Robert Cormier wrote a lot of books that fit easily into this, and a few books that would have avoided this if the likable characters hadn't died (such as Kate in After The First Death) or been beaten into submission. The best chance his characters are ever given is that the next life might be better than this one (and his later works deny even that.)
Greg Egan has a couple of stories that play with this trope in an unusual way. In The Planck Dive and in Oceanic, the world is not a Crapsack World or Dystopia, however, society exists in the aftermath of the discovery of the Awful Truth that the heat death of the universe cannot be evaded by any means even in theory, and so society is doomed to collapse, killing everybody (without any hope of an afterlife or of reincarnation) and making the entire pursuit of knowledge completely pointless. This is ultimately so soul-crushingly depressing and nihilistic that it threatened to undermine the entire Aesop he sought to promulgate, and so he eventually dialed back from this in later stories which casually mention travel to other universes with different physics, theoretically letting his characters escape this fate.
The works of Bret Easton Ellis can have that effect, as pretty much everyone in them is completely shallow, self-absorbed, and stupid. Given that this is deliberate, you probably know what you're in for when you start one of his books. Clay in Less Than Zero may be an in-universe example, as eventually, he finds himself passively watching horrible things (like his friends face-raping a drugged 12-year-old girl) while saying he just wanted "to see the worst".
James Ellroy's The L.A. Quartet and Underworld USA trilogy definately reach these levels. Many of his main characters are crooked cops, gangsters, drug dealers, and fixers. Typically, they are racist, homophobic, and violent. His stories typically surround serial killers, political assassinations, massacres, and scandals. Notable cases include:
The Black Dahlia: Follows Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard investigating the murder of Elizabeth Short. The reveal was that she was murdered by a serial killer that, at one point, Bleichert had a relationship with. Bucky and Blanchard themselves are Antihero protagonists who engage in Police Brutality and one is covering up the Black Dahlia murderer's identity for money.
White Jazz: The main character, Dave Klein is a corrupt cop who works as a killer for hire and an enforcer, who had an incestuous relationship with his sister. He is assigned to a case involving the Kafesjians, a heroin-dealing family under LAPD protection. On top of that, Klein is a pawn in the fight between Captain Ed Exley and Captain Dudley Smith. Smith is a corrupt cop who is behind most of the horrible things that happened in the Quartet. It is also revealed that Dudley smothered a three-day-old infant to maintain the peace with the Kafesjians.
This is a common complaint about Thomas Hardy. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, everyone is, without exception, demonically evil or flat. A contemporary reviewer of his work stated that "[His work] is depressing because he himself is somewhat depressed" and boy does it ever show. Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles are both unrelentingly depressing Shoot the Shaggy Dog stories. Hardy was to some extent trying to skewer the Victorian values of the day and make the point that it was impossible for good people to survive in such a system, but as the audience, it's difficult to not just stop caring about these characters once it's obvious that any Hope Spot will only lead to another horrible disappointment.
Many Tom Holt books suffer from this. The protagonists are sometimes just as cynical, ruthless, selfish, vapid, cowardly, and/or nasty as the erstwhile antagonists. Valhalla and Little People are particularly memorable in this regard.
Chuck Palahniuk's works definitely fall under this, which causes some to think of him as a nihilist and a shock writer. As an example, Fight Club: it's the road of a man becoming a nihilistic terrorist (via the development of a Split Personality who embodies everything he wants to be) who wants to destroy all of society, casualties barely be damned, because he's sick of people's consumerism, and who manages to raise a secret army who is literally everywhere, even inside the police. Although in the text/movie's defense, it came out long before 9/11 (which made having a character with this kind of mentality and who somewhat successfully manages to carry it out a gigantic no-no), but the comic-book continuation by Dark Horse Comics shows the narrator as being on the fast track to try to fulfill his "urge" again... whether he wants to or not.
It was never a particularly lighthearted series, but by the end, it's comparable to Game of Thrones. The main characters are traumatized anti-heroes at best and psychopaths at worst, both sides of the military in the Yeerk vs. Andalite war have been shown to have committed atrocities to the point where it's hard to say that anyone is morally superior, and most of the humans are horribly outmatched and have virtually no say in their fate, when the Animorphs finally call the Andalite homeworld the aliens' response is to "Quarantine" planet Earth, thereby marking it for destruction, and to top it all off two god-like characters are locked in a "game" that might result in the universe being destroyed.
Unlike most examples, though, creator K.A. Applegate later admitted in an open letter to fans that she was aiming for this trope. She wanted to write a series that showed, in no uncertain terms, that War Is Hell, and thus went out of her way to avert the Do Not Do This Cool Thing trap as much as possible. Applegate explained that even in a war with an obvious enemy like the Yeerks, everyone who participates ends up either dead or doing terrible things that haunt them for the rest of their lives: "...even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows, and grieving parents." The bleakness, then, was arguably the point of the story, which may make this a case of Gone Horribly Right.
