From Bad to Worse/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Every novel by Franz Kafka. Ever. Just when you don't think things can get any worse for his Chew Toy protagonist, things always do.
  • The Book and Movie versions of Sybil should have been entitled Sybil: It got worse.
  • The state of the known universe in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation space trilogy. Everything was fine and dandy in the golden age of nanotechnology, then the Melding Plague showed up and ruined everything. Then the Inhibitors showed up and started hunting down humanity. And then the Greenfly terraformers were released, which will devour the entire universe
    • Also applies to the state of the Nostalgia for Infinity; at the beginning of the trilogy, most of the ship is exposed to vacuum, radioactive, and full of malfunctioning defense automatons. Amazingly, It Got Worse. Like how The Captain becomes one with the ship via a strain of the Melding Plague, causing the ship to turn into a giant flying Captain, with organic goop covering it. Then it/He gets cut to bits at the end of the trilogy
  • Hubert Selby's Requiem for a Dream. In fact, he was probably thinking "How could I possibly make this worse?" the entire time writing the book.
    • On the DVD Commentary for The Film of the Book, director Darren Aronofsky recalls a conversation he had with Selby during the planning phase. Aronofsky asked if Harry was supposed to survive the end of the novel. Selby's response: "Of course he lives. He has to suffer more."
  • While good things do occasionally happen in A Song of Ice and Fire, when bad things happen, they do so in the very worst possible way. And the same goes for characters that do bad things.
    • The Stark family motto ("Winter is coming") is basically an acknowledgment of how peculiarly applicable this trope seems to be to the inhabitants of the Seven Kingdoms.
    • And this is particularly true for Stark family itself. Let's take a look at their history through the series: the first major event in the first book is Bran (son #2) getting thrown out of the window, barely surviving but leaving him crippled for the rest of his life. Then the family splits: Ned (the father) goes to King's Landing with his daughters to serve as King's Hand while Catelyn (the mother) stays in Winterfell with their sons. In King's Landing, Ned's naivete and sense of justice lead to his own execution. His daughter Sansa, quickly shaken out of her naive and idealistic view of the world, is forced to endure physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her former fiancee, then-Crown-Prince-now-King - who turns out to be a sadistic prick fond of torture and murder. Younger daughter Arya manages to escape King's Landing only to see her friends and mentor getting killed and getting captured twice. Meanwhile, Robb (son #1), leaving his younger two brothers behind in Winterfell, leads his army south hoping to liberate his father from prison. After a series of hard-won battles, he is betrayed and killed by his supposed allies, along with his mother and most of his army. Two young Starks - Bran and Rickon - left in Winterfell, get to see their home razed, their people killed and are forced into fleeing.
  • In the future world described in The Time Machine, the human race has degenerated into Morlocks and Eloi. In the even more distant futures, Morlocks and Eloi have disappeared, along with all other forms of vertebrate life. Little is left but an endless ocean, a dying sun and a bitter wind. And a creepy flapping thing that comes after you.
  • This could be said for any number of the books in the Harry Potter series, but I feel that Goblet of Fire is a huge It Got Worse. Let's see... near the end, Harry and Cedric get through the myriad dangers of the Triwizard Tournament, only to not tie for the Triwizard Tournament, instead being transported to a place where Cedric gets promptly killed, Voldemort is restored to his body, Harry gets tortured repeatedly and nearly murdered. He finally escapes and the worst seems over... until Mad-Eye, a Death Eater in disguise, brings Harry up to his office and nearly kills him again.
    • It also is the turning point of the series, which from that point on becomes Darker and Edgier with each book.
    • The entirety of Umbridge's presence in book five is this trope. First she votes to get Harry expelled from Hogwarts during a disciplinary hearing, then she gets a job at Hogwarts and sets a curriculum that ensures that none of her students will learn jack shit about defense. Then she starts telling the students that the whole Voldemort coming back story is a lie. Then she starts giving out detentions for calling her out on this. Then it turns out her detentions are medieval torture. Then she gets a position as a High Inquisitor, allowing her to inspect and suspend teachers who don't conform to her opinions by leveraging enormous bias on them. Then she gets Fudge to pass decree after decree expanding her power more and more and more, until she gets Dumbledore kicked out and becomes Headmistress. Then she passes more decrees, turning her from Headmistress to absolute tyrant. Then she tries to throw Hagrid in Azkaban, and gets her lackeys to almost kill Professor McGonagall. Then she reveals that she was the one who sicced Dementors on Harry last summer, making her retroactively even worse than before. Then she tries to torture Harry for information. And that's leaving out what she does later, in the seventh and final book.
