Roots of the Hunger Games Companion: Posted on TOR.COM

[image error]In his review of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Stephen King calls the book "a violent, jarring speed-rap of a novel" and points out that "The winner gets a life of ease; the losers get death. The only 'unspoken rule' is that you can't eat the dead contestants."

Once kids are in the Hunger Games arena, they fight to the death, and anything goes. The same is true in the second book of the Hunger Games series, Catching Fire.

By the time we get to the third book, Mockingjay, as Nicole Sperling of Entertainment Weekly says, "Collins has kicked the brutal violence up a notch."

When I first read the books, I was stunned that they were young adult novels. Only a year or two earlier, romantic vampire novels such as Twilight dominated the genre. And before Twilight, we had Gossip Girls, which combined Mean Girls with Sex in the City and tossed in plenty of high fashion, boozing, and partying.

All of a sudden, the young adult genre took a 180-degree twist into the realms of dark science fiction and brutal horror. Fans everywhere went wild. It didn't matter how young or old you were; when the Hunger Games series came out, you were hooked.

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