The Hunger Games seems to be the biggest blockbuster book series since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. I’m currently listening to the series and finding a multitude of parallels to other books. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just very apparent. That Suzanne Collins borrowed ideas from other works and glued them together to make a wildly successful story shows that she’s a smart author with a knack for marketing. The language of the novel is simple – no ten dollar words, giving it an enormous possible audience.
I think the strength of The Hunger Games is how Collins’ pulls together powerful stories using a young girl (with a good name, Katniss) as the main character. This opens up dark tales to a whole new audience. Katniss in The Hunger Games is like Ice-T in the movie Surviving the Game, minus the dreadlocks. Girl power sells books – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just showed us that. Seems to be a lesson here, just as someone once told me about “inventing the next killer-app”. I was told that the next big idea is not something totally new, pulled out of nowhere, but usually a combination of existing things in a new, better way. This applies to books and products. Recall that Apple didn’t invent the MP3, but the iPod won the marketing and design battles. Suzanne Collins wrote a killer-app using existing stories, tweaking this and that to find an audience of millions. Kudos to her.
A few spoilers follow:
| Hunger Games scene | Related reading/viewing |
| The Reaping: Children are selected for a sacrificial ritual | Anyone who enjoyed the suspense of the selection scene in The Hunger Games should check out Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. |
| The Games: People hunting people | A story by Richard Connell called “The Most Dangerous Game” is about a man being the prey of hunters. Likewise, a movie starring Ice-T called Surviving the Game was a sleeper hit of the 1990s. Both of these are riveting in the near-death constancy of the characters. |
| Full surveillance of a human in an arena, broadcast on TV | Reality TV seems to have contributed to Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games setting. The Truman Show took place inside a large arena, where a producer controlled every day of the main character’s life. Likewise, the “gamemakers” can alter the terrain and water sources with in the arena for the tributes in the Hunger Games. Moreover, a mass audience observes every minute of the character’s lives – taking reality TV to a more logical conclusion. Life and death. |
| The Districts / “The Seam” | The Districts clearly define a class or even caste system. District Twelve compared to the Capital is poverty versus wealth, and very clear inequalities between the have and have-nots. Katniss’s favorite thing about the Capital is the Lamb Stew, which makes the Capital denizens chuckle. There is plenty of other reading on rich man/poor man. There is a 1984 feel to the book, of living under totalitarianism, where even the children can be conscripted for deadly entertainment value. Having the hero be the plucky underdog from the poverty-stricken coal mining district gives the story power, like Abe Lincoln starting off the Washington from a log cabin. |
| Names like Haymitch and Effie Trinket | Collins’ names in The Hunger Games reminds me of Dickensian names. Effie Trinket implies trivial, ornate, and useless – which her character is. Haymitch has a rough, unshaven, rural taste to it. Dickens is the master of names with meaning, often humorous, like John Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend or Mr. Sowerberry in Oliver Twist. |
Lastly, I’m looking forward to seeing Jennifer Lawrence play Katniss in the movie. Can’t think of a better Katniss…
Image: Screenrant.com
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