Atlas Shrugged is this, at least to non-Objectivists, for the same reasons as The Birth of a Nation (1915). You don’t want either side to win because the conflict is between corrupt government shills hoping to set up a Soviet-style communist dictatorship, and equally, Corrupt Corporate Executives who lionize their own selfishness, refuse to understand how democracy and rule of law actually work and set up the collapse of civilization just to increase their profit margin.
Black Bullet's setting is so very crapsack and the main characters are hopelessly ineffectual in stopping the Gastrea threat. The author also has a nasty tendency to kill off characters (or at least put Rentaro and Enju through sadistic hell) before they receive sufficient Character Development, meaning people can simply get bored of the darkness. Detractors accuse the author of putting too much emphasis on treating the characters badly while failing to clear up several plot points such as Enju's high corrosion rate. The Fugitive arc (volumes 5 and 6) gets particularly over-the-top, with every main character being put through a Trauma Conga Line.
Blood and Chocolate suffers from this twice over. On a larger scale, Humans Are the Real Monsters who hate and fear werewolves, while werewolves sometimes provide very good reason why humans hate and fear them. On a smaller scale, any of seven or eight different characters, including the main character and both love interests, could be argued to be the most repulsive character in the book for one reason or another, and of the two characters who are most likable, one's a Straw Feminist who's not treated very seriously and the other gets eviscerated by a supposed friend. The silver lining is that the werewolf female lead and human primary love interest could balance each other out— except that humans really can't trust werewolves, so he winds up trying to kill her. Although the lead gets a relatively happy ending, the whole novel is a lot bleaker and more cynical than your average YA Paranormal Romance, which catches some readers off-guard.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World can induce similar reactions to Ethan Frome, The Jungle, or Wuthering Heights. The sheer soul-crushing hopelessness of the story combined with the utter depravity of the Crapsaccharine World it portrays has been known to cause severe bouts of depression in readers. In fact, the novel was chastised by critics for precisely this reason upon its initial publication in 1932, and Huxley himself later regretted not offering John the Savage a way out of his dilemma.
In "The Merchant's Tale" of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the merchant's tale of a wife's adultery is supposed to show women as dishonest, but the poisonous way all characters, including the wronged husband, are portrayed makes it difficult to sympathize with any of them. This is almost certainly deliberate, as several of Geoffrey Chaucer's characters let their view color their stories and how they tell them.
The Castle by Franz Kafka is about a character, K., who arrives at a village operated by a bureaucracy which is centered in the titular castle, and his endless attempts to find out exactly what the castle does and how to gain influence there and... it gradually turns into a series of interminable, roundabout discussions about the castle and bureaucracy and what K. has to do in order to get anything done, to the point that Kafka himself was unable to finish writing it, making this a case where the creator stopped caring.
The Casual Vacancy has a rather mundane premise and characters that, as one reviewer put it, are "fairly horrible or suicidally miserable or dead." Thus, some found it hard to care about the conclusion.
The Child Thief falls into this at the beginning, and for some readers, until its end. The story is billed as a darker retelling of Peter Pan, and it shows—rooting for Peter is all but impossible given his bloodthirsty and careless ways. The real world is not much better in the book—because it focuses on Lost boys and girls, everyone has horrible stories in their past. Although there are a few characters the reader can identify with, they pale in comparison to the horrible people around them rather than providing a real contrast.
The works of Cormac McCarthy (for example The Road, The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men) can definitely bring this up — good people are powerless and die senselessly (or are pile-driven past the Despair Event Horizonand may as well be dead), the bad guys (when there are any) are like forces of nature, the world itself is hard-core crap-sack (and on The Road, it is flat-out Death World crap-sack). It is impossible In-Universe and out for people to find a reason to live on a daily basis. What few good things are there are very small lights in a really big field of darkness. His work Blood Meridian is the most extreme example, as it's so dark that no studio will risk making a film adaptation because of this trope.
While Diary of a Wimpy Kid isn't a very idealistic series, the Rowley Spin-OffDiary of an Awesome Friendly Kid almost entirely consists of stories of Rowley being taken advantage of by Greg, and Rowley being too naïve or dumb to realize it. Greg abandons Rowley in the woods at night, tricks him into thinking a burglar is robbing the house, forces him to do chores for a month while promising a prize he doesn't deliver, repeatedly harasses and bullies him while he's trying to study, cheats off Rowley's test and gets him in trouble, spends a sleepover preventing him from using the bathroom, flushes Rowley's toys down the toilet, and makes fun of his drawings. At the end, he gets mad at Rowley for not making the book about him, even after Rowley is willing to share the credit. The onenice thing Greg does, standing up to a lazy teacher who gave him an unfair grade, is immediately undercut by him claiming that Rowley owes him a lot more to make up for it. The book also has a Downer Ending where Rowley assumes that all friendships work this way, even after his parents point out Greg's Toxic Friend Influence.
