A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

An intriguing and compelling but borderline parodically grimdark novel about apocalypse by sleep deprivation. It's like a reading a car crash. I couldn't put it down.

Even before the apocalypse, the narrator, Paul, hates literally everything and everyone except his doomed wife Tanya. Even the metaphors are ultra grim. Here's a sample of Paul's pre-apocalypse outlook on life; he writes scholarly books on etymology.

My agent, still unsure about me after seven years of contractual bondage, was always pushing for an Eats Shoots and Leaves sort of mass placebo, the idea being to try to trick the public into consuming something inherently dry and bland by dusting it with MSG. I never delivered that book. I never refused, mind you—just went ahead and wrote other books which, published through unambitious presses, sold just enough copies to shut-ins and fuzzy-sweatered fussbudgets to draw forth more grudging grants, more painful teaching gigs, and to continue the damp seepage of royalties into my checking account.

In a single, typical paragraph, Paul drips contempt and hatred for his agent, having an agent, popular books on language, people who read popular books on language, etymology, his publishers, people who read his books, people who give him grants, teaching, and the money he makes writing.

Another moment which was emblematic of the novel's tone was when the apocalypse has begun and Paul and Tanya decide to have one last hurrah by eating at a restaurant. They choose a restaurant which is kind of a couple in-joke, because it has terrible food and bad service and they hate it.

And then the most people became unable to sleep overnight, became psychotic, and died (after setting up batshit cults because of course they did), but a small minority did continue sleeping. Paul was one of them. The adult Sleepers all dreamed blissfully of a beautiful golden light. The child Sleepers stopped talking and communicating in any way, and seemed weirdly calm.

None of this is ever explained. Possibly it would have been in Nod's planned sequels, Pod and God, but sadly Barnes died of cancer before writing them.

The batshit cult tortures and murders Sleepers and paints things bright yellow, including the heads of murdered Sleepers. Paul reluctantly protects a Sleeper child after Tanya goes insane, witnesses Seattle getting nuked, and prevents the insane last survivor of a nuclear warship from setting off a nuke. He then barricades himself and the child in his apartment from a crazed mob outside, lowers her down from the window on a rope, and lies down to sleep and be torn apart when the mob breaks in.

When he falls asleep/commits suicide, the book ends in mid-sentence.

There was an excellent sequel story this Yuletide, which is dark but not in this particular mode of grimdark, marginalia by StopTalkingAtMe.

Nod

The books which were able to break my reading block all shared a compelling, propulsive, page-turning quality, including this one. That is how I came to read what is possibly the single bleakest book I've ever read. It's very very good and I'm glad I read it, but... be warned.

Only Ever Yours is more of a satire/allegory of sexism, misogyny, beauty culture, and the maddeningly contradictory things we tell teenage girls and then judge for failing to do perfectly than a dystopia that could really happen. But consider it on any basis other than "is this a plausible extrapolation of the future," which it clearly isn't supposed to be, and it's horrifyingly realistic on its own terms.

In this horrendous post-apocalyptic world, frieda is a teenage girl being raised with other girls in a nightmarish school which is supposed to teach them to be perfect and beautiful so they can be given to men. It goes to every possible length to brainwash them to ensure that they won't ever rebel, let alone band together to do so, or even be kind to each other. There's no rebellion to overthrow the system, but there are some small and personal ones, in a world where choosing not to be cruel is a rebellion in itself.

The lack of capital letters on the girls' names (boys get them) is probably the least of the relentless detailing of how this society (our society, exaggerated) crushes girls and women, and prods and pushes them to crush themselves and each other. They must maintain a designated weight, but eat in a cafeteria where the Fatgirl Buffet always waits as a public temptation. Audio tapes play all night telling them they're worthless if they're not thin and perfect. They have regular sessions where they're told to critique each others' bodies. Even the flowers (as artificial as everything in this setting) have mirrors in their centers.

In the middle of all this horror is frieda, desperately grasping for love and acceptance, isabel, destroying herself for reasons frieda doesn't understand, and megan, who understands the rules and plays by them as hard as she can. All three of them are heartbreakingly human in a system designed to strip them of humanity.

Here are two excellent short fanfics, both distinctly more cheerful than the novel.

