I’m so damned tired, I read the title of this thread fast and I thought Evie was asking “Most depressing golden book ever.”
Did virtually the complete works of Graham Greene elude me in this thread? The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair are profoundly albeit elegantly depressing.
Then there’s the apocalyptic Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, although one could argue this has an upbeat ending.
Say, nobody mentioned the Stephen King short story “The End Of The Whole Mess”. The premise of this story is that one of the characters discovers a small town in Texas where the incidence of violence is extroardinarily low. Hoping to end worldwide violence he figures out a way to collect and super-concentrate enough of the area’s groundwater to lace a volcano that is about to erupt. The eruption spreads this water throughout the world, and at first the idea seems to work. There’s a brief period of worldwide peace and understanding.
But then, too late, it’s noticed that the Texas village also had an extraordinarily high incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. The result is the worldwide destruction of human intellect. The narrator, who was a successful SF writer before the disaster, writes this up after injecting himself with the solution as a means of suicide, and we see his writing style become progressively simpler and more childlike as his mind goes. In fact, it’s much like Flowers For Algernon, as Charly descends from genius to retardation (hey there’s another depressing book). Except in the Stephen King story, the regression occurs over one or two hours at most.
How about The Pigman, which I was forced to read in 6th grade?
Or When the Old Man Waves the Banner (which is a short story, not a book)?
Gah! Most everything I was going to nominate has already been mentioned, and I don’t feel like digging up anything else. Just wanted to say that I’m pleased that someone (Eve) is aware that The Lost Weekend is a better book than movie, and that it was a book before it was a movie. And that someone (Dung Beetle) was as affected as I was by The Nanny Diaries. I posted in another thread that it took me half an hour to calm down after finishing it.
Oh, and XWalrus, try anything by Paul Zindel. Well, I think there was one book of his that wasn’t depressing, but it was also total crap.
Rilch, I read the Nanny Diaries after seeing it mentioned recently on the boards, so it was probably your fault I read it!
:smack: Sorry!
Well, it’s not like you didn’t warn me. 
I’m not sure why people are listing Salem’s Lot as depressing. I always liked the fact that the characters reacted intelligently once they knew what they were dealing with.
I mean, yeah the good guys took some losses, and they torch the town, but it’s arguably a (pyrrhic) victory. Never did understand why the hero had to be the one to kill his now vampirized girlfriend.
For quality depression, I always go with Philip K. Dick. There was a man who could take any technological advance, right down to the advent of the fruit rollup, and have it come back and wipe out humanity. I think the best example is “The Second Variety”
Wherein the hero accidentally sends a human-disguised killing machine straight to humanity’s last outpost, and then is torn apart by a variety of nasty robotic killing machines
[Fixed spoilers --G]
Crap! Did something wrong with spoiler tags. Can someone tell me how to fix this before I toss myself to the nasty robotic killing machines? :eek: :smack:
Sorry, sorry, sorry!
[brackets] not <pointy things>
<b>Less Than Zero</b> by Bret Easton Ellis. This book will make you depressed for about a week.
I actually liked it, but i agree, horribly depressing.
I thought “Memoirs of a Geisha” was rather depressing, the same with “Of Mice and Men”, and we cannot forget the granddaddy of all depressing books “Les Miserable”.
Oy, vey. I had to examine three books by the same author for a YA literature class that I took this past semester; I chose The Chocolate War, Beyond the Chocolate War & We All Fall Down.
Oof. Fantastic reads - I enjoyed them all & think they’re valuable, but what unremitting gloom.
When I read depressing books, I like TRASHY depressing books. Wallowing in self pity is not a time to read great literature.
I vote for Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.
None of the characters have happy endings.
Nobody got anything to say for James Joyce here?
Dubliners makes Thomas Covenant look like Gilbert and Sullivan by comparison.
House of Sand and Fog: I really like the plot conflict, but shit this was a very depressing book.
There is another book, but I cannot remember the name of it; it’s about an old man, crippled, who looks back on his life of nastiness and destruction. I hated that old bastard that I threw the book out into the trash [something I would never do with a book - this was the only time - since I usuallly give books away or sell them].
I don’t know the author of the most depressing book I’ve ever read. It was something that my mother had me read when I was fourteen or so, and I handed it back asking why, why would she think I’d want to read it? I never got a good answer. :rolleyes:
The title was Rebecca but I don’t think it was the Daphne du Maurier novel, unless: There’s a scene in that book about a woman throwing her infant son off a balcony, killing him. That’s the only part I haven’t been able to block out by now.
**The Bell Jar ** by Sylvia Plath. Sure, this (heavily autobiographical novel) ends on a tentatively upbeat note, but most readers know how Plath’s own story ends.
**An Underachiever’s Diary ** by Benjamin Anastas.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, not the least because the events therein could well happen in the not-so-distant future.
Everybody dies. Everybody in the world. Horribly. Without a killer robot in sight.