What’s the most depressing work of fiction that you ever read?
Mine is Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun about a US serviceman who has lost his limbs and his voice in combat but whose mind is fully functioning. He is permanently relegated to a hospital bed, unable to move, unable to speak, his situation the very definition of hell.
John Steinbeck’s total oeuvre. Being forced to read The Pearl then Grapes of Wrath in school put me off reading books at all for many years.
Jude the Obscure.
I win. Which is to say I lose :(. Fucking Thomas Hardy.
Yeah, Jude the Obscure.
Infinite Jest isn’t exactly a bag of laughs. I’ll have to go with that one.
I hear you - unfortunately, Steinbeck has that flavor of books. He has the other flavor - fun, whimsical stories like Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, etc. Wish those were assigned more often in school!
I have a few - I tend to call them “everybody dies” books. Hardy, some Dickens, the darker Steinbeck stuff. Oy.
I wholeheartedly agree that The Pearl was depressing, but I actually liked it…it was among the few things that I was forced to read in school that I did enjoy and found interesting.
My nominations would have to be Great Expectations and Les Miserables. It’s one thing when the stories themselves are depressing, but when the actual reading is trudging and amplifies that depression, that’s another. Thank gawd I never had to read Moby Dick, Of Mice And Men, and Jude The Obscure…
Remains of the Day
Of Human Bondage by Sumerset Maugham.
*The Heart is a Lonely Hunter * by Carson McCullers
**AKA **Life Sucks and Then You Die.
Tess of the D’ubervilles doesn’t have the greatest ending.
The Road is almost completely relentless and grim. It’s a great book, but it ain’t exactly beach reading.
Night Train by Martin Amis. A murder-whodunit. Here’s the setup: A cop has to investigate a suspicious suicide by a woman who had everything going for her - genius astrophysicist, engaged to be married to a golden boy, etc. Turns out the victim had two bullets in her head, so it looks like murder.
Here’s the solution, if you don’t want to read it (but think about reading it first!):The two bullets is a red herring - suicides do that, sometimes. The victim committed suicide out of hard-won nihilism based on her research (and other stuff in her life). The book ends with the cop-narrator, an on-the-wagon alcoholic, having been driven off the wagon and probably ready to off herself as well.
“The Jungle.” I’m not even sure how it ends, because I never finished it the three times I started it. It was too damn depressing to keep reading.
Ethan Frome.
Fuck that novel so hard.
I can’t recommend the entire book, but The Passage by Justin Cronin (which is a novel, though not literature) has one of the most depressing first Chapters EVER. The entire book is bleak but that first chapter. Damn, I’ve got something in my eye.
Never Let Me Go was a real buzz kill.
Atlas Shrugged: tedious, boring, depressing and pointless. The more I read, the more I wanted to murder Ayn Rand and then shoot myself in the head. That was one fucked up woman.
A contender might be Wuthering Heights, although I can’t decide if it was depressing or just crushingly boring.
“A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” by Poul Anderson, pretty much the climax of the Dominic Flandry saga. Now, this is a brilliant book! The concepts and development are at the very peak of Anderson’s creativity.
But, oh, hades, what a depressing book! He really whales on his protagonist, hurting him in ways I wouldn’t hurt my worst enemy.
*We Need to Talk about Kevin * Made me glad I never had children.