Suzanne Collins’s prequel to The Hunger Games will focus on the early life of her villain Coriolanus Snow, the tyrannical president of Panem, an extract from the forthcoming novel has revealed.

Publisher Scholastic has announced a world record first printing of 2.5m copies for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, due to be published in May. But the preview has prompted unease among fans, after it showed that Collins has chosen to tell the story through a younger version of Snow – the dictator who loomed over her Mockingjay trilogy.

The passage, from chapter one of the novel, takes place 64 years before the events of The Hunger Games. Collins’s trilogy, a global bestseller, is set in a dystopian future America known as Panem, where every year children from 12 districts are chosen, or “reaped”, to fight to the death on television. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes opens on the morning of the reaping of the Tenth Hunger Games. It shows Snow as an 18-year-old student, preparing to mentor a boy or girl who will fight.

“The grand staircase up to the Academy could hold the entire student body, so it easily accommodated the stream of officials, professors, and students headed for the reaping day festivities. Coriolanus climbed it slowly, attempting a casual dignity in case he caught anyone’s eye. People knew him – or at least they had known his parents and grandparents – and there was a certain standard expected of a Snow,” writes Collins. “The world still thought Coriolanus rich, but his only real currency was charm, which he spread liberally as he made his way through the crowd. Faces lit up as he gave friendly hellos to students and teachers alike, asking about family members, dropping compliments here and there.”

Snow ends up being partnered, “to his horror”, with a girl from District 12 – the poorest district of Panem, which in later years will be home to Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen.

Although Scholastic has promised that the novel will see Collins returning to “important questions about authority, the use of violence, and the truth of human nature”, fans were unimpressed at her decision to focus on Snow. “Like we need another story about some tortured white boy,” complained one reader. “Snow? Hard pass. Removing this from my anticipated list. Bye.”

“You mean to tell me … I’ve waited years and preordered the Hunger Games sequel,” wrote another fan, amid a plethora of disappointed responses, “for it to be a President Snow origin story … about a rich white boy becoming an authoritarian who loves *checks notes* genocide?”

Collins has previously said that she wanted her new book “to explore the state of nature, who we are, and what we perceive is required for our survival … The reconstruction period 10 years after the war, commonly referred to as the Dark Days – as the country of Panem struggles back to its feet – provides fertile ground for characters to grapple with these questions and thereby define their views of humanity.”