And so is the HBO series. You watch it at all?
I haven’t read any of the books, but the series is full of what you mention. It’s also a pretty bleak world, in much the same way I’ll bet the actual Middle Ages were, though without the magic. But it does have an exciting story arc for many (though not exactly all) of the plot lines, like a rated-R version of LotR. All-in-all, great television at least.
But GoT has castles! Dragons! Nifty shining armor on hunky men and floor-sweeping kirtles on gorgeous women. Nifty shining armor on one gorgeous woman. Sorceresses dressed in scarlet cloaks with ruby chokers round their throats. A witty, cynical dwarf. Dicks 'n tits. Explosions of green fire. Who minds a little misery when you have all of that?
Did I mention the dragons?
My contribution to “most depressing” threads is usually “Boys and Girls Together” by William Goldman. You may have heard of him – he wrote The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and lots of others. Well, he’s a great writer with a gift for making you really like his characters. Then he does terrible things to them. Apparently when he started writing novels in the late 50’s, early 60’s, happy endings were not a thing.
The only thing even remotely original about GoT is that you don’t hit the end of a chapter when two people start to f*ck or chop each other to pieces, or both.
Recycled drivel with a shovel of hot spices. And yes, relentlessly, aggressively, endlessly depressing.
My Sister’s Keeper, the ending of which pissed me off so much I really did rip it in half and throw it across the room.
I watched the first Season and while it was good TV, it was way too disturbing for my tastes. At this point, based on what I’ve heard, it just sounds like exploitative plot device after plot device with no apparent motive other than to shock and dismay. I don’t consider that good writing, though obviously a lot of people disagree with me because it’s a very popular show.
I don’t mind misery at all. I do mind misery without a point.
Then stay way, way away from the whole mess!
And speaking of Stephen King and Flowers for Algernon, and ‘the whole mess’, he wrote a short story very similar to Flowers for Algernon called The End of the Whole Mess. The story’s form is that of an account of a genius’s brother who figured out a way to eliminate any violent nature in humans. TPTB decide to seed the drug into the whole world, bringing on a short period of absolute peace. The unfortunate side-effect being, which they found out far too late, is that it eventually it erodes your mental capacity to being a driveling idiot; then death. The ending was so sad. Great read though.
Hmm. Sounds like a fair trade-off.
I haven’t actually read Flowers for Algernon.
I second this. First book that came to my mind, and frankly I’m not sure what’s second but I don’t think it’s close. C&P is not like a sad sob story or anything, it’s just so dark and dismal. Of course, Dostoyevsky was exiled in Siberia doing hard labor for several years, so what do you expect.
The Good Soldier by George Gissing is summed up by it’s famous 1st line:
[QUOTE=George Gissing]
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
[/QUOTE]
That was school required reading when I was 14. I utterly hated it, until I found the book it’s a sort of parody of, Coral Island. After reading that sickly dreck, in which a bunch of boys with largely the same names get shipwrecked, then basically rebuild the British empire on a tiny scale (stopping just short of tea plantations and forming cricket teams only because of the lack of natives to subjugate), while having jolly japes, it totally changed my view on Lord of the Flies. Honestly, I wanted horrible things to happen to those cardboard characters just as much as William Golding clearly did.
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
I never read that, but I did see the short film it was based on. Very sad.
Interesting, because I’ve long thought of Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky as being a response to Lord of the Flies (even though the publication dates make that unlikely). In Heinlein’s story, a group of youths stranded far from civilization manage, through some muddling through, to build a basically functional (though not perfect) society, only to get branded as savages when they’re eventually rescued.
A Narrow Street by Elliot Paul: about Paris in the 1920s – widely felt to be an overall joyful place and time. Not in this novel, whose emphasis is heavily on how horribly screwed-up France was in multiple ways, owing to World War I and its consequences; plus much concerning ugly oppression at the time, of the “have-nots” there (essentially, the book’s central characters), by the “haves”. Add in, much about folk then living in Paris, displaced from their homes elsewhere in Europe, mostly further east – in the main, ill-treated and disliked by French officialdom and French individuals; and with abundant hideous back-stories about what had been done to them back home, especially during WWI. Mostly, a misery surfeit-and-overdose.
I’ve never been a communist; but I personally found The Jungle a less miserable read, than I’d envisaged. Much horrible and heartbreaking stuff, re big business abominably ill-using the working stiffs; but also, in my view, a surprising amount of picaresque comedy and strange experiences, engaged in by the book’s protagonists – plus the hero and his friends’ discovery of Socialism as a positive way forward (which would likely have ultimately gone sour for them in real life; but the book does not take us that far, chronologically).
I’ve loved LOTR and The Hobbit almost lifelong; but I’ve heard from sundry sources about – as above cite – the extreme depressingness of "JRRT and editors’ " chronicles of Middle-Earth pre-the late Third Age. Reckon it most unlikely that I’ll ever embark on Silmarillion or Children of Hurin; be their literary crafting never so exquisite.
I see that Ethan Frome and Sanctuary have been mentioned, so I’ll add Rabbit, Run. And for short stories, The Man Who Came Early, by Poul Anderson.
Don’t do it unless you’ve grown tired of living.
Plus one for Jude The Obscure.
Now I have to find Coral Island, read it, and re-read Lord of the Flies (which I, too, had to read at 13 or 14).
Kundera’s The Incredible Lightness of Being is one that I recall as being particularly unpleasant. Not only did the characters seem like thoroughly miserable people, the story itself was underwhelming and didn’t live up to anything I’d heard about it.
I had read his Notes from Underground and that was depressing as shit also.
I loved Lord of the Flies.
I guess I have really dark tastes. Which is fine but it can be a real pain in the ass because sometimes it just gets too depressing.