Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. It’s just not fair!
I second the Wharton and Hemingway novels (especially For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms – “gratuitous unhappiness” pretty well describes them), and also Saramago’s Blindness.
A novel similar to House of Mirth was Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (not Eve’s favorite author, IIRC). The character of George Hurstwood starts out in a very elevated social position and just sinks… meanwhile, Carrie herself starts out low and rises. Her fate is not quite uplifting, though, since she is confronted by Hurstwood at his end. Poor melancholy baby.
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein Since I was 9, this book is guaranteed to make me sob uncontrollably.
I had to read Ethan Frome my junior year of high school, too. The next year when some of us were complaining about it to our senior year English teacher, he said “Oh, she’s still teaching that awful book?” I loved that teacher.
I recently read The Handmaid’s Tale and found it pretty depressing. The worst part about it was the main character–we know she misses her old life and isn’t happy, but at the same time she seems like she’s trying to lose herself and fit in the new world.
Another short story:
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Somebody might have mentioned it already, but the Harley Ellison Story I have no mouth and I must scream is pretty damn depressing. The end of Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton wasn’t exactly happy either.
And of course, It’s a Good Life (I can’t remember the author).
That would be Harlan Ellison.
It’s A Good Life was written by Jerome Bixby. But it’s a good thing you couldn’t remember that. A real good thing.
Thanks for the correction on the Ellison bit.
Why is a good thing that I couldn’t remember the author of “It’s a good life”?
In the original story, it’s stressed that Anthony isn’t evil. It’s simply that no one has ever tried to teach him. If Anthony senses that people are unhappy he’ll try to make them happy. This generally makes thing much, much worse. So the people of Peakesville do their best to be cheerful and content. That way Anthony won’t do anything to make them happy. Regardless of what happens, folks will say it’s a good thing.
I would like to nominate Canadian literature. All of it.
Okay, not all of it. Most of it, not including the children’s books or the satires.
I mean I love CanLit. I really do. I plan to make it my field of study.
But I have been reading Canadian Literature almost exclusively for the last year, and I’m growing increasingly amazed that our literary set hasn’t slit its wrists, en masse.
Just what I’ve exposed myself to in the last year, all major authors:[ul][li]One book of short stories includes a woman whose baby dies in a dust storm, a hard-working farmer whose years of work are destroyed in a single hail storm, a husband who commits suicide by freezing because his wife has an affair[/li][li]Two short stories in a single anthology have two guys whose lives are pretty much ruined by homophobia in small towns in the 40s or 50s[/li][li]Down and out family in the slums of Montreal suffer and suffer and suffer – 10 kids and another on the way (one’s dying of cancer, and the only one who could work just got pregnant – and two family members are off to war)[/li][li]One novel traces a little girl losing half her family to the Japanese internement camps, and her mother is horribly mutilated at Nagasaki during the dropping of the atomic bomb[/li][li]One novel is told from the point of view of a woman in her 90’s who’s looking over her life and thinking how she made the wrong decision at every moment, and it’s the reason she’s so unhappy, now. She dies in a hospital, mostly abandoned by family.[/li][li]Never Cry Wolf is the purportedly true story of the horrors inflicted on wolves by humans[/li][li]Klee Wyck is Emily Carr’s word-portraits of the disappearing native communities of British Columbia coast – disease, unwed and unemployed mothers, and the destruction of culture by missionaries…[/ul][/li]
The list goes on and on. You’d think nothing good ever happened here.
I think that’s our strategy if we’re ever invaded – we’ll simply lob depressing books a the enemy. The invaders will lack the resistance to depressing literature that Canadian children build up in public school, so if any soldier stops to read one of these books, he or she will immediately commit suicide.
I have to second The Lovely Bones. Maybe because I have children, but I found nothing uplifting about that book. My friend at work loved it, but I just found it too sad.
The Green Mile was sad, but I thought the story was fascinating. If you want to talk Stephen King books, I have read his books over and over again, except for one, which I have not been able to read again after the first time.