  • In House of Leaves, Tom Navidson's meaningless death came after the house started trying to eat everyone inside it. That came after Will Navidson being stranded in the labyrinth for a week, which was directly after Holloway blew Jed's head off. Really, it was a downward spiral, or maybe a string of It Got Worse moments.
  • This trope is pretty much the bread and butter of the Sword of Truth series. Each book somehow gets progressively worse, despite the first book starting with all of creation being on the brink of oblivion. Terry Goodkind is almost disturbingly fond of the plot rape.
    • In the first book, only the entirety of the world is at stake. In the second book, reality itself comes close to being destroyed. Then back to merely worrying about the fate of the world. Then the world again. Then the world again. Then reality. Then the world. Then reality and the world. And of course Richard and Kahlan are constantly in mortal danger.
  • Thomas Hardy adores this trope, especially in his later novels. "It Got Worse" could be an alternate title for Jude the Obscure. Jude begins his life as an unloved orphan, grows up to be tricked into marriage with a coarse woman who destroys any chance he has to reach intellectual fulfillment and then leaves him, and then falls in love with his cousin Sue, who proceeds to marry his mentor. Sue eventually runs away with Jude, but refuses to marry him, which (due to Victorian morality) condemns them and their children to an endless cycle of transience and poverty. It Gets Worse. Their nine-year-old son pulls a murder-suicide, hanging himself and his siblings when he realizes Jude and Sue can't provide for them. Sue has a mental breakdown and leaves Jude for her first husband. It Gets Worse. Jude meets Sue privately to try to convince her to return, but finds that she blames her children's fate on her and Jude's sins and means to devote the rest of her life to religious penance. This completely obliterates any hope Jude has in both religion and humanity. His first wife then tricks him into remarrying her, just in time for him to get pneumonia and die. As a final kicker, he dies alone because his wife is out on a date with another man.
    • Tess of the D'Ubervilles fits pretty well also. Everytime you think things are going to get better, they only get much much worse.
      • If it weren't for the fact that "It Tessed," doesn't sound quite right, she could be the trope namer. It's pretty hard, without introducing supernatural elements, to imagine any way it could possibly have gotten even worse by the book's close, and the thing about Tess, is that she never gets a break. She's not on a roller-coaster, where she goes down, then up, then down again, even if she eventually ends up at the bottom. It's all down. There's never a single tiny bump up anywhere. Angel Clare might seem like one, but he's the start of the sharpest decline of all. At best, he's a brief plateau in her constant descent into suck. Although, to be fair, that was Thomas Hardy's point: no matter how hard you try, fate wins in the end.
    • A Radio 4 Panel Show about literature once had a round "Things literary characters would never say". The winner was "Anyone in a Thomas Hardy novel: 'Things can only get better.'"
  • There really isn't a whole lot else in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Seriously. The Snicket Warning Label has its name for a reason.
  • The Seafort Saga can be described as "Anvil drops on Seafort. Anvil drops on Seafort. Two anvils drop on Seafort. Giant anvil drops on Seafort..."
  • Germinal. At the start of the book, the coal-miners are overworked, underpaid, and working under horrible conditions. Enter the protagonist, who convinces them to go on strike to improve their lot. Their failure is more than just a little tragic.
  • "It Got Worse" pretty much sums up the whole of Ian Irvine's Three Worlds series, giving him scope to end every book (even some at the end of supposedly self-contained series) with a ridiculously hopeless-seeming Cliff Hanger. Mauve Shirts get killed off at random, plans fail, main characters get ambushed, captured, tortured and horrifically injured; it's not an Ian Irvine book if someone isn't trying to scale a frozen, razor-sharp mountain ridge with at least two broken limbs and losing blood by the minute, while being pursued by vicious soldiers with some sort of Secret Art-powered flying machine,and he's still doing.
  • The first half of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is essentially this happening over and over again.
