I love bleak books. Novels where only sad things happen, and then they get more miserable. Not the weepy kind of fiction where you know the characters will overcome their troubles at the end of the book, or grisly horror, just pretty relentless grimness. A few days ago Lissa Evans author of Crooked Heart wrote her top 10 bleak books and inspired me to do the same. These aren’t necessarily my favourite books ever, just my favourite really unhappy ones. You can look for our lists on Twitter using #bleakbooks, but here’s mine below.
And if anyone else loves bleak books too, what have I missed (plenty, I’m sure)? If this inspires you to write your own list, I’d love to see it, and will update this post and link to yours. So ready for a bit of a cry?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Father and son trudge through destroyed USA looking for
food and trying to save people from cellars.
Legend of a Suicide by David Vann. In the main story two people go to an Alaskan island. One gets angry and destroys the radio. Only one survives.
Blindness by Jose Saramago. Nearly the whole world goes blind. In a terrible ‘hospital’ the men gang up on the women. This kind of ends well, but it feels like an afterthought.
All photos courtesy of Unsplash
I get too frustrated with Jude to really enjoy the misery of this novel 🙂
Hah! I know what you mean.
I too like to wallow in bleakness, although perhaps I should opt for more ‘feel good novels’, as my library keeps helpfully suggesting. I find David Peace very bleak in general – and ‘Tokyo Year Zero’ in particular. Practically all of Richard Yates, especially ‘Revolutionary Road’. Finally, ‘Death in Venice’ is creepily brilliant in its sombre bleakness.
Oh, yes, Richard Yates – I forgot about him, but I absolutely agree. I don’t know Tokyo Year Zero or Death in Venice, but I’ll go and look them up.
I love Halldor Laxness, Independent People is brilliant. It’s hard to think of books which are solely bleak, but I love The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, and anything by Jean Rhys, and Buriel Rites by Hannah Kent. All great, but sad reads.
I’m currently reading Good Morning, Midnight, which is great, but yes, bleak. It’s #ReadingRhys week next week on Twitter (hosted by various bloggers) if you want to join in.
I am also #ReadingRhys next week 🙂 Good Morning, Midnight is particularly bleak.
I just finished it this morning. Loved it, and yes it’s certainly bleak!
I’m a total wuss when it comes to bleakness! There was a thriller I read a few years ago – Alex, it was French though I can’t right now think of the author’s name unfortunately – and while I enjoyed a lot of it, it was just so unrelentingly dark that I felt like sitting down and weeping every few pages!
Hah! I don’t recommend that you read any of the books on my list then…
I think I can take (and even sort of enjoy) bleak but something…
Jean Rhys: bleak but so so stylish in every sense.
Hardy’s Jude: bleak but dramatically shocking. Came home from the pub aged 18 to see the children’s demise in a televised version and remember feeling my temperature plummet.
But Stoner I just found bleak. Perhaps I missed something.
bleak…but so ordinary? (I mean like he could be any one of us. Relateable?)
Claire, interesting because I like that type of book and have read a good number of those listed. Suggest The Drought (and the not quite so good, although my son preferred it, The Drowned World) by JG Ballard. Or do they fall into a different category of Dystopian novels? Not sure which category Margaret Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale would fall into.
BTW my wife thoroughly enjoyed your book, as did I.
I haven’t read any JG Ballard. Perhaps I should because I like dystopian, and aren’t they always bleak? I don’t see why they couldn’t go in both categories. And so glad you and your wife enjoyed Our Endless Numbered Days!
That’s my kind of reading list in some ways. I always prefer tragic operas and plays to the the comedies. They are usually so much more complex and fulfilling. Most of all I love the photo at the head of this post!
I have to admit I don’t know too much about opera, but if it works the same way with literature – I agree, much more fulfilling.
This is a great list, and I am ‘pleased’ to see Hardy on the list. I would also suggest ‘The Nether World’ by George Gissing, which is packed full of grinding poverty and dashed hopes and dreams in late nineteenth-century London. Don’t get ideas about your station, is this brutal message!
Thanks for your suggestion. I don’t know The Nether World, but even its title is bleak. I shall look it up.
Thank you for your very kind replies to my messages.
The following quote about ‘The Nether World’ by George Gissing sums up its fatalistic mood rather well:
Gissing invests his London with a stygian gloom. An incidental character, Mad Jack, a crazed itinerant preacher, gives voice to this metaphor while reciting a message received in a vision: ‘”… There is no escape for you. From poor you shall become poorer; the older you grow the lower you shall sink in want and misery; at the end there is waiting for you, one and all, a death in abandonment and despair. This is Hell – Hell – Hell!”’
https://www.londonfictions.com/george-gissing-the-nether-world.html
The Oxford Classics edition has an interesting introduction, but if you have time, you can read it for free on Project Gutenberg as the copyright has expired. (If that is the right term: please excuse my ignorance!)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4301
I have now been inspired to reread your novels, and I will buy new copies of them in the hope that you get at least some of the money.
Regards,
Patrick.