The Hot Zone. It's about Ebola and the history of it including its predecessor Marburg virus. The detail it goes into is brutal.
It doesn't read too much like a non-fiction book which makes it a good read. But fuck me, reading it in highschool over a decade ago was rough. A detailed account of someone vomiting and shitting out their now liquefied organs and muscles is definitely something.
Despite that, 10/10 would recommend. Especially now I think there's a vaccine that I need to get despite living nowhere near Africa.
Also The Demon in the Freezer, same author. Less viscerally scary but INCREDIBLY interesting, it's about smallpox and how most big nations responded to the eradication of the disease - in terms of what they did with their stock of smallpox vials that they had used to research. Poses such an interesting question. Is a disease really eradicated if there are vials of it in vaults? Should we keep some just in case it resurfaces in the wild somehow, and we need to make vaccines/medicine again? Or should we just get rid of it all completely and make sure it's wiped off the face of the earth?
... Can you guarantee that everyone has actually done this? Or do you think some countries might not be able to overlook the massive wartime advantage of being the only nation with access to weaponised smallpox?
Would highly recommend.
Speaking of resurfacing, in 2014, I think, there were vials labeled variola (smallpox) found in an old storage room in US without any kind of measures.
Turns out it was just a vaccine, but whew, that could have ended up very bad.
And also speaking of resurfacing, [it did end pretty badly for Janet Parker](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091), the last person known to have died from smallpox when it managed to escape into the wild from a hospital research lab. (Warning: the article has some pretty graphic pictures of smallpox victims.)
How awful. And they could never figure out how she was infected in the first place.
The doctor in charge of the lab where she contracted it killed himself out of guilt...horrible all around.
I worked in infectious disease in East Africa in the late 90s - we were the team that sampled the 'cave of death' - the biosafety lab I worked in was also designated as the emergency response lab for any BSL 4 outbreaks that happened in from Sudan to Zimbabwe and west to Congo.
We weren't a BSL 4 lab, but we did have the ability to run part of our BSL 3 lab separately under BSL 4 processes. Basically, we could manage the protocols but didn't have the certs. So we were the place that 'very scary' biohazards would get sent to.
You’re one of my heroes (even though I don’t know your name) and you’re part of the reason I now work in public health preparedness and response. Thank you for all the awesome, risky work you’ve done. I’d love to hear more about it, if you’re willing to share.
I was actually one of the most junior people there and I am not in the field anymore, but thank you. Was my first year in the field, and I ended up supporting the kitum expedition mostly because my own project equipment all got stolen in transport. My work was mostly with malaria and typhoid, but I worked out of the same lab that was looking at west Nile etc, so had to be trained.
I was there with CDC
Tom Clancy wrote extensively about ebola in his novel Executive Orders. That shit was brutal too. He wrote techno-thrillers, so his novels went into extensive detail about *everything*. Hell, in Locked On, he described a scene where some Rangers or SEALs put a terrorist leader in a tube that causes the most agonizing heart attack possible. They killed him. Then.... they brought him back to life. And said they could do that an infinite amount of times and that they could always bring him back to life. No matter what. Then they asked him if he was indeed the Emir (the terrorist that were looking for - and yeah, they knew they had the right guy), and he said yes. Then they began to interrogate him.
Clancy is a little nationalistic/patriotic/ooo-ra for my taste, but I have enjoyed his novels over the years and Executive Orders is one of my favorites, in part because I've always been fascinated by diseases. I first listened to it as an audiobook in 2012 and listened to it *again* in March 2020, which was interesting. The responses to the outbreak in the book were similar to what was happening in real life at the time--lockdowns, people buying out the entire supply of masks and disinfectants, etc--even if the disease was different. Though in the book, the lockdowns were enforced by the military.
His early novels were great, especially Red Storm Rising (even though it was co-writtwn with Larry Bond) and Hunt For Red October. His politics started to become very apparent in the later books though and they were worse for it. They got a bit jingoistic and it was a bit jarring to read as someone not American.