  • The first half of Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy is also a laundry list of bad news for NATO. First, the Soviets launch a Macross Missile Massacre against the outpost on Iceland, resulting in a Five-Man Band situation for the Americans. Two chapters later, a NATO carrier strike force falls victim to Bombers on the Screen. To top it off, by Chapter 28, the Dirty Communists make a strategic breakthrough in the town of Alfeld, West Germany. Fortunately, that book ends happily when General Colonel Alekseyev refuses to help unleash Mnogo Nukes after the Red Army fails to make progress.
  • A rather big part of the Silmarillion can be called this -- although sometimes it got better for brief periods of time, the inability of the Noldor to defeat Morgoth was a Foregone Conclusion. Perhaps the best example of It Got Worse within the overall work is the story of Turin Turambar, which invokes just about every doomed hero trope in existence.
  • The Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove takes It Got Worse almost as far as it can go in regards to the human race. Over 8 books we get: a world wide clandestine civil war, which develops into open revolution, then open war that killed practically everyone on the Mars colony, followed by a Colony Drop that leads to the utter collapse of all civilization in North America (when next we see them they are basically techno-tribes fighting wars killing millions for possession of North America). Next we have a plague that cripples Southern Europe, which is partly good because no one notices (outside the government of City Europe) that a quarter of a million people died when a storm hit France. Europe and Western Asia go to war with Africa. The rulers of South America, Australia, Africa and all of Asia are removed from power, causing civil wars there and the rise of Warlords. Civil War (notice the pattern?) breaks out in Europe and the ruling Emperor kills 20 million of his own people just to hold off the enemy, and only survives because the Warlords backstab the new Fuehrer of Europe. Then the leader of the original rebels returns from Pluto with 100 million copies of himself, killing half the human race. Then a plague breaks out at the end killing off basically 99.99% of the human race (which by this stage probably doesn't consist of many people)...and it gets even worse. Eventually, Earth returns to just being inhabited by plants and the only surviving humans were already leaving Earth 10 years before and colonized another planet..but only after some of them help another Earth from economic collapse even worse then their Earth did. All this because a General didn't do what he was told.
  • This is pretty much the story of the Mistborn Trilogy. No matter what happens, until the VERY end of the series, things get worse. Even if the good guys win. Heck, especially if the good guys win. Oh, and this is a series that starts with the world as an ash-covered wasteland under the millennium-long tyrannical rule of the seemingly immortal Lord Ruler.
  • John Steinbeck's work in general, but The Grapes of Wrath in particular.
    • Actually, The Grapes of Wrath can be argued to end with a glimmer of hope. The previously self-centred Rose of Sharon uses her breast milk to feed a starving man, suggesting community can prevail where the land cannot.
  • Robin Hobb seems to love this trope as well, as a lot of her plots seem to centre around "What's the absolute worst thing that could happen to my main character?" Particularly in her Farseer Trilogy.
  • The story "Tough to be a god" by Strugatski brothers starts by a nice, brave and kind charachter from a shiny Utopia being a on a medieval planet to study comparative history (Don't ask). The standard medieval world is bad enough, but then an Evil Chancellor Reba usurps the power and goes all Pol Pot on educated people (where "educated" means everybody who can write his own name, unless he is an aristocrate; but even this is not a 100% protection). Then Reba poisons the king and the prince and blames the protagonist on it. Then hero's Love Interest is killed, he snaps and goes on Roaring Rampage of Revenge, at which point he is forcibly removed from this world, but his earlier thought indicate that because of his actions it will yet get worse on this world (because by killing all Lawful Evil Mooks he paved the way for Chaotic Evil barbarians). Oh, and he is now pretty much ostracized on Earth, too because of his actions...
  • "It Got Worse" is the entire plot of The Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf's Children, written by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steve Barnes. The story begins with a bunch of Earth's best and brightest on a ship headed to a new planet for a colonization project. It's only after they arrive that they find out that the cryogenics they used during the long trip caused ice crystals to form in their brains. So a bunch of Earth's best and brightest are stuck on an alien world -- and they all have brain damage to various degrees. Things go bad when people start to vanish, and the colonists think that a murderer is in their midst. Turns out there is, and it's one of the local wildlife: a deadly predator with Super Speed which is dubbed a grendel. Things seem to get better after it's finally slain (but not before it killed about 20 more people). Then they find out that the "fish" (which they call samlon) they've been eating are actually baby grendels -- and without the mother pumping chemicals into the water to slow down their growth, they quickly mature into vicious and hungry adult grendels. The colonists only survive thanks to the desperate actions of Joe Sikes, who dumps oil into the island's rivers and lights it on fire. And this is just the first book. Things somehow get much worse in the sequel after a rather peaceful Time Skip thanks to a twisted Magnificent Bastard and a huge swarm of flesh-eating bees with Super Speed. Flesh-eating bees with Super Speed. Thankfully things do get better in the end.
