Are the same idiots calling this a "dystopian" the same ones who reluctantly read it in school against their will? Okay maybe I'm starting off this review a little too aggressively. This book changed my life when I first read it in eighth grade, and honestly, it changed my brain chemistry. I absolutely LOVED it. So much so that a friend and I wrote an entire chapter-by-chapter parody of it where countless more littluns are given very absurd and pointless deaths. But even beyond it just being my first exposure to a book with a downer ending as well as being incredibly entertaining and violent in a realistic way, it spoke to me as a person; I'd been to enough scout camps to understand that this story isn't even a heavily fictionalized exaggeration of what would happen if a bunch of thirteen year olds were all left on an island. In each of those situations, I'd seen myself as the Ralph of the bunch. Each had had their own Piggies, Jacks, Samnerics, Rogers, etc. And what makes this book so brilliant (and equally disturbing!) is that it IS believable. And beyond that, it's a great commentary and allegory for society as a whole. Fear is used to control and the most unreasonable tend to get their way. This is one of the finest books ever written. It was the book that encouraged me to love reading.