I’ve enjoyed some bleak books mentioned here. Ivan Denisovich, Sphere, etc. I can understand the reaction of depression following their reading, though.
Flowers for Algernon I found not so much depressing as fucking terrifying.
I thought Great Expectations was simply irritating. But that eventually gave way to a morbid curiosity, in a “what the hell is wrong with all these idiots?” kind of way. I think I sprained muscles in my eyes from rolling at the stupid twist(s?).
A Farewell to Arms
It may be a good story, but too many people in my family have succumbed to dementia for me to think of that book with anything but burning rage. Fuck Algernon and his flowers.
This thread made me remember why I don’t like dog stories: Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows. Don’t get a dog, kids, or you’ll have to kill it once you’ve gotten really attached to it!
Well, no one ever accused Sinclair Lewis of subtlety.
The novel is indeed an inevitable drift toward awfulness, but the ending does dip its feet into hopefulness, especially with the famous last line:
“And still Doremus goes into that red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die.”
That’s why one of the first Baker’s Dozens I ever started was “Fiction with a dog as an important character where the dog doesn’t die.”
Worse than fictional dogs dying heartbreaking deaths are stories about real animals dying even worse one. Is it “Invisible Man” or one of the other 1960s black autobiographies where the subject, as a child, is told to get rid of a kitten?
And there’s the kitten in Black Sunday. That a writer could conceive of such a scene, let alone put it to paper…
Gah! I can’t believe Angela’s Ashes hasn’t been mentioned.
It had such critical acclaim that I was really looking forward to reading it.
And then I read it and discovered that it was about how life is pretty bad, but then it gets worse and then worse and then worse still and then it ends.
What a colossal bummer of a book.
God, yes, and 'Tis. At least Roddy Doyle understands humor; the rest of the beloved Irish writers just seem to be trying to replace the Russians at the bottom of the depression barrel. Mrs. B. loved AA and got me to read it. After about the sixth time the drunken, filthy father drank up his wages and got them booted to a yet-worse living situation, I gave up. I think that was chapter 3.
If you haven’t already, then don’t read There Will Come Soft Rains. That poor dog…
The first book that popped into my head was Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
For me, it wasn’t the “life stinks” aspect that turned me off, it was that there was no forward movement in the book–not much plot development, not much character development, just “life sucks” “life sucks” “life sucks” “life sucks.” Well written, and evocative, but it just got so repetitive after a while. I gave up less than halfway through.
Several people have mentioned The Road. It is a bummer, for sure, but I’ll take it that you haven’t read McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It makes The Road seem like Harry Potter.
(Insert classic Russian literature title here):
Or, Night, a semi-fictionalized account of Elie Wiesel’s lighthearted romp through Nazi death camps, a forced march that resulted in the deaths of 90% of the prisoners (think: ‘Richard Bachman’s’ “The Long Walk” with pre-starved Jews instead of game show contestants) and his jackanapes reintegrating into normal society afterward. Fun for the whole family! Especially when the young and adaptable Eliezer starts resenting his father for holding on to moral values that threaten to get both of them killed in the camps. Bonus lifetime haunting image of starving toddlers sucking the frostbitten meat off the ends of their fingers, leaving exposed bone behind.
Night made an enduring impact, that’s for sure.
I’m curious what bits were fictionalized? It read like straight-up memoir to me.
If truth-based accounts are included in this assessment, while we’re on the lovely subject of the Holocaust, I dare you to read Maus and not be totally wrecked by it.
Not so bad as a few upthread, but I was very depressed by “Earth Abides” by George R. Stewart.
There have been a lot of really good, dark books mentioned already. I actually really like dark, depressing books sometimes, and I’ve read a number of the ones mentioned already.
Just to mention another, I don’t think anyone mentioned Requiem for a Dream yet. It just gets darker and darker, and the ending is superbly depressing. Some people don’t like the writing style, but I think it is very well suited to the topic.
The movie adaptation is also very depressing.
“Angela’s Ashes” and “'Tis” weren’t novels, although it’s believed that a lot of the stories were embellished.
I just looked that up. You are right; BTW, there’s a Stephen King short story where a man committed suicide in that same manner. :eek:
That’s kind of inevitable with memoir, because human memory has a tendency to fill in the gaps without first consulting the person doing the remembering. I recently wrote a short memoir piece, and it’s amazing how much detail you have to come up with to bring a story to life, things you couldn’t possibly have known, like what someone was wearing at the time or exactly how the dialog went. Or maybe an experience has happened so many times they all blur together (did he move six times? or was it eight?) Maybe separate incidents become one in your mind. There are a million ways to misremember things, and that is just a flaw of human memory, not intentional misrepresentation by any means.
I recently attended a Writer’s Workshop on the subject of memoir, and they addressed that specifically. Namely, ‘‘Of course it isn’t going to be 100% accurate, it’s essentially a dramatized version of the experience as you remember it.’’ But I think a lot of readers don’t get that. They want to be certain everything happened just so and that’s just not a realistic expectation.
Discussed on the Wikipedia page; the original manuscript was enormous, it was translated into French, and then heavily edited and compiled into an English translation. By that point, there was little resemblance to Wiesel’s original memoir, and a couple of people have already pointed out that memoirs themselves are almost never actual straight accounts of what actually happened. Major events are probably fairly accurate, but the narrator was more of a literary construct than a young version of Elie by that point, and details had certainly been elided.