In the postapocalyptic fantasy series "The Hunger Games," starving characters eat whatever they can kill or forage: wild dog, horse, tree bark, mouse meat. 
 
 It's not exactly the kind of story that demands a recipe swap. 
 
 Grilled Snake and Other Recipes Hardcore fantasy fans seeking to immerse themselves in their favorite fictional worlds are swapping tips on how to cook dishes like this grilled snake with fiery mustard sauce from the book 'A Feast for Crows.' View Slideshow Chelsea Monroe-Cassel More photos and interactive graphics 
 
 Yet fans have become obsessed with the food in the books, trying home preparation of dishes such as fire-roasted rabbit and seaweed bread. This month, "The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook," was published, with 150 recipes for rustic, gamy fare including fried squirrel and raccoon in bacon drippings, though none for dog. 
 
 Cooking dishes from popular fantasy books—from "Harry Potter" to "A Game of Thrones" to the "Twilight" vampire tales—has become a pastime for fans seeking to immerse themselves in their favorite fictional worlds. Literary foodies are trading tips on how to cook eel pie and nettle soup, sharing ideas on blogs, YouTube and Twitter, and occasionally scoring cookbook deals. 
 
 "The food enables you to connect on a deeper level with the books," says Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, 26 years old, a devotee of George R.R. Martin's medieval fantasy series, "A Song of Ice and Fire." She has cooked dozens of dishes from the books, including grilled rattlesnake with mustard sauce and honeyed crickets. "I'm now a food geek as well as a geek geek," she says. 
 
 Fantasy food has become a tempting niche for publishers. "The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook," which came out last year, has sold more than 150,000 copies. In addition to the newly released "Unofficial Hunger Games" cookbook, by Emily Ansara Baines, a 26-year-old substitute teacher and uber-fan of that series, there are two rival coming cookbooks based on Mr. Martin's series, which spawned a hit show on HBO. There are also coming cookbooks based on food in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia." 
 
 Sometimes, fealty to the story trumps taste. Crystal Watanabe, 32, a university office administrator in Honolulu, posts recipes inspired by several fantasy books on her blog, Fictional Food. 
 
 Brent Concilio A meal cooked by fans of the fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire.' 
 
 Ms. Watanabe says she left sugar out of a bread recipe she adapted from "The Hunger Games," because characters in the books didn't have sugar. Food, and the lack of it, is a recurring theme in the dystopian trilogy by Suzanne Collins, published by Scholastic Press. 
 
 After Ms. Watanabe posted the recipe on her blog, which gets some 50,000 hits a month, she got complaints. 
 
 "People were like, 'It didn't taste that good,'" she says. "I said, 'It probably didn't taste that good for them either.'" 
 
 Julia Christy, a 19-year-old "Hunger Games" fan who lives with her parents in Glendale, Ariz., decided to cook a meal from the novels—chicken and oranges in cream sauce—after she came across the recipe on Fictional Food. The dish, which the series' young protagonist eats during an emotionally fraught scene, was "odd but definitely edible," Ms. Christy says. "It helps you relate to the character and understand how she was feeling." 
 
 Food is so central to Mr. Martin's series—set in a medieval world populated with dueling nobles, dragons and zombies—that some critics have accused him of "gratuitous feasting," he says. In the books, he lavishes attention on dishes his characters eat, ranging from peasant meals to royal feasts featuring camel, crocodile, singing squid, lacquered ducks and spiny grubs. 
 
 "At one point I had someone eating a seagull, which I think was a mistake," Mr. Martin says. "I got a number of letters about that saying that seagull is nasty tasting." 
 
 Over the years, he's gotten repeated requests to write a cookbook. He demurred. "I'm very good at eating, but I'm not too much of a cook," says Mr. Martin. 
 
 This past spring, Mr. Martin got an email from two food bloggers in Boston who had been recreating dishes from his books. The women, Ms. Monroe-Cassel and her roommate, Sariann Lehrer, had been chronicling their culinary efforts on their blog, Inn at the Crossroads, named for a location in "A Game of Thrones," the first book in the series. The blog has received more than a million hits. Mr. Martin put the women in touch with his editor at Bantam Books, who offered them a cookbook deal. 
 