I'm the New Blue-Blood, by atheilen. megan carves out a life for herself after the book.

We All Have Our Favorites, by scioscribe. A very satisfying and even comforting fix-it, though fix-it in the context of the book is still incredibly dark.

Only Ever Yours

I got some boxes in the mail today. Here’s what I bought at Bookman’s:

The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Winner of the 2017 Newbery Medal), by Kelly Barnhill. A fantasy that looks surprisingly non-depressing despite having won a Newbery medal.

The Private Worlds of Julia Redfern, by Eleanor Cameron. Sequel to A Room Made of Windows, which is itself in a four-book series – huh, I had no idea! It’s about a girl writer.

Big Red , Outlaw Red, and Haunt Fox, by Jim Kjelgaard, who cornered the rather specific niche of exciting kids’ fiction about Irish setters.

Forest, by Janet Taylor Lisle. The back cover promised a pastoral fantasy about a girl and a forest, but I just now realized that it’s by the author of Afternoon of the Elves, possibly my all-time least-favorite Newbery book. I thought it would be about elves. There are no elves. Elves are a delusion. The heroine’s friend who says there’s elves turns out to be living with a mentally ill, abusive mother. When the heroine tells her own mother in the hope of getting her help, her friend is taken away and she never sees her again or learns what happens to her.

Message: Elves aren’t real. If you ever tell anyone a friend is being abused, they will disappear and you will never know if you did the right thing or made it worse. Also, everything is terrible.

Message of almost every Newbery book before about 1990: Your pets will die. Your grandparents will die. Your parents will die. Your best friend will die. Mentally ill or abused or disabled people die, are institutionalized, or disappear. (You may learn later that they died.) Social workers lock up your mentally ill friends, take away your abused friends, and step on your kitten. Magic isn’t real. All attempts to do the right thing lead inevitably to misery. Everything is terrible.

Meanwhile, Layla bought a book at Bookman's that she thought would be a heartwarming story of kids making friends while rescuing stranded narwhals. No One Expects Surprise! WWI.

I did end up reading the third book, hastily skimming the animal torture sections. Thankfully, they are clustered toward the end. However, the first part contains a tragic unicorn stillbirth.

This book had similar flaws and virtues as the first, and resembled that more than the incredibly depressing second book: 60% heartfelt and charming tale of vets in fantasyland, 40% torture, OTT tragedy, and whisker-twirling villains who kill people because they’re homicidal maniacs.

It introduced a number of new characters (possibly because so many were killed in book two), some of whom seemed potentially interesting but got little screentime, and some of whom were marvelous. I adored the earnest young griffin and his best buds, who decided to model themselves after the ideals of chivalry and so named themselves Roland, Oliver, and Clark Kent. Everything involving the junior and senior griffins was great. The obligatory incursion of a new genocidal bloodthirsty sadistic tortures-for-fun sociopath was not great.

This one has a happier ending, except that… ( Read more... )

A pair of '90s portal fantasies about veterinary students who travel to a fantasyland called Crossroads to treat centaurs, unicorns, griffins, and other magical beasts. I read these years ago and re-read recently with the intention of finally reading book three, which I had either failed to find or failed to read previously. Now that I have re-read, I understand why I never read the final book. I had remembered the fun parts (vet students figuring out how to treat magical creatures, and that is both accurate to my knowledge and very fun if you like that sort of thing) and forgotten about the truly amazing amount of awesome depressingness surrounding them.

I also have to mention that O'Donohoe also wrote an sf novel in a dystopian future, Too Too Solid Flesh about androids programmed with the personalities of the characters of Hamlet. This was also fairly depressing (though with way less torture), but more appropriate to the subject matter and I recall liking it a lot, despite a manic pixie dream girl.

Too, Too Solid Flesh

The Magic And The Healing

Under the Healing Sign

The Magic and the Healing

BJ Vaughan, a vet student, is understandably depressed. Her mother committed suicide out of the blue, leaving a note saying that she was dying of Huntington's Chorea (a horrific, fatal genetic disease) and BJ should be tested to see if she's going to get it too. BJ, who has been having mysterious symptoms lately, gets tested. Sure enough, she has it. She tells no one, but begins planning her suicide. I will cut to the chase and say that she continues telling no one and planning her suicide for the entire book, and in fact by the end of the second book, though she is no longer planning suicide, she has still told very, very few people and has not informed the people who most need to know.