  • The beginning of American Gods. Having been in prison for three years, the protagonist gets out, only to find out his wife and best friend have died in a car crash. He later finds out that the car crashed because his wife was performing oral sex on his best friend while he was driving. Believe it or not, it gets worse: later, the protagonist is crucified.
  • Voltaire's Candide is long stretches of It Got Worse, with occasional respites of getting better so things can get worse again.
  • World Binder is about how It Got Worse for both its entire series and the world it is set in,because of the efforts of The Chosen One. Things continually get worse for the protagonists,too - the climactic battle at the end meticulously crushes the hopes of the entire human race. Only a small incidental detail prevents it from becoming an utter Downer Ending.
  • The Thai novel, The Judgment by Chart Korbjitti could be described as this. Malicious gossip proceeds to ruin the life of a guy who just wanted to do the right thing by taking care of his father's insane (or merely mentally retarded) widow. Cue a downward spiral into alcoholism, social ostracization, the death of the lead's principles, recurring illness, a beating from some angry villagers, being cheated of his life savings, and death that is contrasted with the village's modernization.
  • The Chaos War in the Dragonlance novels.
    • And then it got worse when the Dragon Overlords showed up and enslaved Krynn.
      • And then the War of Souls happened, and it got even WORSE.
        • Really, the whole Chaos War/5th Age plot was a bad idea, introduced only so that TSR could market the SAGA Dragonlance 5th Age gameline. Apparently some executives thought it was a smart move to utterly wreck the world of Krynn to do so, remove all the gods, rewrite the whole mythology, remove the Three Orders of Magic and everything fans knew from the original novels, kill off several main characters, and introduce a whole new game system. And then pretend the 5th Age of Krynn was "The Age of Humans" despite huge frikkin Dragon Overlords reshaping the continent at will. And then, when Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition came on the market, they back-pedaled and brought back the original gods and the original wizard magic, because SAGA hasn't sold. And the worst thing? SAGA wasn't even a bad rules system in itself. but fans of Dragonlance will always remember it for ruining Krynn.
  • Harry Dresden will usually start the story with a major, but not intractable, problem. Then he'll find out that some sort of absurdly dangerous magical group involved. Okay, that's going to make things tougher, but- wait, there's another one? And they don't want him reaching his goal either? And now they're holding one of his friends hostage? And the whole city and probably eventually the rest of the world will be annihilated if he doesn't do something blatantly impossible? Ah, there we go, now it's a Jim Butcher novel. Taken Up to Eleven in Changes, where the entire universe and everything in it seems determined to eviscerate his soul.
    • Based on the gradually changing tone of the series and commentary from the author the tendency for it to get worse in each individual novel is a microcosm for the series as a whole.
  • KING. LEAR. Not only does Cordelia, the only truly good female character die (sealing a Deadly Change-of-Heart by Magnificent Bastard incarnate Edmund), the memory-impaired Lear himself dies holding her corpse, while remembering how he used to hold her as a baby, and it his heavily implied that Cordelia's husband will commit suicide shortly after the play ends. It can be argued that the only reason any good characters survive in this play is because the villains all attempt to out-evil each other, resulting in all of their plans collapsing in a spectacular way
    • As opposed to other Shakespeare tragedies? For instance, try Titus Andronicus. (I'll leave someone else to write the description there because I was mildly traumatized by it.)
    • Short version: Titus's daughter gets raped, and her tongue cut out so she can't identify her attackers. She manages to reveal their identities to Titus by writing their names in the sand, but he can't do anything. One of his sons is accused, and Complete Monster Aaron tells Titus he can get him reprieved if Titus cuts off his own hand, which he does; then Aaron just says I Lied. (Near this point, Titus bursts out laughing because he "has not another tear to shed"). The rapists then visit Titus to mock him, which finally causes him to snap; he bakes them in a pie, tricks their mother into eating them (to be fair, she had been complicit) and only then tells her what she has just eaten, leading to a final scene in which all the remaining characters kill each other except Lucius, a Flat Character whose sole function in the play is to exist so there will be someone left alive to punish Aaron.
