I have also. I was surprised to see Ann Coulter in it.
In my top five would have to be The Gods of Pegana by Lord Dunsany. Inspired by Hindu mythology, it depicts a cosmos that is cruelly indifferent to humanity. For starters, all creation is the dream of an Ubergod, and will vanish like a soap bubble when he someday wakes up. The lesser gods don’t give a damn about humanity, except to punish people for hubris or to torture them for fun. Love, justice, purpose? Fuggedaboutit.
Moby Dick isn’t depressing, though, and is in fact, really funny and entertaining! I would have hated it if I had had to read it in school, too (because I’m sure I would have tried to read it all the morning of the big test), but I read it for the first time last Christmas and absolutely loved it. Don’t keep away from it thinking it’s going to be a boring slog because it really isn’t!
I came to say Painted Bird by Kozinsky. It was so disturbing that I recall asking myself “should I be reading this?”
JZ’s Blind Date wasn’t exactly an all-nice-n-gooey-fest, either. Kinda tough, though, distinguishing memoir from novels with his stuff, sometimes, so I don’t know if one can technically call it a novel.
Holy GOALIE Notes really takes the cake. It takes several cakes. Actually, it takes so many cakes, that Cuddles from Polyester would have a really, really tough time getting through all of them.
Too illiterate to go through whole thread, but I’d be surprised if Knut Hamsen’s Hunger hasn’t been mentioned. I made the mistake of reading it when I was sick - felt like Munch’s stupid screamer in the process - and regretted, very much, wading through equally feverish prose that swept me up in this swirling impressionistic shitstorm as buddy (oh great - first person narrator, too, just to really immerse us in it), tried to navigate through a maelstrom of unsteady encounters with various people during his impoverished search for food. Felt almost claustrophobic being continuously subjected to his increasingly less lucid musings, which grew more intense and frenzied as his physical state correspondingly declined.
Shit-eating-grin-tastic.
DM Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, at points, was depressingly grim, like the depredations of World War Two, and even all that horndog poetry < (?) at the beginning wasn’t exactly un-depressing, let’s just say. Even her parrying with “Freud” was a bit of a bring-down. The ending, like - whoa - whole different kettle of over-steamed eggplant, there - powerful, moving, almost dare I say wrenching. Certainly didn’t see it coming, considering what preceded it. Pretty-well a happy ending, basically, without being incongruous nor facile.
John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me was depressing, but got me fired up, too, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon was upbeat like one of Mr. Mike’s least loved bedtime tales was.
I bought that book at a thrift store several years ago, and before I had a chance to read it, one of my cats threw up on it. :o
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane is not exactly jolly reading. Nor is ‘House of Mirth’ by Edith Wharton.
Has anyone mentioned Elie Wiesel’s Night yet?
Allow me to present Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Not only does the main character spend most of the novel providing basic first aid in one of the worst slums in Bombay/Mumbai (which thrills the residents who previously had exactly jack and shit to treat their wounds and illnesses) it also kills off the only happy character in the most gruesome way possible.
Happy Guy gets married and becomes a cab driver. Late one night he gets hit by a truck carrying steel girders which fly into his car and rip off his entire lower jaw. But he’s not dead, oh no. He survives several days in the hospital and *then *he dies.
There are some really great suggestions here, though this may be a list I would be happier avoiding reading. I will add to the list though… Winter’s Bone by Woodrell. Even though it can be taken that things work out for the protagonist, the cycle of the lifestyle that she lives in is pretty bleak looking forward, especially if that cycle is relatable personally.
Jurgis finds out Socialism cures everything. Upton at his most Upbeat.
I read all the way to the end sure that somebody else would have mentioned A Fine Balance. Really, nobody? Because that book, my god, music to hang oneself to.
There’s a difference between “books that are sad, or have sad parts” and “books that are just flat out depressing”. I find myself putting down books that are overwhelmingly bleak, or that have a certain kind of cruelty, these days. (Not just books that are sad, books should be sad sometimes.) I put down Let the Right One In because it was just so relentlessly bleak, and another one that I can’t remember the name of but it’s recent, and really nasty, and about whalers? because it had that specific sort of cruelty.
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Goddam, I love this book. It is the biggest middle finger to the entire human race that I can think of, but it is also beautiful, haunting, lyrical, maddening, saddening, and hysterically funny all at the same time.
Another great example, in praise and damnation of human nature.
I found Black Like Me incredibly depressing when I read it in the 1980s. More recently Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is even more depressing because a lot of it is the same problems.
Upvotes for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day both mentioned upthread.
Another vote for The Handmaid’s Tale. It hit me harder than even 1984, for some reason.
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Charles Frazier’s “Thirteen Moons” comes to mind, off the top of my head.
Also William Trevor’s “Felicia’s Journey”. I took it along to read on a trip, it was so depressing, I threw it away somewhere in Cental Asia, it nearly spoiled the trip.
Possibly because theocracy seems more plausible in the USA than socialism?
I was waiting for something worse than Jude the Obscure. Thank you.