But! Something more cheerful happens, and about time. BJ and some other students are invited on to a special exotic animal rotation, which of course turns out to be in Crossroads. The magical creatures, their cultures, and their ecologies are sketched-in but interesting and convincing. My favorite for cuteness was the flowerbinders, which are kittens the size of German Shepherds who catch their prey by winding flowers into their fur and camouflaging themselves as a bush or hillock of wildflowers. My favorite for interesting worldbuilding were the several sentient species which remain the prey of other sentient species, and how intelligent beings evolved cultures, laws, and rituals which account for that. There are a handful of human inhabitants of Crossroads, most of whom are essentially refugees who stumbled in while fleeing for their lives, but it's mostly populated by centaurs, fauns, griffins, etc.

As BJ and the other students ply their trade, they learn more about how the magic of Crossroads works, and BJ realizes that though traumatic injury and some diseases exist in Crossroads, cancer and degenerative diseases don't. If she stays, can she arrest or even cure her own degenerative illness? Is she willing to give up her entire previous life for the chance at a new one?

I think this is plenty of story for a novel, and if this had been the entire story, the book would have been much better, much less grim, and also much less ridiculous. Unfortunately, there is another plotline involving one of the most moustache-twirling villains I've ever come across. Her name is Morgan, and she is a sadistic genocidal sociopathic mass murderer whose hobbies include torture, mass graves, bathing in blood (literally), invasion, getting people hooked on drugs, slaughtering her own minions in front of her entire army just for the fun of it, and slaughtering everyone in sight. She plans to invade Crossroads, slaughter everyone, and then go to another world and slaughter everyone there. Rinse, repeat. Inexplicably, her army does not desert en masse despite her periodically torturing her own soldiers to death. Oh, yeah, and did I mention that she's immortal and invulnerable, so no one can just whack her?

She has a backstory. Sort of. It's the sort which introduces more plotholes than it resolves. Why is she the way she is? She's angry. NO SHIT. What's she angry about? Who knows! Why is she immortal? Because it was somehow a condition of booting her out of Crossroads earlier, when she was just a non-immortal homicidal maniac. Why the hell would you make a homicidal maniac immortal? Uh... the magic works that way! Why not kill her when you had the chance? Because the king was in love with her! WHY? Because she didn't seem evil right away. I realize this sort of thing happens in real life (the charming sociopath, I mean) but 1) we never see the charm, 2) if your choice is "kill the genocidal maniac you still kind of love, or make her immortal so she can come back and murder you and every citizen of your country," you need to suck it up and break out the guillotine.

Nobody in Crossroads thinks they have a chance of fighting her off, though they're planning a hopeless last stand anyway. Periodically Morgan sneaks in, tortures or kills some animals or people, and sneaks out. I don't mind reading about hurt animals in the context of veterinary medicine, but I draw the line at animal torture. Anyway, eventually the good guys beat her back, but it's just for now. They're still doomed. (Until book two! No, wait. Still doomed.)

There is also an extremely unconvincing romance between BJ and a faun named Stefan. They have no chemistry and nothing in common other than that they both like animals. They never have sex because BJ doesn't tell him she's dying but doesn't want to commit when she's dying. This entire plotline really didn't work for me. Alas, it continues in exactly the same vein in book two, except BJ is no longer dying and they do have sex... but she still doesn't tell him and continues to angst in the exact same way.

Approximately half of a pretty cool book melded to half of a pretty terrible book. Perhaps this was meant to be symbolic of Crossroads' many chimera-creatures... Nah.

Under the Healing Sign

My feelings about the sequel are summed up by an Amazon reader who wrote, "On the whole, it [the third book] is much better than the second book of the very same series, "Under The Healing Sign", which made me wish to commite suicide immediately upon reading the last chapter of it."

Despite the charmingly pastoral cover, what actually happens in this book is mostly death, despair, defeat, torture, animal and child harm, and the least triumphant "happy ending" I've ever read in a fantasy book. It does have some sweet scenes a la the good parts of the first book and introduces a really awesome character(who, shockingly, does not die), a gay and fabulous cross-dressing, swordfighting veterinarian, Dr. Esteban Protera, who needed to star or co-star in a cheerier book. But overall, I'm with the Amazon reviewer.

