What’s the big deal with The Hunger Games?

We understand everybody needs to read the Newest Big Thing every now and again, so for reviews of books you probably shouldn’t be reading instead but almost certainly will have to anyway, there’s “What’s The Big Deal?” a segment with the aim of letting you know whether you’ll at least enjoy it. Today, we look at The Hunger Games, the first book in Suzanne Collins’ YA trilogy.

I haven’t read the whole trilogy and probably won’t, so if I say something that you can argue against by citing the later installments, you’ve got to forgive.

The Hunger Games is, in one sense, revisiting several earlier works. Stephen King’s The Running Man and Battle Royale by Koushun Takami both spring immediately to mind, and both essentially deal with a publicized bloodsport pitting average people against one another. In the case of Battle Royale, it’s middle school children on an island, all from the same randomly-selected class, induced to fight one another through explosive collars that blow their heads off if they don’t keep moving.

I haven’t read either, though I did see both film adaptations (The Running Man movie has nothing to do with its source material) and I did plug through a chunk of the Battle Royale manga like, seven years ago. Fans of The Hunger Games cry foul on bringing up the similarities, but you kind of have to. That said, The Hunger Games can stand on its own merits, and pissy people who sneer at it for themes it may share with earlier works are really just angry they need to share the sadistic juvenile bloodsport sub-genre of Orwellian dystopia fiction with tween girls, and also kind of angry that said property is actually pretty good.