 That has spurred a frantic medieval cooking marathon. Ms. Monroe-Cassel quit her job at a Russian religious art museum to devote herself to cooking. A picky eater as a child, she had no formal food training and taught herself by reading medieval cookbooks and watching the Food Network. For the past six months, she's been testing cookbook recipes every day, providing feasts for her five roommates and two cats. She and Ms. Lehrer have tested 153 recipes and plan to try 75 more. 
 
 Recreating dishes like spiced honeyed locusts, jellied calves' brains and grilled snake requires creativity, and a strong stomach. After failing to find locusts, the women ordered freeze-dried crickets from Amazon.com. They fried them in butter, salted them and drizzled them with honey. Ms. Lehrer poached the calves' brains in stock, then layered them in herbed butter and an aspic made of pigs' feet. All of the roommates passed on that dish. 
 
 They bought rattlesnake and wild boar from a specialty meat shop. "We're on the lookout for squirrel," says Ms. Monroe-Cassel, who hopes to serve it with acorn paste and pickles. "You kind of have to know someone." 
 
 They've intentionally spurned certain dishes consumed in the books: black swan, olives stuffed with maggots, and a wedding pie with a hundred live doves cooked in. 
 
 On a recent evening, Ms. Monroe-Cassel used boar tenderloins to recreate a dish served during a wedding feast with 77 courses in "A Storm of Swords." 
 
 After consulting a recipe for "bourbelier of wild pig" from a 14th-century French cookbook, Ms. Monroe-Cassel marinated strips of meat in grape juice, red wine and a mix of cinnamon, mace, cloves and long pepper, a potent cousin of black pepper. She bought the long pepper, a spice used in the Middle Ages, from a spice merchant at a medieval re-enactment. 
 
 Two of her roommates arrived home from work, hungry. "Are there any edibles?" asked Brent Concilio, 31, a high-school English teacher. 
 
 They helped themselves to plates of boar, corn fritters and honey and oat bread, washed down with pear brandy. 
 
 Write to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com ||||| Relax, you legions of Hunger Gamers. We have a winner. Hollywood didn't screw up the film version of Suzanne Collins' young-adult bestseller about a survival-of-the-fittest reality show that sends home all its teen contestants, save the victor, in body bags. The screen Hunger Games radiates a hot, jumpy energy that's irresistible. It has epic spectacle, yearning romance, suspense that won't quit and a shining star in Jennifer Lawrence, who gives us a female warrior worth cheering. 
 
 That's more than you can say for the castration job that the suits did on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight franchise. I'll admit that Games isn't the scary, eruptive firecracker of my dark, Tarantino-fueled imagination. And if you're among the 26 million who devoured the Collins trilogy – The Hunger Games followed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay – you know it could have been. But even wearing a PG-13 harness to ensure profitability, The Hunger Games gets your pulse racing. It's about something pertinent, the mission to define yourself in a world that's spinning off its moral axis. 
 
 As 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, the renegade hunter who kills with a bow and arrow and stands up to take the place of her younger sister in the deadly Games, Lawrence reveals a physical and emotional grace that's astonishing. Give her the deed, because she owns this movie. It's not just that Katniss makes Twilight's Bella Swan look like the wimp she is, it's that Lawrence, 21, is an acting dynamo with the skills to let us into Katniss' searching mind. Last year, Lawrence won an Oscar nomination for playing an Ozark girl in Winter's Bone. She's just as affecting this time, lending primal force to this dystopian fable of a society out of sync with human values. 
 
 At 142 minutes, The Hunger Games can go from rushed to draggy. But director Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) hits the high spots, using action to define character instead of obliterate it. He wisely brought in Collins to collaborate on the script he wrote with Billy Ray (Shattered Glass). That way, even when the book's events are condensed or characters eliminated, the feeling stays true. 
 