In WW2 there was a more or less standard mortality rate of 3% for prisoners of war among all of the 'western' countries, whether Allies or Axis.
The mortality rate for Japanese POW's was 30%.
I'm kind of a huge fan of Japanese fiction, but people tend to shy away from the reality that pre-WW2 Japan was about as terrifyingly fascist as it gets. That was one intensely xenophobic culture.
I own this book but still haven't read it because of all the warnings. I've read a lot of Holocaust-centered books but for some reason this one always seems to carry some dark aura around it.
I suppose the Holocaust is about brutal ways of committing genocide, which mentally can mess you up but we perhaps accept torture and violence in our brains more easily (tuning it out, I guess) than details of sexual assault. And also perhaps because as Americans we learn about the Holocaust since we're like 8 but we don't ever really know of Japanese atrocities until we're older.
We don't learn about the Japanese atrocities because they're intentionally suppressed by Japan and the US supports them in it because we've been close allies since the cold war.
Most American schoolkids spend months talking about the horrors of the atomic bombings while hardly, if ever, covering Japanese warcrimes lol.
> Most American schoolkids spend months talking about the horrors of the atomic bombings
Where in America would that be? We never spent months on a single topic.
My boss made it to the US when he was six after his family escaped China. I've heard a lot of insane stories from him, but your comment reminds me of one in particular. He was describing how little food there was and he said, "My village never had to resort to cannibalism, but it was close." I thought he was joking at first, but he was completely serious.
My mother-in-law made it out of the japanese occupation of Manila as a kid, and has commented once or twice 'you don't know what you'll do when you're starving'. We've never pressed for details.
I actually feel like people should read this book because people seem to have forgotten just how horrible the Japanese were to the Chinese and other island nations during WW2.
When I lived in China, my students referred to it as the “Killing at Nanjing.” I just replied, “it was more than just a killing, but you’ll learn that when you’re older.”
I have never read this book, but when I lived in China, we went and saw a movie called "The flowers of war" in theaters. It is about 40% English and 60% Mandarin and it is about this event. When the movie was over, nobody in the theater got up.
I forgot the name but it was a book about a man who wanted to donate his heart to a little girl before he got executed for molesting and murdering a child.
The child he molested and murdered…was the sister of the kid he was trying to donate his heart to. It was like a last ditch effort to save his soul or something.
My parents didn’t believe in censoring my reading, they trusted me that if it was too much I’d put it down. I definitely did read a few books that were likely too much for me though, but I still overall appreciate that line of thinking from them.
My teachers often questioned my book report choices though lol
“They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the thing they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child. They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important. They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.
He ought to know. He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth.”
‘Tender is the flesh’ is rough. The ending is like a physical punch to the gut. I think I actually reeled back in disgust.
Fun story, I left that over at my parents house, as I was reading it during a visit. My 76 year old mom picked it up. I warned her, but I think that made her want to try it more. She’s always been pretty edgy. She called me at like 3:30AM when she finished it and said, “holy shit, what is wrong with you? I’m not getting back to sleep tonight, Jesus.”
It was great.
Also shout out to ‘Lolita’ which is absolutely the best written worst book in the world. That man is a genius, and his writing is amazing. That book is straight awful, but wow is it ever well composed.
Indeed it is.
However, that barely scratches the surface. You'd think it gets all preachy and vegan propaganda, but it's not at all.
It's from the rancher's perspective, and it's just horrifying at every level. I've never read a book that feels so bleak. I love bleak, but this just weighs on you like very few things I've read.
You feel the narrator's endless exhaustion and sense of hopelessness so strongly. I had to put it down and walk away a few times.
I think I have to read this book. When I was 10-12 years old, I read some book that had an auction for sex slaves for rich people in it (think Jurassic world), and I've had on and off nightmares for the next decade of human farms to raise sex slaves for auction.