The Disney Chills books are infamous for being bleak and horrific, as they all have the protagonists (innocent but flawed children) interacting with the Disney Villain characters in some fashion and undergo cruel twists, in the end, resulting in a Downer Ending, and the Disney Villains themselves coming out on top. It's best to not care about any of it when reading.
Dubliners by James Joyce is a book of short stories where every single one (except, perhaps, the last one) is about a disappointing, half-lived life that will probably end in isolation and disgrace. Hope spots are few and far between, and are usually swiftly replaced by misery. The only (arguable) exception is the final story, "The Dead", where the private sadness of the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, is set against the genuine hospitality and generosity of his aunts Kate and Julia and his cousin Mary Jane, whose Christmas party takes up most of the narrative.note The story wasn't written when Joyce was first trying and failing to get the book published, and after being turned down several times he realized with hindsight that he'd been too ungenerous towards his countrymen. "The Dead" was written to redress the balance, and it's less unrelievedly dark than the other stories in the book, only because it's more ambiguous.
The Elric Saga: It's maybe hard to go through all the books with Elric's constant misery and casual cruelty, not to mention that all of his friends and loved ones are either killed by Stormbringer or by the villains in the sixth book. Certainly evoked by Moorcock, who wanted to deconstruct the popular epic fantasy stories of the time such as Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian by dialing the brooding up to eleven and giving an air of hopelessness and nihilism in Elric's ultimately vain quest to fight his fate.
Ethan Frome can induce similar reactions as Wuthering Heights. The utter hopelessness of the story has driven many an English Major to the bottle.
Fire & Blood can seem this way during the Dance of the Dragons, as both the Green and Black factions quarreling over the Iron Throne commit atrocities. Some characters in both factions are more sympathetic/tragic than others, but the leaders of both (Rhaenyra and Daemon for the Blacks, Alicent and Aegon for the Greens) are not particularly nice people. While the broader work of A Song of Ice and Fire is excellent at making you more sympathetic towards most sides of a conflict, the parts about the Dance of the Dragons in this history can make a reader lean towards the Eight Deadly Words not only for the members of the two factions but even for the smallfolk affected by them as well.
Some Goosebumps novels can fall towards this. The Monster Blood series, in particular, hardly has any likable characters. Evan Ross, the main character of all four books, is an unlikable whiny kid and makes a bunch of dumb decisions that cause him to waste away any sympathetic points any reader will ever give him. It doesn't help that he doesn't get better in any of the books following the first book, as he gets even whinier and dumber in each and every one of them. There are also the other characters of the series that aren't much better, such as Evan's parents, Conan Barber, Mr. Murphy, and Evan's cousin Kermit. And we don't even need to get into the Negative Continuity and poor plotting.
Hammer's Slammers falls heavily into this. The series is David Drake's personal attempts to deal with PTSD from serving in The Vietnam War, and it shows. The Slammers are a bunch of war criminals who burn villages, kill civilians, and use nukes with great abandon, while off duty they're drug-abusing assholes. The people they fight are just as bad. It's very difficult to come up with a reason to want any side to win.
Hannibal Lecter novels Hannibal and Hannibal Rising both suffer from this. Almost none of the main characters have any redeeming attributes (sans Clarice, but she's basically a pawn half the time, and in the novel ends up falling for Lecter)—and those who do are mercilessly picked on or forced out of the action. Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter himself, the murderous psychopath is practically presented as the hero. Hannibal himself is part of why Hannibal falls into the trope. Even though he is a psychopathic murderer, the vital heart of Silence was the dynamic between Lecter and Clarice; Lecter comes to admire her doggedness and pure, honest nature of her and treats her as kindly as anyone in a Crapsack World where seemingly every male treats her horribly. By turning him back into more or less a standard murderer on the loose and severing that mutual respect, it throws Hannibal into this trope, as discussed in great detail by Roger Ebertin his review:
"It misplaces the reason why we liked Hannibal Lecter so much. He was, in the 1991 classic, a good man to the degree that his nature allowed him to be. He was hard-wired as a cannibal and mass murderer, true, but that was his nature, not his fault, and in his relationship with the heroine, FBI trainee Clarice Starling, he was civil and even kind. He did the best he could."
