Start with The Maze Runner and read in publication order: The Maze Runner, The Scorch Trials, The Death Cure, then The Kill Order, then The Fever Code. The obvious alternative is chronological order, which would put The Kill Order first because it is set thirteen years before the Glade. Do not do that.
Here is the reason, and it is unusually clear-cut for a reading-order question. The Maze Runner opens with a boy waking in a walled enclosure with no memory, among people who will not explain where he is, and the reader is meant to be exactly as lost as he is. The withholding is the entire engine of the book. The Kill Order hands over the solar flares and the release of the Flare virus; The Fever Code hands over WICKED, the purpose of the maze, and who built it. Read either first and you arrive at page one of the trilogy already knowing everything the trilogy is going to spend three books revealing.
The trilogy
The Maze Runner (375 pages) puts Thomas in the Glade with a maze that reconfigures every night. The Scorch Trials (384) moves the survivors into a sun-scorched wasteland and the next phase of the trials, widening the scale from a walled maze to a ruined world. The Death Cure (358) resolves WICKED and the cure and ends Thomas' story. Treat it as the end of the series proper — nothing after it continues from there.
The prequels, after the trilogy
The Kill Order is set thirteen years earlier with an entirely new cast, on the flares and the virus release. Published fourth and best read fourth: as a prequel it explains a collapse whose consequences you have already lived through, which is the only arrangement in which the explanation is interesting rather than deflating. The Fever Code is the direct origin story — Thomas and the others as children inside WICKED, and the building of the maze. It answers questions the trilogy raised, so it is close to worthless read first and genuinely satisfying read fifth.
Both prequels run to 384 pages in our records, which makes the five-book sequence about 1,885 pages in total.
Honest warnings
The trilogy is built on withheld information, and a section of readers find The Death Cure an unsatisfying payoff for what the first two books promised — that complaint is common enough to be worth knowing about before starting. The prose is deliberately plain and fast, and the invented Glade slang in the first book puts some readers off in the opening chapters. Note also that we could not verify a catalogue record for the later Maze Cutter sequel series, so it is not on this path; its absence here is ours, not the series'.
Dashner elsewhere
The Eye of Minds opens the Mortality Doctrine books, set inside a total-immersion virtual reality with a hacker antagonist. It is the nearest thing to the Maze Runner's puzzle-box structure in his other work, and a fair way to test whether it is the author or the premise you are following.
The books the Glade is built out of
Lord of the Flies comes first here. Boys alone, a society improvised out of nothing, and its collapse — the Glade's rules, its Keepers and its banishments are a direct descendant, and Golding is who Dashner is arguing with. Ender's Game is the other direct ancestor: children put through escalating tests by adults who will not explain the purpose, which is the source of the trilogy's central cruelty. Gone is the closest contemporary in premise — everyone over fifteen vanishes from a Californian town enclosed by a barrier — and is considerably harsher in what it allows to happen; our record for it is a French-language edition. The 5th wave (The 5th Wave #1) is the best written of the contemporaries and a good place to leave the subgenre; our record credits Richard Yancey, which is the author's full legal name rather than the Rick Yancey on the covers.
The full ordering with stage notes is at the Maze Runner reading path.
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