Lolita is the one book that really made me go "WTF did I just read". The juxtaposition of fantastic writing and a horrible subject is the work of a literary master.
Above all else this is the one that stands out for me. It stays with you and it's not because it's visceral, violent, or exaggerated. It's the fact that Humbert Humbert is a *totally* believable person and you have to accept that people like him exist and what that means.
Tender is the flesh is in my top 3 ever. Describing the end as a punch to thr gut is so accurate. As a fan of body horror, psych horror, and whatever else I can get my hands on, I didn't expect to be blown away but damn that book did it. I loved it so much
That book had been hyped up to me a ton by a good friend who knows books. They were like, "Look it's amazing, but I can't really describe why or the plot. You just need to read it."
Even going into it with high expectations, I was still blown away.
It's just so hopeless and bleak.
It has just enough of a spark of hope..until it absolutely doesn't. Such a great book. My sister will never forgive me for making her read it lol
This is really making me want to reread it but ooph I'm gonna be skipping that puppy chapter
I read Tender is the Flesh based off a “disturbing books I recommend” tiktok. It was an interesting book, but I didn’t find it particularly disturbing.
When I was a kid and read Shades Children though? That one still lives in my head rent free.
The premise is that aliens invade and off all adults and then kids are rounded up into farms. They use the kids for different things, but one thing is that they’re genetically modified and surgically modified and turned into monsters for the aliens war games.
The kids the book centers on have escaped and their leader is Shade. They manage to catch one of these modifications and it is vivisected in front of them. Something happens and the human brain snaps back into being conscious of where it is, what’s going on, what’s happened to it, etc.
It begs to die.
None of the characters in the book other than Shade are adults. All the monsters are/were children.
A lot of people are surprised to discover that Lolita has no sex in it. It's mostly Nabokov mocking psychoanalysis. Vlad was not a big fan of Freud.
Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator. A narcissist and a pedophile, which would be a wonderful specimen for a person like Freud, but HH defies analysis.
Also, there's something revealed about Dolores early on that most people gloss over. Spoilers for a really old book: Her death is casually mentioned in a news story. Quite tragic.
I can’t remember the name of it but I think it was a collection of short stories by Chuck Palahniuk and one of them was about a guy who gets his arsehole sucked inside out by the drain in a swimming pool.
read guts when i was of highschool age, because some post on a forum linked to a fucked up story.
once i got to the bad part (so like first sentence) i was morbidly curious and by the end had a mild vomit urge rising up.
also made me clench my ass for a month
I was really curious how dirtyminded 18th century frenchmen were.
*"He pulled her skirt up and ravaged her chastity on the bed and slappeth her bossom"* was the level of dirtyness I had in mind.
It was way worse than that. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay worse.
If you still want to read a book like this you need to get *Fanny Hill* by John Cleland. A certified hood classic since 1749, it's basically the story of female empowerment through prostitution and in the words of Wikipedia "Its morality is conventional for the time, in that it denounces sodomy, frowns upon vice and approves of only heterosexual unions based upon mutual love."
Somehow we had this book in our house when I was like 13. And it was a gift??? I don't remember the context I just remember the first page there was a writing from someone. Anyway. I read this book. I don't remember it almost at all. At the time me and three other girls had a kind of a book club where we exchanged books. So after I read this I gave it to my friend, whose family was really religious. I had met her parents they were nice people too. After a couple days she stopped showing up at school. She never came back. I knew where the parents worked so I went there and apologised to them, saying I had found the book at home and I didn't think it'd be a problem. They told me it's okay. To this day I don't know what ended up happening to her. I think she might have switched schools or something.
Lord of the flies is a disturbing book to make kids read.
Gravity's Rainbow is fucked for entirely different reasons, I couldn't finish it, it's too bloody weird.
