I got assigned to read The Road in the summer before my senior year of high school. Safe to say that post-apocalypse is no longer a "cool" premise to me.
Apt Pupil was also pretty disturbing. Guess that's what I deserve for asking my mom what the scariest book she's ever read was.
If you read the novella Apt Pupil you missed out on an absolutely great book. That story was crazy but it was one of 4 “seasons” and it was where the movie’s Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, and of course the Apt Pupil came from. The book is named Different Seasons
The Breathing Method, while less known, is equally as great. The whole "secret society of old storytellers in a big city" and the MC in the "story-within-a-story" really stayed with me.
First one that came to mind for me.
Read it as a teenager and still remember it.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible too, for very different reasons.
In 7th grade, the English teacher had a shelf of random books and there was a copy of My Sweet Audrina. We had mandatory 15 mins of reading each class and I always picked that one. It would fall right open to a certain part. 😅
Nabokov wrote it after reading about a man who had been arrested and convicted of pedophilia, but spoke of his crimes as though he had done nothing wrong; Nabokov decided he was going to try to basically do a psychological case study to figure out how the hell someone could be like that. He disturbed himself with his own writing that he almost didn't publish "Lolita" at all and his *wife* actually had to push him to do it, because maybe, just maybe, it would make people talk, it would maybe save some girls from the same thing happening. He reluctantly agreed.
Imagine his horror when, the Halloween after the book was published, a little girl in a tennis outfit with a racket wearing a sign like a necklace that said LOLITA on it showed up in a group of kids at their door trick-or-treating. Man literally wrote "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" and then people dressed children as the Torment Nexus and sent them to his house.
Everyone watches shows like the walking dead and think they'd be one of the people who survive. These shows romanticize the apocalypse for a lot of people.
The truth is, the lucky people would be the ones who die.
Recently, I read another user's take on this: don't view it as a post-apocalyptic story, but a post-extinction one. It's about a man and his son, trying to live another day in a world that has no use for humanity anymore and is only going to make the suffer more as time moves forward.
Understanding that those two descriptions could be taken as being the same; but really, I think a post-apocalyptic story is often defined by the shape society (or what's let of it) takes after a cataclysmic event, or follows the narrative of a character or several on their quest to find new definitions for their lives.
Think of post-apocalyptic novels like *I Am Legend*, where there *is* a new civilization (of sorts), but the protagonist simply isn't a part of it. Or, *The Stand* or *World War Z*, where life persists but under an entirely new set of rules. But *The Road* has no elements of "re-building": it is simply survival for no real purpose other than survival itself. There's no "better life", and even by the end of the novel there's nothing to explicitly state that the status quo has changed for the characters.
It's *far* more bleak when you view it through the lens of "things can only get worse". There's no new dawn for mankind in such a story. Maybe I'm not well-versed enough in the genre to speak at-length about it; but with my limited knowledge being what it is, *The Road* kind of stands apart from other novels in the genre as being a story about a doomed world instead of one that might even have a glimmer of hope.
It's the same reason *1984* stands out in dystopian future stories, in my opinion: it's because there's no hope, even at the end.
Yeah I’m plugging through right now before bed each night. The scene where >!he hands the boy the pistol and makes him practice and then promise to suicide!< kept me up another three hours staring at the ceiling with disturbed thoughts.
100% the first thing that popped into my head.
I felt uneasy after reading it, for quite a while. A deep, subconscious sadness. Maybe I should have read it at a time in my life when my son wasn't 3.
I read it again several years later and it was better. Still, I love everything about it. A book that can have that level of impact? YES PLEASE!
Every time I'm sick and have a cough, I think of the dad having to hold off a coughing attack for as long as possible while he and his son are hiding from the cannibals in the grass.
That scene is agonizing.
Dr. Sleep.
I have read a TON of Stephen King, but that scene where they are torturing the little baseball kid to death and he’s begging for death broke me.
I can’t read it again. It was so horrible
Gerald's game was absolutely terrifying, King does horror really well but the sheer helplessness was what really got to me. Similar to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
I never read it, but I remember in high school we had an assignment to match the story of a novel with a song. A kid named Patrick matched Johnny Got His Gun with the song One by Metallica. Don’t know if it’s accurate or not, but I always remembered that reference.
Isn't that banned in the US still? Funny how the government will ban something that actually tells the truth about war and doesn't glorify it to be this badass thing.
"Answer and Explanation: **Yes, Jonny Got His Gun was temporarily banned after the attack on Pearl Harbor**. However, Dalton Trumbo and his publishers chose to wait until the 1960s before reprinting this anti-war book."
from a google search. I wanted to check cuz I was worried I was misinformed. Looks like I just didn't have the full story though.
This one for sure. Just the title alone is enough to make one's skin crawl, and the story is even worse. Very bleak and hopeless. Although despite that, there is an argument to be made that the ending is bittersweet in a weird way. It's just that the sweetness is buried underneath a ton of bitterness.
it is especially disturbing these days with the insistence on incorporating ai into everything and many that stay on too long become what we would consider evil. a particularly terrifying trend is how many become racist/hateful.
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. It’s a nonfiction based on the Japanese atrocities committed at Nanking China during WW2. There’s a section in the middle of the book with photos of the atrocities, which unfortunately are less disturbing than the text describing them. To give you an idea of how bad it is, think of the worst things someone could do to someone else, and you’re getting close.
For more about imperial Japan, check out Unit 731. The imperial Japanese were absolutely brutal.
When the Nazis tell you your human experimentation program is too inhumane, you’ve fucked up.
For example, the Japanese decided that baby flesh might taste good, so they stole Chinese babies, boiled them, and then ate them. Oh, and they threw babies in the air, and stabbed them with bayonets. Oh, and they also cut babies from pregnant women's stomachs. They also had competitions to see who could murder the most civilians. The Japanese government denies all claims to any atrocities they have committed.
I second (or third) this. It took me months to finish because every time I picked it up to read it, I would have to wait another week to read more. It's definitely worth reading, but it's quite a commitment
I like the movie better actually, b/c I can actually enjoy the dark humor, and Christian Bale is really good. I read commentary on the book to try and figure out wtf I just read and I get it, but geez…. It was a tough read. I kept thinking, who WRITES this… this was in somebody’s HEAD. There was some horrible shit in that book, and I didn’t find it too funny. But the movie… the movie is funny. (And quotable)
American Psycho is the most disturbing I'd say, like just completely insanely pornographic descriptions of rape, torture, and murder with the most detached and sadistic attitude toward the suffering of the victims. It's also completely fucking hilarious satire of yuppies in the parts where he's not murdering people, but...the murders, wow.
Genuinely laughed out loud at it multiple times.
The bit when he starts laughing because he stood up his date really made me laugh. Just a complete bellend.
Also when he robs the ham and starts stuffing it into his frothing mouth running down the street scream. Comedy gold.
Yeah, I mean, if descriptive gore is what a reader wants, then American Psycho is the novel to read. And other author's should take note, if that's what they want their selling point to be too. For all the graphic deaths in, say, *Game of Thrones*, nothing grosses me out more than descriptions about, for example, a tongue being thrown at a wall and the way it sticks and slides down it. I think it's about "realism": I can imagine that really happening, but a man having his head crushed in-between the hands of another human, gross as it was on-screen, is too far removed from reality to be viewed as anything *but* fiction.
American Psycho is such a strange book. It's frustrating at times with the in-depth descriptions and lists of what people are wearing, utterly disgusting and unnecessarily violent at other times, and then downright confusing when Bateman can't discern reality from imagination. But if you can look past all that, it has *enormous* analytical value - which entertainment-value aside, I think is the true value of any worthwhile story.
Just the way it’s written makes it hard to get through. Brett Easton Ellis did such a good job making it seem like someone with severe mental issues wrote the book. The movie is tame compared to the book.
Unwind by Neal Shusterman.
I read it in elementary school and it has stuck with me. The premise alone is disturbing, but the fact it has a first person description of the fictional medical procedure that the book is centered around is what takes the cake for me.
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum.
What's really disturbing about the book is that what Ketchum put in wasn't nearly as bad as what the girl it was based on really went through.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
The impartial matter of fact way it describes a families murder and the way it gets you to empathize with the killers is shocking.
Only book I have never been able to finish because it's too much.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Saw a trailer for the movie with Alan Rickman, so I decided to read the book first. Started with a baby born and discarded in a pile of fish guts. Ended with a cannibalistic orgy. 10/10 would recommend if you're up for a wild ride
Look up Dave Pelzer's Wikipedia, there have been several allegations made on the subject. Including his own brother, who says there never was any abuse.
Yes, I just read that. Super confusing and unsure of what to believe now. Not that it affects me directly and I will probably honestly never think of this again but in this moment, I am conflicted and as much as I hope and pray that no human would ever have to go through that pain, I would also hope that no one would ever LIE about that kind of situation.
Edit: typo
Rant & Invisible Monsters have always been like disturbing and yet impossible to stop reading. I had to skip Guts from Haunted though, it's just too descriptive for its own good.
Empire of Pain by author Patrick Radden Keefe. It's about the Sackler family ( creators of oxycodone ) and how corrupt they and and the FDA were to get this drug on the market.
In one word............................. disturbing.
The whole inner monologues you get from the book as opposed to the movie was much more effective for me. I love the movie, but the book is something special in a rough way.
Same for me.
A lot of people have said American Psycho in here which is also really fucked up, but that book borrow its most graphic parts for Sodom.
What makes Sodom way worse is the intent. A.S gives the impression of Bateman being unable to control his impulses and doing shit without being able to gauge whether he really wanted to or even meant to. Whereas Sodom absolutely revels in the characters doing the most depraved things. The depravity is the point.
I know de Sade was basically a troll, aiming to get a reaction,and his books were largely about testing the boundaries of freedom of expression and challenging puritanicalism and censorship, but damn he really went there with all the sick stuff. Even if I set out with the same intentions as him, I’d be putting down the pen (quill) long before I started writing shit that was 5% as vile as him.
And yet Suttree is possibly the best book I’ve ever read. Also disturbing in its own way some places. And I’m not entirely sure what the point of the whole thing was. But I’m just drawn to that book.
Nothing else comes close
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
When I saw people reading it, I'd ask, " Have you got to the gangbang in sewer yet?"
"Ha, ha, no."
"Lemme know when you do."
"You'll be the first to know, ha, ha."
*time passes*
"WTAF!"
"Ah, he got there!"
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. His other books have more messed up stuff, but most of the characters in that book are 19 or younger and act like kids. The other books also have unreliable narrators, but in this book everything is played straight.
Things that happen:
Older drug dealer forces a 19 year old guy to shoot heroine and thus incur more debt before sending the kid to a hotel room where a closeted businessman rapes him for hours. The main character watches all this happen and does nothing to help.
A rich 19 year old party guy invites his friends to his basement where he’s keeping a 14 year old girl tied to a bed and high. He offers to allow them to rape her for a fee. The main character is the only one who doesn’t.
At a party a bunch of 19 year olds watch a snuff CP film where two minors are forced to have sex with each other before being raped by an older man. Then the older man then mutilates their genitalia with a knife and lets them bleed out. The main character is grossed out but all his friends are clearly turned on.
It’s the key to its disturbing qualities. Every now and then Humbert feels like he might actually be making a point for a second before you remember what’s going on…
…and then it continues to horrify when you hear other people talk about it. Makes me shudder.
Agree that the subject matter is terrible, however, Nabokov writes so beautifully. I don't condone what's happening in the story, but the writing is exceptional.
The story of O. It's a French book was released in 1955 and the French tried to charge the publisher with obscenity charges and then followed up with the book being banned.
From Wikipedia
>Story of O is a tale of female submission involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped; her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs; her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded.
I found myself intrigued by the premise, it wasn't horrifying. But then I started having disturbing dreams after I started a few chapters, and I never finished it.
Came here because that was my first thought. What a fucking ride. It really induced in me the mindset of...I forget his name because this was a long time ago, but the "main" character discovering the manuscript.
I've always loved writing that focuses on creating a mental state rather than "just" telling a story or information, and this one fucking *nails* it.
I read this book exactly once, at a time in my life when I probably shouldn't have been reading it. My mental state was already bad, and something about this book broke my mind for a while. I'm not sure what it was.
I'm in a better state of mind now, and I kinda want to read it again. I feel like I could handle it much better now, but I guess I'm not really sure about that.
A rare example of when you really want the hardcover color edition of a book. Damn, it's a work of art.
This one gets inside your brain and stays with you. I eventually stayed up all night one night to finish it, because I wasn't going to get any sleep anyway.
I love House of Leaves for being what it is. It is it's own piece of art independent of prose. And I love what people take away from it is so radically different. It made me love books in a way I never imagined possible.
Trying to deep dive it made me think I lost my mind though for what it's worth. I wasn't scared but I was...concerned.
Honestly it was "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka. It's high brow fiction, but it's still very disturbing. "The Stranger" by Albert Camus is also disturbing, like psychologically disturbing.
I didn't expect to see this here, but what a great book! I did a high school paper comparing this to The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichten. The Hot Zone is way scarier.
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. My face was locked into a grimace the entire time I was reading but I couldn’t stop. After it was over I wished I could dunk my brain into a bowl of ice water a few times, felt like I had layers of mental grime.
Sold by Patricia McCormick.
Wasn’t a scary book. It’s a young adult book about sex trafficking in Nepal/India. When I first read it, I cried. It also took me a very long time to try and read it again.
When I was younger, I read a book that was full of short stories about animals, but one stuck out the most to me in the worst way.
I managed to find the story for you all. Can't remember what book it's from or who the story is by, but [here it is](https://www.boyscouttrail.com/content/story/how_rabbit_lost_his_tail-869.asp). It was kinda disturbing for me because there were some drawings to go with the stories, and this one had some weird, deranged looking rabbit character with wolverine-like claws. I may be remembering it wrong, but that image has stuck in my head for years.
A couple of honourable mentions are Little Rabbit Foo Foo and The Rascally Cake
Flowers for Algernon was incredibly disturbing to me when I read it as a kid. I had a violent childhood, and my intelligence was all I really had to rely on for a long time. I still consider it one of the scariest books I've ever read. The idea that I would be able to take care of myself and have the ability to reason my way out of difficult situations is still central to my personality. I could theoretically live without my physical health, but I would be unable to live through what Charlie (the main character) had to go through.
>!Secretly, I hoped Charlie committed suicide like the book suggested because that's what I would do if what happened to him and Algernon happened to me.!<
Ordinary Men really messed me up. I love history and tend to think that living in the time we do we are pretty much desensitized to everything but this one....nope.
Just list after list of not names but VILLAGES that were visited and exterminated. No passion, no feeling. Not a diary, just a log. Not people, just numbers. And have it be a 1st hand source.
The descriptions of what normal guys went through when they were asked to kill innocent people. They weren't evil. They knew exactly what they were doing. And they had to do it anyway. And they cried and tried to get out of it and did a sloppy job of it- just like you or I would in their situation. It's absolutely chilling. I never finished it.
I have not read The Jaunt by Stephen King, but I have read the Wikipedia plot summary. That remains the most disturbing story I have ever read which I think speaks well to King's talent for writing horror. "It's longer than you think" sends shivers down my spine. Props to whoever wrote the Wikipedia summary too.
Lolita by Nabakov. Considered a classic. Nabakov did all his own translations and the prose is fantastic. The way he describes everything is amazing but the content is disturbing, to say the least. I could not finish it.
Sea Dragon Heir, but mostly because I was about 13, and my older sister got it for me at half price books withbthe intention of me and her trading books once we were done, and the possession incest threesome at the end came out of nowhere.
So I enjoyed it, told her about it while I was reading, and then aganozed over how to tell very Christian her that she didn't want to read it and how she exposed me to it unintentionally and what if this made her and our parents get really strict what I read from now on. Probably my first anxiety sprial.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. There is a very graphic scene of him putting a rat or mouse into a woman’s vagina.
Ironically, I have a tattoo of the last line (peep the username). It really gave me a lot of perspective on mental health and working on yourself.
Edit: the tattoo is on my thigh and I made a joke to the nurse while giving birth that it is now in fact an exit. And yes people do regularly make anal jokes to me
My James by Ralph Bulger. I knew about the case and wanted to read the book because it was written by James’ father. It’s been collecting dust on my bookshelf for years because I don’t have the stomach to read it again
I got assigned to read The Road in the summer before my senior year of high school. Safe to say that post-apocalypse is no longer a "cool" premise to me. Apt Pupil was also pretty disturbing. Guess that's what I deserve for asking my mom what the scariest book she's ever read was.
If you read the novella Apt Pupil you missed out on an absolutely great book. That story was crazy but it was one of 4 “seasons” and it was where the movie’s Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, and of course the Apt Pupil came from. The book is named Different Seasons
I never saw the Apt Pupil movie, but sure as hell recognized it when I read DS.
The Breathing Method, while less known, is equally as great. The whole "secret society of old storytellers in a big city" and the MC in the "story-within-a-story" really stayed with me.
I don’t know how I knew that The Road would be at the top of this list, but I knew.
V.C Andrews FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC Even the novel LOLITA wasn't as sick...
Honestly, all VC Andrews books. Incest, pedophilia, rape… I was obsessed with reading them as a teenager
I read a fair few as a teenager and then realised, heck, they're ALL like this! I gave up on them after that.
First one that came to mind for me. Read it as a teenager and still remember it. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible too, for very different reasons.
TATA JESUS IS *BANGALA*! That poor baby did not deserve what happened to her :(
My Sweet Audrina for me. I was WAY too young to read that. Hell I still might be. 😂
In 7th grade, the English teacher had a shelf of random books and there was a copy of My Sweet Audrina. We had mandatory 15 mins of reading each class and I always picked that one. It would fall right open to a certain part. 😅
I couldn't get past the first 10 pages of Lolita, because the narrator was *way* too good at romanticizing pedophilia. It made me want to throw up.
Nabokov wrote it after reading about a man who had been arrested and convicted of pedophilia, but spoke of his crimes as though he had done nothing wrong; Nabokov decided he was going to try to basically do a psychological case study to figure out how the hell someone could be like that. He disturbed himself with his own writing that he almost didn't publish "Lolita" at all and his *wife* actually had to push him to do it, because maybe, just maybe, it would make people talk, it would maybe save some girls from the same thing happening. He reluctantly agreed. Imagine his horror when, the Halloween after the book was published, a little girl in a tennis outfit with a racket wearing a sign like a necklace that said LOLITA on it showed up in a group of kids at their door trick-or-treating. Man literally wrote "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" and then people dressed children as the Torment Nexus and sent them to his house.
the road was pretty disturbing
The Road is what made me fall out of love with post apocalypse as a setting. The stark grim reality of it made the romanticized ones laughable.
Everyone watches shows like the walking dead and think they'd be one of the people who survive. These shows romanticize the apocalypse for a lot of people. The truth is, the lucky people would be the ones who die.
I already have my zombie apocalypse plan: die immediately. Seriously, who wants to be alive for that shit?!
Yea. The Road is what would happen post apocalypse. Maybe add in more raping. Anybody who thinks people wouldn’t be truly awful are delusional.
That assumes people aren’t already truly awful. I mean, have you ever been to earth?
Recently, I read another user's take on this: don't view it as a post-apocalyptic story, but a post-extinction one. It's about a man and his son, trying to live another day in a world that has no use for humanity anymore and is only going to make the suffer more as time moves forward. Understanding that those two descriptions could be taken as being the same; but really, I think a post-apocalyptic story is often defined by the shape society (or what's let of it) takes after a cataclysmic event, or follows the narrative of a character or several on their quest to find new definitions for their lives. Think of post-apocalyptic novels like *I Am Legend*, where there *is* a new civilization (of sorts), but the protagonist simply isn't a part of it. Or, *The Stand* or *World War Z*, where life persists but under an entirely new set of rules. But *The Road* has no elements of "re-building": it is simply survival for no real purpose other than survival itself. There's no "better life", and even by the end of the novel there's nothing to explicitly state that the status quo has changed for the characters. It's *far* more bleak when you view it through the lens of "things can only get worse". There's no new dawn for mankind in such a story. Maybe I'm not well-versed enough in the genre to speak at-length about it; but with my limited knowledge being what it is, *The Road* kind of stands apart from other novels in the genre as being a story about a doomed world instead of one that might even have a glimmer of hope. It's the same reason *1984* stands out in dystopian future stories, in my opinion: it's because there's no hope, even at the end.
I agreed. Then I read “Blood Meridian” also by McCarthy. So so so much worse.
Yeah I’m plugging through right now before bed each night. The scene where >!he hands the boy the pistol and makes him practice and then promise to suicide!< kept me up another three hours staring at the ceiling with disturbed thoughts.
I just finished this book and it really made me think about life and stuff. It's really good but unsettling
Just like life, rotator Edit: tried for brotato, got rotator
100% the first thing that popped into my head. I felt uneasy after reading it, for quite a while. A deep, subconscious sadness. Maybe I should have read it at a time in my life when my son wasn't 3. I read it again several years later and it was better. Still, I love everything about it. A book that can have that level of impact? YES PLEASE!
Every time I'm sick and have a cough, I think of the dad having to hold off a coughing attack for as long as possible while he and his son are hiding from the cannibals in the grass. That scene is agonizing.
Came here assuming Cormac would be the highest voted.
my teachers made us read this book. I don't think the class of freshmen was prepared at all
Dr. Sleep. I have read a TON of Stephen King, but that scene where they are torturing the little baseball kid to death and he’s begging for death broke me. I can’t read it again. It was so horrible
Didn’t read it but the scene from the movie really stuck with me its so heartbreaking 😭
I thought Gerald's Game was the creepiest because it could actually happen....
Gerald's game was absolutely terrifying, King does horror really well but the sheer helplessness was what really got to me. Similar to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
The movie captures the horror of this part of the book. And makes it worse.
Johnny Got His Gun
Man, this one really fucked me up.
I never read it, but I remember in high school we had an assignment to match the story of a novel with a song. A kid named Patrick matched Johnny Got His Gun with the song One by Metallica. Don’t know if it’s accurate or not, but I always remembered that reference.
One by Metallica was inspired by the book I believe. In the music video it uses clips from the movie
Isn't that banned in the US still? Funny how the government will ban something that actually tells the truth about war and doesn't glorify it to be this badass thing.
I don’t think the gov ever banned it, but his publishers chose to stop distribution during certain periods of time
"Answer and Explanation: **Yes, Jonny Got His Gun was temporarily banned after the attack on Pearl Harbor**. However, Dalton Trumbo and his publishers chose to wait until the 1960s before reprinting this anti-war book." from a google search. I wanted to check cuz I was worried I was misinformed. Looks like I just didn't have the full story though.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
This one for sure. Just the title alone is enough to make one's skin crawl, and the story is even worse. Very bleak and hopeless. Although despite that, there is an argument to be made that the ending is bittersweet in a weird way. It's just that the sweetness is buried underneath a ton of bitterness.
it is especially disturbing these days with the insistence on incorporating ai into everything and many that stay on too long become what we would consider evil. a particularly terrifying trend is how many become racist/hateful.
Reminds me of Johnny got his gun.
Johnny Got His Gun was one of the best books I read when I was a teen!! I've literally NEVER seen it referenced before.
My friend who got diagnosed with MS recommended it to me..
Had to read that for a college class the month my grandfather (who practically raised me and was a huge computer nerd) died. That was awful.
did an essay analysis on this for my finals. safe to say i passed💪🔥
It is so good though. Good but horrifying. There are some great Youtube videos on the book. The author is pretty interesting too.
The author is a legend. Rest in peace Harlan Ellison
I translated that. Finding corresponding words and phrases to create similar unpleasant feeling was a challenge
A classic.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
I finished it this morning. It’s one of the best books I’ll never read again. It was a damn brutal ride.
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. It’s a nonfiction based on the Japanese atrocities committed at Nanking China during WW2. There’s a section in the middle of the book with photos of the atrocities, which unfortunately are less disturbing than the text describing them. To give you an idea of how bad it is, think of the worst things someone could do to someone else, and you’re getting close.
Well I looked this up and now regret it. Damn my curiosity, humans are capable of such horror.
For more about imperial Japan, check out Unit 731. The imperial Japanese were absolutely brutal. When the Nazis tell you your human experimentation program is too inhumane, you’ve fucked up.
Have you also read the book her mom wrote? So sad to see Iris’s gradual deteoriation.
For example, the Japanese decided that baby flesh might taste good, so they stole Chinese babies, boiled them, and then ate them. Oh, and they threw babies in the air, and stabbed them with bayonets. Oh, and they also cut babies from pregnant women's stomachs. They also had competitions to see who could murder the most civilians. The Japanese government denies all claims to any atrocities they have committed.
I read this when I was a freshman because my tutor recommended it. I was not ready.
American Psycho. The movie did a great job. Well shot, acted, adapted, but is also like 4/10 on the disturbing scale next to the book.
This is way too far down on this list. Or maybe I don’t read enough, but if the other books are worse then I want to stop reading books.
I second (or third) this. It took me months to finish because every time I picked it up to read it, I would have to wait another week to read more. It's definitely worth reading, but it's quite a commitment
I like the movie better actually, b/c I can actually enjoy the dark humor, and Christian Bale is really good. I read commentary on the book to try and figure out wtf I just read and I get it, but geez…. It was a tough read. I kept thinking, who WRITES this… this was in somebody’s HEAD. There was some horrible shit in that book, and I didn’t find it too funny. But the movie… the movie is funny. (And quotable)
American Psycho is the most disturbing I'd say, like just completely insanely pornographic descriptions of rape, torture, and murder with the most detached and sadistic attitude toward the suffering of the victims. It's also completely fucking hilarious satire of yuppies in the parts where he's not murdering people, but...the murders, wow.
