Tess and House of Mirth, check.
Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. Which is more uplifting then Oryx and Crake.
Then there is the non-fiction. Holocaust literature. Randy Shilt’s And the Band Played On.
Oh, forgotten about Toni Morrison. Beloved is a real joy ride as well. Laughed out loud all the way through that book…
Thanks for the correction…I think I read the story when I was freshman in high school (long long time ago)…I just remember hating the man so much for even thinking of killing his dog.
I love this book. Every step of the way, I could say to myself, “Well, yeah, that’s probably what I would have done.” Damn, I wanted it to work out! But I liked the book so much I wouldn’t call it depressing.
My picks:
Grapes of Wrath
1984 (as Fugazi said)
Roadwork by Stephen King
The Nanny Diaries
I felt terrible for days after the Nanny Diaries. I just had to keep saying to myself, “There aren’t really people like that. There aren’t really kids in families like that.” And I know there are!
Dangit, Dung Beetle just beat me to mentioning Steinbeck. I’ll go ahead and nominate all the rest of his books, though, in a lump sum.
But he’s not the worst. I used to think so, but then I tried to read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. I couldn’t finish. At least in Steinbeck, the worst that ever happens to anybody is that they die.
But I should have been expecting that. After all, my copy of The Martian Chronicles, I won in an essay contest on Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in a Day”. Set on Venus (before we knew it was Hell), where the rains only stop and the clouds part enough to let a single sunbeam through once a decade. The meteorologists have predicted this, and schoolchildren are given the day off to enjoy the one speck of good weather of their childhood. Except for Margot, the protagonist, who got locked in a closet by her classmates while they ran off and frolicked, and who isn’t found until the next day.
Most hard-boiled detective novels are pretty depressing, even when the PI solves the case. At best he doesn’t like the solution; at worst he doesn’t like getting there either. See Dashiell Hammet (In Red Harvest, for example, the Op provokes a gang war so the brutal and oppressive owner of a mining town can get back his control.), or anything by Raymond Chandler. For a more recent example, the first half-dozen Matt Scudder books by Lawrence Block show Scudder as an alcoholic PI who hates himself, the criminals, and most of his clients. (He dries out later and has a better life, but still the same sort of cases.)
I’d like to toss in the following:
The World According to Garp - John Irving - I know a lot of people on here don’t like Irving. I can take or leave him. This is a good book but overall depressing as hell
A Fools Progress: An Honest Novel - Edward Abbey - a semi-autobiographical novel and it’s pretty damn depressing throughout despite a few humorous moments. Still one of my favorites.
1.The Book of Sorrows By Kurt Wagner
This is a sequel to “The Book of the Dun Cow” if you liked this book my advice to you is avoid “The Book of Sorrows” like the plague.
2.The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant By Stephen Donaldson. The sequel was pretty depressing too.
3.The Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series By Tad Williams.
4.(Not really a book but…) Anything written by Tennessee Williams.
5. A Series Of Unfortunate Events By Lemony Snicket. I know he’s trying for black humor here. But in my opinion he’s completely misses the mark. Just plain depressing.
Actually, there was one book I read that was even more depressing than “The Book of Sorrows”. I don’t remember the title, but it was a book of short fantasy
stories about Native Americans.
These would fit somewhere at the top of my list, noting some have already been mentioned:
Camille - Alexandre Dumas, fils
Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
Mill On The Floss - George Eliot
The Plague Dogs - Richard Adams
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Long Walk by Stephen King (he used his alias, Richard Bachman)
A story that takes place in the future (I think it’s supposed to be some Fascist society) where teenage boys participate willingly in a game called the Long Walk. In this game, the boys must walk from Maine to Boston (I can’t recall the exact locations, but it’s about that distance). The winner gets anything he wants for the rest of his life. Seems simple enough? The rules of the game are that they are supposed to walk a certain speed without stopping at all. If they stop at all they get three warnings. After the third warning they are shot dead. If that’s not depressing enough…
In the end, the main character wins, but is too insane by this point to enjoy anything he might receive. Since he is the winner, he has seen all of his friends killed.
Love that book. Another one that shocks people who’ve seen the movie versions and are expecting a Grand Romance.
Thing of It Is ends kinda nicely, doesn’t it (two happy people boffing)? Father’s Day, Color of Light, The Silent Gondoliers all turn out okay. . . I’d agree with you, though, that he loves to torment his characters.
Would second most of the noir picks, especially Jim Thompson. Criminy, Savage Night ends with all the civility and logic of William Burroughs describing his night sweats.
Mother Night just killed me.
Can’t actually remember how J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. ended, but the book was so unrelentingly bleak that I think I was numb by the time I got there.
I don’t know, Eve, sometimes I think depressing books actually just make you feel lousy!
Wow, furryman. My kids and I love love love these books! The kids actually recite bits out loud. Maybe it’s because we’re listening to the audio version, which is an incredible performance by Tim Curry.
Another vote for Thomas Hardy here, as well as the aforementioned Jude and Tess there’s The Woodlanders, in which an ugly poor girl with beautiful hair is in love with the same man as a beautiful rich girl with bad hair. I stopped reading at the point where ugly girl sells her hair which is made into a wig for beautiful girl who then gets the man.
Most depressing children’d books – Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby series in which terrible things happen to wild horses, especially the ones you got fond of in previous books. After weeping my way through the all the ones in my local library I have rarely cried over a book since, which is some kind of a result I suppose.
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Maybe it’s the mood I’m in—or maybe I’m just mean—but I fell out of my chair laughing when I read that.
Like when my friend Michael was describing this movie plot that had him crying his eyes out, and when he ended with, " . . . and then his Seeing-Eye Dog got cancer," I nearly wet my pants.
Oh, and a few assorted fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen. No wonder children were depressed in the 19th century. (I know they’re short tales, and not strictly books, but I have them in a book, so that should count for something.)
The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock. Anyone the main character loves or befriends is dead meat. Sooner rather then later usually and probably in a pretty horrific manner.
The ending manages a new level of this His last friend and the only one that’s survived all the books throws himself on Elrics sword in order to feed Elric enough life force to blow some horn. His last words are something like “oh this is worse then I thought” as his soul is sucked from him. Elric then blows the horn his sword transforms into a demon that mocks him while Elric dies in the grass.Just lovely. I wanted to slit my wrists after reading that crap.
If we’re going to talk stories for kids… I’ll nominate Bridge to Terrabithia . Oh my fricking God, I stayed in a funk for about 3 days after I finished reading that.
A few that haven’t been mentioned:
Wuthering Heights, I love this book but it just sickens me how sad the story is.
Blindness by Jose Saramago, this book was literally painful to read. The most horrible part about it is that you know the whole time that if the situation were real, we would actually act that way. It took me a long time to read it. I had to keep putting it down and come back to it when the black fog had lifted. I think he won some sort of literary prize for it.
Maus by Art Spiegelman, beautiful and horrifying. This book touched me deeply.