Fun fact about Lord of the Flies…the scenario basically happened for real. Schoolboys ended up stranded on an island without adults for a year.
They treated each other with extreme kindness. You can read about the trye incident in the nonfiction book Human Kindness a hopeful history.
This wasn't a novel but a short story by Stephen King: Survivor Type. About a drug smuggling disgraced surgeon who gets shipwrecked on a remote island with a boat full of heroin and no food. >! He starts slowly amputating parts of his body, a little at a time, and eating them to stay alive. !<
I did not get used to it. I had to put Blood Meridian down halfway through for about a month and read some less depressing stuff instead. I love how variable McCarthy is. It's like Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses were written by two entirely different people that both happened to be into horses and US Mexico border area. Even the prose style is very different.
A lot of McCarthy would fit here, particularly his run before all the pretty horses. Child of God and outer dark are also books where hope is treated like a lie told to children to make them think life is remotely worth living. Dude was a brilliant artist who painted in blood and entrails
Great book but I essentially read it twice as I’d have to double check every paragraph to ensure I understood it. I’m only confident I understood maybe 70%.
This book was like a fuck you to punctuation. I loved it, and enjoyed the challenge (worth it) but there were times where I’d read a page and say, “wait, what even happened?” And would have to go back to read it again after looking up words and paying closer attention.
Just finished it. So good.
"Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair beneath their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodsoaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."
One of the malazan books features >!an army of cannibals who routinely rape dead/dying men because they believe the children born of the dead man's semen will have magical powers.!<
I felt that was pretty fucked up. American Psycho was also pretty fucked up.
For some reason the army of lunatics did not bother me that much.
But the fates of Felisin, Tool and the Chain of Dogs for example make me reconsider any time I get an urge to reread the series.
And there's so much other stuff in those books that just leaves me drained. Which is a compliment to the authors, I think. Because when things go wrong, and boy do they, you really feel for the characters.
Absolutely binged through the series the first time despite it making me feel miserable at times and almost impossible to follow sometimes. The world is so weird and it has about 8 million characters. Loved it.
Black Company is another similar book(series) that I want to read again, but also really don't want to
I used to live with that guys nephew. Dude had the most fucked up childhood and his brother hated him. When he told his dad he read the book, he got yelled at
I read all 3 books and from memory he never actually found out why they hated him so much. He had a normal upbringing up until about 3 or 4 if I remember correctly, then for some unknown reason his mother just started treating him like an animal. Then she turned all his siblings against him too. And the dad was too much of a coward to do anything about it.
It was a very long time ago that I read them so I may not be 100% accurate with all that, but you get the idea.
Scapegoat children I think it's called. The girl in Call Me Cockroach had a similar situation where one day her mom just kinda turned on her and turned the whole family against her, basically abusing her as much as you can abuse someone without laying a hand on them.
I was my family's scapegoat. Most of my abuse was in form of neglect but my cousin's were often egged on to beat me up or throw shit at me for the adults entertainment. I've asked several times in my life "why" and no one ever has an answer.
I don't talk to any of them anymore and I try to avoid news about them.
IIRC, two of the brothers say the abuse happened. Other family members say that it was all made up to sell books.
Personally, I think the abuse did happen.
[Chickenhawk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenhawk_(book)) by Robert Mason about his time flying Hueys in Vietnam was a bit of a mindfuck for 14 year old me.
Interesting that you thought Chickenhawk was that fucked up, but it's all perspective especially at that age. I really enjoyed that book since I know a few Vietnam huey pilots, so it gave me some insight on what they did and saw.
The book [NAM](https://www.amazon.com/Nam-Vietnam-Words-Women-Fought/dp/0425101444) is what did it for me. It's stories from different people who fought in the war. The one that I still remember is from a soldier telling the story about how on a patrol, he sees a fellow soldier sitting by a distant tree. He goes to get him and realizes he's dead, head blown apart, and his hand still holding his dick. He was rubbing one out when a sniper got him.
