There are high-quality books that offer escapism, just as there are movies (usually blockbusters) that focus on entertainment over anything else. Not
There are high-quality books that offer escapism, just as there are movies (usually blockbusters) that focus on entertainment over anything else. Not necessarily all, but a good many romance novels are intended to be digestible in this way, and the same can be said for many (though again, not all) works of fantasy, particularly so for fantasy books that are aimed at younger readers.
Then you’ve got books that go in the other direction, possibly intending to be compelling, but not really fun. That’s what the following novels more or less do, and there are also a couple of works of non-fiction thrown in here, just to keep things engaging, alongside some horror, drama-focused, and thriller books. These are some of the heaviest books of all time, and they’re all worth reading… just maybe not as the last thing you look at before falling asleep. The vibes aren’t good, but at least the quality of the writing is.
10
‘American Tabloid’ (1995)
The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential might well be James Ellroy’s best-known novels, and they’re plenty murky and cynical, yet American Tabloid is perhaps even more nihilistic. It takes place in the overdue 1950s and early 1960s, with various point of view characters all wrapped up in a complicated series of events that lead to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with the aftermath explored in two subsequent books by Ellroy, with all three forming the ominously titled Underworld USA Trilogy.
Of the trilogy, there’s an argument to be made that Blood’s a Rover is actually the darkest, but that third and final book is sort of incomprehensible, and almost a self-parody on Ellroy’s part. It’s strenuous to care when things are dialed up to the extent they are there, but a somewhat more grounded line is walked in American Tabloid, and that makes it more upsetting. Everyone involved in the narrative, be they fictional or based on real-life people, is morally shady at best and downright evil at worst, and all of them seem equally doomed, in one way or another. It feels like a novel about a president dying, and then the U.S. dying right along with him.
9
‘Lolita’ (1955)
There’s a lot to grapple with, while reading Lolita, including what the book itself is about, and who the narrator of it all is. He’s a man writing under the pseudonym of Humbert Humbert, and he’s someone who describes his infatuation with a 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita (who he’s technically the stepfather of), with much of the book dealing with how he targets and manipulates her.
A certain amount of murky humor does run throughout Lolita, but that serves to make the frequently horrible events of the book feel all the more intense and unsettling. It’s a fantastically written book that is also incredibly challenging and bold, even by the standards of postmodernism. For as good as the book is, and for as purposeful as the disturbing content might be, you really can’t blame anyone if they take a look at the thing, as a whole, and feel the complete opposite of compelled to read it.
8
‘Empire of Pain’ (2021)
Empire of Pain deals with opioid addiction, and the events that led to the opioid epidemic in the U.S., done in a way that condenses a good many moving parts and history into one coherent narrative. It’s masterfully done, as a work of non-fiction, and does give you a comprehensive overview of the Sackler family, while making it feel like something of a tragedy, what certain members of the family ultimately did.
It’s more sympathetic to those who’ve been directly impacted by the opioid epidemic, of course, so maybe it’s more right to suggest that it humanizes the Sackler family, or, at the very least, logically lays out how and why they did so much harm. Empire of Pain is huge in its ambition, and also extremely confronting in so many ways, particularly when you consider how the events of the book don’t end all that long ago, in the overall scheme of things, and further consider that deaths from opioid overdoses have continued to happen on a vast scale in the years since Empire of Pain was published.
7
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949)
The general despair that’s weighty throughout much of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a substantial reason why it’s considered so necessary, as a piece of dystopian fiction, perhaps even being the definitive novel about a dystopia. Numerous terms and ideas from the novel have entered the English language, to the extent that Nineteen Eighty-Four is at least partly known about, even by those who haven’t read the whole thing (though everyone should read the whole thing, at some stage).
The novel’s about a bleak future torn apart by war and cultural chaos, and it’s led to mass surveillance by an all-powerful superstate, which the protagonist does rebel against, though in a rather futile manner. If any part of Nineteen Eighty-Four is hopeful or not entirely depressed, it’s just so that the eventual weighty parts will feel even more crushing, in comparison. Still, it’s a substantial aged downer for a purpose, and it’s really not too strenuous to see why the novel has endured to the extent it has.
6
‘Pet Sematary’ (1983)
People dying in a book by Stephen King isn’t anything fresh, nor particularly novel, but the extent to which Pet Sematary focuses on death (while also exploring grief) is. The pet cemetery referred to in the title is one that seems capable of bringing dead pets back to life, so when tragedy strikes a family, the father of said family starts to grapple with the idea of seeing whether the cemetery might also bring humans back to life.
