I have to agree with Rabid Child about The Long Walk . It is my most favorite book ever but I cannot read it very often. It just haunts me because I could actually see something like that happening.
I’ll have to nominate Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn.
from Amazon:
I have a pretty high tolerance for outre literature, but this is the kind of book that really makes you want to scrub all the skin off your body after you finish.
I’ll nominate Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Long sad story about a guy named Ethan Frome who is in a loveless relationship with a hypochrondriac. He then falls in love with her teenage cousin, and they
try to commit suicide by, and I am NOT making this up, crashing a sled into a tree. Ethan ends up crippled, and the teenage girl is paralyzed.
Unlike most of the other books mentioned in this thread, I can’t recommend this ass splotch of a book. I’m never going to touch it again, and I’m making it my life’s purpose to completely destroy any memory of this book. I would rather stick my privates in a vise than even look at the cover of this book again.
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
You know the poor kid is doomed from the first page and yet you are compelled to suffer along with him.
Now that I think about, everything by Irving is depressing.
I’ll second Wuthering Heights, which depressed me so badly I couldn’t finish it, and add:
The Partner - John Grisham
Ceremony of the Innocent - Taylor Caldwell &
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Ugh! This one is the worst! We had to read it junior year of high school. Everyone hated it and our teacher couldn’t understand why. I haven’t even thought of it in years. I believe I had completely destroyed any memory of the book until you mentioned it. It might be the most awful book I had to read.
King Lear is tons more depressing, though. (I love it anyway.)
Wilfred Owen’s poetry is relentlessly bleak, though I love that too – really, anything to do with World War I is incredibly depressing.
Oh, and count me into the Ethan Frome-hating club. I loathed that book with a passion.
Thank you Colibri - I’ve been trying to remember the name of that book forever. Ick, ick and more ick.
I found War and Peace to be moderately depressing, aside from the annoying fact that it just ends, no resolution or anything.
Anna Karenina is deeply depressing at the end. It’s practically a one-liner about the fate of the daughter, but it’s awful.
matt_mcl I remember reading that in junior high as well. Nice, no?
Don’t get me started on Bridge to Terabithia
Eve, have you ever read Civilization by Paul Quarrington? I suspect you might find it interesting…
I’ll second both of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever by Stephen Donaldson, but I found his Gap series even more depressing; I only made it through the first two and have no idea how low things got by the end.
I also found most things by Vonnegut pretty darned depressing; but for some reason I kept reading them. And so it goes.
The World According to Garp was a pretty damn despressing read. It ended on such a down note.
Marc
can’t believe I’m the first to mention Dalton Trumbo’s JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (tho the movie is even more depressing- at least at the end of the book, he had a dream! Oh btw, an album pf classic radio broadcasts I got has a 1940s James Cagney dramatization of it- Wow!)
The Lovely Bones made me weep continuously.
Second Silenos for On the Beach. That one really blew me away when I was a teen-ager growing up in the seventies. The movie was a killer too with, I think, Fred Astair, if you can believe it.
But I actually liked Anna Kerenina and War and Peace (maybe because I read this one while on vacation on Maui, am I a nerd or what?). My favorite part about W & P is Tolstoy’s description of battle which basically describes the butterfly theory of chaos. Did any one else notice that?
Oh and I forgot; why oh, why did they make us read “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles in high school? That and “Ethan Fromme” and “Great Expectations” put me off on “LITERATURE” for decades.
Postcards by Annie Proulx.
Pass the hemlock, please.
Almost forgot: The Sweet Hereafter. My son read it for school and walked around looking shell shocked for an entire weekend.
The Dwarf Par Lagerkvist
Ick ick ick. Powerful, but with a nasty taste to it. Left it half convinced that all people everywhere are just evil and sordid and small.
You’ve heard the saying ‘power corrupts’? This is more ‘people are corrupt, period. Everyone’s a puerile torturer at heart, and what separates the idly murderous despot from the kiddies pulling wings off flies is only their amount of power’.
And then of course there’s the Plague because it’s just not depressing enough without seeping buboes everywhere.
Read it almost 20 years ago and it’s still the most visceral reaction I’ve ever had to a book.
OH yes. Book of Sorrows made me bawl.
The short stories sounds like Ursula Leguin’s Buffalo Gals.
I haven’t read any of the detective novels or classics, but I can vouch for the depressing nature of Burmese Days, Catch-22 and A Prayer for Owen Meany, and add At Swim, Two Boys. Has anyone else read the latter? One of the saddest endings I’ve ever read.
I cast a fifth vote for Jude the Obscure. First you read it, then you jump off a bridge.
The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain. The world is inherently irrational and the only way to be happy is to be completely insane. Great…