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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41462
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41462
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

> Are these many layers of misery inflicted upon innocents too much for a reader to handle?

You must be careful here: the way you phrase that statement, you appear to be laying the blame on the reader - "the story is good, but the reader is too weak for it". Consider instead the alternative approach: the reader is good, but you have not given him enough reason to care about your characters, substituted trauma for depth, and consequently bored the reader. This might not be the case, but this is a possibility you have to keep in mind.

Mark Twain famously criticised Fenimore Cooper's work:

> [...] the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and [...] he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together. (Mark Twain, _Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences_)

How would your reader feel about your characters in the first chapter, when you start torturing them? Would he care, or would he "wish they would all get drowned together"?

Now, this might seem a strange notion: after all, shouldn't we care about a person being hurt by virtue of them being human? To some extent, we do. But we have only limited patience for the sob story of a person we don't know. When we're oversaturated, we close off, sympathy turns into boredom and rejection. It's like darkness-induced apathy, only applied to what happens with the characters, rather than the general setting.

It's not that we absolutely need sunshine and roses to connect to a character. **What we need is the character having agency**. You describe things done to the characters, more and more. They are victims, again and again. But we don't want to read about victims - we want to read about people struggling to stand in the face of adversity. Even if they fall in the end (e.g. _1984_). There's an autobiographic book that came out recently: _[Born in the Ghetto: My Triumph Over Adversity](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18797000-born-in-the-ghetto)_ by Ariella Abramovich-Sef. It doesn't start happy - it starts during the Holocaust, as you might have guessed from the title. But never does the author present herself as a victim. Again, from the title alone, this is a book about triumph, not about bad things happening to her.

M.R. Carey in _The Girl with all the Gifts_ has an interesting way of avoiding inducing apathy with a dark start:

> Now she's ten years old, and she has skin like a princess in a fairy tale; skin as white as snow. So she knows that when she grows up she'll be beautiful, with princes falling over themselves to climb her tower and rescue her.  
> Assuming, of course, that she has a tower.  
> In the meantime, she has the cell, the corridor, the classroom and the shower room.  
> [...]  
> After Sergeant says "Transit", Melanie gets dressed, quickly, in the white shift that hangs on the hook next to her door, a pair of white trousers from the receptacle in the wall, and the white pumps lined up under her bed. Then she sits down in the wheelchair at the foot of her bed, like she's been taught to do. She puts her hands on the arms of the chair and her feet on the footrests. [...]  
> Sergeant comes in with his gun and points it at her. Then two of Sergeant's people come in and tighten and buckle the straps of the chair around Melanie's wrists and ankles. There's also a strap for her neck; they tighten that one last of all, when her hands and feet are fastened up all the way, and they always do it from behind.

The setting is creepy, but the MC is very upbeat. The contrast creates curiosity. It's easy to sympathise with a girl who thinks of herself as a fairytale princess, and _because_ we sympathise with her, we fear for her. Not the other way round.

When all else fails, there's gallows humour. _All Quiet on the Western Front_ starts with this: "today we got double rations, because half the company got killed". Gallows humour too is a form of defiance, a form of agency. (And of course, Remarque doesn't rely on gallows humour alone - there's also strong camaraderie to build and maintain readers' sympathy.)

**TL;DR** : It's not about darkness alone. As others have pointed out, plenty of works from Dostoyevsky to Shakespeare are dark. Problem is, your readers must care about the characters, or you're inducing apathy. The character having some sort of agency goes a long way to help the reader connect with the character. If we want to read about suffering victims, there's always the news.

Original score: 22