Spoilers, if anyone cares. I'll just hit a few of the grimdark highlights. ( Read more... )

Rosemary once was a child in a family with a sister, Fern, and a brother, Lowell. Now she's in college, palling around with a manic pixie dream girl named Harlow and trying not to think about the mysterious event that caused Fern to vanish and Lowell's life to go off the rails. The novel switches between Rosemary's childhood and adulthood as she comes to grips with whatever happened.

This novel has a possibly surprising plot twist about a fifth of the way in; I say possibly because I learned of it in a review, and there are other elements of the novel itself which may make it immediately evident. However, I will keep it a surprise for the benefit of those who don't want to be spoiled. I'll put it behind a cut.

Fowler is a highly skilled author whose books, unfortunately, never appeal to me anywhere near as much as they appeal to others. She always has intriguing premises and her novels always get rave reviews, so I keep checking them out. To date, I have never much liked any of them. Something about her prose style, characterization, and tone always strikes me as distant and chilly. This book was no exception. It involves a lot of potentially interesting and moving elements, but I found it dry and unsatisfying. However, I am in the minority in this, so you may well love this or any other of her books.

That being said, if you are at all sensitive to animal harm, avoid this book. It is centrally concerned with cruelty to animals, and contains multiple graphic depictions of it. (I didn't know this when I started, or I would not have read it.)

Great title, though.

( Read more... )

By Karen Joy Fowler We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

An anthology of dystopian YA short stories with a focus on diversity, ie, most of the protagonists are not white.

As a whole, this anthology is not much like most current YA dystopian novels, which are generally about naïve privileged white girls slowly coming to realize that their “the government controls everything” society actually sucks, while navigating a love triangle. The characters in this anthology are often aware from the get-go that everything sucks, and the central problem is generally not an over-controlling government, but a devastated environment, poverty, and the haves grinding the have-nots beneath their feet.

The result is more realistic and less paper-thin, but also quite depressing. Few of these teenagers are trying to save their world, but only to scratch out a few more days for themselves and their loved ones in a world which is clearly already doomed. With two possible exceptions, no one makes any difference at all to anyone beyond themselves or a handful of people in their immediate surroundings. (I say “possible” because there are two stories in which characters make an effort, but the story ends before we learn whether or not they succeed in terms of the larger picture.)

Sure, it wouldn’t be realistic for teenagers to save the world singlehandedly… but I don’t read science fiction for realism. Also, in real life people do make large changes collectively. A few more stories in which the protagonist is part of a larger effort to save or even improve the world would have been nice. (There is one story in which that's the case, Tempest Bradford's.)

I did really like some of the stories. But I would recommend reading a story or two here and there, as you feel like it. If you read the entire anthology from start to finish, the grimdark is overwhelming.

“The Last Day” by Ellen Oh. An alternate history of WWII set in Japan comes out… extremely similar to real history, so far as the main characters are concerned. Maybe the point was that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Otherwise, it’s a straightforward “war is bad and children suffer horribly” story, all the way down to its awesomely depressing conclusion. If you’re disturbed by graphic atom bomb scenes (I am) this might be one to skip. I would not have selected this as the story to open the anthology – it’s the darkest in the whole batch, and that's saying a lot.

“Freshee’s Frogurt” by Daniel H. Wilson. Oral history of robots run amuck, much along the lines of World War Z. A robot attacks two employees in a frozen yogurt shop, and there’s a bloody battle. That’s it. This was an excerpt from the novel Robopocalypse, which may explain how slight and unfinished it felt, but on the other hand it didn’t leave me wanting more. On the positive side, it’s only depressing in the sense that its space could have been given to a better story. In fact, it’s probably supposed to be funny in a hipster-ironic mode. (I did not find it funny.)

“Uncertainty Principle” by K. Tempest Bradford. A young girl notices reality shifting around her, but nobody else does. Over the years, the President changes, wars break out and are erased from time, and her best friend vanishes as if she had never existed. This extremely intense and existentially horrifying set-up turns into a more standard action-based science fiction story about halfway through. The whole thing is well-written but I liked the first half much more. It probably needed to be longer to give the second half the same emotional weight as the first. This one is more bittersweet than depressing.