The Hunger Games has an initial premise that is dark enough (children forced to kill one another on national television), but for the first couple of books they're still plenty engaging, with human kindness even in the midst of brutality, and hopes of rebellion and change. The third book goes into a swan-dive down the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Katniss' PTSD and emotional disconnect from the world increases (and she's our narrator, which makes for tough reading) and the factions come to seem more and more alike, both of them horrible. Throw in arbitrary and senseless deaths and an ending that seems built to deny any meaningful closure... well, some fans applaud the "realism" of Mockingjay, and others just found it a slog.
Iron Druid Chronicles can invoke this reaction in some people. The main character is an often jerkish Nominal Hero who only gets involved if he is forced to, who is willing to let lesser crimes fall by the wayside in service to what he considers more significant goals, and who is willing to commit any number of those crimes himself if he deems it necessary. His "allies" include an (if Affable) largely amoral vampire (who sells Atticus down the river as soon as it becomes clear that Atticus isn't backing his corner), a pack of werewolves (themselves guilty of a number of more mundane crimes, typically in service of keeping up the Masquerade), and a coven of witches who are of a similar mindset to Atticus, if not worse. Their enemies tend to be Jerkass Gods at best, if not outright Omnicidal Maniacs.
This was something Steven Spielberg took great measures to avoid when adapting Jaws because the original book suffered from this: the protagonists in the novel are so unlikable, selfish, and hypocritical that they make the shark look decent by comparison.
The Kid, the sequel to Push, got hit with this hard. The first book was very dark too, but it at least had some moments of hope and a (somewhat) happy ending. The Kidstarts with Precious dying of AIDS and goes on to focus on her son Abdul, who himself is abused, beaten, and raped to the point that he becomes an abuser himself, murders his girlfriend's parents and winds up in a mental institution. Suffice it to say that many readers who enjoyed Push and rooted for Precious found it very hard to slog through The Kid.
Both 'sides' in Left Behind have exactly the same goals and use pretty much the same methods, everything that happens is part of God's plan and, as such, the characters have no free will and nothing they do at any point in the series makes any difference whatsoever, so it's really rather difficult to root for them. Both sides of the conflict are more or less interchangeable morally and the only real difference between them is their power levels, with God's side absurdly powerful and Satan's side downright ineffectual. The only concrete reason why one side is specifically good and the other is bad is that the writers say they are. It's especially bad in the first few books, where the "heroes" are willing collaborators with the Antichrist in all but name.
The Legend of Drizzt is mostly a solid tale of a renegade dark elf who develops morals and principles and fights for them while struggling to keep himself honest and in the light (compared to his irredeemably evil kin). Where Too Bleak, Stopped Caring comes in is after "The Ghost King", after Cattie Brie and Regis die. These two deaths haunt Drizzt so much, he becomes something of an Anti-Hero, and the advent of the Nether, the Ghost King's rampage, and the Crapsack World ending to "The Pirate King" which showed the death of Deudermont and the downfall of any goodness in Luskan, really cranked up the "grimdark" to max levels. This was so off-putting to so many readers, that they more or less rejected Dhalia as a partner for Drizzt, as she was a terrible Jerkass and basically evil. The fact that Drizzt would sink so low just to get some elf-lovin' was repugnant to many. Then, you have Bruenor's death, the evil of the Netherese, and the resurgence of the drow, and the world is just such crap that no one cares to read what was once a light-hearted, fun fantasy about good characters fighting and kicking the butts of evil. Now the "heroes" are mostly evil. It's telling that in response to this, the "Companions Codex" came out with "Companions" (book 0) that basically reintroduces the heroes of yore: Cattie Brie, Regis, Wulfgar, and Bruenor, only now more heroic. Regis is braver, Wulfgar is a little less a cardboard cutout stoic, and then moves into the next series. Dhalia is killed off (and brought back as an evil zombie), Effron kind of becomes neutral/good-ish, Afafrenfere returns to ask forgiveness from his order, and Ambergris fights to honor her dwarven heritage by fighting for Bruenor and on the side of good (along with Jarlaxle, another interesting character who turned into a pretty grimdark type and then recovered back to the humorous Anti-Hero ish figure we all know and love). The world of more heroic protagonists fighting evil really resonated with readers, and the apathy was replaced by interest once more.
Like Water for Chocolate piles so many disgraces on the protagonist Tita, makes her Love Interest Pedro so spineless and selfish, and reduces the other characters (especially Tita's big sister/Pedro´s wife Rosaura) to such unlikeable assholes... that many readers have given up mid-reading since it's a chore to read and wonder "what's gonna happen to her now?!"
