Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

People at their worst
no redeeming qualities
distilled ugliness.

(Just read Miss Lonelyhearts, will pick up Day of the Locust another time)
I think I use “deranged” to describe media a lot, but this would truly have to be the most “deranged” novel I have ever read. I thought it came out in the 60s reading, was unaware it was published in 1933 until after reading it. I've never read something so viscerally negative and aggressively abrasive. There simply is no hero in this novel, Miss Lonelyhearts is a delusional, self-pitying laceration and the novel's greatly unsettling anti-hero Shrike is exhausting in his endlessly cynical world-encompassing sarcasm and wit. The reader has no room to breathe, there is tension, without tension misery, without misery apathy. The blackest of comedies.
It also seemed shocking to me less that it foretold America's future obsession with religion (which I think is in full and open decay) but rather the American citizen's need to substitute God in their lives. Lonelyhearts has a “Christ complex” in part because his job demands of him to be Christ for the grotesque lives that flood him with letters every day. Searching for meaning or value from secular human sources, the immense onus that levels on the deified and those who fervently hope for a tangible savior, seems to me something that has been more prevalent now in the internet age than was prominent in a still very church dominated 30s America.