Mood Whiplash/Literature


 * In Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, we have an adorable, Cinderella-like little boy exploring the wonderful world of magical, colorful wizards. Then, we see his dead parents, have him traumatized by almost being killed by a figure drinking blood, and confront with a trusted teacher with the Big Bad growing out of his head.
 * Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, definitely. We have this awesome contest, with romance and rivalry, fun and games. and then
 * The Hunger Games trilogy is loaded with these moments- they'll take you from heartwarming happiness, or seeing the characters laugh for the first time in weeks directly to horrific death and much despair.
 * The Kalevala is Finland's national epic, compiled in the mid-19th century from oral traditions that in turn date all over the previous centuries/millennia. At one point, it features the Eternal Sage, in search of words of power, descending into the Netherworld until he stands before its black river and meets the daughter of Death itself. She's short and fat, and washing clothes in Finnish!Styx. Yeah, that's right. At least to a modern audience, the prehistoric sagas subvert themselves when they start getting too serious.
 * An Epileptic Tree: this was the inspiration for the Discworld character of Ysabell, Death's adoptive daughter, who, yes, is short and fat.
 * Done deliberately in the novel Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger of 8-bit Theater. In a nod to Cerebus Syndrome, the enemies Nuklear Man fights suddenly go from the usual comedic supervillains that never accomplish anything to one who gets some seriously horrible moments, including killing off major characters and firmly establishes that things aren't funny any more.
 * Many of the short stories of Sholom Aleichem have a weird combination of humor and depressing reality. For example, in the short story Two Dead Men, we leave two of the main characters, one of which is so drunk he can't even remember the holiday it is, clumsily trying to get themselves out of the mud and look at his wife, who is worried her alcoholic husband's going to be found dead in a ditch.
 * The Discworld series is usually billed as 'uproariously hilarious' or the like, and in many places it is. However, there are many parts that range from dramatic and moving to outright Nightmare Fuel--for instance, the torture rooms of the Particulars in Night Watch.
 * Pratchett also manages to do utterly hilarious and tear-jerkingly dramatic at the exact same moment. I'll only say: "THAT! IS! NOT! MY! COW!"
 * The Time Traveler's Wife has moments like this. Towards the end of the book, there are some fairly depressing scenes, such as . This is followed by a fairly comical scene where Henry travels a few months into the future and ends up locked inside the library, which forces him to reveal his time traveling nature to the entire library staff. A few pages later,.
 * That was not Played for Laughs. One of the worst scenes in the book up to that point, in light of the Foreshadowing.
 * Fools Crow by Richard Welch has a very strange ending: in the penultimate chapter, the main character Fools Crow (A Pikuni Blackfoot) finds a village of another band of Pikunis that had been slaughtered by white men. He reflects on the essential hopelessness of the Pikunis' situation with the white men. Previous chapters dealt with the ravaging of the Pikunis by smallpox. In the last chapter, Fools Crow and his tribe celebrate joyously a Blackfoot ceremony, the buffalo return, and everything is put back in equilibrium. Huh?
 * George Pelecanos' novel King Suckerman does a meta twist on Mood Whiplash: The book starts out as a light-hearted take on '70s exploitation films with a strong hint of Quentin Tarantino, with pop-culture riffs and catchphrase-spouting badass drug dealers and ex-cons. About halfway in, some of the characters go see a hotly anticipated blaxploitation flick (the titular King Suckerman) which abruptly ends on a depressing note. From that point on, the novel itself takes on a darker, more menacing shift of its own; the previously cool-seeming criminal characters turn out to be rather monstrously evil.
 * T. H. White's The Once and Future King started as a light hearted parody of Arthurian Legends, with anachronism, Merlin as a bumbling magician, Arthur turned into various animals, and Pellinore's ineffectual quest for the Questing Beast. Slowly each following chapter got less and less humor and got darker and darker, until the tragic last chapter that ended just before King Arthur's fight against his son Mordred as he reminisces the good old days.