A Little Life has received criticism from some readers and critics for being so relentlessly bleak and preoccupied with graphically depicting things like rape and self-harm, it at times feels less like a profound in-depth study of trauma and its long-term effects, and more akin to melodramatic "misery porn". Some readers found that Jude's Trauma Conga Line reached almost farcical levels, particularly as any time things start looking up for him they just get worse again. Considering the novel is over 700 pages long and the constant emphasis on how miserable and traumatised Jude is, some readers understandably find it a slog or give up entirely before the end.
In-Universe at the end of Anne Sexton's poetry collection Live or Die, which is pretty much an unending series of poems of despair and hopelessness, with Sexton constantly wishing for death and thinking about how suicide is a good idea.note She eventually committed suicide eight years later. Sexton herself notes in closing poem "Life" about how others get tired of her constant depression:
And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer.
Logan's Run: The lead character is a borderline sociopath. Jess is something of a Satellite Love Interest. None of the side characters have many redeeming qualities as they're shallow, oversexed, ultra-violent, casually doped up, or some combination of all of the above. Pedophilia, anonymous sex, heavy drug use? Check, check, check. The apocalyptic setting of the sequels makes the world's setting an even bigger dump, but not by much. There's a good reason many people prefer the film's slightly more idealistic take on the premise.
Some readers have a hard time caring about much that happens in Lost Souls (1992), or even struggle to finish it, due to the copious amounts of graphic violence, rape, incest, nihilistic angst, drug abuse, underage sex, and other squicky content, all held together by a thinly-written plot. The vampires are far from the friendly kind and the majority of the characters are either murderous, hedonistic assholes or helpless victims who suffer horrible fates.
The reaction to the anime series was mainly this, with many mixed to negative reactions over yet another Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction show being aired at a period in which more typical takes on the genre have become very seldom (at the time, only Maho Girls Pre Cure, Sailor Moon Crystal and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vi Vid were mainstream, and all of them were new installments of old-established franchises instead of fully new works). Even Crunchyroll staffers showed themselves frustrated about it on the live portion of the Fall 2016 Rollout special where they first announced they were simulcasting the anime adaptation of Magical Girl Raising Project.
A very common complaint, even by fans of the show themselves, is that it is hard to feel any impact at the death of characters who barely get any development before being mowed down. Part of the fault goes to the anime attempting to adapt all the side stories and backgrounds of the cast from the first arc, which leaves no screen time to dedicate individually to every one of them given the short length of the series. Being a twelve-episode anime trying to flesh out sixteen characters meant that it could not even focus on a single character per episode.
It's hard to care about some war arcs as the factions are nominal at best and corrupted or outright evil at worst, and the fact that bad guys always win doesn't help, at least in early war arcs.
This problem actually is endemic to the light novel itself, as many fans agree that the characters in the first arc, which the anime adapts, were weaker in terms of characterization. Later arcs were much better received both in character depth and world-building.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen doesn't always do this, but it did creep up during Midnight Tides. That novel depicts a war between the Tiste Edur (a nation that keeps humans as slaves and is ruled by an insane emperor who works for an Eldritch Abomination) and Letharas (a brutal, expansionist empire that takes the flaws of capitalism as far as it can without being Played for Laughs). You can't even blame one side for being the ones to initiate the war, since they're both pretty eager for it even before the first blow is struck. Sure, individual characters on both sides of the conflict can be quite sympathetic, but the outcome of the war isn't that suspenseful, 'cause you know you're gonna wind up with a regime of violent, oppressive conquerors either way. The continuation of this plot after the war ends only makes it worse because the victors lack the finesse to control their new subjects, resulting in them slowly being undermined and torn apart by their supposed subjects. Things only improve after a lot of important character deaths when the Tiste Edur give up and leave while Letharas gets a decent ruler.
The Maze Runner series is this to a great degree. While the first book is likable enough for young adult fiction, the second takes a nosedive as the protagonist is betrayed by almost all of his friends, who reason that they work For the Greater Good and actually blame him for acting sensible and trying to question things. Then the third book reveals that all the ordeals that the experimental subjects had to endure were pointless because there is no cure for the Flare virus, which means that the only thing humanity can do is let the teenagers start again in a new paradise which comes out of nowhere, which means that the entire trilogy could have been avoided had some of the higher powers actually accepted that instead of putting the protagonists through hell in hopes of a miracle cure.Adults Are Useless, indeed. The degree of hopelessness in the TMR universe is all the more highlighted when a companion book reveals the origin of the Flare virus: it's man-made. No, really. A certain scientist devised the virus as a way to reduce overpopulation due to the shrinking resources caused by the Sun Flare, without thinking that, sometimes, viruses mutate.
