Sunrise on the Reaping. By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic; 400 pages; $27.99 and £19.99
There is, one character says, “no way to pretty up what follows”. Indeed. Nor is there any attempt to, as that might spoil the fun. By the end of the first chapter, a shot has rung out, causing one boy’s head to “explode”. A little later, a girl’s head cracks open on the floor (blood leaks onto her plait); then another is poisoned (“blood begins running from her eyes, her nose, her mouth”); a third girl’s eye is gouged from its socket (blood is everywhere). For the dramatic climax, the hero is disembowelled; for the romantic one, his beloved is poisoned and “blood-flecked foam bubbles up over her lips”.
Welcome to the latest serving of “The Hunger Games”, the dystopian young-adult (YA) franchise for which the world seems to have an almost insatiable appetite. Suzanne Collins’s new instalment, “Sunrise on the Reaping”, is the bestselling book on Amazon and has shifted more copies than any other fiction title on the e-commerce site in 2025. A film version of “Sunrise” will come out in November 2026. It is likely to do well: the books have sold over 100m copies worldwide, and the five previous films grossed a combined $4.4bn globally after adjusting for inflation. In October a stage adaptation of “The Hunger Games” will open in Canary Wharf in London, in a custom-built theatre that can seat 1,200 people. It turns out that the market for dead children and sentences such as “I felt my intestines sliding out” is big.
It is also very old. When the first book in “The Hunger Games” series was published in 2008, there was hand-wringing about its violent plot. Every year each of the 12 districts of Panem sends two children to fight to the death in games, while the nation watches enthusiastically on all-revealing screens. Winning depends on brute force but also on-screen magnetism, since the contestants who are “liked” by the audience (in both the social sense and the social-media one) get more perks. This is survival of the fittest in every way.
But as Theseus—a young man from ancient Athens sent to Crete as part of an annual tribute of youths to feed a mythical man-eating Minotaur—could attest, stories about innocent youngsters being sent to their doom have always done well. And as the fate of Aegeus, his father (who kills himself when he thinks Theseus has died), proves, adults have always found this sort of stuff harder to stomach than children, who don’t seem to find it hard at all. “Sunrise on the Reaping” is at the top of Amazon’s list of “Books on Death for Young Adults”, which is surprisingly long.
A red thread of gore winds from the Minotaur’s maze through all books for youngsters. One of the earliest of all was a 17th-century Puritan manual titled “A Token for Children”, which, as its subtitle explained, offered “an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children”. (They catch various incurable diseases, then expire piously, promptly and—between bouts of blood-spitting—full of happiness at the thought that they are off to “enjoy the embraces of [our] Saviour”.) The overall tone is, as Sam Leith, author of “The Haunted Wood”, a book about children’s literature, has put it, your “basic snuff-fiction anthology”.
Corpses, then, are a constant in literature for the young; what changes is how this gore is rationalised. “A Token” justified it with Satan. By contrast, “The Hunger Games” seasons its violence with politics, rather than piety. Panem’s capital, the “Capitol”, is plastered with posters whose slogans (“NO PEACE, NO BREAD! NO PEACE, NO SECURITY!”) might have come straight from George Orwell’s Oceania; Orwell also inspired the Big Brother-style cameras that watch the contestants everywhere they go. “Sunrise” comes with epigraphs from Orwell (on truth) and David Hume (on government). This is death with dystopian pretensions.
This, too, is typical. If you currently think the world feels a little dystopian, that is nothing compared with the mood of YA bookshelves, which are packed with glum titles like “Plague” and even glummer covers. YA dystopias are “immensely” popular, says Gregory Claeys, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, which he puts down to a “seeping anxiety” about the world.
Many dystopias come to be seen as prescient; far more often they are a portrait of present fears. Stalinism helped inspire Orwell’s “1984”; the Stasi influenced “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. She had a rule that she would “not put any events into the book that had not already happened”, because, if she were to create an imaginative garden, she “wanted the toads in it to be real”. Ms Collins’s strongest inspiration for “The Hunger Games” was her “unsettling” experience of channel-hopping between reality-TV shows and coverage of the Iraq war and finding that the two started to blur.
It has been said that the tense of dystopia is not “now” but “not yet”. Dystopias usually avoid painting precise political portraits; they are political parables, and like parables, can be widely applied and reinterpreted. In 2018, more than 30 years after “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published and a year after the first season of the TV version aired, women across the world dressed in red robes and white bonnets as they rallied in favour of women’s rights. Many will project today’s problems, from a hot war waged by Russia to political wars in the West, onto “Sunrise on the Reaping”: it bottles the sombreness of the moment, even if it was not expressly intended to. When the film comes out next year, interpretations could change again.
Until then, the most sinister Big Brother in “The Hunger Games” feels less Orwellian than televisual: this is a social-media dystopia, in which you are always being watched and being “liked” can change your life. Another Amazon bestseller list that “The Hunger Games” tops is called “Books on Being a Teen for Young Adults”. This list is rich with titles such as “The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout”, which advises readers to “consider taking a social-media break”. “The Hunger Games”, by contrast, offers advice on how to attack the problems of social media with an axe. And it is outselling them all. ■
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