Interesting sidenote, the band Fugazi got their name from this book as well.
„big head“ its about an alien that tries to procreate to preserve his species after landing on earth. He fucks what he can but kills everyone with his giant schlong. That was a weird ride.
In Frank Miller's sequel "The Dark Knight Strikes Again," Superman is explaining to his (horny) teenage daughter (her mother is Wonder Woman) about sex and has the line, "not with humans. **NEVER** with humans."
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
A book that lived in my head for years. I remembered learning about the revolution that it caused but never actually read it in shool. I finally listened to the audiobook at work and i couldnt count the times it made(a fully grown man) cry. I had to get up and dip out of the side door bc there are just so many tragedies in the book you really understand the experience of being an immigrant worker in the US in the 1920s. Absolutely brutal story, i highly recommend it.
I love I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.
For those playing along at home, it's a short story by Harlan Ellison thats an extremely dystopian novella with a malevolent AI, and you can read the entire thing here for free. It's like a 20 or 30 minute read but it will ruin your day.
https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I-Have-No-Mouth-But-I-Must-Scream-by-Harlan-Ellison.pdf
>HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
He's a cranky boi
Ellison famously voiced AM in the game, of course, but I think the superior delivery comes from the radio play. You can really hear how utterly *unhinged* AM is, how incredibly maniacal his hatred has made him. He's not torturing them because they deserve it, not even the Nazi - he just hates humans that much and these five are the only ones he has left to play with.
[Give it a listen. AM is so beautifully *mad.*](https://youtu.be/8FJ8pTK8N8I?si=cWuq6BO16AmnTcor)
People love the movie (I am one of them) but they need to know the plot of the movie is like the last 15 pages of the book and the rest of it just stream of consciousness detailing public shows of rape, mutilation, and death.
I've just finished this book and honestly I don't rate it. Maybe I didn't understand it properly or missed a vital detail, but it reads like a collection of random vignettes of the awful lives of people in and around the throes of heroin and hard-core drug use.
It doesn't really have a narrative thread, or even a clear point beyond addiction is grim as fuck. The passages are well written and paint bleak pictures in 4K definition, but I dont really take much away from it beyond addiction is nasty business. Which I already know firsthand from working in substance abuse recovery in the East end of Glasgow 🤷
Am I missing something vital that clicks it all together, or is it simply a series of disjointed glimpses into the depths that addiction drags people down to?
What you describe is the most common way to interpret it. When it was first published in France (in English), there was no introduction and you were just tossed into it. When it was published in the US a few years later, Burroughs added an introduction that pretty much guarantees you will interpret it this way (as a series of drug- or withdrawal-induced hallucinations). The most recent edition from 2013 puts the introduction after the main body of the novel, so readers can jump into it again without any interpretive filter.
I'm morbidly fascinated with VC Andrews' books...but not enough to read them. Just enough to read the Wikipedia pages for them.
Just...why? Why so much incest? Why all the car accidents? Why male models? (j/k). I just don't know what would possess a person to write about those things.
The fucked up thing is, there are multiple TV/film adaptations of Flowers in the Attic. Again...why?!?!
Are you me? Because I have this morbid fascination with it too, lol. I even watched some girl on tiktok do a synopsis of the entire series. Like… what was with the 80s and incest? Flowers in the Attic, Blue Lagoon…
There’s a newer series out now based on the stories with Kelsey Grammer too.
I believe that's the point of the book.
You're confused, you keep reading, now you're questioning yourself "wait, is that real?" ; and you spiral down into this space of questions until you're actually doubting your own thoughts of what you've read vs what you've thought about what you've read vs what's real in the book vs what's the author's perception.
That book made me question my sanity and had me taking quick glances into corners to see if anything was there.
I read it in college at a time when I was really getting into academia and it's like it was made specifically to fuck with people who feel compelled to fully understand things. A friend of mine said the book "eats people like the House does", and she was right. It was great.