Night Watch (Series) is a debatable case. The eponymous Night Watch claims it wants to improve the world, but in practice, this means making everyone else think as they do, and their actions include putting Hitler in power. The Day Watch talks of freedom of choice, but they're selfish, hedonistic, and frequently hypocritical. Muggles are snacks, and there's nothing they could conceivably do to influence the situation. On the other hand, it's only the upper ranks that are rotten—both the Night Watch and the Day Watch have good and honorable members in the field. This comes full circle when it is revealed that at the highest levels, the Watches are actually working together; the conflict between them is mostly for the sake of keeping the Others away from normal people, and the Watches often deliberately sabotage their own efforts to overtly influence human society. Their real plans to improve the world are much more subtle and cooperative.
In On the Beach, the impending and inevitable end of life on earth is made clear from the beginning, and mostly handled in calm acceptance. The film versions try to make the single dim Hope Spot shine a little brighter, but arrive at the same state halfway through. With the subject of global nuclear selfdestruction at hand, a depressing mood was very intentional, but it can leave readers disengaged over the course.
The Poppy War: The horrors of war are depicted in such depressing detail, particularly the massacre of Golyn Nis, that many readers feel nothing could possibly be worth reading any further into the trilogy.
The Program and its sequels fall into this for a lot of people. The protagonists are generally sympathetic enough, but the atmosphere is so bleak that it almost doesn't matter. The story is set in a world where one in three teens are Driven to Suicide, and the titular Program, designed to prevent this, is arguably a Fate Worse than Death. Nearly all the adults are either compliant with the Program, or actively working with it, and all the teenage characters are broken, Mind Raped, and then broken some more. Fun.
Re:Zero: Kicks in during the later episodes, where Subaru's punishments for screwing up become more visceral. For some people this borders on unnecessary cruelty.
The Rising of the Shield Hero: The World of Jerkass setting as well as the fact that the bad guys often pull a Karma Houdini (well, until much later) can make the viewers simply unable to care about what's happening to the main characters. The Shield Hero himself thinks the world is too bleak to care about.
Scott Smith's book The Ruins is made of this trope. Some college students are vacationing in Mexico and after finding their way onto some Mayan ruins, are trapped there at arrow-point by local natives. Meanwhile, some vines on the ruins are not only carnivorous but also intelligent. The first third of the book somewhat averts this trope as the protagonists try a few different things to make the best of the situation. The second third of the book is essentially them giving up, bickering with each other constantly, and constantly suffering. In the final third, they all die. Bonus points are when it's revealed that the vines are basically godlike in power and knowledge, and could have easily killed them at any time, but preferred to torture them For the Evulz. The film was slightly less dark and edgy than the book.
The School for Good Mothers: After Frida leaves her toddler unattended at home for a few hours, the Department of Child Disservices intervenes and she loses custody of Harriet. Their investigation is a conga line of hope spots that raise Frida's spirits and then crushed them. The judge rules that Frida's only chance of being a part of her daughter's life is to go to the "school", which is run more like a prison or reeducation camp, for a year. The school is just part of a revamped Child Protective Services that ends up setting the mothers up for failure (most end up as Broken Birds) and hurts the same children it seeks to protect.
Donna Tartt's The Secret History sometimes inspires this—it's not uncommon for readers to respond to the revelation that one of these unsympathetic characters will be murdered by thinking "Only one?"
A Series of Unfortunate Events: Adults Are Uselessall the time (and this only gets worse as the series goes on), Poor Communication Kills (and, again, this only gets worse), the Baudelaires do not get anything resembling happiness ever within the books themselves (the last book ends with them taking their chances going into the unknown, but there is a big Inferred Holocaust and whatever clues there are of them getting a bright future once everything is done are deeply buried amongst endless misery and the Lemony Narrator's ramblings). A similar feeling may come from the enormous barrage of mysteries the series has-the author deliberately invokesThe Chris Carter Effect at its absolute worst (refusing to solve almost all of them), which may drive people into frustration.note In fairness, every one of the books does have a blurb telling you not to bother reading it.
Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects falls into this at times. Readers are presented with a heavily unlikeable narrator and a whole cast of unlikeable supporting characters. The narrative's overall tone tends towards despair and in spite of the fact that narrator Camille's story seemingly ends hopefully, with her finally finding a nurturing surrogate family and working towards undoing the damage of her toxic upbringing, it's made very clear that none of the characters will ever truly be happy and that dozens of lives were destroyed beyond repair. Flynn's other books flirt with this but are generally redeemed with moments of hope, levity, humor, etc.
The Silmarillion is a Dark FantasyCreation Myth that goes continuously From Bad to Worse and is pretty close to being both a "Shaggy Dog" Story and shooting that dog. Then why bother writing it, let alone reading it? Because there are wonderful and great things amid all the desolation. Author J. R. R. Tolkien would probably argue that the beautiful is made even more beautiful and valuable precisely because it doesn't last. Moreover, since the setting is supposed to be Earth in the very distant past, all the fantasy elements must slowly and surely disappear, even though this requires deities and superhumans to act in idiotic ways.
