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.

The book opens, like the original, in a coal-mining holler of District 12 on reaping day — which also happens to be Haymitch’s 16th birthday. It has been 50 years since the failed rebellion against the Capitol, and every year since, one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 from each of the defeated districts have been chosen in a lottery and forced to fight to the death.

Teenage Haymitch is a down-to-earth moonshiner’s apprentice who dreams of keeping his ma and little brother safe; building a future with his sweetheart, Lenore Dove; and staying out of trouble. It is his bad luck that, this year, the Games come with a cruel twist: To mark the second Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes are chosen from each district. He initially avoids selection, but when the second male tribute is killed at the reaping ceremony, Haymitch is taken instead.

The story that unspools from there features the familiar beats we’ve come to expect from a “Hunger Games” tale: the train journey to the Capitol; the cognitive dissonance of taking in its opulence and horrors; the pageantry and jockeying for allies and sponsors; and, of course, the countless nightmares of the Games. Many familiar faces from the original trilogy pop up too, including Beetee, a tech whiz former victor from District 3 whose own 12-year-old son, Ampert, has been reaped as punishment for his father’s attempt to sabotage Panem’s communications network. While Ampert organizes the more vulnerable tributes into an alliance, his dad recruits Haymitch to help sabotage the arena, hoping to end the Hunger Games once and for all.

Collins has not lost her flair for the grisly, and there are some horrifying scenes once the tributes reach the arena — a verdant garden of earthly terrors. Once again, we find ourselves complicit in the grotesque voyeurism of watching a bunch of scared, exhausted children get executed in increasingly brutal ways; a death by genetically modified squirrels is particularly haunting.

What saves Collins’s work from veering into torture porn is the ferocious humanity with which she imbues her characters. “Sunrise on the Reaping” features a vibrant cast, especially the other District 12 tributes — the precocious Louella, the pragmatic Wyatt and the surprisingly savvy Maysilee — and Collins draws out each character’s anguish and tenderness, their humor and stubborn hope, as they refuse to follow the Capitol’s script. This is the project of dystopian fiction: to shine a light in tyranny’s greasiest corners and show how people — ordinary, determined human beings — might take it apart.

“Sunrise on the Reaping” comes overloaded with poetry (passages from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” recur like a bad ear worm), song lyrics and four epigraphs, two of which are from the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who Collins said inspired the book. But if I were to add my own, I would offer the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

SUNRISE ON THE REAPING | By Suzanne Collins | Scholastic | 382 pp. | $27.99