Find nothing but faith in nothing

I read two disturbing books quite recently- both quite disturbing in their own way. Lionel Shriver's We need to talk about Kevin and James Elroy's LA Confidential (turned into a classic film in 1997)
Shriver's book is-put plainly- about a mother and her son who hate each other and the dynamics of this relationship are fascinating although mainly in a kind of morbid way. Kevin's mother is fairly sure she'll have a conventional motherhood once she gives birth to him, but she gets increasingly more worried that she doesn't like him much. Kevin appears to dislike her even more intensely right from birth and the result is a string of awkward and chilling chapters leading up to Kevin killing twelve of his schoolmates in a Columbine-style massacre (although he uses a bow-and-arrow)You know he will kill them right from the start of the book so that's not a twist, but the book shows you how he gets there through his mother's eyes. She's trying pretty hard to like him but Kevin-whose behaviour suggests mental difficulties- has already made up his mind. He hates her and nothing is going to make him change his position. As the chilling conclusion to the book rolls around, Shriver delivers a grim twist that you never really see coming. It's not a book for the faint-hearted at all and there's a bittersweet revelation at the end regarding the relationship between mother and son.
Elroy's book is disturbing in an even more unconventional sense. It potrays 1950's Los Angeles as a kind of dystopia where the cops are as crooked as the criminals and everyone is heading merrrily to hell with scarcely a backward glance. Even the cop with integrity (Ed Exley played so well by Guy Pierce in the film) turns out to be a fairly dodgy character in certain places. Meanwhile there's savage killings, prostitution and corruption (plus just about every other crime you can name)plus gangsters and vigilantes and muck-racking tabloids that make national Enquirer look like The New York Times.. It's hell in bright neon and hot lead. Elroy writes the whole thing as if he is getting points for brevity-the books is long, but the sentences are not. Every single unnecessary word is cut out. Not for him long, flowery descriptions. The sentences are short and sharp and disorienting when you first start the book. The action is brutal and the language would make Eminem cringe. It's fantastic and was well worth my time.
These books reminded me of a cliche which is exploited by both film and book reviewers-the complaint that the characters are not 'likable enough.' Why on earth should that be a criterion? Why should the lead character be sympathetic? If art should at some basic level imitate life, then why this insistence on having a lead character people should like (and to a lesser extent identify with)Neither of these books has a conventionally likeable character (although Kevin's long-suffering mother comes close) but both received rave reviews (and in the case of Elroy's book is already a classic work of literature)There are no happy endings here, barely any redemption and a dark, grim message about our world. I dare you to read them without flinching.