My first time reading James Patterson was an experience I’ll never forget, though I’ve tried. There was almost no descriptive language; the dialogue was generic and often unattributed; major plot reveals were tossed off indifferently. Suspense was nonexistent, and chapters ended with corny lines such as “Then, suddenly, there were more shots!” The book, 2008’s Cross Country, read more like a rambling summary of a book than a book itself. It was also the funniest thing I’d ever read: a novel that ignored even the basic principles of narrative and craft.
The author is, of course, one of the most successful of all time, having sold more than 400 million books. His crucial insight from his time as an advertising executive seems to have been to “Give the people what they want,” and apparently what many of them want are novels that are stripped down to the bones, and then stripped down some more; if a Jonathan Franzen novel is a BMW, one by Patterson is the car from The Flintstones. In some ways, Patterson, whose first novel came out in 1976, was producing second-screen content long before smartphones were invented. Which is why his latest co-author may be a natural fit: Earlier this month, he published The Most Dangerous Games with Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, the No. 1 YouTuber on the planet.
Patterson has already collaborated with a prestigious if puzzling list of big names: Dolly Parton, Viola Davis, Bill Clinton. This book, though, has the specific mission of getting more young people to read—especially those who might prefer to binge-watch YouTube videos. Patterson, according to his website, has donated more than $220 million in “literacy-focused philanthropy” over the course of his career, and Donaldson has more than 500 million subscribers on YouTube, 39 percent of whom are 13 to 17 years old. “We’re not trying to preach to the choir here,” Patterson told The New York Times of the book’s intended audience. “We’re trying to reach out in particular to people that aren’t in the choir.”
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In an era when a sizable platform seems to come with a big red “Instant Book Deal” button, it was probably inevitable that someone with as many followers as Donaldson would publish a book, even though he’s admitted to not really liking them until recently. People are, in fact, buying the novel; it debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times hardcover-fiction best-seller list. But whether the duo has figured out how to entice Generation iPad into reading a book to the end is another question. Their prior work suggests that they know how to make stories digestible, if not always compelling: Does their book channel enough of the same qualities to lure kids away from their screens?
In theory, fans of MrBeast might also enjoy Patterson. The work of both men goes down easy, like a glass of room-temperature tap water. MrBeast videos are briskly edited, so much so that many of them seem like trailers for a longer version of themselves; they’re ideal to watch while folding laundry or listening to a podcast. (Or, considering MrBeast’s demographics, while slurping Go-Gurt or playing Minecraft.) Donaldson’s other strength is that he found a formula that worked and has committed to doing it over and over; this is not a man who seems tortured by the necessity of finding a second idea. Like Patterson’s long cast of FBI agents and homicide detectives, the list of MrBeast’s most-watched uploads reveals what you might call a common theme: Survive 30 Days Chained To Your Ex, Win $250,000; I Stranded 100 People In The Wilderness For $250,000. Most people can instinctively grasp this drama because Demean Yourself For Money is straightforwardly what being on the internet is like in 2026.
Not coincidentally, this is more or less the premise for The Most Dangerous Games. The novel centers on a group of contestants who compete in a life-and-death game for a billion-dollar prize, following in the tradition of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale. They have to outswim tiger sharks, march through Death Valley, survive being dropped into a war zone. The last one standing will be revealed as The One, a sort of messiah-by-default, and MrBeast (who, yes, is a character in his own book) assumes that the winner will use the $1 billion to save the world, because obviously this is what billionaires do.
Patterson has said that he tries to “leave out the parts people skip,” but this book seems to take the opposite approach. The chapters rotate among the characters (all of whom are interchangeably exceptional—a West Point grad, a former Army Ranger, a former British Royal Marine, a “veteran of an elite military unit,” etc.) and sometimes depict the same events from different points of view without adding much new insight. One chapter describing a boat capsizing in orca-infested waters is fine; three chapters describing the same incident from the perspectives of two different characters is an extreme test of patience.
Although the writing in Patterson’s other books is uninspiring, it at least tends to move quickly. In Cross Country, for instance, a car chase is winnowed down to a handful of lines. Most Dangerous Games, though, slows things down to a crawl, and repeats everything in case you didn’t get it the first two times. In setting the scene for a character on a boat near Antarctica, the authors write that “slivers of ice” fall from a railing when she grips it, and that “ice bites her palm.” Later, “the cold wind knifes into her face.” One gets the impression of a student struggling to meet the minimum word count for a paper.
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The Most Dangerous Games does have one modest twist on the form of a novel: Readers gain a chance to enter a real-life $1 million competition by solving puzzles that drop each week on the book’s website. Getting answers requires hunting for clues scattered throughout the text; for example, looking for differences in images on the book’s website and illustrations in the book, or using certain page numbers as map coordinates. (Nothing projects confidence in a book like offering people a chance at a big check if they complete it.)
Donaldson seems to think that the story itself, and not just the puzzle, will propel readers toward the end; he has compared the book to The Odyssey. Considering that both authors are innovators of highly consumable brain rot in different mediums, the book is an old-fashioned dud. Most Dangerous alternates between tersely described physical action and what I’d describe as free indirect whining (“This isn’t a dream. This is a nightmare.”). There are undigested chunks of clumsy characterization (“He wants to help people. He wants people to count on him again.”), clichéd trauma background (control-freakish behavior is blamed on a “mother’s depression”), and dialogue that tries to be quippy but comes off as tired (“I’ve got a better idea.” “What’s that, mate?” “You can kiss my ass.”). I’m not sure that the tween demographic, conditioned by short-form video and stroboscopic editing, will be eager to read 480 pages of this, even with the million-dollar jackpot on the line.
Perhaps predictably, some people are accusing the authors of using AI. But a spokesperson for both of them said any suggestion of that “is simply untrue.” The Atlantic also put much of the text through Pangram, the most reliable (albeit still an imperfect) AI-detection tool, which reported that it was at least 95 percent human-written.
Placing most of the blame on Patterson here is tempting, as the written word is his domain. Zooming out, though, the book’s execution seems to reflect a generational shift toward the contemporary MrBeastian “Platform is everything” ethos over Patterson’s 20th-century “Give the people what they want” worldview. By putting out a book that skimps on many of the ultra-processed qualities that led Patterson and Donaldson to mass success, the authors seem to be betting that the reason so many Americans don’t buy books anymore is that they haven’t yet heard about them from their favorite YouTuber. In essence, The Most Dangerous Games is a gamble that the product doesn’t matter as much as the brand, that consumers buy the sizzle, not the steak.
In taking that gamble, the authors cheated fans and missed an opportunity. A significant portion of today’s teenagers are proactively limiting screen time in favor of offline living, and a book could have been a way for Donaldson’s audience to follow him even after they’ve logged off. When I asked a friend whether her 11-year-old son, Linden, liked MrBeast and had heard of the novel, she showed me a photo of his copy. But when I asked if he was enjoying it, she said that he thought the writing was “amateur” and that he’d quit 100 pages in. For a while, she tried to solve the puzzles by herself; if her kid didn’t get much out of the book, she thought, she wanted to at least try for the cash. This week, though, she quit too. Some people, apparently, have limits on what they’re willing to do for a buck.
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