Hey, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

In 1982, Richard Bachman (Stephen King’s pseudonym) published The Running Man (later very loosely adapted into the Schwarzenegger film of the same name). Set in a very dystopian 2025, the main character is forced to turn to the government’s Game Federation and enter in a deadly game show to get money to help his gravely ill daughter (one game is called Treadmill to Bucks, where contestants with heart and respiratory problems earn money for as long as they can last on a treadmill, though they often die in the process). The game he enters is called The Running Man, where contestants are set loose in society as “public enemies” and Hunters are sent after them. The contestants earn money for every day they stay alive, with bonuses earned for every law enforcement officer or Hunter they kill. By the end of the novel, the main character ends up bringing down the Game Federation by crashing an airplane into the Network building (resulting in his own death as well). At the time, the novel was a satire of game shows, though now it might seem closer to satirizing reality television.

In 1999, Koushun Takami wrote the Japanese novel Battle Royale (which later became adapted into manga and a movie). The the film deviated a bit from the novel, but the trailer above gives you a small idea of what the book is about. Set in a socialist alternate timeline, every year since 1947 fifty third-year high school students are enrolled in The Program, which the government uses to terrorize the population into submission, making organized insurgency impossible.
In The Program, each student is fitted with a collar and released on an island with survival packs containing maps, food and water, and a random weapon. The collars are a tracking device and also a micro-bomb designed to kill the wearer if it is detonated. The students are ordered to kill each other, and if any student attempts to escape or enter a “forbidden zone” their collar will be detonated. If 24 hours go by without any deaths, all the collars will be detonated.

In 2008, Suzanne Collins released the young-adult science fiction novel The Hunger Games. She says she got the idea when she was watching television one night and the line between a reality show and war coverage began to blur. Readers of The Running Man and Battle Royale will certainly be familiar with the content, though I’m hoping teenagers are reading neither.

The Hunger Games fills that role quite nicely. In this first book of the now fully released trilogy, the reader follows sixteen-year old Katniss Everdeen in a post-apocalyptic America ruled by a powerful government from The Capitol. The country is divided into twelve districts, each district providing goods and services for The Capitol, which lives in eternal distraction and entertainment. As part of that distraction, every year one boy and one girl from each district are chosen to participate in the Hunger Games, a Battle Royale–like competition where the children are released on an island to kill each other, with the winner receiving food and money for the rest of their lives. The Capitol, of course, has more nefarious reasons for the competition, and through the series, those reasons come to light as a Resistance forms.

The book was very well received on its release. The New York Times wrote that the novel was “brilliantly plotted and perfectly paced,” and that “the considerable strength of the novel comes in Collins’s convincingly detailed world-building and her memorably complex and fascinating heroine”. One critique however was, “Collins sometimes fails to exploit the rich allegorical potential here in favor of crisp plotting, but it’s hard to fault a novel for being too engrossing.“
Stephen King, in his Entertainment Weekly review puts it more succinctly. “Reading The Hunger Games is as addictive (and as violently simple) as playing one of those shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames in the lobby of the local eightplex; you know it’s not real, but you keep plugging in quarters anyway”, though, “balancing off the efficiency are displays of authorial laziness that kids will accept more readily than adults”.

It’s easy to see what King means. I was thoroughly engrossed in the novel, rather than setting it aside at bedtime, I found myself staying up to incredibly late hours to complete it. There are moments, however, that I found frustrating until I remembered that the target audience for the novel are readers half my age. It’s still a good read, in spite of that, and I give it a strong recommendation for parents who want to give their kids something to read now they’ve finished Harry Potter but you don’t want them getting into to utter banality and utter vapid personality found in the heroine of the Twilight books.
Adults will enjoy the novel as well, though admittedly not as much. You’ll recognize flavors from Brave New World and 1984, as well as key ingredients from Battle Royale and The Running Man. I still recommend the series to you, but if you’re looking for more hearty fare (to keep with the food metaphors), pick up these other novels and give ‘em a read.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_