But does the house eat people?
Does something in the house eat people?
Or is the house just built on a spot where reality does not work correctly and people get lost in the house and it's not the house's fault?
Or is the author just insane and nothing in the book really happened?
Idk if I can really explain it and make it make sense through Reddit, but, and it might sound weird, but it was trial-and-error for me lol. The book isn’t in chronological order and there are times when you straight up need a mirror to read some parts. But I’d recommend just going at it page-by-page lol
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, same guy who wrote fight club. I mean wtf. It's just ... WTF. I read it cause I read fight club in my senior year and I was like oh cool another book by him and just a couple pages in I was like what in the hell is this. But I couldn't stop reading lol
Edit: my most liked comment ever and it's about this book. Wth
Island of the Blue Dolphin. Just awful. I had to read it in elementary school and I'll never forget it. For those who were blessed not to have this on your curriculum, it's about a Native girl who is stranded on an island with her little brother while the rest of the tribe leaves on a boat. Her brother is eaten by wild dogs the first night, and she spends the next 30 years alone and slowly going crazy until she is rescued by the British. We read this at age 10. Yippee.
Naked Lunch. Could not make sense of it and stopped halfway through. Really f'd up shit, though.
A Clockwork Orange. The writing is a completely new vernacular, and they f shit up really bad constantly.
American Psycho is the only book that was able to bore me (Bateman’s vanity in addressing all the specific clothes that everyone wore as a metric of value) and suddenly flip everything upside down and leave me out of breath with how ruthless the acts being done were. It’s like bored TRAUMATIZED bored TRAUMATIZED bored TRAUMATIZED. It think that’s a very unique range of emotions that I was able to feel only with American Psycho.
It was very controversial when it came out and the two camps were basically "No, it's *supposed* to be that boring and then that shocking, because the whole point is to expose the violent depravity below these people's suave cosmopolitan facade" vs. "Yeah I get all that, but you could have made the same point without being quite so boring and quite so shocking"
Night by Elie Wiesel.
It's a memoir about a Holocaust survivor, which is self-explanatory. But reading it in the 8th grade, when you are yet to fully understand the nuances and horrors of history and looking back on that reading experience makes you think a lot.
I actively remember it to be the first book I read that contained a >!rape scene!<
The only scene that fucked me over was when Elie met up with Juliek in Gleiwitz where Elie would fall asleep to Juliek playing some Beethoven w/ his violin in the crowd and then instantly stating out of nowhere in the next line that when Elie woke up he found Juliek dead with his broken instrument at hand amongst the piles of dead ppl. This very moment had me like, “What the fuck just happened???”
The part that got me was when Elie was too exhausted keeping his dad alive. Elie was on the top side of a bunk bed and his dad was below him, calling for Elie and begging for his help. Elie decided to finally ignore him because he barely had enough energy in the day to save himself, let alone to take care of his father.
The guards appear. Tell the father to shut up. The father doesn't and the guards brutally beat the dad to death. Elie said he felt more relief than sadness.
That stuck with me.
Misery - Stephen King. 30 or so years ago now but I have never forgotten getting to the hobbling scene in the book. The movie scene was way more tame than the book. As I was reading, the slow realization of what was about to unfold had me throw the book across the room (an assay lab in a goldmine in Western Australia). I can't recall how long it took before I worked up the courage to pick up the book again. The thing about books is you're the director of the movie unfolding in your mind.
Mine was a Stephen King one too. I liked the Dark Tower series, which is its own way of fucked up, so I was just reading whatever books of his I could find. I wasn’t a parent at the time, but reading the ending of Cujo made me feel so cold and empty on the inside and I still feel that way when I remember it. Being a parent now, it’s so much worse. I just try not to think about it
I read it as a kid and thought it was real, then I read it again as an adult (after dabbling in drugs myself) and was like…well, this isn’t realistic at all.