“Pattern Recognition” by Ken Liu. Kids in an orphanage are told that they’ve been rescued from a hellish world outside, and are made to play video games all day. Very good prose; plausible but predictable story. There’s a really jarring, confusing transition right before the climax, possibly exacerbated by the poor formatting of the version I read (an e-book via Netgalley.) Moderately depressing.

“Gods of Dimming Light” by Greg van Eekhout. Alone among the stories, this is fantasy, not science fiction, and so reads more oddly than it probably would have in a more fantasy-geared anthology. In a doomed and dying world, a boy of Indonesian descent finds a connection to the other side of his heritage – his descent from Odin! The ancient Norse theme of the brave fight against inevitable doom meshes powerfully with the modern apocalyptic setting.

This was one of my favorites, mostly because of the ending. ( Read more... ) I didn't find this one depressing, but that was purely because the tone was heroic/tragic. Everyone's still doomed.

“Next Door” by Rahul Kanakia. The haves have gotten so plugged in to VR that they barely notice squatters living in their houses. A boy and his boyfriend search for a squat that isn’t bedbug-infested, and tangle with a family of haves that aren’t as out of touch as most. This story made me itch. Literally. It’s a black comedy and quite clever. And yes. Everyone is probably doomed. Including, quite possibly, ( Read more... )

“Good Girl” by Malinda Lo. Alone in the collection, this was an X has been banned and the government controls X story. (Interracial procreation is banned and the government controls marriage.) Ironically, it was my favorite of the original stories in the collection – sexy, well-written, well-paced, believable, and even with a somewhat hopeful ending. A biracial girl who can pass meets another biracial girl who’s living underground – literally and metaphorically. Lo is fantastic at depicting sexual attraction in a hot but non-cheesy way. The characterization is good, too. Great last line. I would read a whole book of this.

“A Pocket Full of Dharma” by Paolo Bacigalupi. A scarred, disabled, half-starved plague survivor leaves his village to become a beggar in a future Chinese city in the hope that things will be better there. Spoiler: they aren’t. Lots of colorful details of the setting, but I have a low gross-out threshold for descriptions of bodily fluids, and I ended up unable to finish this one.

“Blue Skies” by Cindy Pon. A have-not boy kidnaps a have girl in an environmentally devastated future Taiwan, in the hope of getting her wealthy family to pay a ransom. Very well-observed details, and a poignant relationship given just enough room to breathe. In another world, those two might have been lovers or friends… but this is not that world. The tone is more wistful than depressing, but the world as a whole is probably doomed.

“What Arms to Hold” by Rajan Khanna. Indian children are slave labor in a mine… and the details are even more grim than one would expect from that thumbnail description. Well-written and with a surprisingly hopeful ending, but most of the story is excruciatingly depressing. Appropriately so, given the subject matter. But still.

“Solitude” by Ursula K. Le Guin. A reprint from The Birthday of the World. A fantastic, non-grim story – there’s even some funny lines – about a future anthropologist who goes to a planet with her two young children to study the ways of a culture that seems to have no community. The mother and older son learn a lot about the culture; the young daughter becomes part of it. Can a culture really be based on solitude? A fascinating, moving, beautifully written, well-characterized work of anthropological science fiction.

I was puzzled at first as to why it was in this collection, as I would have never thought of that culture as a dystopia. Then I realized that while the daughter sees it as her home, and sees all the positive aspects (as well as the negative ones – she’s only naïve when she’s very young), the mother sees it as a dystopia. The idea that the same place can be utopia for one person and a dystopia for another is unique to this story, in this collection: it’s the only one set in a world that isn’t objectively, unequivocally horrible. No wonder it’s the only story that, while it has some sad and dark moments, isn’t depressing at all. No one is doomed! It was such a relief!

There are some excellent stories in the anthology, and not every single one is depressing. But the cumulative effect is awfully grim. This is purely my personal preference, and I do realize that dystopian sf is not a cheery genre, but I would love to see a diversity-focused YA anthology that’s a bit more fun.

