Various analysts pick anywhere from three to 87 basic plots. I like Vonnegut’s six arcs, plus the no-plot:
/ - Failure to success
\ - Success to failure
/ \ - Rise, then fall
\ / - Fall, then rise
/ \ / - Rise, fall, and rise
\ / \ - Fall, rise, then fall
__ - Flat; no real change
Those whose last leg rises may have sweet HEA (Happy Ever After) or at least HFN (Happy For Now) endings. Those that fall are tragic. Are such bummer narratives more likely to be depressing or head-twisting? Does THE CRYING OF LOT 49 break the mold?
After the Bible (of which I had three for some unholy reason), definitely Stephen King’s “IT”, for which I was simply too young.
Honorable mention, various adventure book series teaching children how to be burgeois squares, like Enid Blyton’s insipid garbage, and probably worse, the German “TKKG” series, teaching kids how to rat out people to the police for minor offenses, and the culprits quite often are marginalized people like e.g. punks, “bums” or “gypsies” - it really didn’t age well.
Reading The Fountainhead in high school made my life worse in that it deeply divided everyone I knew. I had good friends who embraced Egoism and thought of Howard Roark as a hero; other people hated the book and thought its philosophy was awful. It’s an influential book and its influence on high school kids took awhile to wear off.
Reading Ethan Frome made my life worse by boring the shit out of me (and everyone I know who’s read it).
Such a great topic I had to join!
I read a lot of true crime stuff and a lot of other non-fiction and fantasy/sci-fi.
I grew up reading my Mom’s horror fiction (a lot of Steven King, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz…it was the late 70s-early 80s.)
The only horror book that actually scared me was Pet Sematery. I vividly remember staying up til dawn one teenage summer night after finishing it in the wee hours because it really spooked me.
As an adult, the one piece of fiction that really, really disturbed me (and still does!) was Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. That one left me reeling for at least a week. I felt like I wanted to wash out my brain afterwards. It was just so unrelenting!
The second Narnia book (Prince Caspian?) I was a 3rd grader who eagerly devoured the first book, started the second, and suddenly realized that I was being proselytized to in the guise of fiction. I was furious! I felt duped.
It made my life worse in that I realized that writers could write down to you and it broke my naive little heart a little.
However, I later discovered paganism so maybe it wasn’t all bad.
Odd, that was one of most calming books I read. It made clear that so many of the stupid decisions that seem born of malice, or at the very least unforgivable negligence, are simply human beings doing exactly what evolution designed them to do.
Help shift my world view towards the idea that good decisions are something to be surprised and grateful for, and that bad decisions are regrettable, but to be expected.
Of course, re-reading what I just typed reminds me of the old adage: Only pessimists are happy because things are always better than they expect.
Yah. We read Ethan Frome in 10th grade. I think everyone found it pretty boring and dismal. But our English class did so well anyway that, at the end of the year, the teacher wanted to do something special. We joked than a Matty & Ethan themed sledding party would be the perfect way to say goodbye. The idea still amuses me more than it should.
I should add The White Mountains by John Christopher, the first book in the Tripod series. That book freaked me out when I read it in 5th grade. I just wasn’t ready for a post apocalyptic story where War of the Worlds style tripods rule over earth and force mind control metal caps on people’s skulls when they reach 14.
Dahl was a genius and a delightful human being, whose work transcends genre. It keeps on giving, no matter your age.
Likewise. In my teens, I gobbled up everything by Salinger, all the short stories, multiple times, right up until ‘Seymour: An Introduction’, which even I at the tender age of 15 or 16 recognized as utter tripe.
Salinger might be the most overrated author in the English language. His work resonates with the teenage boy mindset because he never grew out of a teenage boy mindset. All the mystique about him disappearing into seclusion etc., the whole shebang, created by N.Y. media elites to sell magazines. He went into hiding because he knew he only had one idea, and a juvenile one at that. Plus he was an asshole, a snob and quite likely a pedophile.
As a kid, Singularity and Interstellar Pig by William Sleator were such great SciFi YA novels. But Singularity, in particular, was kind of f**d up. I still think about that shack and the kid’s resolve about 25 years later.
Yeah, my thought as well. If any book “f**ed me up” then it was the schlock novels that Clive Cussler wrote. It implanted toxic ideals on an impressionable youth, but on the other hand recognising that has made me better able to pull the brakes on myself.
Same here! I grew up with an evangelical Mom who forbade all things fantasy and wizard-y on account of the occult connotations. Yet for some reason C.S. Lewis was not only allowed, but encouraged. Then I figured out why.
I just want to state that I have read a lot of these books, but I wouldn’t say they fucked me up, but expanded my horizons. Yes, even the Principia Discordia, the Book of the SubGenius and even the Bible. Note that I consider the Bible less a guide and more an interesting collection of writings that were important enough for others to add it to their omnibus.
“The Last Picture Show” - I grew up in a small Texas town every bit as dull and hopeless as the town in the book. It made me feel like shit, if there’s other places this awful out there, what the fuck good is this world?
“The Night Land” by William Hope Hodgson. About a time so far in the future the stars have all gone out. All that’s left of the entire human race lives in one last building, menaced by supernatural monster, and they can measure the days to the very last of everything.