 The Games are a punishment invented by the Capitol of Panem (read: North America) for the 12 districts whose rebellion against Capitol rule was crushed more than 74 years ago. The attitude of President Snow (Donald Sutherland, wily in his evil) is "You screwed us, so we'll screw you." Every year on Reaping Day, a boy and a girl (ages 12 to 18) from each district are chosen by lottery to fight to the death in a televised gladiator event devised by head Games-maker Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley). Ratings are not a problem. Even in downtrodden District 12, where Katniss hunts for scraps to feed her sister and her widowed mother, viewing the Games is mandatory. You won't need your arm twisted to see the movie, artfully shot by Tom Stern (Mystic River) as the scene shifts from the perverse lushness of the Capitol to the stark landscape of the battle zone. And did I mention makeovers? All the Tributes (that's what contenders are called) get them. Katniss has fashion genius Cinna (Lenny Kravitz doing a fun spin on Tom Ford) to create a wow dress that bursts into flame at the hem. Nice one. 
 
 Like Bella before her, Katniss is pursued by two laddies-in-waiting, in this case Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), the strapping District 12 hunk and fellow illegal hunter she leaves behind, and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), the baker's son who joins Katniss in the Games and secretly pines for her. Are you Team Gale or Team Peeta? You might not care as much, since neither has the exotic allure of a vampire or a wolf. But Hemsworth (The Last Song, with girlfriend Miley Cyrus) quickly establishes a strong, appealing presence. And Hutcherson (The Kids Are All Right) brings humor and a bruised heart to a boy who needs to mature fast. 
 
 Dynamite actors dot the film. Stanley Tucci is a brilliant blend of mirth and malice as Caesar Flickerman, a TV host who reps the dark side of Ryan Seacrest in this lethal version of American Idol. Elizabeth Banks brings malicious wit to the bewigged and powdered PR guru Effie Trinket. "May the odds be ever in your favor," announces Effie with inane sincerity. And the reliably stellar Woody Harrelson cuts deep as the perpetually shitfaced Haymitch Abernathy, a former victor in the Games now acting as mentor to both Katniss and Peeta. When he's not falling-down drunk, Haymitch instructs his protégés on how to suck up to sponsors who send supplies into the arena when a Tribute wins audience favor. So-called reality TV is given a sharp, satirical kick as Tributes learn to play and pander to hidden cameras. Is Katniss really falling for Peeta as she nurses his wounds, or is she faking it to save her ass and his? Discuss. 
 
 Sadly, the erotic heat that Collins generates between Katniss and Peeta in a hidden cave never rises above room temperature onscreen. Hand-to-hand combat does fuel the intensity as Katniss fights career Tributes trained to go medieval on enemy ass. Check out machete-wielding Cato (Alexander Ludwig) and knife-throwing Clove (Isabelle Fuhrman), not to mention a swarm of deadly, genetically engineered wasps called Tracker Jackers. The caring bond Katniss forms with Rue (Amandla Stenberg), the youngest Tribute, is just a brief break from the assaults aimed to make Katniss trade her soul for survival. 
 
 For all its compromises, The Hunger Games is a zeitgeist movie that captures the spirit of a soul-sucking age in which ego easily trumps common cause. Ironically, the kill-to-win ethos that dominates movies from 1987's prophetic The Running Man to the undiluted brutality of Japan's Battle Royale in 2000, may find its largest viewership in The Hunger Games. But will mainstream audiences respond to the moral challenge churning under the pop-culture razzle-dazzle? It's anybody's guess. My advice is to keep your eyes on Lawrence, who turns the movie into a victory by presenting a heroine propelled by principle instead of hooking up with the cutest boy. That's what makes Katniss revolutionary. May the odds be ever in her favor. 
 
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– Fantasy novels' focus on food has spawned a mini-industry—even if the recipes aren't always so appetizing. Last year saw the release of the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, which has sold 150,000 copies; now there's a book of recipes taken from The Hunger Games and two Game of Thrones-inspired cookbooks on their way, the Wall Street Journal reports. But eating what the characters eat means chowing down on food that ranges from bizarre to downright disgusting. On the tamer side, there's chicken and oranges in cream sauce, from the Hunger Games. It's "odd but definitely edible," says a reader of the Fictional Food blog, which garners 50,000 hits monthly. "It helps you relate to the character and understand how she was feeling." Perhaps less appealing is grilled snake and spiced honeyed locusts, from Game of Thrones; fans-turned-chefs mimic the latter using freeze-dried crickets. Now, "we're on the lookout for squirrel," says one cook. But "you kind of have to know someone."