Robin Wasserman's novel Skinned has a similar problem to Blood and Chocolate, since it initially discusses Fantastic Racism against cyborgs, then applies Cybernetics Eat Your Soul. Do you support genocide, or do you root for inhuman freaks?
Though the series has its share of likable characters, it's also full of death. While initially, the death of the "main" character was a refreshing twist, by the end of A Storm Of Swords so many of the characters had been killed off or worse that some readers found it hard to care about the rest of them. Also, all the endless, gratuitous war crimes perpetrated by all factions — rapes, skinned children crucified for miles, burning women alive after raping them — not only began to lose their shock value but made it hard to care about who wins in the end. Some are even convinced that the Big Bad of the series, the Others, are practically saints, by comparison, making it difficult to consider them a dire threat. Of course, this is still averted occasionally, since many of the people who end up dying are very loathsome villains (a giant rapist and war criminal spending weeks dying due to a man he killed having poisoned him, a psychotic mercenary who loves maiming being gradually cut to pieces, a sadistic Royal Brat being poisoned and choking to death...). It's frequently shown that just being evil isn't helpful in the long term. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, it appears that the Northern Houses are planning to restore the Starks, the de facto good guys, and kill the Boltons, their arch enemies. House Manderly even bakes Bolton allies in pies and states that 'the North remembers' the hideous crimes committed on their kin, allies, and the Starks. It's enough to make many fans cry tears of happiness. Simply, hope has returned, which averts this trope a bit.
Played straight, however, with its rather cynical view of medieval life and of human nature in general. Knights are depicted as little more than glorified thugs, the rulers use underhanded tactics in an attempt to keep their power, and No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. The fact that it was (ostensibly) based on The Wars Of The Roses doesn't help.
Deliberately used in The Sound and the Fury: the first brother is severely mentally handicapped, and although hard to hate, his section of the book (written from his perspective) is so confusing that it's hard for many people to identify with him. The second brother is completely insane and lusts after his own sister which turns out to be a lie to protect her, but we don't find this out until later, so you really want to turn away from him. The third brother already has turned away from him, and narrates in a completely comprehensible style, so at first, you like him, but then he's a total Jerkass who hates everyone around him.
The Star Trek Novel 'Verse is starting to have this effect after the two-part novels Plagues of the Night and Raise the Dawn. The series had already gone through a completely legitimate rough patch with the Borg war of Star Trek: Destiny, only for a new cold war with the Typhon Pact to occur. This was fine until these two books: which destroyed Deep Space Nine, the Bajoran Wormhole and Killed Off for Real about five really popular characters from the TV shows. The books following have increased the canon character body count, and the Federation is starting to collapse. The story has already written itself into Only the Author Can Save Them Now but the stories like the authors just want everyone dead or completely miserable. It's probably one reason why Star Trek Online cherry-picks from the novel verse.
Several reviews cite this as a flaw of Stranger Things: Flight of Icarus, a prequel novel revolving around Eddie Munson (of the "likable protagonist who goes through hell" variety). Due to being set prior to Season 4, it's a Foregone Conclusion that none of Eddie's attempts to better his life will work out, with all the major plotlines ending in failure or putting him in a worse position. Because Eddie didn't find out about the paranormal goings-on in Hawkins until Season 4, the story lacks any fun Speculative Fiction elements to balance things out, instead being a mundane and rather bleak drama about a teenager's crappy life of bullying, crime, poverty, parental abandonment and crushed dreams; anyone who has watched Season 4 (which is likely the majority of the reader base) also knows that Eddie's life will only get worse despite the novel's attempt to inject some hope. Unless you're a hardcore Eddie fan who wants more detail about his background than the show provided, Flight of Icarus can make for a pretty depressing read that doesn't add much to the Stranger Things universe or Eddie's character overall.
The Terror by Dan Simmons falls into this. Already you know a vast majority of the characters are doomed, due to the book being based on a real-life failed Arctic expedition and the graves of main characters being marked on the book's map. Add to that the sheer number of unlikeable characters (and good characters making stupid decisions and/or getting bridges dropped on them right and left), the Anyone Can Die attitude, the countless hope spots that always turn out to be for naught, and the fact that the majority of the book follows a crew of starving, freezing, scurvy-afflicted sailors and Marines being stalked by a murderous Eldritch Abomination, and by the book's halfway point, you're wondering why the titular Terror doesn't just put everybody out of their misery already.
Brought up in Through the Looking-Glass. Tweedledum and Tweedledee recite the poem about The Walrus and the Carpenter. After hearing the poem, Alice wonders about who is the more sympathetic of the two. But the twins point out that both of the duo ate as many of the oysters as they could. After much thought, Alice concludes that both of them were very unpleasant characters.
