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Darkest book you've ever read


First of My Name

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Paradise Alley - The Irish Famine, the New York Draft riots, domestic violence, an interracial marriage under siege, the dysfunctional relationship between an Irish prostitute and a WASPy journalist, the economic repression of the working poor... very dark stuff



Handmaid's Tale - Read it with 15 which was probably not the best time.



Winter's Bone - the atmosphere is incredibly bleak, the family life wrecked, betterment seems far away and only possible through illegal means and the less we talk about sexual identity and gender politics the better. But at least Ree Dolly offers a glimmer of hope.


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I thought of another one. The Bloody Chamber. It's fairy tales and general public domain stories like beauty and the beast, red riding hood etc but dark and often needlessly so. The Snow Child in particular was quite bad, it involved a man ( her kind of sort of father )raping a child's corpse after her kind of sort of mother tricked her into.killing herself. strangely enough it was part of our reading list for A-level literature.

I really don't think there is anything 'needless' about Carter's use of grim in The Bloody Chamber. Remember the book was written by a strongly feminist woman in response to the usually very misogynistic versions of fairy tales known to the public and bring to light the extremely violent subtext that's always been present in the original stories.

The Snow Child in particular is a biting and violent critique of men's sexual desires and their tendency to objectify women and even young girls.

I highly recommend reading up on analysis of The Bloody Chamber. It's not just stories.

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He said satin.

:bowdown:

Edit: Still trying to get my head around this one. How anyone could actually read those books and think they're actually about SATAN(or Satin, hoho)...just...no. I mean, I've never heard of any Satan/Lucifer/Satin/wtfever myth that's basically about Satan wanting to fuck little girls so they can level up their magic hymen witch powers :P

I

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  • 4 weeks later...

While true, it doesn't make it any easier to read. Covenant isn't just unlikable, he's utterly loathsome. Granted, I only read the first book, but there was just nothing there for me to latch onto. None of the characters were interesting to me, nothing about the world was intriguing to me, etc, etc.

Thomas Covenant despite being the protagonist is not the character that I think the author intended the readers to "like". Other characters such as Saltheart Foamfollower and Lord Mhoram from the first trilogy fulfill those roles.

As for the world not being intriguing then maybe the series just isn't your style. Just different tastes in literature is all. I liked them well enough and also liked the way the books also touched upon determinism vs. existentialism

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