Heh. Actually despite its grim ending, it’s a fantastic story. One of the best of all time. I think if you liked Lord of the Flies, you’d love Flowers for Algernon.
The great thing about the Silmarillion is that if there’s one story in it you don’t like, you can just skip on to the next one. Children of Hurin is the only really depressing tale in it: Others have sad happenings and wistful longings and crushing defeats and so on, but it’s not really personal. And on the other hand, you also have epic adventures like the tale of Beren and Luthien.
A year or so ago, at a “dirt-cheap used-books bazaar”, I did buy a copy of the Silmarillion for 50 UK pence: have yet to open it – but will endeavour to keep your words in mind.
Any given book by V.C. Andrews. They’re all the same premise anyway.
You forgot the incest porn.
A Song of Ice and Fire has plenty of depressing things happen, but it’s not depressing itself. No matter how many hero characters get massacred, there’s always someone else for you to root for. Sometimes even the very characters you once despised for what they did earlier in the series.
Until they die.
For me it’s got to be *Of Mice and Men *and Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Do graphic novels count? Can I “recommend” the 2000AD Story “Kano” originally published in Progs 828-837 in 1993 but available as a complete volume?
The eponymous hero “Kano” is a war veteran struggling to come to terms with terrible abuse at the hands of his captors and the death of his family and comrades. He lives it all over again on a planet where time runs backwards for an hour a day. The ending where he experiences the terrible certainty of it all is just awful to experience. A wonderful, vivid, emotional read. But not happy, oh no.
That lady really had a thing for incest.
When I was maybe 10 (yes, 10!) my grandmother gave me the Dawn series. Based on what I recall, Dawn lives a shitty life sharing a mattress with her brother and goes to a rich-kid school where she meets this pushy rich asshole Phillip that she almost fucks. Then the cops come and she learns that her brother is not really her brother, and the pushy asshole Phillip is actually her brother. So naturally she fucks the guy that she thought was her brother, and then is raped by her actual brother (Phillip.)
Later in the series she has a teenage daughter with the guy she thought was her brother, and her actual brother (Phillip) rapes the daughter too. Lovingly depicted, detailed rape scenes clearly intended to titillate.
It’s trash.
SO you were in Sister Mary Roberta’s Sophomore class too? I hated that book!
So I gathered.
Wow,* ten?
*
It’s the only John Gunther book that’s still in print.
It’s pretty sad these were some of the only models for romance in fiction I had at the time. A lot of my early work is very derivative, which is not uncommon for new writers, especially considering I was just a kid. But it was a standard model that took some time to work through and ultimately reject. I vowed no book of mine would be exploitative of these very painful issues. I’ll write about them, because they matter, but I won’t exploit them.
I still kind of hate the romance genre but the straight-up rapeyness of romance novels is not as bad as it used to be. And VC Andrews books were generally targeted at teen girls. These helpless victims were supposed to be our role models. And people wonder why some women have such fucked up ideas about sex and relationships.
What do you write?
Ironweed.
It’s “its” and it’s Ford Madox Ford and it’s not really all that sad.
This. It was required reading in HS. Hated it then. It was free on kindle several months ago so I picked it up to see if it was as bad as I recalled. Yep.
This was a big thing in the 70’s when I was a teen. I read the first chapter or two, don’t really recall how many. I was nope, nope, nope…one of the first books I never finished.
I thought she was brilliant when I was 15. I thought she was insane by the time I graduated college 5 years later.
I’m revising my first sci-fi novel. It’s a dark, gritty, sexy love story set in the middle of a fictional civil war. Genocide, poverty, racism, trauma, sexual assault v. kinky consensual sex, you name it, it’s in there. I have a brief description here.
It has some intense, very violent, bleak moments, but I think the message is ultimately positive: Love makes life bearable.