BY THE end of “The Hunger Games”, a trilogy of dystopian novels, the main character—a country girl in a post-apocalyptic America—has survived a state-run reality TV show in which children must hunt and kill each other, and joined a rebellion against the autocrats of the “Capitol”, an elite enclave that runs the rest of the country as a collection of colonies. On finishing the final volume, Amanda Robbins, a pillar of the Florida Federation of Teenage Republicans, fired up her computer and excitedly asked: “Is this author a conservative?” A “ton” of pages were debating this very question, Miss Robbins found.

In truth Suzanne Collins, the author of “The Hunger Games”, has never declared her politics, calling her trilogy a “gladiator story” exploring inequality, war and the power of television. Competing online essays have proclaimed her blockbusters a Christian allegory, an attack on capitalism, and a rallying cry for the tea-party movement.

As part of wider efforts to recruit younger members (and challenge images of the tea party as a home for grey-haired curmudgeons), groups such as the Tea Party Patriots are explicitly laying claim to the books (the first has also been made into a film), calling the trilogy a commentary on Barack Obama’s America.

The Patriots held a Hunger Games-themed youth event on March 15th at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual shindig for conservative activists and Republican leaders who woo them. The group also launched a lavishly-produced film trailer drawn from the trilogy’s dystopian themes. Entitled “A Movement on Fire”, it depicts a future America in which young rebels battle the “Development Party”, a statist claque trying to smother individual will with the help of government welfare, a slavish media and death squads.

In case the point is missed, the group’s co-founder, Jenny Beth Martin, used a speech to declare Washington, DC, “very much like” the decadent Capitol in the trilogy. Even the children slain in its gladiatorial contests have their equivalent in patients who face shorter lives thanks to Mr Obama’s health reforms, she says. Ms Martin calls the third book a favourite, its double betrayals by both a luxury-addled despot and a rebel leader bringing to mind the unprincipled profligacy of both the Bush and Obama eras.