Corridor is a twisted science fiction novel for a YA audience. Troy wakes up in a blinding white room with the voice of a girl, Victoria, in his head. Victoria tells him he has to run in order to survive. Before he can understand what she means, the ground he sits on collapses beneath him. Troy is trapped in a life or death battle with a sentient and ever-adapting labyrinth taking him through the harshest environments known to humankind.
In Corridor by Robin Parrish, the rules of the game never stop moving or adapting.
Are Troy and Victoria likable characters? No. We never learn enough about them beyond personal tragedy to gauge that. They’re more developed than foils, but not anywhere near as developed as your typical sci-fi survivor/last one archetype.
But are they empathetic? Goodness, yes. We believe Troy’s desperation and Victoria’s panic because Robin Parrish keeps them in the moment. If they have time to talk, it’s fleeting. Time is constantly ticking away and Troy will not live long enough to meet Victoria in the flesh if he does not keep running. The novel only works as well as it does because the two leads are believable. We can connect to their emotional states because the stakes are obvious.
Corridor does suffer from an overly episodic structure. The rules of the environment may shift within a task, but the look, style, and details do not change beyond the initial presence of danger. The only time the parameters of a really well planned alternate universe grow is when Troy moves into another room.
The rooms are defined by color on a very basic level. White is light, orange is fire, and green is plant life. Parrish could have delivered a more compelling world by playing against these expectations. Why does blue have to be water and ice? It could have been space, depression, fear (shivers, as if from cold), blood, or something unrelated to add more challenge to Troy’s tasks. The rooms themselves are menacing and imaginative, but the linear relation to common associations is perhaps a bit too plain.
Corridor is being marketed as Hunger Games-ish in content, which is sadly a poor reflection on Parrish’s intentions. He did not set out to write a great commentary on modern society or teach a lesson about the fleeting nature of fame or the harsh reality of war. His goal wasn’t even to create a strong and self-reliant protagonist. He wanted to make a twisted game come to life in the world of science fiction and he succeeded.
A better parallel would be Cube, where there is no guarantee that anyone will survive the ever-changing environment. There is an internal logic to the structure of the challenge. It’s just not the most direct logic. The guiding force is obvious in hindsight and acts as a strong denouement at the end.
Robin Parrish subtitles the novel A Mythworks Novel, implying some kind of series to come from Corridor. It’s hard to imagine where he would take it. Will it be a collection of related novels in the same universe? As close to a continuation of Corridor as possible given what happens in the novel? Or will it be some kind of exploration of the limits of YA science fiction? All of these seem possible given how Corridor works. If the books stay consistent in quality, it’ll be worth exploring future books.
Thoughts? Love to hear them.
[...] couple of “If you liked The Hunger Games…” type of books: Corridor by Robin Parrish and Legend by [...]