“Happiness is but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”
It may surprise no one that I like my fiction dark with a side of grinding poverty, execution, murder, miscarriage, and animal genitalia related injuries – you know, general death, violence, and misery. Maybe a few dashed dreams here and there.
No wonder Daria is my spirit animal.
Without having previously made the connection – and only tenuously doing so now, at best – my early love of Thomas Hardy may have influenced my love of the may-be-a-genre (or maybe not) grit lit. Because nobody writes with more AMPS – abject misery per sentence – than Thomas Hardy. The Brothers Grimm have nothing on him.
I missed this when it first came out (from The Guardian), but this infographic is brilliant. My apologies if you’ve already seen it – there may be no one more behind the blogging times than me (or more abusive of dashes and parentheses) – but it’s worth a second glance (in my humble opinion).
I know some of you share my love of a well done brutal novel (Andi and Shannon come immediately to mind), but what about the rest of you? Have you ever noticed that brutal, heart-wrenching novels seem to better accepted if they are classics? Jude the Obscure, Wuthering Heights, and The Monk come immediately to mind. Discuss.
(Please.)