Literary Misery, Please...

[LittlePrecious]

I like dark, disturbing, atmospheric and/or miserable fiction books. I veer towards literary fiction.

As a flavour of where I'm at;
I love everything that Hanya Yanagihara has written.

I love most of Siri Hustvedt's fiction books, even if the art bits are a bit pompous.

I love most of Ottessa Moshfegh's books.

I love Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" though struggled with his other works.
I love "My Dark Vanessa" by Kate Elizabeth Russell.

I love "The Handmaid's Tale" but hate everything else Attwood has ever written. I've never tried "The Testaments" because HMT ended perfectly for me.

I love most of Kazuo Ishiguro's books but was taken completely aback at how shit "The Buried Giant" was and so haven't gone back to his works.

I love "Washington Black" by Esi Edugyan but hated "Half Blood Blues" and so haven't tried anything else from her.

Not quite as dark, by other favourite authors are:
Isabelle Allende
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
Bernadine Evaristo
Karen Maitland
Yaa Gyasi
Sarah Waters

Currently waiting be read I have:
"Shuggie Bain" by Douglas Stuart
"The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Wise readers of MN, do you have any recommendations for other dark, atmospheric, disturbing and/or miserably novels which veer towards literary fiction?

Perfume: the Story of a Murderer - Patrick Suskind
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

There’s the Kate Atkinson short stories every one of which ends tragically. Will look up title.

Just about anything by Jean Rhys.

Also some horrendously tragic short stories written by Olivia Manning. I’ve tried to find the book’s title but not having much luck. It was published by Virago.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road
So so bleak and a bleak film

Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
Does it get bleaker than this?

Wilkie Collins - The Woman In White
Atmospheric as hell

The Suspicions of Mr Whitcher
Can't remember the author - stayed with me for ages

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

Yep - this is my favourite book of all time. It ruined reading for me when I read it first time because absolutely no subsequent books could come close it it. Then I re-read it earlier this year and it did exactly the same thing (kind of hence me starting this thread!)

I was going to suggest Jude the Obscure and The Road.

There are so many amazing suggestions here, thank you.

I really enjoy Daphne Du Maurier - especially Jamaica Inn. But I couldn't get to grips with "The House on the Strand" and it kind of put me off her a little.

I was also going to suggest Hardy. He is good at atmosphere. He’s also the most consistently depressing author.

I did Tess for A level and still hate Angel Clare, 40 years later.

Jude may be the bleakest book in the history of mankind.

Weirdly, I don’t find Hardy depressing. You’re right, of course, that he’s bleak as hell, but he wasn’t an unhappy man. In general, he seems to have been relatively cheerful. The writers who really depress me were themselves depressed. It’s as if their depression seeps into the work. I can read Hardy and quite enjoy it. OK, it isn’t P G Wodehouse, but he doesn’t have the same effect on me as Joseph Conrad or Philip Larkin. I admire both, but god I feel depressed after reading them. And I think it’s because Conrad and Larkin suffered from depression, whereas Hardy didn’t.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Just read Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss after reading the recommendation here and I thought it was brilliant. I'm just downloading some more of her stuff onto my kindle now. Thanks for the recommendation, whichever poster it was!

I found Secret Histories by Donna Tartt quite dark.

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys, both by Carlson Whitehead.

Beloved by Toni Morrison is about as dark as it gets

Bookmarking. Right up my street.

School run beckons, but just quickly -

Over the Easter hols I inhaled Diane Cook's The New Wilderness. Oh my gosh. If you're in the market for feeling miserable, this more than delivers. She's brilliant. And the novel is Bleak As.

Oh you should absolutely read The Dumb House and Glister by John Burnside. Single handledly the darkest stuff I’ve read.

Haruki Murakami‘s Wind Up Bird Chronicle may tick your boxes (maybe all of his would actually

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

Surprised no one has mentioned Orwell yet - 1984 and Burmese Days are pretty miserable!

I found 'A Fine Balance' too oppressively miserable, than and Elias Cannetti's 'Auto da Fe', so maybe you'd like that 😜

Hilary Mantel's 'Beyond Black' is as the title suggests, but entertaining with it.

Anything by Zola seems to be crushingly dark and full of people who hate each other, I had to read 'Germinal' at university and recently wondered whether I should try some of his other stuff but all the summaries suggested they were equally misanthropic!

Not long finished prophet song by Paul lynch. Misery on a stick

A little life. It's well written but incredibly disturbing.

A girl is a half formed thing. Brilliant but harrowing.

Beloved.

Juneteenth

The orphan master's son.

1984

The book of Ruth

A high wind in Jamaica

Anything by Claire Keegan tends to be quite atmospheric.

Not forgetting Jane Eyre which is disturbing in many different ways. And Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel that is also disturbing.

stasiland
Anna Funder
One of the best books

Following 👍

Hmm.

Pretty much my favourite novel of the 19thc is the too-often overlooked Villette by Charlotte Bronte, which is far, far more interesting than Jane Eyre, and does a wonderfully interior, Gothic take on suppressed female anger and misery, with a brilliantly self-censoring first-person narrator.

Colm Toibin's The Master, or The Blackwater Lightship, or his short story collection The Empty Family.

Rachel Cusk does misery very well -- start with The Lucky Ones or The Bradshaw Variations? Or, if you fancy funny Cusk for a change, The Country Life is hilarious.)

The brilliant and prolific Alice McDermott -- Child of My Heart is both brilliant and heartbreaking.

Have you read any Gwendoline Riley? Short, uncomfortable novels about awful families and wandering writer protagonists.

I can't recommend the brilliant Miriam Toews enough -- if you haven't read her, she's a Canadian Mennonite. Start with All My Puny Sorrows, which manages to be funny and warm as well as desperately sad, and is written from the POV of a sister visiting her suicidal concert pianist sister in a psychiatric unit. Her Women Talking (recently filmed) is very bleak.

Sorry for typos in pp. I was running out the door to an appointment.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Under the Skin by Michel Faber
The Siege by Helen Dunmore (lots more to choose too but this one stayed with me)
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby