The Bleakest Book I Ever Read Was an Anthology of American Short Stories I Got From the Local Library - One was about a recovered alcoholic who called into the local bar and filled up on the way home from work, another had a morbidly obese woman and her socially disadvantaged son .. Patrick White
(www.google.com)https://www.google.com/search?q=Anthology+of+American+Short+Stories&client=firefox-b-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjstMKLz4z1AhXYyzgGHd5vCeQQ_AUoBHoECAEQBg&biw=1155&bih=1086&dpr=0.8The American anthology also had a gun nut who was put in his place by a couple who made it clear to him his armed presence was not wanted on local walking tracks, another recounted the genocide of the indigenous Cherokee inhabitants of Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia.
Recounting a force led by an Irish Major veteran of the Napoleonic Wars landed on the island in 1830 with a force of sealers recruited in Nantucket, who slaughtered every Cherokee man woman and child and torched their dwellings, that smoke still lingered over the site when her forebears who were Mayflower type immigrants got there.
Australian writer and
Nobel Laureate Patrick White kept the bleak tradition alive with a collection of stories titled
The Burnt Ones, they were venomous and revealed White's self loathing as a sodomite .. one had a Jew whose youthful mistress walked out on him, another poured scorn on a local bloke who married the girl in the dry cleaning shop, the opus was a fellow whose missus had to massage his bare butt because of a medical condition, who was "having it off" with a bloke down the street.
