Recently the publishing powers that be have released a particularly strong slate of Young Adult titles, including two books that managed to top my infernally long “Need to Read” list – The Inferior, a stunning debut and the beginning of what looks to be an incredible fantasy series by Peadar Ó Guilín, and The Hunger Games, one of Scholastic’s lead titles for the fall season and also the beginning of a series, written by by Suzanne Collins, the popular author of The Underland Chronicles.

With their dark subject matter and unflinching portrayals of potential dystopian futures, both books will appeal to a similar audience, including mature young adult readers and adults alike.

The Inferior easily ranks in my list of top reads of the year – I found myself utterly unable to put it down over the course of the day it took me to read it, literally walking around work with the book open in my palm as I attempted to pretend to be productive. 

It is a firecracker of a story — an inventive, fast-paced fantasy of a dystopian future world where hunting for flesh among deathly dangerous predators is the central drive of daily life. Main character Stop-Mouth, considered slow-witted because of his stutter, is fiercely dedicated to protecting the ways of his village until the day a woman speaking a foreign tongue falls from the sky and changes his very view of the world. I wouldn’t want to ruin anyone’s discovery of the world Ó Guilín has carefully crafted, so I will just limit myself to saying that the book contains one of the most incredible monsters I’ve encountered, with a brilliant visual depiction that stuck in my head for many chilling days.

The Hunger Games

I read The Hunger Games at a similar pace, and found myself fully immersed in Collins’   dark future world of Panem (formerly the U.S. of A.), largely reduced to villages filled with peasants. Each district must send one boy and one girl, chosen by lottery, to compete in the Hunger Games: a televised survival battle to the death. Unflinching young heroine Katniss becomes a contender when she volunteers to keep her younger sister from being sent to the Games, as ever her family’s protector.  Despite her small size, Katniss quickly becomes a top competitor in the violent match, earning her rivals’ respect and an audience fanbase that may actually help her make it out alive.

At first I was put off by the book’s obvious similarities to the Japanese cult hit Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, a favorite of mine. First published in Japan in 1999, the novel ‘Battle Royale’ has become its own mini cultural phenomenon, spawning two films and a 15-volume manga series before finally being translated into English in 2003.

Highly controversial in all its various forms, the story is a powerful dystopian thriller, set in an alternate Japanese reality governed by a brutal totalitarian regime.  To exert control over a wild teen population, the government institutes The Program, a bizarre mix of defense experiment and social, physical and psychological torture: For each Battle Royale, a class of Junior High third-years (think 9th graders) is isolated and forced to fight, friend to friend, to the death until only one survivor is left the winner. The resulting events construe a “Lord of the Flies for the 21st century,” as the students try to work out who they can trust, who’s playing for real, and how they are possibly going to survive.

Obviously the overall theme of teens being forced to fight to the death for a televised “reality show” is the same for both books, but once I gave Hunger Games a chance, I found that Collins tackles the tricky subject matter in an entirely different fashion that quickly found me abandoning my reservations and reading voraciously to the end.

I wholeheartedly recommend any of these three fine books for some thought-provoking, pulse racing literature.

–Whitney Spotts