The 1981 novel, Mazes and Monsters, tells the story of four wealthy college students who deal with the ennui of being rich and privileged by obsessively playing a role-playing game called Mazes and Monsters.

That’s right!  The game is Mazes and Monsters and most definitely not Dungeons and Dragons, even though both games are basically about people wandering around in dungeons and fighting monsters and searching for treasure.  (For the record, I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons or any other role playing game and I’ve never really had any desire too.  That said, I did enjoy those episodes of Freaks and Geeks and Community.)  One of the four players is Robbie Wheeling, who has never recovered from the death of his brother.  When the players decide to move their game into the tunnels underneath their college, Robbie has a total break from reality and thinking that he actually is his M&M character, he flees to New York and lives on the streets.  Desperate for money and food, he turns to prostitution but ends up stabbing the first man who picks him up.  Agck!  He never should have played that game!

Mazes and Monsters is usually described as being one of the key works of the 80s Satanic Panic and there’s certainly an element of that to be found in the plot.  But the game is actually a fairly small part of the book.  The majority of the book just deals with teenagers struggling with the transition of adulthood and figuring out where they belong in the world.  The book isn’t quite as hysterical as its been described.  If anything, the book almost makes the case that the game is helpful to the players in that it gives them an escape from all the ennui.  Robbie was mentally unstable long before he played the game and it’s hard not to feel that something would have eventually set him off.

This is a rare case where the movie version is better than the book, if just because the movie features Tom Hanks as Robbie.  Robbie mistaking a man for a demon and stabbing him?  That’s really sad.  Tom Hanks doing it?  That’s cinematic magic!