Many of the critics and even some of the fans claim that the series suffers this badly in the Love Triangle the third book Eclipse is built around. Edward, Bella, and Jacob all come off as extremely possessive, selfish, and emotionally manipulative Jerkasses to the point that some found all possible resolutions to the triangle equally repugnant.
There's also the issue of the Volturi. They are built up as a corrupt government that ruthlessly murders vampires over any slight, forcibly "collects" powerful vampires, and looks for excuses to destroy the Cullen family. The problem is, vampires as a whole are a bunch of murderous animals who do nothing but think about their next meal and who to kill to get it. Thus, not only are the Volturi the only ones trying to instill any sense of order into the vampire world, but they're the few actually keeping the vampires from slaughtering humans without restraint. Even the Cullens in no way condemn or try to stop this behavior, which makes their declarations that human lives are valuable come across as rather hollow. Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be defending humanity, the werewolves apparently slack off a good bit (they do nothing to stop Peter and Charlotte in Midnight Sun, even though there were werewolves transforming at that time), and actively go against their duties when Jacob imprints on Renesmee and puts her before his job as Alpha. This is all best summed up by their actions in Breaking Dawn. The Volturi try to use Renesmee as an excuse to kill the Cullens and their allies, the allies are so kind as to go outside the city limits to slaughter people during their stay, but the werewolves do nothing to stop this because the allies are needed to protect Renesmee, and the Cullens loan cars so the allies can find victims more easily.
One problem Twilight has is that all of the characters that are jerks are pushed to the front of the story, often having incredibly fucked up backstories despite being portrayed rather positively (Jasper, Sam), while the ones that aren't are either pushed to the background as fast as possible (Bella's school friends), portrayed negatively despite not really showing any negative traits (Bella's school friends again, Charlie in the early books, and Leah, although her case is more that her negative traits exist but aren't really her fault so much), or made worse in an apparent attempt to make them less sympathetic (Jacob, Charlie again). About the only character in the book that isn't either a massive jerk or made one, but still stays roughly important in the story is Carlisle. And even his morals and motives are somewhat questionable.
The Witcher: The world is filled with monsters, Fantastic Racism at its absolute worst, and a total lack of any sign of change that makes it hard to get invested in what happens. Really, who do you want to root for? A bunch of back-stabbing racists? The evil empire conquering the known world? Mages and sorceresses playing their own game of world domination? Cruel elven supremacists? Or maybe an ignorant hunter, who kills everyone in his way? Oh, and you know from the start how meaningless everything is since you are informed before the title page of the first book about the incoming ice age destined to destroy everything. It kinda makes you wonder what the point is of even having a story.
Worm is set in a world with superpowers where people get their powers on the worst day of their lives, criminals outnumber the heroes to the point where Neo-Nazi gangs are seen as a reasonable alternative to what could replace them, and massive creatures regularly destroy cities. The main character gains powers after a protracted bullying campaign led by one of the heroes, and tries to become a superhero, but is constantly branded a villain, in large part because one of the early heroes she helps has taken credit for her achievements. And things only get worse from there, not helped by villains who hurt people just to watch them break, heroes making awful decisions with nominally good intentions but incomplete information, and culminating with stopping the Big Bad from utterly destroying everything, but at a truly horrific body count. There's a reason why a lot of the fanfic is wish-fulfillment involving the world becoming a better place, and even stories where Taylor becomes the world's most skilled serial murderer or spends years just going through the motions of her life after having her memories erased are still much more optimistic than canon.
With a title like Worst. Person. Ever., you'd expect this trope to rear its ugly head. Raymond Gunt is an unrepentant misogynist who brings so much misfortune onto himself, while everyone else around him is just as corrupt and assholish, but evades karma. The novel's relentless heaping of bad luck onto Ray makes it rather difficult to get through. However, judging by Coupland saying he wanted to "damage the reader" with Worst. Person. Ever., it seems this trope was indeed intended.
Wuthering Heights can induce this reaction, in the 'too bleak and angsty and without hope' subcategory. (Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books parody this with an anger management class for the characters, who are warned that their drama has made the story more angsty and angry as time goes by, and they risk going the same way as Titus Andronicus: "Once a gentle comedy of manners, it's now the daftest, bloodiest tale in all of Shakespeare!")
:"It misplaces the reason why we liked Hannibal Lecter so much. He was, in the 1991 classic, a good man to the degree that his nature allowed him to be. He was hard-wired as a cannibal and mass murderer, true, but that was his nature, not his fault, and in his relationship with the heroine, FBI trainee Clarice Starling, he was civil and even kind. He did the best he could."