The world doesn’t end with a bang; instead, it drops a giant smiling head in the sky.

Max Milden was just trying to walk his dog when the Earth got drafted into a cosmic blood sport. Now, his neighbor’s been sliced in half by an invisible wall, there's a cheerfully psychotic alien named Jessica who is hosting a game called “Maze Twenty,” and everyone has thirty minutes to sign up and play, or they melt into soup.

Grouped up with a talking octopus woman named Jay (who's also his “game manual”), his pit bull named Patti, and a whole lot more friends he'll meet along the way, Max is forced into a nightmare mash-up of survival horror and video game logic, complete with race changes, mutant classes, and even weirder monster combinations.

If humanity wants to survive, it’ll have to beat the maze.

If Max wants to stay sane, he’ll have to break the rules.