of the Scorpion and The Maze Runner differentiated in characters and setting; however, shared similarities in the same places.

The characters in The House of the Scorpion are drastically different at times but also so similar to the characters in The Maze Runner. El Patron from The House of the Scorpion, a drug lord and creator of eejits, and Chancellor Ava Paige from the Maze Runner, leader of WCKD, have both similarities and differences. The two characters are both evil and are the head of a villainous plan. In The House of the Scorpion, El Patron devised a plan to turn illegal immigrants into his slaves just with an obedience chip implanted into their brains. Ava placed innocent teenagers into a giant maze with grievers, robotic creatures, that were inserted a device that told the critter what to do. However, at the end of The Maze Runner Ava shot herself in the head and shockingly recovered, but in the ending of The House of the Scorpion El Patron dies from heart failure. Even though the two did equally wicked things, only El Patron died.

The setting in The Maze Runner resembles The House of the Scorpion’s setting, but they are not quite identical. Although neither of the two told specific times in which they took place, we can conclude that they are sometime in the future. (The events in both, The Maze Runner and The House of the Scorpion, are not something you would see in modern day and it is not in our past.) Towards the end of The Maze Runner, it reveals that their lands had been scorched by the sun. On the other hand in The House of the Scorpion, Opium continues, proving that their land would live on for many more years to come. In both, the novel and the film, the storyline takes place away from everyone in total isolation. El Patron kept his people close to him and far behind everyone else. Ava placed humans into a maze away from everyone. While the two took place in isolation, they are in two different places in the world. The author of The House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer, created another name for Mexico which was Opium, so readers wouldn’t mistake her story for Mexico. Whereas The Maze Runner was somewhere of English decent with very little diverse ethnicity.

Whereas The House of the Scorpion and The Maze Runner are different as The House of the Scorpion (is/are) El Patron died and Opium lives on, while The Maze Runner (is/are) Ava lived and the sun scorched the land, they are also similar as they both (are) El Patron and Ava try to kill the main character and El Patron and Ava place implants in creature's brains.