Diverse Energies

The continuing adventures of reviews of books I read a while ago but never got around to writing up.

Front cover: An earthquake leaves Kriss stranded with an old hermit and a "talking" chimp!

Back cover: Capers for every kid. Adventure. Mystery. Science fiction & fantasy. Hilarious escapades... by many of today's favorite authors.

This is why thrift stores are great sources of books. I can't imagine finding this weird little unknown work-for-hire book by a very famous author in a regular bookshop, and indeed I never have. I had vague recollections of reading this book as a kid, though I had not remembered the author (I probably read it before I read any of Yolen's more typical works), and recall finding it rather disturbing. I re-read it as an adult. For a very short kiddie adventure novel, it actually is rather disturbing.

The beginning introduces Kriss, a clumsy California boy who wears glasses. His father refuses to take him camping on the grounds that he's so terrible in the outdoors that he'll instantly break his leg, his glasses, and get poison ivy. Annoyed, Kriss decides to sneak out and hike to his grandmother's house. He'll show them!

It is mentioned in passing that a few years previously, there was a huge earthquake and Los Angeles fell into the ocean.

Kriss hitches several rides to get to the wooded area through which he plans to hike. I check the copyright date. Huh, I guess in 1981 the idea of a kid hitch-hiking wasn't OMG SHOCKING, because nothing is made of that. His last ride is with a guy transporting caged signing chimpanzees to a lab. Then the Big One hits! The truck crashes. The driver is killed. All of this is described in pretty vivid detail - again, especially, for a book intended for eight-year-olds.

Kriss releases the chimps, who stick with him. I have to say, after reading about the guy whose chimp ate his face, I would have regretfully left them where they were. But these are nice signing chimps, not face-eating chimps, and they and Kriss wander around the wilderness, helping each other and fleeing the people who immediately reverted to cannibalism pet dog-eating - okay, I guess Yolen did make a concession to the age of her audience. Then one of the chimps falls into a crevasse and is killed.

Kriss then runs into an old vegetarian hermit named Chris. They have adventures together, including trying to rescue some pets from a pet store (most are already dead - I told you this was dark), but he does get another chimp. Then Chris has a heart attack. Surprisingly, he does not die. They are medevaced out by a mysterious, possibly sinister helicopter, and Kriss releases the chimps into the wild and certain death lest the helicopter people do something awful to them. Kriss still has no idea whether or not anyone in his family is still alive.

The end! Only not, because Yolen has an author's note discussing signing chimps. It concludes - this is the last line of the book - But even though scientists may disagree about the talking chimps, they all agree that there is a real possibility that one day California will have a different coastline than the one it has today. Have a nice day, California readers! It is scientific fact that one day you and your family may be killed in a giant earthquake!

I don't give this an "awesomely depressing" because it doesn't actually read that way, despite the dead people, dead chimps, dead dogs, dead pets, possibly dying buddy, and possibly dead family. It reads as an entertaining but slight adventure that would probably have been more memorable at a longer length. But seriously, that author's note! What was she thinking?

The Boy Who Spoke Chimp



So, what weird children's books do you recall, or wonder if you imagined? Have you read any of them as an adult? How were they?

Ages ago, when I auto-disqualified any works set during the Holocaust, slavery, etc from nomination in the YA Agony Awards, I threatened to do a second run-off based on the trashiest and most exploitative works involving real-life tragedies.

Before I go any further, I want to make it very, very clear that I am not mocking the Holocaust or any other real life atrocities! I am mocking works of fiction which make inappropriate, trashy, and/or ludicrous use of actual and horrible historical events.

("Springtime for Hitler" in The Producers is a deliberate parody of that sort of thing, and so doesn’t count. (The link goes to "I'm WET! And I'm STILL HYSTERICAL!")

I’m not sure if I’ll actually do a run-off, but a while back I had a conversation over email which I kept meaning to write up.

I wrote, “There was this whole genre of trashy Holocaust novels, popular I think in the 80s, which I kind of distilled into the cement truck Holocaust novel. [Link contains spoilers for Mockingjay.]