 * Mark Twain's works often suffer from this, the most notable example occurring in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where we are treated to a humorous drunk, a cold blooded murder, an attempted lynching, and then a circus, all literally in the same chapter.
 * A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is particularly egregious, since the mood whiplash effect arguably results in an Out-of-Genre Experience. The book goes from a scene where Sandy actually thinks a pig farmer is really a bunch of 12 foot tall ogres and the pigs are captive princesses (which is a laugh out loud hilarious scene) to a gut wrenching description of slavery. It feels like going from a Discworld type absurdist satire to high drama.
 * One of Jim Butcher's signature tropes.
 * In The Dresden Files, this is usually because of Harry's sense of humor. Once, the Dangerously Genre Savvy Nicodemus had him in a totally inescapable position, giving him the opportunity to join him-- and if he refuses, Nick will just cut his throat after he finishes his breakfast. Harry promptly cracks a Spider-Man joke, and when Nicodemus is a bit nonplussed, says, "Must be a DC Comics fan."
 * The Codex Alera often manages this by juxtaposing a Crowning Moment of Funny with a serious scene. The most spectacular example was at the beginning of Princeps' Fury, when we're treated to some hilarious bickering between a couple of soldiers. Then.
 * Bridge to Terabithia: The book (and by extension, the movie) starts out relatively lighthearted and without drastic conflict...
 * Pretty much the exact same thing in A Taste of Blackberries.
 * Catch-22 practically runs of this trope. The author seems to have taken a particular liking to ending chapters by revealing critical bits of information that cause the reader to re-evaluate the events of the chapter, which had up till then been Played for Laughs, in a much more sinister light.
 * Book five of Virgil's Aeneid. The first half describes the funeral games for Anchises, in a generally light-hearted and sometimes humourous manner, ending with a running race in which the contestants start tripping each other up and get into an argument about who really won, which Aeneas cheerfully settles by bringing out extra prizes for those who feel cheated. He then gets the news the Trojan woman have become so disillusioned and tired of the constant travelling that they have set fire to his fleet, leading to his emotional low point - even his own people have now turned against him - and the realisation that he must now descend into the world of the dead.
 * Kids' novel Jennifer the Jerk is Missing. Starts out very suspenseful, with an 8 year old boy who has a reputation for telling tall tales and being a brat, trying his best to convince his 13 year old babysitter that he did in fact witness the kidnapping of his 8 year old classmate, bratty Jennifer "the Jerk". Played totally for suspense for the first half of the story, but things start to get silly when Jennifer is encountered. Bound to a chair and gagged, she actually lets out a muffled bratty "ha ha" under her gag when her rescuers mess up, and things just mostly get sillier from there. One of the kidnappers even merely pretends to have a gun by pointing his finger through his pocket (and Jennifer can even tell). Totally shoots the suspense in the first half of the book to pieces. (Then later, it starts taking itself seriously again)
 * Yoda: Dark Rendezvous alternates a much sillier-than-standard Master Yoda with reminders that a war is going on. A set of undercover Jedi suffering through transit on a ship belonging to a Kut-Rate Kruise line, having to deal with things like an overexcited fire alarm system and a mazelike ship structure, turns heart-breakingly tragic when Asajj Ventress comes in and starts trying to kill the main cast. And anyone between her and them.
 * Aaron Allston's run in the X Wing Series can tend towards this at times, but it helps that he does use transitional devices, and much of the silly is a deliberate in-universe attempt to raise morale.
 * In The Giver, there is a nice scene where Jonas watched his father give the smaller of infant twin brothers a check-up. It's so nice and lovely, and... Wait, that's that needle? What do you mean "can't have two identical people running around?" WHAT DO YOU MEAN "THE VEINS IN YOUR ARM ARE TOO TEENY-WEENY?!?!"
 * The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 starts out as a light-hearted family comedy told from the perspective of a boy living in Michigan. However, in the last couple of chapters