Quote:
Originally Posted by Frida Fantastic
Interestingly enough, I enjoy reading about crapsack worlds where everything is terrible, as long as it maintains some wit, or a sense of humour, or has a different take on things. I don't like it when books with dark settings are take themselves way too seriously. The darkest stories I've enjoyed with asshole anti-heroes and seriously crapsack-why-aren't-you-all-dead-yet settings still had a refreshingly twisted sort of humour. There has to be bits of humour to everything, whether it be dry humour, wry, off-beat, slapstick, gallows, twisted, etc. Even just a few quips at the right moments will make a book much better. Humour is part how people put up with life, and I like seeing that reflected in fiction.
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I haven't read much like that, but I agree 100% with the principle. Some delicious snark can make most things enjoyable.
It's the "this is so HARDCORE BRUTALLY DARK!!!" or the "Look how tragic! You must sympatise with him/her! Because their life was so TRAGIC and SAD" things that take themselves seriously that don't work for me.
I thought of something else: Character names that are real words not usually used as a name.
It's not a hard and fast rule - if there's a whole culture that uses names like that, it tends to work, or if it's a comedy (Thursday Next), or if it's apparently a nickname (say, Shadow in
American Gods), but in a lot of cases it puts me off.
It's particularly distracting for me when the name is a German word in an English text, e.g. Stammel in
The Sheepfarmer's Daughter (though that one had other problems, too), or a book recommended to me recently I decided I wouldn't be able to enjoy because the main character was named "Rache" (revenge).
Things like that are like mixed up homonyms: They push me right out of the story, so if they happen too often, they kill the book.