( Some artists think of the Holocaust, and write The Devil's Arithmetic. Others think of the Holocaust, and write about traumatized telepathic lion tamer twins. Cut for somewhat disturbing content )

While Rebekka begins her hypnosis treatment, Ruda's ambition moves her to further crime; as their histories are disclosed, the twins are led to a final overwrought meeting under a Berlin bigtop.

That synopsis reminded me of the infamous Jerry Lewis movie, The Day The Clown Cried, in which he played a comedian in a death camp. You would not think that was such a great concept that it deserved to inspire not one, but three movies, but it also generated Life Is Beautiful, not to mention Jakob the Liar. I should note that lots of people thought Life Is Beautiful was a genuinely good movie. I have no opinion on the matter, because I can only stand to see one Holocaust movie every twenty years, and Schindler's List was it.

Speaking of controversial Holocaust movies, a number of parents I know were very, very ticked that Boy In The Striped Pajamas was advertised as a sweet story of friendship, with no mention of the fact that it’s a Holocaust movie and does not end happily. To say the least. All else aside, even if parents do want to take their kids to a Holocaust movie, most of them would like to know in advance that that’s what they’re doing. As it was, several family plans for ice cream after the movie had to be hastily switched to grief-and-trauma counseling after the movie.

Share with me your favorite examples of awful, exploitative, inappropriate, trashy, ridiculous, surprise!genocide or otherwise bad works of fiction attempting to springboard off of history. As in Life Is Beautiful, I realize that one person’s moving work of art is another person’s crass exploitation. Given that and the sensitivity of the subject, please be nice to each other in comments.

I didn’t love the first two books in this series – the worldbuilding is flimsy and I couldn’t help comparing them to the remarkably similar Battle Royale movie, which I like a lot more - but I liked Katniss, her narrative voice, and the energy of the story enough to keep reading. That was a mistake.

Not only is Mockingjay awesomely depressing, but the elements I enjoyed in the first two books are absent. It lacks energy, and Katniss’s character has changed radically and off-page before the book begins: the angry, determined survivor of the first two novels is gone, replaced by a clinically depressed and passive girl who spends most of the book in a despairing haze, being moved around like a pawn by authority figures.

This was such a deliberately and consistently grim novel that I ended up sorry that I read it, and I rarely feel that way. The first two books were dark in ways which logically followed from the premise: the story was about kids forced to kill in gladiatorial combat, and kids were killed in gladiatorial combat. This one is dark in ways which logically follow from the premise, but also in ways which don't. Sometimes people act out of character solely so that horrible things can happen, and a climactic scene makes absolutely no sense solely so that the most horrible thing of all can happen.

My usual example separating inherently depressing from gratuitously depressing is a Holocaust novel in which everyone dies in a concentration camp, and a Holocaust novel in which everyone dies in a concentration camp except for the protagonist's true love, who is liberated, runs joyously across the street to meet her, and is squashed by a cement truck. Not only was the cement truck not a logical consequence of genocide, but by adding implausible elements to make genocide even more depressing, the entire novel and so the genocide it contains seem less real, and so defeats the author's purpose.

Mockingjay is a cement truck novel.

It’s not necessary to write a book which is no fun in order to point out that war is bad, nor is it necessary to make the book excruciatingly depressing in order to convey that the heroine is depressed. Aristotle wrote all about the paradox of audiences getting profound enjoyment out of watching horrific tragedies unfold onstage. The emotional state of the protagonist does not have to be inflicted on the audience to make the audience to understand how the protagonist is feeling.

The first spoiler cut only describes the first sixteen pages, which is one of the most stunningly depressing openings I’ve ever read.

( Spoilers trip over the skulls of loved ones )

Had I been normally browsing, I would probably have given up there. However, I was determined to stay at air-conditioned Borders to prevent heat exhaustion, so I continued, cool but depressed.

The next spoiler cut is for the rest of the book.

( Spoilers fall, everybody dies )

If you haven’t started the series but you want to, I would recommend reading only the first book and possibly the second (though that one ends on a bigger cliffhanger), then writing your own ending.

The Hunger Games - Library Edition

Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games)

Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) - Library Edition

Battle Royale: Director's Cut (Collector's Edition). Warning: very violent and disturbing, doubly so because it’s live-action and the teenagers look like (and I think are mostly played by) real teenagers, not young-looking adults.