Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossen.
Omigod, yes, and Jude the Obscure, which a constantly-depressed friend sent to me.
By the Color of our Skin - yes, everyone in the world hates me and there’s nothing I can do about it. I never got over that one.
Heh, I was wondering why it was taking so long for Thomas Hardy to come up in this thread.
**On The Beach ** by Nevil Shute. I hated that book. They just gave up! So the world was a radioactive ball. Big deal. Always go down fighting!
So depressing…
Hoo boy, is that an understatement. The Getaway has one of the most chilling denouements I’ve ever encountered. You never think about barbecue in quite the same way again.
I love the ending of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, too…again, much more bleak and surreal than the one in the movie.
Jean Rhys’ early novel Quartet is another delightful dip into despair.
My list…
To Build a Fire by Jack London: Stupid, stupid man ignores all advice, does stupid things, kills his dog and then dies. Ok, so this book made me more mad than depressed, but if I was the sentimental type I’d be depressed by it.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo: Everyone lives a depressing life and then they all die. This one really depressed me. How the hell the ever made a Disney film from it is beyond me.
A Simple Plan by Scott B. Smith: Like Ellen Cherry said, you just feel sick and bleah the whole time you’re reading it, but it’s really an engrossing book.
That’s exactly how I would describe Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, about four characters trying to survive under Indira Gandhi’s suspension of the Indian constitution. That book really slammed home the hopelessness that must come with living in absolute poverty.
Here’s my summary of Dostoevsky’s the Idiot: Absolutely nothing works out in the end.
Catch-22 depressed me. Yes, I know the end isn’t very depressing, but the hundred pages leading up to it are.
Hamlet. C’mon, how has this not been mentioned yet?
Titan by Stephen Baxter is by far the grimmest science fiction book I have ever read. It’s the year after tomorrow. A Shuttle is lost on landing (you didn’t have to be a psychic to see that coming, but still . . .) throwing the space program into a crisis of faith and funding from which it cannot recover. American society is descending into an all-too-believable new dark age. A handful of misfit adventurers embark on a dangerous, underfunded mission to the eponymous frigid moon of Saturn that might lead to the greatest scientific discovery in human history—but then again, it might not, and even if it does, there is no way for them to return home, and no way for them to survive more than a few weeks or months on Titan.
It depresses me just thinking about it, especially after Columbia.
I am currently reading a collection of short stories called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders. You may know his work from This American Life, which featured “The 400 Pound CEO” and “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz.” Well, those are the two cheeriest stories in the book. Gruesome deaths, crippling guilt, and the anguished undead. Fun for the whole family.
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner.
Hands down, **A Fine Balance ** is the most depressing book I have ever read. Thomas Hardy’s stuff is downright giddy in comparison.
I don’t even wanna know . . .
The only reason I don’t want to see a remake of Double Indemnity, following the Cain book more closely, is because you’ll never get anyone to play Phyllis Dietrichson like Barbara Stanwyck did. Can you imagine her in an uncensored version?
Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream is pretty depressing (though excellent), as are Orwell’s Burmese Days and 1984.
Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land depressed me as well (made me angry too), because it had potential…until it degenerated into a mish-mash of stupid philosophy and whatnot.
Another vote for Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as well.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being was unrelievedly depressing. Even the end was just awful. I actually threw the book across the room after I finished reading it. It’s one of the few books I’ve given away willingly.
IIRC The dog lives. The story ends with the man dying, the dog realising he’s dead and heading off to camp.
He does try to kill the dog He remembers hearing about cuting open a cow and crawling in for warmth. He decides to kill the dog, cut it open, and stick his hands inside to thaw them. When he finally manages to get ahold of the dog, he realizes his hands are too numb to kill it, or use a knife to gut it. He lets it go.
I just wanna note that there is no “Sy Kassler”. This book is by Jeremy Levin, who also wrote the book and screenplay for Creator, which I’ve praised in another thread. The book is depressing, and the movie isn’t (surprise!). I don’t usually like depressing books, but Levin writes with wit, knowledge of science and scientists, and puts in racy situations.
I’m not a big fan of downers, but I do like the writing of C.S. Forester, and I have to point out that, aside from his Horatio Hornblower books, most of his books have pretty damned depressing endings, including The African Queen and The Gun, both of which got facelifts when they were translated to film.
In fact, based on most of the entries here, virtually all of the depressing books had their contrents altered to be, if not downright happy, at least not as depressing when they were adapted to celluloid.
I’ll third A Simple Plan. Although, the whole time I was reading it, I was thinking of ways I would have just taken the loot and split.
Nobody mentioned Bringing Out The Dead yet. It wasn’t a bad book, but it was an exhausting read. And, of course, terribly depresssing.
All Quiet on the Western Front. Not too traumatic to read in grade 9. :eek:
The Front Runner.
A touching gay romance that ends with the beautiful athlete getting shot dead at the Montreal Olympics.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison