Aside from the occasional designed-to-offend ones, probably The Road. Only book I’ve ever read that haunted me
I got offended at the lack of punctuation or anything. Didn’t get far. Fuck you Oprah and fuck your book club.
Hm I wonder how the next scene will go. Gray ash huh? Well I guess I should have seen that coming.
I read it and then watched the movie and it was depressing. His other book Outer Dark involves brother sister incest, child murder, and cannibalism! Very cheery.
American Psycho contained scenes so graphic that I’d have to pause and stare out the window briefly before I could go on.
I used to sell books and this elderly couple came up to the counter saying they were buying it as a Christmas present.
So I told them “Hey, it’s not my place to say what is or is not a good Christmas present, but before I sell it to you, could I get you to just flip the pages, randomly stick your finger in, and start reading?”
They thought I was kidding, but they did it…
“OH MY GOD!”
“Yeah…”
“OH MY GOD!”
Better they find out then than AFTER I sold it to them!
So did they buy it or what
They did not…
That’s a pretty interesting encounter. Glad you helped them know what they were about to do.
It was more self preservation. I didn’t want them coming back after the fact. ;)
Yeah first time I read a grueling book. Couldn’t believe how much worse literature gore affects me compared to onscreen blood.
Pausing is a regular thing with books for me, disturbing or no
The pause was forced was my point. I couldn’t go on otherwise because I was overwhelmed.
Anytjing that marquis de sade wrote. Dont read it. Its the work of someone who pretended to “pose interesting questions” while write the worst rape fanfiction with his dick in his hand.
Trigger warning: just straight up awful assault
!There is a scene in which a father is forced to raped his underaged daughter and then gets shot while cumming inside her. The daughter of course gets spared. Oh wait no. She gets raped a gun point, mutilated and then rape killed again. Repeat this fof roughly 400 pages. Oh wow, so challenging and insightful! I truly believe that de Sade was horrified by this! Fuck off. !<
it is horrific - but you’re missing some of the context.
De Sade partly wrote it as a fuck-you to the establishment in and of itself
Partly as a satire of the aristocracy - and you can’t understate exactly how much he hated them - which is why he casts them as rapist pedophiles that prefer young boys
And partly as an attempt to catalog horrors of abuse and mental illness and the suffering of the common man at the hands of those in power
If you’ve come across the short story Guts at some point, it’s apparently part of the book Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I haven’t read the whole book so not sure what the other stories are like but this story is really trying to be both gross and fucked up.
That’s one of my favourite books. If you take it in the sort of gory comedy horror genre (thinking evil dead), it’s actually pretty great and has more depth to it than just horror stories.
Some of his later books get much worse, more gory, and far less interesting. He’s really just going for shock value in a lot of them. I stopped reading after the pink sock in Pygmy (couldn’t even finish the book).
I looked it up again when writing this comment and even though most reviews are negative they do make it sound pretty interesting. I’ve put it in a maaaybe list.
If you want to start with another less horrifying book by him (that isn’t fight club), I’d highly recommend Rant or invisible monsters
Rant was fantastic, and I also agree wholeheartedly with everything everyone says about Guts.
I read Guts for the first time in an issue of playboy when I was in my early teens… I still vividly remember reading the titular bit at the end. And also how it affects his family…
Goddamn.
Naked Lunch by Christopher Burroughs
The Trial by Franz Kafka. Anything by Kafka is pretty mental.
Now imagine being German and having to read several works by that loony in middle school.
William S. Burroughs, not Christopher! Unless that’s I joke I’m missing…
Oh sbit
I can’t remember the name of the book now, but in high school we read a ‘true’ story of child abuse. I’m sure it was edited to both tone down and turn up certain elements, but it was pretty much a brutal shock to people who are mostly from decent families that love them. Whether the kids were rich, poor, or middle class in my school, just about everyone there could at least return home to parents that didn’t commit those horrors.
I remember the diapers, the exposure to the elements, and the way the other children were pitted against the abused kid, and honestly? It was the emotional abuse that was the worst to read.
Like reading https://elan.school - just completely outside of what happy people can imagine.
I think the book you’re referring to is The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. That book make me sick to read, and yes, it is based on a true story. One of very few books I’ve ever finished with a sense of profound disgust and vowed never to return to - not because it’s a bad book, on the contrary Ketchum manages to capture the wrongness of it all in compelling detail - but the subject of its story was just completely unpalatable. I was too young for that story when I read it and that was my first real taste of the sort of horrible fucked up shit that humans can do to each other. And God, there was an awful lot of horrible fucked up shit in that story. Sylvia Likens (the real life poor dead girl the book is based on) deserves to have her story told to the world but part of me wishes I didn’t read it.
Was just talking about this yesterday because of the “would you pick the man or the bear” question going around. The novel Bear by Marian Engel is quite literally about a woman who falls in love with and tries to have sex with a large bear. It won the Governor General’s award in Canada.
Also The Wasp Factory is seriously fucked up.
Probably not as fucked up as other entries, but I read Geek Love in grade school. The original meaning of geek, which was someone who bit the head off a chicken. Bunch of weird shit about a messed up carnie family. Not a terrible read I guess but holy shit was I not prepared.
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That’s pretty terrible. Good luck to you.
The Reckoning by Grisham.
Death in Her Hands by Moshfegh.
The Long Walk by King.
The Children of Hurin by Tolkien.
Angela’s Ashes by McCourt.
Already mentioned but The Road, definitely.
The Children of Hurin is one of my favourite books. It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember I loved it for the beautiful prose and just how sad (and messed up) the story is.
So honestly the train in IT was pretty fucked up and I probably shouldn’t have read it as young as I was. 100 years of solitude has its own fucked-up-ness and God of small things is also fucked up at the end, but all very different types of fucked up…
The Wasp Factory and We Need to Talk about Kevin (both have scenes of an older child abusing the trust of a younger sibling, which really bothered me at the time).
Kevin is a TOUGH read. Very well written though.
“Mangez le si vous voulez” (Eat him of you wish)
A book relating events that happened in 1870 in a French village. From a misunderstanding one guy is beaten, released, tortured and ultimately burned alive with people bridging toast to collect the fat that was dripping from the fire.
All the events happened in a single day that goes from mundane to horror.
Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy.
It’s kinda hard to describe. I recon it’s a parable about American colonization and the genocide of the native people. Like a map of how a project like that gets done and who benefits from it.
It’s like a melodrama in that it’s light on plot, and character motivation, but without the extreme circumstances unless you count the pervasive, persistent, and senseless violence. (that the characters themselves barely seem to notice) Not exactly a supernatural tale, but filled with dream logic, oh and the literal Christian Devil is one of the main characters.
This is the only book Ive ever read twice, back to back. I got to the end and was like WTF, turned to the first page and started again.
Reading Spectrum 7th grade math workbook was the first time I considered ending it all
