SkipMagic and Eve.
Your comments on Andersen.
Exactly!
Color of Light ends well??? Either I’m misremembering, or your idea of a happy life isn’t my idea of a happy life:
Doesn't it pretty much end up with the protagonist discovering that his lover has pushed the girl he was having an affair with out the window?
Rule of thumb for William Goldman: Non-fiction-- thoughtful and hilarious. “Serious” Novels: Often funny, but ultimately grim.
Thrillers: Almost universally worth reading, except for Brothers which was a steaming pile of crap. Marathon Man had no sequel – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Am I warped because the one book I’ve noted that I want to read after finishing this thread is Geek Love? :eek:
Magic is pretty depressing. Corky works extremely hard for success as a magician and fails because he can’t relate to people. The only way he becomes successful (and the only way he can relate to people) is through a ventriloquist dummy whose personality takes over Corky’s mind and makes him insane. His life before becoming a magician wasn’t great either. It pretty much hurts to be Corky in that book.
Ellen Cherry: I read Geek Love because of a thread on this board a couple of years ago.
I’m working my way through the Rougon-Macquart novels by Emile Zola.
I’ve read five of the 20, and every single one has moments of normalcy offset by years of almost unbelievable sadness, people at their very worst.
After Therese Raquin, The Dram Shop, Germinal, The Earth and Nana, I gave up on any of these people ever finding a moment’s peace or happiness, and I’m just enjoying the damn things. These are wonderful books.
I like depressing books. I’ve read many of the ones mentioned in this thread and loved 'em.
How about Lonesome Dove. Let’s just kill everybody, shall we.
Geek Love also made me feel dirty. If I could push a button and get one book out of my brain, that would be my choice. Undeniably powerful, since it still haunts me years and years later, but ugh!
I like Tolstoy, but I think you like him for the moments, not for the entire sweep of the plot. Down with Thomas Hardy–why is he so beloved by high schools? I love Lemony Snicket, and find him hilarious!
Now, Black Beauty is about as sad as it gets, if you care for animals.
I award the egregiously depressing ending prize, young adult literature category, to a book called I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier.
There’s something about Irish writers . . .
John McGahern’s Amongst Women and The Dark.
Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy and The Dead School.
All four are among the most savagely depressing books I’ve ever read. All four are also among the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read.
I was very depressed reading This is the Way the World Ends, by James Morrow. I mean, sure, the title itself tells us the world is headed for apocalypse, but the crap the protagonist has to go through, just so some ghosts can fulfill a revenge fantasy really skeeved me.
I was also quite put off by the ending of North Dallas Forty, by Peter Gent.
The Mosquito Coast, by Paul Theroux, was another novel that brought me down.
I was going to mention that but you and several others beat me to it. If I had kids I wouldn’t have been able to finish the book. It was like it tried to create every parent’s worst nightmare.
There’s also an excruciating novel called Marathon Man by the same person who wrote The Princess Bride (the actual name of the author escapes me at the moment.)
William Goldman.
For your consideration, three short stories:
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
“The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin
I agree with “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. I remember a person in my class ran into me on campus and asked if I had read the story. I said I had. He said “What the fuck was up with that? I mean, what the fuck?”
Where the Red Fern Grows and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest traumatized me so badly when I read them in elementary school that I could never re-read them. I don’t think I could even read them now. Kafka’s The Metamorphisis also really fucked me up when I read it in high school. For my money, that’s the most depressing story ever.
originally posted by violacrane
. . . 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.
It’s hilarious in four lines but over something like eighty pages…
Oh and forget the Silver Brumbies, Hans Christian Andersen was much worse.
Hmmm…you’re probably right. All of my books are packed away right now so I can’t access them, but looking at amazon.com I wonder if I’m not thinking of Cold is the Sea, also by Beach? And the end was as you say - two subs go out, are engaged by Soviet subs, and one sinks. As it sinks, it remains in radio contact with the second sub and calls out its depth as it dies. The remaining sub avoids the Soviets by going below rated depth due to the information it gained from the sunken sub.
I disagree with this. I found the story to be too cliched and predictable to have any impact at all. It’s like a bad EC Weird Fantasy story.
Re The Lottery – is this an instance of the story seeming cliched because so many people have copied it? I’m not a dark fiction historian, by any means, but I don’t think Ms. Jackson knew how to write cliche.
Heh. Brothers, the sequel to The Marathon Man was even more depressing. Goldman does, indeed, do odd things to his characters, and he did downright weird things to them in Control.
Heat was one where, conceivably, the main character could have gone out with a semi-happy ending. At least, when the book was finished, he was still fighting.
It’s interesting the different translations: the compendium I’ve had since I was eight years old has the story as The Hardy Tin Soldier; when I looked for it on-line, I see it as The Brave Tin Soldier; yours, of course, is different than even those. Huh.
Anyway, when I was a kid, I took that story as “shit happens, but remain true”–which is what happened to the soldier (oh, and he did turn into that tin heart, so maybe he was later shipped off to Oz). Later, as I read more about Andersen, I think it’s probably not too far off to say that it was a parallel to the loves in his life: he tended to love from afar, but never ended up with the women he loved. He was probably just expressing his pain.
It’s this type of an unhappy ending which keeps me coming back to his stories. There’s very little–if none–20th century cliche in his tales.
I’m really easy to depress, and this one didn’t depress me. In fact, I read it in a class dedicated to humor.
I’d nominate a different short story. “The Dead,” by James Joyce. I sob. For hours.