Chris asked a good question in the previous thread, and I'm very interested to hear people's answers, so here it is, in the prominent position it deserves:

That's a good point about fiction helping people to work through bad events, but then it really has to be something special. For example, "The Quiet American" is spell-binding stuff, with Greene making so many points it dazzles you. On the other hand, while a film like "The Day After Tomorrow" does try to warn us about global warming and be entertaining, I just came out of the cinema thinking, "So, they really can do anything with computers." For me the film completely missed the target (notwithstanding that that might just be my fault!).

Does anyone have any examples of good fiction that can help/has helped people through the trauma of bad events?

I'm trying to think of examples myself, but it's actually kind of difficult. Fiction can act as a kind of emotional work-out, making you feel empathy and perspective, which may make you better able to deal with things life throws at you - but that's fiction read before a bad event, rather than after.

The only example I can think of, a bit tangential but still recommended, is the movie Citizen X. It's a based-on-fact-but-not-entirely-accurate-for-narrative-convenience film about the years and struggle it took to catch the Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, in the face of Soviet insistence that serial killers were a decadent Western phenomenon and couldn't happen here, so no you can't have more resources to investigate these fifty-odd murders. I don't know how it would affect anyone whose loved one had been murdered, but it did give me a sense of restored faith in humanity, the opposite effect to the one we were discussing in the last post.

In the wake of Thomas Harris (the high quality of his early work notwithstanding), there's been a tendency to view serial murder as a kind of performance art; lots of really tacky stuff where the murderer does all sorts of baroque and frankly lame things in the way of mutilations, cunning clues and drastic scenarios, as if killing people was a bold and brilliant means of self-expression - naughty, but somehow full of genius as well. Citizen X, on the other hand, tells a story I've seldom seen told so well: without self-righteousness or self-congratulation, it follows the desperately hard, frustrating, necessary struggle to catch the man who's doing these things. The tag line says a lot of it: 'You don't want to know what he does. You just want to know when he's caught.' The point is not the coolness of either the killer or the detective - the killer is a pathetic loser and the detective is a rumpled, determined, ordinary man, who's trying to catch Chikatilo because he has to be stopped, no other reason. It gets its priorities right. It always made me feel better to think that at least someone can treat of so gruesome a subject without being ghoulish.

That's artistic reassurance as much as real life reassurance, though. Has anyone got a better example?