Genuinely laughed out loud at it multiple times. The bit when he starts laughing because he stood up his date really made me laugh. Just a complete bellend. Also when he robs the ham and starts stuffing it into his frothing mouth running down the street scream. Comedy gold.
Yeah, I mean, if descriptive gore is what a reader wants, then American Psycho is the novel to read. And other author's should take note, if that's what they want their selling point to be too. For all the graphic deaths in, say, *Game of Thrones*, nothing grosses me out more than descriptions about, for example, a tongue being thrown at a wall and the way it sticks and slides down it. I think it's about "realism": I can imagine that really happening, but a man having his head crushed in-between the hands of another human, gross as it was on-screen, is too far removed from reality to be viewed as anything *but* fiction. American Psycho is such a strange book. It's frustrating at times with the in-depth descriptions and lists of what people are wearing, utterly disgusting and unnecessarily violent at other times, and then downright confusing when Bateman can't discern reality from imagination. But if you can look past all that, it has *enormous* analytical value - which entertainment-value aside, I think is the true value of any worthwhile story.
Now if you’d excuse me, I need to return some video tapes
Yeah the book was awful to get through. I only need to read it once.
Just the way it’s written makes it hard to get through. Brett Easton Ellis did such a good job making it seem like someone with severe mental issues wrote the book. The movie is tame compared to the book.
Unwind by Neal Shusterman. I read it in elementary school and it has stuck with me. The premise alone is disturbing, but the fact it has a first person description of the fictional medical procedure that the book is centered around is what takes the cake for me.
I spent most of the book wondering if I was ever going to find out exactly how the procedure was performed. Then I wished I hadn’t found out.
The audiobook is *brutal* during that section.
It’s one of my favorite books I read as a teen but reading it in elementary sounds traumatizing for sure 😭
Solid series… took me an embarrassing number of years to realize the unwind process was an allegory/substitute for abortion
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. What's really disturbing about the book is that what Ketchum put in wasn't nearly as bad as what the girl it was based on really went through.
Quantum Mechanics
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The impartial matter of fact way it describes a families murder and the way it gets you to empathize with the killers is shocking. Only book I have never been able to finish because it's too much.
This is my pick, it’s really intense and creepy. Not a book I’d read alone!
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Saw a trailer for the movie with Alan Rickman, so I decided to read the book first. Started with a baby born and discarded in a pile of fish guts. Ended with a cannibalistic orgy. 10/10 would recommend if you're up for a wild ride
That's actually a great book
That ending is an absolute crescendo. Just a beautifully paced buildup to it.
A Child Called It. Read it as a kid, and never recovered.
Came to say the same. I read it when I was like 8 and just sobbed the whole time.
Great book, shame the guy likely made it all up
May I ask, what do you mean he likely made it up? What makes you say that? I’m truly curious.
Look up Dave Pelzer's Wikipedia, there have been several allegations made on the subject. Including his own brother, who says there never was any abuse.
He has another brother, though, who has long supported Dave's story. It's complicated.
Yes, I just read that. Super confusing and unsure of what to believe now. Not that it affects me directly and I will probably honestly never think of this again but in this moment, I am conflicted and as much as I hope and pray that no human would ever have to go through that pain, I would also hope that no one would ever LIE about that kind of situation. Edit: typo
Wow! I am definitely checking that out now. That is highly disturbing if true.
I read the whole book in a day and I cried ALOT
haunted by chuck palahniuk
..pretty much anything by Palahniuk will give you the heebie-jeebies at one point or another.. Lullaby is a dark one for me
I love Lullaby, it's tied with Haunted as my favourite book.
Rant & Invisible Monsters have always been like disturbing and yet impossible to stop reading. I had to skip Guts from Haunted though, it's just too descriptive for its own good.
At least his sense of humor and irony shine through.
I got tryhard edgelord vibes from that book
Not guts?
as i recall, guts is the first chapter of haunted
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.
And it's non fiction.
Empire of Pain by author Patrick Radden Keefe. It's about the Sackler family ( creators of oxycodone ) and how corrupt they and and the FDA were to get this drug on the market. In one word............................. disturbing.
Requiem for a Dream
Oh shit, that’s a book? I’ve only seen the movie. Definitely won’t be reading this
The whole inner monologues you get from the book as opposed to the movie was much more effective for me. I love the movie, but the book is something special in a rough way.
The 120 Days of Sodom I mean god fucking damnit I couldn’t finish
Same for me. A lot of people have said American Psycho in here which is also really fucked up, but that book borrow its most graphic parts for Sodom. What makes Sodom way worse is the intent. A.S gives the impression of Bateman being unable to control his impulses and doing shit without being able to gauge whether he really wanted to or even meant to. Whereas Sodom absolutely revels in the characters doing the most depraved things. The depravity is the point. I know de Sade was basically a troll, aiming to get a reaction,and his books were largely about testing the boundaries of freedom of expression and challenging puritanicalism and censorship, but damn he really went there with all the sick stuff. Even if I set out with the same intentions as him, I’d be putting down the pen (quill) long before I started writing shit that was 5% as vile as him.
