Great book, but one of those where you know it’s not going to end up right.
Atonement. And the movie’s no lark, either.
This is what I came in to say. So +1.
Also, Flowers for Algernon and/or Of Mice and Men.
Isn’t this what Metallica based their song One upon?
That book actually has an upbeat ending, if you’re a communist.
This is the novel that popped into my head when I read the thread title.
Lots of people hate it, and I agree it isn’t uplifting. However, Ethan’s quiet shy, hopeless and almost desperate affection spoke to nerdy shy teenage Sitnam. For all the strong feelings Ethan has almost nothing happens in the book, just like real life. I found comfort in not being the only one in a J. Alfred Prufrock-like existence.
Now, something like The Road, that’ll make you slit your wrists.
On the Beach by Neville Shute. Humanity is wiped out by a nuclear conflict. Can’t get much more depressing than that!
I couldn’t care about the characters enough to be depressed by their predicament. Another book for the trash heap.
I’d nominate Crime and Punishment, which I loved but never finished because it made me want to shoot myself.
The Confusions of Young Torless is another one, loosely based on the personal experience of the author. I liked it quite a bit when I read it, but it’s basically about some boys who physically and sexually torture a weaker boy, and the protagonist’s (bystander participant’s) struggle to understand what he’s done through the lens of existentialism.
When I had a course on existentialism in college, my professor said, ‘‘If you have clinical depression, do not take this course.’’ I took it anyway. Those were my more masochistic days. Nausea, The Stranger, Heart of Darkness, etc. etc. I eat that stuff up when I can stomach it. I did have to withdraw from the course, though, because prof was absolutely right. It was too much for an already depressed person to handle.
If we’re talking about stuff I’ve recently read, Ender’s Game is almost intolerably depressing to me right now. He’s just a boy.
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Lots of people hate it, and I agree it isn’t uplifting. However, Ethan’s quiet shy, hopeless and almost desperate affection spoke to nerdy shy teenage Sitnam. For all the strong feelings Ethan has almost nothing happens in the book, just like real life. I found comfort in not being the only one in a J. Alfred Prufrock-like existence.
[/QUOTE]
It’s okay, I understand what it’s like to love books people hate. One of my favorites is Catcher in the Rye, for a similar reason. Holden was a traumatized kid expected to act like everything was fine.
I’ll add The Long Walk by Stephen King to the list, despite thinking its one of the best American novels ever written.
Seeing by Saramago (especially if you read Blindness)
2666 by Bolaño
Mine’s a little bizarre.
It’s hard to explain why, but a potboiler sado-romance named Two sent me into such a rage that I tried to tear the book in half. It was around the house, half-tear across it, for years. It might have been that it was button-pushing crap (think Fifty Shades, forty years ago), or that I was really too young to have read it, but something about the mildly sadistic “get away closer” romance at the heart of the story made me angry-sick.
I’ve never been able to find it since; it must have been from a very minor genre publisher.
Other novels have left me depressed, but not more than they should have, if you know what I mean. That one still bothers me, and I don’t think I can recall a specific paragraph from it now.
Yes.
For me it was The Bell Jar, which I read when I moved to college, alone for the first time, in a dorm room with no roommate. It was not a happy time.
Agreed, and agreed.
It was originally published under the pen name Richard Bachman, though I see there are more recent publishings under King’s name.
Probably this one; I didn’t much care for “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, but I kind of saw the ending coming, and pretty much loathed the book anyway, so it didn’t bug me much.
But “Flowers for Algernon” really hit home when I was in high school.
I know the question is subjective (the most depressing novel you have read), but objectively … The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Allegedly, its publication lead to a rash of suicides, leading to the coining of a term: the “Werther Effect”.
Hard to get more depressing than that - the novel gives its name to causing people to kill themselves. 
I haven’t read any Steinbeck at all except for The Pearl, being forced to read it as well, in high school. It was such a downer it put me off of the author completely.
I also haven’t read Dickens since I had to read Great Expectations in high school.
Seconding Never Let Me Go.
A Clockwork Orange and Of Mice and Men are definitely up there.
Connie Willis Doomsday Book.
“It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis.
Published in 1935, and it could potentially happen here. I read it a few months ago.