Cujo.
Let’s just say the movie’s ending and the book’s ending are ve-hery different.
House of Sand and Fog was very depressing. A great book, but depressing. Especially felt for the Iranian Colonel.
I’ll second Mystic River, it was so…bleak.
I haven’t seen either of the movie versions of those two books.
The most depressing book I’ve ever read has got to be The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, the story of a young boy who catches a wolf and, unwilling to shoot it, decides to release it in southern Mexico. While this sounds like the start of rollicking Boys-Own style yarn, it isn’t. Not even slightly. Things just get worse…and worse…and worse.
He and the wolf go through a lot of hardship before he eventually has to kill it anyway, having dragged it hundreds of miles across Mexico. He then returns home to discover that he’s inadvertently gotten most of his family killed, except for his traumatized younger brother. Who he takes back to Mexico to look for his family’s horse. And who eventually also gets killed. In the end the boy ends up physically and psychologically scarred, with no home or family or future and knowing that he has been responsible for the death of everyone he loved.
The thing is that if this had been a mediocre book I could have ignored the gathering gloom. But McCarthy is a skilled and poignant writer, and twists the knife again and again. I’ve avoided reading any of his other books because of this one.
I mentioned The Long Walk, but I’d also like to mention a couple more Stephen King books:
The Dead Zone: John Smith is in a coma for four years. When he comes out of it, he finds out that his fiance has now married with children, and he has ESP-type powers that becomes a curse more than a benefit.
The Shining: It sucks to be Jack Torrance in this book. There’s nothing he can do, as the hotel easily manipulates him to get to his son, Danny. Sure, bad things happen to the other characters, but I always felt bad for Jack most of all.
Come to think of it, most Stephen King novels are depressing. Carrie, Misery, 'Salem’s Lot…
The most depressing-in-a-good way book I have ever read is Patricia Anthony’s Flanders, which is an epitimological novel told from the point of view of a Texan in the British trenches of WWI.
I know it’s supposed to be uplifting–Christian allegory and all that–but I think “The Last Battle” (final book in “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis) is damned depressing. Maybe it’s just me, but the end of the world is kind of sad, even if you do end up in Heaven. And killing off the kids in a train accident! Hoo-ray! (Sheesh.)
“Charlotte’s Web,” by E.B. White, really knocked me for a loop when I was a kid. Worst of all, I finished it on Christmas morning.
I was going to nominate just about ANYTHING by Flannery O’Connor, but I see she’s been mentioned already, so I’ll settle for just about ANYTHING by William Faulkner.
The last Harry Potter book (so far) was a real bummer, not only because of the way the plot turned out, but because the quality just wasn’t there.
I found “The Return of the King” really depressing when I read it as a kid. The Scouring of the Shire (not in the movie, if you don’t know what I’m talking about) and the departure from Middle Earth – awful!
Oh, and regarding Hans Christian Anderson – may I add “The Fir Tree” to the list of horrors?
This thread is 3 pages and no one has brought up The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass?
That sunk me more than Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which I read on the sly in the library during my 12 yo gross-out phase. I checked it out once and my mom made me return it as unsuitable.
Would have been better to keep the Gunter Grass out of my hands…
Susan didn’t die! Of course, she may be going to Hell!
Rod and Tod YAY!
Oh! I had forgotten about that one. He’s a cheery writer altogether. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by him that ended even remotely well. Personally I think After the First Death is even worse than The Cheese. With The Bumblebee Flies Anyway following close on.
Btw, this list seems to have more of my favourite books in it than any other book-related poll. I live fairly cheerfully, but read and listen to depressing stuff.
That’s funny. . . I’d pretty much forgotten what happened to the cheerleader chick.
The book did end on a decidedly upbeat note, though- kind of a “How Chub Got His Groove Back.”
He was finally jazzed on an idea for a novel he could actually finish, The Predator and the Prey. Remember?
Two-Brew: “He put the wrong fucker in the quicksand?!”
Goldman’s my bud.