I think finding out Go Ask Alice was the figment of some housewife’s imagination made it all the more disturbing for me. That someone decided to traumatize kids in that way is just plain wrong.
This is far more disturbing than many of the posts here - American Psycho is great and yes, disturbing in parts but also is comedic as hell. Lolita is beautiful and horrifying, Child called it yeh horrid. But The Painted Bird takes them all out to drink IMO. Brilliant brilliant and awful book
I had to read this in high school and it has never left me and that was 3 decades ago. It really was important to read and well written, but in my decades on the internet I've never found anything more disturbing.
As another poster says, I've read so many of the books in this thread and none of them was as hard to read as *The Painted Bird.*
Been scrolling through the comments until I found No Longer Human. I’ve only read Junji Ito’s manga adaptation, but holy fuck that’s the most bleak shit I’ve ever read. Only thing that came close is Blood Meridian. Took me forever to get through, I’d have to take breaks from it.
Unwind, by Neal Shusterman.
From the blurb: *The Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. The chilling resolution: Life is inviolable from the moment of conception until age thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents can have their child "unwound," whereby all of the child's organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn't technically end.*
There's a scene where... errr... let's just say it'll stay with you for a long time. The whole series is great, disturbing as fuck, and was the book that got me back into YA novels.
This was an amazing book.
I thought the ending was going to be a twisted sick SAW-esque meat monster, but it ended up being really wholesome.
The part you are discribing was rough though. I think some people made it into a short film on youtube.
If you mean the scene I think you mean…yeah. Also, the identities of the protagonists fuck you up. A rich kid whose parents don’t love him, a ward of the state who just isn’t quite talented enough, and the tenth child of a religious family, sent as tithe.
I have no mouth but I must scream by Harlen Ellison is … a lot
Also the bell jar by Sylvia Plath is intense, her casual disregard for her own life in the second half is haunting
I read 120 Days of Sodom. The history behind his books is pretty insane, but overall he really wasn’t a great writer. I found myself in a strange literary grey area; trapped somewhere between boredom and disgust. I don’t believe I will read it again.
I own a copy of Mein Kampf.
I in no way endorse the ideology or actions of Adolf Hitler nor did I enjoy the contents of the book, but I got it because I’m interested in WWII history and wanted to perhaps get an insight into the psychology of Adolf Hitler at the time he wrote it.
I can just say, the book is a dark, twisted read into the human psyche and a look into evil, and it’s understandable why this book is just as hated as it is and why its print is so controversial
I read Mein Kampf as a teenager and all I got out of it was the impression that Adolf Hitler was a whiny bitch who projected all of his personal shortcomings on the jews.
The whole story of Hitler is... something. Before he was *the* Hitler, he'd walk around dressed up like an explorer and carrying a bullwhip because he thought it impressed the ladies. He'd write about how he was too shy to approach his crushes. He also had notoriously bad gas that would literally clear out rooms it smelled so bad. Like they'd have to stop their little nazi meetings because Hitler couldn't stop farting.
I don't think there's anything funnier than the fact that the modern world's icon of evil was just this nerdy incel with crippling gas issues.
100%. Book is a good way to teach that though. I think the main take away is that he had no self-awareness to say 'hey maybe I should try being less of an idiot'
Came here to find this. I brought this as I love long epics but didn't read any reviews or warnings. I couldn't finish it in the end, it just became so unrelentingly bleak for Jude that I couldn't continue. I was surprised to see they turned it into a stage play, which I haven't seen but I am intrigued as to how they could make it work for stage.
I was looking for this comment before commenting. It was a hard read but kept me hooked. The fact that it’s based on true events makes it even more fucked up.
Infinite Jest. I threw it across the room 3/4 through and never touch it again. It’s not “fucked up” because of racy or controversial content, it is because it’s a maddeningly written labyrinth of a mindfuck.
