Darkness Visible

William Styron 1990

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
mental health grief literary fiction

Our Take

Styron's account of his own near-fatal depression is clinical in the best sense — he refuses metaphor that flatters or obscures, insists on the word 'brainstorm' over 'depression', and makes you feel the full weight of a mind that has turned against itself. The most honest thing written about the interior of severe mental illness.

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