    • To quote the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, "The bad end unhappily, and the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means."
  • In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is a Jew during the Holocaust. He gets taken to a ghetto, then a cattle train, then a concentration camp then another... And that's not the half of it.
    • At least he survived. For a lot of Jews in similar situations, it got even worse than it got for Wiesel.
    • Bear deeply in mind though that in no way is that a bittersweet ending. Elie discovers his dehumanized figure in the mirror.
  • In The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, at the very end, Viola is shot. With a bullet. From a gun. Then, when they finally reach the city they had been trying to reach throughout the entire book, it turns out the army that had been chasing them got there first. Then the book ends.
    • Used again in the second book in the series, The Ask and the Answer. sure, Viola and Todd just got done beating the crap out of Mayor -excuse me- I mean President Prentiss. But there's still two armies fighting each other, one of which is led by someone that might be worse than Prentiss. Oh, then it turns out the alien Todd let escape earlier in the book went and gathered an army of its own. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. Three armies and no sign of a stop in violence to see. Then the book ends.
  • In Philip Roth's American Pastoral, the main character's daughter goes from being a happy, loving child (albeit with a speech condition) to a viciously angry war protestor. Then she blows up a post office and kills a local doctor. Then she disappears. Then a crazy woman who claims to know her comes to her father and forces him to do everything from give her money to have sex with her if he wants to see his daughter again. Then she also disappears, and he doesn't see his daughter for five years. When he does, she's become a Jain and is starving herself to death. Then he finds out his wife is cheating on him and that his former lover had sheltered his daughter for half a week without telling him. Oh, and all this time the reader knows that his daughter is going to die before she reaches thirty.
  • Goto Dengo's whole ordeal in Cryptonomicon, from when Americans attack until he meets up with his fellow Nipponese again. I mean, first the bombs, then the flaming oil everywhere, then the whole nearly dying of thirst and exhaustion thing, then the sharks, then the other sharks, then the sharp coral, then the poisonous snake, then the cannibals, then an Australian patrol, then a death sentence for surrendering to the enemy...
  • The first book of The Stormlight Archive contains strong hints that this is going to happen, especially at the very end when Talanel, the Lost Herald shows up at the gates of Kholinar warning of a new Desolation..
  • The Tomorrow Series is basically one big It Got Worse.
  • In the novel Wither, scientists know that many people die each year of various diseases such as cancer. They alter everyone's DNA so that future generations will never suffer from these diseases. This works fine for the first generation, after that all males who are born die at the age of 25, all females at age 20.
  • In Codex Alera, everything involving the Vord. Whenever the might of Alera's legions and citizenry gets unleashed against the Vord, something goes spectacularly wrong. Then the next major encounter involves even stronger Aleran forces in an even better position and something goes spectacularly wrong. Repeat until end of series. Most common forms: It turns out that the surviving Vord forces are three times the size of the dead ones, Takers arrive unexpectedly, the queen takes the field, and/or the Alerans are abruptly outflanked.
  • Poor Precious, her life is a long series of things getting worse and worse until they're a tiny bit better at the end. And then comes the sequel, which opens with Precious dying of AIDS and gets worse for her son Abdul, who goes into foster care where he's raped and beaten until he becomes an abusive rapist himself.
  • Mike Resnick does this to the Nth level in his books Paradise, Purgatory, and Inferno (which he admits are based upon the histories of Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda, respectively). Particularly appalling is the ending of Purgatory, where a tree which was an historic landmark for the natives is chopped down for firewood.
  • Maria's chapter in Fame. It starts with her traveling to an unnamed Eastern country for a writer's conference, and ends with her in slavery, through a series of Kafkaesque misunderstandings.
  • The Commander's Daughter by J. Jakovlev starts with the heroine Valya, a 14-years old girl, stuck in the Brest Fortress during the siege. The situation is pretty bleak from the beginning (the fortress is caught by a surprise attack, they are nearly out of of ammo, out of meals, even out of water), but at least people assume help is underway and the main army will reconnect with the fortress shortly. But then it is revealed that the army is pushed back 400 km and the German troops keep advancing, meaning no help, and escape proves blocked by Germans, meaning everybody inside (including Valya) is doomed. Then Valya's friends Dima and Mitja are killed and the end is imminent...
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