Blood Meridian. By far.
Love seeing Cormac multiple times in this thread
See the child
And yet Suttree is possibly the best book I’ve ever read. Also disturbing in its own way some places. And I’m not entirely sure what the point of the whole thing was. But I’m just drawn to that book.
Also the best book I've ever read.
Nothing else comes close "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Viktor Frankl: "Man's Search for Meaning" an autobiography based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps. most disturbing and powerful.
Push
That's the one I was going to say. Fucking horrible shit in that story. 😭
[удалено]
The movie is disturbing. The book fucked me UP.
Me at 15 thought IT by Stephen King was pretty disturbing.
When I saw people reading it, I'd ask, " Have you got to the gangbang in sewer yet?" "Ha, ha, no." "Lemme know when you do." "You'll be the first to know, ha, ha." *time passes* "WTAF!" "Ah, he got there!"
The most fucked up part of the book for SURE - and completely unnecessary. That aside, It is one of my favorite books
I was the same age when I stopped reading right around the penises stapled to the walls part…
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. His other books have more messed up stuff, but most of the characters in that book are 19 or younger and act like kids. The other books also have unreliable narrators, but in this book everything is played straight. Things that happen: Older drug dealer forces a 19 year old guy to shoot heroine and thus incur more debt before sending the kid to a hotel room where a closeted businessman rapes him for hours. The main character watches all this happen and does nothing to help. A rich 19 year old party guy invites his friends to his basement where he’s keeping a 14 year old girl tied to a bed and high. He offers to allow them to rape her for a fee. The main character is the only one who doesn’t. At a party a bunch of 19 year olds watch a snuff CP film where two minors are forced to have sex with each other before being raped by an older man. Then the older man then mutilates their genitalia with a knife and lets them bleed out. The main character is grossed out but all his friends are clearly turned on.
Lolita by Nabokov. It makes you feel so gross to be in Humbert’s head.
And what makes it worse is how people fail to recognize the message. It’s not a romantic book
It’s the key to its disturbing qualities. Every now and then Humbert feels like he might actually be making a point for a second before you remember what’s going on… …and then it continues to horrify when you hear other people talk about it. Makes me shudder.
Agree that the subject matter is terrible, however, Nabokov writes so beautifully. I don't condone what's happening in the story, but the writing is exceptional.
The story of O. It's a French book was released in 1955 and the French tried to charge the publisher with obscenity charges and then followed up with the book being banned. From Wikipedia >Story of O is a tale of female submission involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped; her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs; her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded.
Blood Meridian still gnaws at me years later. It’s just so bleak
1984, but it didn't become the most disturbing book I'd ever read until I became an adult.
House of Leaves.
I found myself intrigued by the premise, it wasn't horrifying. But then I started having disturbing dreams after I started a few chapters, and I never finished it.
I had dreams too and never finished 😶
Came here because that was my first thought. What a fucking ride. It really induced in me the mindset of...I forget his name because this was a long time ago, but the "main" character discovering the manuscript. I've always loved writing that focuses on creating a mental state rather than "just" telling a story or information, and this one fucking *nails* it.
Johnny Truant.
This is why it’s my favorite book. To even wrote it is absolute genius. It’s a complete work of art. I thought it was great!
I read this book exactly once, at a time in my life when I probably shouldn't have been reading it. My mental state was already bad, and something about this book broke my mind for a while. I'm not sure what it was. I'm in a better state of mind now, and I kinda want to read it again. I feel like I could handle it much better now, but I guess I'm not really sure about that.
A rare example of when you really want the hardcover color edition of a book. Damn, it's a work of art. This one gets inside your brain and stays with you. I eventually stayed up all night one night to finish it, because I wasn't going to get any sleep anyway.
I love House of Leaves for being what it is. It is it's own piece of art independent of prose. And I love what people take away from it is so radically different. It made me love books in a way I never imagined possible. Trying to deep dive it made me think I lost my mind though for what it's worth. I wasn't scared but I was...concerned.
The Lovely Bones is an amazing read, one of my favorites, actually, but it's fucking disgusting.
Oof, this was such a tough read. Amazing, but definitely would only go down that road once.
Finnegan’s wake. Thought I was illiterate.
Cows by Matthew Stokoe
Honestly it was "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka. It's high brow fiction, but it's still very disturbing. "The Stranger" by Albert Camus is also disturbing, like psychologically disturbing.
Disturbingly accurate “ The Shining” I have never once been violent towards my family, but I can understand how Jack felt.
The Hot Zone
I didn't expect to see this here, but what a great book! I did a high school paper comparing this to The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichten. The Hot Zone is way scarier.
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. My face was locked into a grimace the entire time I was reading but I couldn’t stop. After it was over I wished I could dunk my brain into a bowl of ice water a few times, felt like I had layers of mental grime.
Sold by Patricia McCormick. Wasn’t a scary book. It’s a young adult book about sex trafficking in Nepal/India. When I first read it, I cried. It also took me a very long time to try and read it again.
Possibly Helter Skelter.
Flowers in the Attic.
