My first read-through of "Wuthering Heights" was over ten years ago when I was a high school senior. A friend of mine at the time suggested the book, and upon suffering through the 300+ pages, I realized that she was far more sophisticated than I was. I just didn't get the allure of something filled with such abominably terrible human beings. This distaste, I now realized, came from making a rather common mistake with this book; believing it to be a love story.

Sure, this book has a lot of love in it. Heathcliff and Cathy are the 19th century equivalent of that super volatile, incredibly sexy couple that we all love to ship in fiction, but would run away from in real life. Heathcliff is that dirty, passionate bad boy that we all obsess over in our younger years in hopes that maybe we can be the girl good enough to turn him around. I think its a common enough reaction to find romance in Heathcliff's destructive reaction to losing Cathy, but when you consider the specifics of his actions, its really hard for me to continue liking him.

Hindley and Heathcliff are pitted against each other from the start, but I think they're really the same kind of person. Jealous of his father's favor toward Heathcliff, Hindley nurses a bitterness toward him that is only exacerbated by the death of his beloved wife and the alcoholism that he uses to cope with it. These things combined together make him a volatile, poisonous man who destroys himself in the process of torturing others. Heathcliff, on the other hand, directs his poisonous feelings outward and destroys everybody around him rather than himself. Regardless of the ways in which they manifest their malice, it is malice all the same. And yet, one is a beloved literary character (for some ungodly reason), and the other is generally disliked. #justiceforhindley

Heathcliff is a spousal abuser, dog murderer, and vengeful prick. There is no way around that; it is written in black and white. For this reason, fancying him as the protagonist in a love story turned me off from Emily Bronte's only novel at first. But upon this read-through, and upon reading more about Emily Bronte herself, I realized that I had made the age-old mistake of confusing the fans of the work for the writer. Just because people think of this as a love story does not mean it was intended to be one. Rather, Emily Bronte meant this story to be a tale of vicious, over-the-top revenge. She meant to put the darkness of the human condition on display and marvel at it. And in that way, she excels in crafting a work of genius. In that context, "Wuthering Heights" is fantastic.

All in all, the characters on display in "Wuthering Heights" are insufferable assholes. The narrator and Ellen are both nosy and self-righteous. Hindley is, as stated before, a terrible father and an alcoholic mess. Cathy is a two-faced, selfish drama queen, and Heathcliff is just plain Evil with a capital E. Even the kids, Cathy 2.0 and Linton are spoiled, whiny, and ultimately lack empathy for others. The only good person in the entire thing is Hareton Earnshaw, as far as I'm concerned. But together this cast of terrible people make one of the most interesting stories in the English language. So if you want to like the characters you're reading about, avoid this one. But if you're open to watching the train wreck that is these people's lives, then this is a book that can't be missed.