Why hunger for the Hunger Games is stronger than ever

Shortly after Sean Connors returned from spring break, the University of Arkansas professor of English education asked a classroom of students if anyo...

Shortly after Sean Connors returned from spring break, the University of Arkansas professor of English education asked a classroom of students if anyone had spent their vacation reading the recently released fifth Hunger Games novel, "Sunrise on the Reaping.” A number of hands shot up, and, as he recalled, "a pretty good conversation” ensued.

In retrospect, he said, there was one comment that stood out to him: when a student declared that the novel’s chief antagonist, President Snow, is her generation’s villain. If you grew up in the ’80s, she explained, Darth Vader was shorthand for Bad Guy, and then, of course, the millennials had Voldemort. While Zoomers may nod their heads in agreement with Connors’s student, what may be most interesting about this proclamation is that when the first Hunger Games novel came out, in 2008, and introduced readers to the tyrannical president of Panem, the youngest members of Generation Z hadn’t yet been born.

That long reign of villainy may explain, in part, the popularity of "Sunrise on the Reaping.” Those teenagers and 20-somethings who made the original trilogy such a success? They’re still craving the worst horrors that author Suzanne Collins can dream up. But so is a generation of young people who are turning to dystopian fiction to either escape from or reflect these, shall we say, challenging times.

"Sunrise on the Reaping” is the fastest-selling young-adult book of the year so far. According to publisher Scholastic, in its first week alone, the novel sold 1.5 million English copies worldwide and twice as many copies domestically as Collins’s previous installment, "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” (2020).

Compared with other series, the Hunger Games’ shelf life is remarkably long, and also unusual for the way its popularity has ebbed and flowed. Brenna Connor of Circana, which tracks book sales, surveyed the numbers for all five books - the original trilogy plus the two prequels - and was not surprised by the early sales data: The initial three releases sold many copies, and many more after the four movie adaptations were released from 2012 to 2015.