A Propulsive, Brutal ‘Hunger Games’ Prequel Is Here. And It’s Great.

SUNRISE ON THE REAPING, by Suzanne Collins

It has been 17 years since the first book in Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” series was published. In the nearly two intervening decades, the novel has spawned three further books, five movies and an endless supply of Halloween costumes, fan fiction and memes. So when it was announced that Collins had written a fifth book in the series, a new prequel already being adapted for the screen, I feared the franchise might have gone the way of so many popular properties before it: profit-driven bloat.

It is with great pleasure, then, that I can report that “Sunrise on the Reaping” is a propulsive, heart-wrenching addition to “The Hunger Games,” adding welcome texture to the cruel world of Panem.

This is the second prequel Collins has written since the initial trilogy about Katniss Everdeen, the reluctant teenage revolutionary who was forced to battle other children to the death in Panem’s annual Hunger Games and eventually rose up to fight the domineering Capitol. The first prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” followed the early years of Katniss’s nemesis, President Coriolanus Snow, tracking his time as an impoverished but ambitious Capitol mentor to an early Hunger Games tribute and showing how that led him down a path to fascism.

Now, with “Sunrise on the Reaping,” Collins turns her attention to Haymitch Abernathy, the jaded, alcoholic, fiercely devoted mentor who coached Katniss in the original series.

Collins has set herself a harder project with this second prequel: While Snow’s back story was largely blank, Collins had already sketched the broad strokes of Haymitch’s. In the initial books, we learned how Haymitch won the 50th Hunger Games and that, upon his return home, he discovered a Capitol-inflicted tragedy. Given that we already know our hero’s fate, do we need, you might ask, to go back and flesh out the gruesome details?

But in expanding Haymitch’s story, Collins paints a shrewd portrait of the machinery of propaganda and how authoritarianism takes root.