10 Books For Depressed People
And it's not just that the characters find themselves in depressing situation after depressing situation (well, they kind of do), it's the fact that the scope of the novel makes every depressing instance so much more tragic because you're highly familiar with what lead each character to the sad place they're in currently.
2. Less Than Zero (1985), Bret Easton Ellis
The main character of Less Than Zero, Clay, is a college student simultaneously addicted to and imprisoned by his vacuous existence. Narrated in the first person, Clay moves detachedly through rich kid drug parties, sexual encounters, and all sorts of dark shit that I’m not going to spoil for you by mentioning here. Basically, dude and his friends are so spoiled by affluence that they continually engage in extremely subversive behavior in an effort to feel anything at all, and essentially ‘being’ one of the characters as you read it takes you to some pretty dark places. Warning: not for the faint of heart.