Pet Sematary is quite a compelling read, even with all the sadness and the horror, and so it’s a little “easier” to read than most of the other books mentioned here.
It digs a little deeper and gets quite a bit darker than your average Stephen King book, so it feels worth considering Pet Sematary as perhaps his heaviest overall. That being said, it is quite a compelling read, even with all the sadness and the horror, and so it’s a little “easier” to read than most of the other books mentioned here. Still not a fun book, by any means, but it’s unusually effortless to churn through for something that, in so many ways, proves to be a massive downer.
5
‘Libra’ (1988)
Sorry to go over one more book that’s about the John F. Kennedy assassination, but Libra is another heavy-going and compelling read that is stylistically very different from American Tabloid, even if both novels are paranoia-inducing and cynical about the direction America went in after the assassination. With Libra, though, the central character is Lee Harvey Oswald, and the novel works as historical fiction, unpacking what he might’ve been going through while having him get wrapped up in a massively complicated conspiracy.
That focus on Oswald makes Libra something of an unexpected psychological drama/thriller book, while there’s also ample time spent on confusion and doubts surrounding the event that the novel inevitably has to build to. It’s impossible to come away from a book like this feeling very bullish about much at all, since it so openly confronts the idea that there is so much we won’t – and maybe even can’t – ever know.
4
‘Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy’ (2018)
Even with the word “Tragedy” being in the title, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy still finds ways to disarm and alarm you with the events it covers, and the manner in which it lays out the devastation caused by the Vietnam War. Well, technically, the scope of the book goes beyond the Vietnam War a little, since it begins covering things immediately post-World War II, detailing the First Indochina War, which then led to the Vietnam War.
There’s a lot of history to cover in 30 years, and Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy gets through it at a good pace, while never feeling like it skims over too much. It’s broad without being shallow, and is also admirable for how many different points of view it features. And that sense of showing things from multiple perspectives ultimately helps drive home the scale of the different conflicts in Vietnam between 1945 and 1975, and the alarming size of the overall destruction/devastation.
3
‘Blonde’ (2000)
Blonde is basically a work of horror, even though it’s not got any customary (or more expected) supernatural elements. It’s instead more of a psychological drama that’s intense enough to also be a work of psychological horror, with the protagonist being Marilyn Monroe, and the whole book being about her tiny, tragic, and eventful life, albeit in an impressionistic way that does claim to be biographical.
Instead, Monroe’s life is used to represent how juvenile women are sometimes used by Hollywood, or even just society more generally, since Blonde isn’t just about Marilyn Monroe’s experiences acting in movies. It’s a long, dense, and almost always emotionally harrowing novel that is a challenge to get through, by design, standing as something that’s effortless to appreciate but very much strenuous to recommend, in the customary/conventional sense.
Blonde
- Release Date
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September 28, 2022
- Runtime
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2h 46m
- Director
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Andrew Dominik
- Writers
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Andrew Dominik, Joyce Carol Oates
2
‘A Little Life’ (2015)
An obligatory pick, if you’re talking about depressed and/or weighty books, A Little Life tackles a range of complex subject matter throughout what ends up being a lengthy duration. There’s a group of friends at the center of A Little Life, and all of them have personal demons that they’re battling, with traumatic pasts explored via flashbacks, and then scenes in the “present” dealing with how such events linger and continue to impact those who went through them.
It might sound like fairly normal territory for a drama-heavy story to follow, but it’s the uncompromising nature of digging deep into various things other stories might skim over, or not dwell on too much, that makes A Little Life stand out. It might be cathartic for some to have any novel at all deal with some of the things this one’s willing to, but that content is also what might make it too complex to read, for others.
1
‘Blood Meridian’ (1985)
There are some other Cormac McCarthy novels worthy of honorable mention here, like The Road and No Country for Old Men, but Blood Meridian is perhaps his most grueling and nightmarish. Unlike those other two novels, you can only (at least for now) experience Blood Meridian as a book, since it hasn’t been adapted into either a movie or TV show, with the level of brutality and persistent misery likely playing a role there.
Also, it’s quite loose narratively, and so there would be a need to condense things or recontextualize certain parts of the novel if you wanted to translate it to another medium, and that would be complex, especially with so many people holding the source material in such high regard. And if you’ve not read Blood Meridian, you’re still likely aware of its reputation for being one of the darkest Westerns of all time, and one of the most violent books ever written. On both counts, such a reputation is more than deserved.
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