We are well into winter. It is cold. It is gray. So it goes.
The one good thing about winter is that it gives you the chance to showcase your defining personality trait—having seasonal affective disorder, or kind of adorably, SAD. Unfortunately, every other self-serious schmuck has the same idea. How do you separate yourself from the pack? By going deeper into the abyss.
Sometimes the only way up is down. You don’t want to go into springtime wondering if everyone around you knew just how much the lack of sun fucked with your brain. You want to get all that shit out and have it validated by your psychiatrist, your family, and everyone in your sphere so when those tulips start poking out you’re ready to pivot into full-blown attention-grabbing mania! Enter one Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut was America’s greatest satirist and while his comically depressing work is peppered with uplifting maxims such as “If this isn’t nice, what is?” his overall vibe is the catalyst you need to get the most out of your seasonally triggered depressive episode. Which Vonnegut novel will give you the most bang for your sad bed-ridden buck? Let’s break it down!
10. Bluebeard
This one had so much promise in terms of bumming the reader the fuck out. It’s the tale of a fictional, insanely skilled artist, Rabo Karabekian, who got swept up by the abstract movement and achieved fame by putting simple stripes of colored tape on canvases, work that in his heart he knows is bullshit. What’s more, it turns out the tape he used wasn’t very good, and all of his priceless masterpieces are falling apart. Everything is sailing smoothly toward bummersville until a spirited young woman enters his life and teaches him to abandon his closed-off hermit ways, open himself up, and reveal his secret masterpiece to the world. That’s right, this guy starts in a bad place, learns, and changes for the better. You might as well read a book by anyone else. This is simply not what we come to Vonnegut for.
9. Galapagos
This is the story of how mankind evolves into sea lion-like creatures that pretty much are just sea lions who laugh at farts. It is told from the perspective of Kilgore Trout’s son, or rather his ghost, who refuses to cross over into the afterlife for a million years. There’s good depression here what with the world’s economy tanking and a virus rendering all humans infertile except the survivors of a shipwreck on one of the Galapagos islands, and the book’s central argument that humans are only unhappy because of our large brains sure looks how you feel right now. At the end of the day, however, it’s just too zany to fully bolster your seasonal depression. This is Vonnegut telling us “Hey, I’m a crazy old man now, look at me!” and honestly it’s pretty fun.
8. Slapstick
Vonnegut’s fictionalized meditation on his own loneliness and the tragic loss of his sister is certainly a labor of sad, but truth be told it seems like it was way more depressing to write than it is to read, and let’s be honest, “Hi ho” is no “So it goes.” And while the novel is set in a world where a large portion of the population has been killed and Western Civilization has virtually collapsed (a trademark setting for Vonnegut) his protagonist’s plan to cure loneliness by randomly dividing the population into 20 new extended families does sort of work, and is sort of uplifting. Save this one for summertime, you’ve got abysss’ to stare into!
7. Jailbird
Now we’re starting to cook, depression-wise. “Jailbird” is the autobiography of Walter F. Starbuck, an ineffective bureaucrat who winds up going to prison over the Watergate scandal. The book opens on the day of his release and ends with him going back to prison, which is a bummer, but the real tragedy is to be found with side character Mary Kathleen O’looney, who lives as a bag lady in NYC despite secretly being CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world. A lifelong communist, Mary is hiding from corporate spies who wish to see her dead as she ponders the best way to use her considerable wealth to help the world. She never figures it out, dies, and her company is dismantled and reabsorbed into traditional capitalist channels. The world doesn’t end in “Jailbird,” The tragedy is just everything going back to business as usual, but that’s its own sort of bummer, and if you’re not convinced of this book’s bum-out power here’s a sample line: “The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered on iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for 60 years.” It’s FULL of shit like that.
6. Timequake
With this 1997 book, Vonnegut showed the world that just because he was a crazy old man at that point he still had the power to make you hold a newborn baby, look it in the eye, and think “This means nothing.” In “Timequake” there is, well, a time quake. Basically, time reverses and everyone in the present of 2001 goes back to the year 1991, but the thing is everyone is stuck doing whatever it is they were doing in 1991 because of course free will is an illusion. If you, say, accidentally ran over a kid on his bike in 1995, you just have to watch yourself do it again, and said kid has to just watch himself get hit again! By the time the world catches back up to 2001, everyone is so depressed and complacent that they simply stop moving. The only man unaffected (Kilgor Trout of course) has to shake everyone one by one and remind them that they are still alive. Holy fuck. Apparently, Vonnegut wasn’t satisfied with the depressing powers of the initial draft so he went ahead and peppered in sad anecdotes from his own life throughout the text and even threw in a bunch of last words from dead famous people for good measure because fuck you.
5. Breakfast of Champions
Don’t let the fun drawings of assholes and the fact that Vonnegut tells you the size of every character’s dick fool you, this book is gut-wrenching. Everything from racism to the cruelty of capitalism to the idea that free will is an illusion is gloriously explored here. In it a man reads a science fiction novel addressed to the reader, telling them that they are the only person in the universe and that everyone else is a robot. The unhinged man takes it to heart due to a chemical imbalance in his brain and goes on a rampage. Thanks a lot, Kilgor Trout! Meanwhile, you’re reading THIS book and having thoughts like “If I put tinfoil on all the windows I won’t notice the dishes as much.”
4. The Sirens of Titan
This one will kick the last of your dopamine out of bed faster than you can say chrono synclastic infundibulum! Almost all of Vonnegut’s work has elements of science fiction, but this one is the most science fiction-y. Don’t worry about all the fun space hijinks cheering you up! There is SO MUCH to get bummed out about here. Highlights include an orchestrated war between Earth and Mars, the rise of The Church of God The Utterly Indifferent, and the word “Greetings.” Seriously, he takes the word “Greetings” and uses it in such a way that it is the most devastating, gut-punching word you have ever read in your life. Tear through “The Sirens of Titan” and no one will ever challenge your status as king sad ever again.
3. Cat’s Cradle
Since this novel (*spoiler*) ends in a doomsday forever-winter it’s arguably the most on theme for this, the season of brooding. Vonnegut turns his satirical lens to issues of religion, technology gone mad, and war, themes as relevant today as they were in 1963. I’m sad already! Thrill as everyman narrator John endeavors to write a book about the bombing of Hiroshima only to discover the bomb’s co-creator made an even deadlier weapon, a substance that can cause all water to freeze at room temperature by the name of ice-nine! Become oddly aroused by the small island religion of Bokonon in which practitioners have sex by touching the soles of their feet together! Experience crippling dread as the last survivors of the ice-nine apocalypse commit ritualistic suicide by eating the doomsday substance, and it really really works! Every sun-lamp in the world burning right in your face at the same time can’t save you from the crushing wit of “Cat’s Cradle!”
2. Slaughterhouse-Five
If you think being stuck in bed is bad, try being unstuck in time. That’s what happens to Billy Pilgrim, a prisoner of war who witnessed the bombing of Dresden. Upon witnessing the bombings Billy becomes non-linear, and spends the rest of the novel traveling to and fro various points of his past and his future, which include a brief stint as an exhibit at an alien zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. It’s basically a big crazy metaphor for PTSD and disassociation. If you’re looking to reach the type of depression where you go to the McDonald’s drive-thru and, when asked what you would like to order respond “What’s the point?” “Slaughterhouse-Five is your golden ticket!
1. Mother Night
This one just, I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, you know what I gotta go lay down. I’m going to shut off my phone, don’t text, don’t call.