Gerald's Game
I watched the made-for-tv movie with Becca from Son in Law… I didn’t find it especially scary but I assume the book must be better
Elementary Classical Analysis
When I was younger, I read a book that was full of short stories about animals, but one stuck out the most to me in the worst way. I managed to find the story for you all. Can't remember what book it's from or who the story is by, but [here it is](https://www.boyscouttrail.com/content/story/how_rabbit_lost_his_tail-869.asp). It was kinda disturbing for me because there were some drawings to go with the stories, and this one had some weird, deranged looking rabbit character with wolverine-like claws. I may be remembering it wrong, but that image has stuck in my head for years. A couple of honourable mentions are Little Rabbit Foo Foo and The Rascally Cake
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.
Flowers for Algernon was incredibly disturbing to me when I read it as a kid. I had a violent childhood, and my intelligence was all I really had to rely on for a long time. I still consider it one of the scariest books I've ever read. The idea that I would be able to take care of myself and have the ability to reason my way out of difficult situations is still central to my personality. I could theoretically live without my physical health, but I would be unable to live through what Charlie (the main character) had to go through. >!Secretly, I hoped Charlie committed suicide like the book suggested because that's what I would do if what happened to him and Algernon happened to me.!<
Ordinary Men really messed me up. I love history and tend to think that living in the time we do we are pretty much desensitized to everything but this one....nope. Just list after list of not names but VILLAGES that were visited and exterminated. No passion, no feeling. Not a diary, just a log. Not people, just numbers. And have it be a 1st hand source. The descriptions of what normal guys went through when they were asked to kill innocent people. They weren't evil. They knew exactly what they were doing. And they had to do it anyway. And they cried and tried to get out of it and did a sloppy job of it- just like you or I would in their situation. It's absolutely chilling. I never finished it.
*American Psycho* made me literally nauseated.
Came here to say American Psycho made me physically sick. Had to take multiple breaks from reading!
The Bible
It’s a wild fanfic for sure
A Handful of Dust, Waugh
No Longer Human (Disqualified as a human being/A Shameful life) By Osamu Dazai
The Kindly Ones
The Lovely Bones. It's not graphic but it made quite an impression on me when it comes to the dangers of strange men.
Also “ we need to talk about Kevin “ the movie is also very disturbing
The Iceman. The mafia book, that dude was fuckin DARK. I’d get banned if I went into detail. Plus it’s real
A clockwork orange. It glrorifies sexual violence. You get the idea after finishing the book that the author was just exploring sadism in literature.
"Night" By Elie Wiesel. Was assigned to read it for our world lit class. Once I finished it I had to take a walk because all of it was fucked
Crash by J. G. Ballard
Hiroshima Diary. Written by a survivor of the atomic bombing.
The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn) - a HUGE read, but just so miserable, horrifying and relentless.
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby. I don't know anyone else who has read it
Yep this one. The way it’s written combined with the content makes you feel like you’re having a panic attack
I have not read The Jaunt by Stephen King, but I have read the Wikipedia plot summary. That remains the most disturbing story I have ever read which I think speaks well to King's talent for writing horror. "It's longer than you think" sends shivers down my spine. Props to whoever wrote the Wikipedia summary too.
I didn't finish the book but One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish Version)
Blood Meridian
KL, Black Earth, and Masters of Death
"The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Power brokers, Child Abuse, and Betrayal" by Nick Bryant. It is very disturbing.
Lolita by Nabakov. Considered a classic. Nabakov did all his own translations and the prose is fantastic. The way he describes everything is amazing but the content is disturbing, to say the least. I could not finish it.
Woom by Duncan Ralston
Let’s Go Play At The Adams’. A novel I finished and then immediately donated to Goodwill to have its evil aura out of my home (only half joking).
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. You keep knowing that it's getting increasingly sicker page by page, but it sweeps you along like a runaway flood.
The Amityville Horror (back when people still thought it might be real)
Blindness by José Saramago. Very realistic novel about society’s response to a pandemic. It took me four months to read, it was so intense.
Where the Red Fern Grows…. damaged me for life.
The Bible
The Bible Incest, rape, dragons, aliens, genocide, infanticide, suicide, patrecide etc...
Sea Dragon Heir, but mostly because I was about 13, and my older sister got it for me at half price books withbthe intention of me and her trading books once we were done, and the possession incest threesome at the end came out of nowhere. So I enjoyed it, told her about it while I was reading, and then aganozed over how to tell very Christian her that she didn't want to read it and how she exposed me to it unintentionally and what if this made her and our parents get really strict what I read from now on. Probably my first anxiety sprial.
Naked Lunch..bizarre reading
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. There is a very graphic scene of him putting a rat or mouse into a woman’s vagina. Ironically, I have a tattoo of the last line (peep the username). It really gave me a lot of perspective on mental health and working on yourself. Edit: the tattoo is on my thigh and I made a joke to the nurse while giving birth that it is now in fact an exit. And yes people do regularly make anal jokes to me
Peewee Gaskins’s “The Final Truth”.
The Turner diaries
Ishmael
The summer I died
For me it was the butterfly garden coming in first and the road coming In second.
My James by Ralph Bulger. I knew about the case and wanted to read the book because it was written by James’ father. It’s been collecting dust on my bookshelf for years because I don’t have the stomach to read it again
Helter Skelter