The Most Disastrous Parties in Fiction

The Barbecue in Truly Madly Guilty, by Liane Moriarity
The central mystery that propels Moriarity’s fantastic novel concerns the events of a barbecue hosted by rich, boisterous Vid and Tiffany and attended by childhood friends Erika and Clementine, their husbands, and Clementine’s two children. Erika and Clementine’s friendship is a trusting one, their marriages are realistically complex, and everyone looks at the spontaneous party as a fun diversion. Then the story cuts to weeks later: everyone is angry, sad, and shaken. Moriarity flashes back to the barbecue as she unravels the mystery, and readers will be hooked from the get-go, eager to discover what exactly happened at the Worst Barbecue Ever.

The Other Barbecue in The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas
The Slap, an award-winning bestseller adapted for television in two countries, pivots off of the moment a grown man slaps a three-year old boy across the face at a barbecue after enduring the child’s undisciplined misbehavior, with no attempt from his parents to punish or control him. Anyone who has been forced to tolerate the terrible behavior of someone else’s children has likely felt the urge to intervene, but as Tsiolkas traces the rippling reverberations of the slap, it becomes clear that all involved have plenty of darker secrets to deal with, and the events of the gathering soon grow to alarming and destructive proportions.

The House-Wrecking Party in Girlfriend in a Coma, by Douglas Coupland
The House-Wrecking party in Coupland’s novel occurs in 1979, and is the starting point of a chain of events that leads to the end of the world. Karen McNeil is 17, has been popping diet pills to shed a few pounds, and is dealing with visions of a future that seems increasingly stuffed with doom. She takes a few Valium and has a few drinks at the party, unaware that she is pregnant, and lapses into a coma. Twenty years later, she re-awakens. In the meantime, her boyfriend and friends have aged and fallen into despair as their lives turned out disappointing, while Karen sees the modern world through teenage eyes. And then, literally, the world ends. Coupland has always been an acquired taste, but this novel offers as close to a real plot as any of his books, and it kicks off with a disastrous teenage party—which is, let’s face it, probably exactly how the end of the world really will start.

The Halloween Party in The Basic Eight, by Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler is best known in the persona of Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but before he chronicled the Baudelaire children’s ongoing miseries, he published a debut novel that offered a snarky, meta look at teen life, a book that happens to feature one of those typical teenage parties wherein someone gets murdered via croquet bat. You know, those parties. Told as a series of annotated and edited diary entries, it unpacks the sordid history of The Basic Eight, a group of impossibly sophisticated high school kids who are doomed to lives of cruelty, sarcasm, and, in one case, prison—and it all culminates at one of the worst parties ever.

The Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin
The Red Wedding is legendary these days, but let’s not forget that aside from being a massacre, it’s also a wedding reception—and thus, a party. Not a very good party, of course, in part because the hosts are the grotesque and horrible Freys, and also because of all the murder. While it’s true that every gathering in A Song of Ice and Fire that even vaguely resembles a party usually turns into a massacre or some other flurry of betrayals, The Red Wedding will always take the cake as the Worst Wedding Reception Ever.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Christie’s classic mystery remains one of the all-time bestselling novels, likely because the premise is absolutely perfect: a group of people are invited to a remote resort by an anonymous host, upon arrival are informed they’re each responsible for the death of another person, and then are murdered, one by one. Paranoia and desperation quickly take hold as the guests wonder which one of them is actually the killer. Watching all the other party guests turn up dead is not our idea of a fun time.

Every Single Party in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Not only are the expensive and decadent soirées thrown by Gatsby (in an attempt at attractive Daisy to his opulent home) sad and somewhat horrifying in their empty spectacle, a great deal of the tragedy of the book’s final pages is set in motion early on when Tom brings Nick to a small party with his mistress Myrtle in an apartment in the Valley of Ashes that appears to have been built out of sin and regret. Parties are supposed to be fun, but despite Gatsby’s money, none of the parties in this brilliant novel are events you want to attend—you either must attend, or you stay home and appreciate the simplicity of your life.