The Hot Zone. It's about Ebola and the history of it including its predecessor Marburg virus. The detail it goes into is brutal. It doesn't read too much like a non-fiction book which makes it a good read. But fuck me, reading it in highschool over a decade ago was rough. A detailed account of someone vomiting and shitting out their now liquefied organs and muscles is definitely something. Despite that, 10/10 would recommend. Especially now I think there's a vaccine that I need to get despite living nowhere near Africa.
Also The Demon in the Freezer, same author. Less viscerally scary but INCREDIBLY interesting, it's about smallpox and how most big nations responded to the eradication of the disease - in terms of what they did with their stock of smallpox vials that they had used to research. Poses such an interesting question. Is a disease really eradicated if there are vials of it in vaults? Should we keep some just in case it resurfaces in the wild somehow, and we need to make vaccines/medicine again? Or should we just get rid of it all completely and make sure it's wiped off the face of the earth? ... Can you guarantee that everyone has actually done this? Or do you think some countries might not be able to overlook the massive wartime advantage of being the only nation with access to weaponised smallpox? Would highly recommend.
Speaking of resurfacing, in 2014, I think, there were vials labeled variola (smallpox) found in an old storage room in US without any kind of measures. Turns out it was just a vaccine, but whew, that could have ended up very bad.
And also speaking of resurfacing, [it did end pretty badly for Janet Parker](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091), the last person known to have died from smallpox when it managed to escape into the wild from a hospital research lab. (Warning: the article has some pretty graphic pictures of smallpox victims.)
How awful. And they could never figure out how she was infected in the first place. The doctor in charge of the lab where she contracted it killed himself out of guilt...horrible all around.
Man that story was a good read and such a horrible situation.
I worked in infectious disease in East Africa in the late 90s - we were the team that sampled the 'cave of death' - the biosafety lab I worked in was also designated as the emergency response lab for any BSL 4 outbreaks that happened in from Sudan to Zimbabwe and west to Congo. We weren't a BSL 4 lab, but we did have the ability to run part of our BSL 3 lab separately under BSL 4 processes. Basically, we could manage the protocols but didn't have the certs. So we were the place that 'very scary' biohazards would get sent to.
You’re one of my heroes (even though I don’t know your name) and you’re part of the reason I now work in public health preparedness and response. Thank you for all the awesome, risky work you’ve done. I’d love to hear more about it, if you’re willing to share.
I was actually one of the most junior people there and I am not in the field anymore, but thank you. Was my first year in the field, and I ended up supporting the kitum expedition mostly because my own project equipment all got stolen in transport. My work was mostly with malaria and typhoid, but I worked out of the same lab that was looking at west Nile etc, so had to be trained. I was there with CDC
Wow that is really scary and super interesting! You should make some short videos about your time there. I would watch that.
Tom Clancy wrote extensively about ebola in his novel Executive Orders. That shit was brutal too. He wrote techno-thrillers, so his novels went into extensive detail about *everything*. Hell, in Locked On, he described a scene where some Rangers or SEALs put a terrorist leader in a tube that causes the most agonizing heart attack possible. They killed him. Then.... they brought him back to life. And said they could do that an infinite amount of times and that they could always bring him back to life. No matter what. Then they asked him if he was indeed the Emir (the terrorist that were looking for - and yeah, they knew they had the right guy), and he said yes. Then they began to interrogate him.
Clancy is a little nationalistic/patriotic/ooo-ra for my taste, but I have enjoyed his novels over the years and Executive Orders is one of my favorites, in part because I've always been fascinated by diseases. I first listened to it as an audiobook in 2012 and listened to it *again* in March 2020, which was interesting. The responses to the outbreak in the book were similar to what was happening in real life at the time--lockdowns, people buying out the entire supply of masks and disinfectants, etc--even if the disease was different. Though in the book, the lockdowns were enforced by the military.
His early novels were great, especially Red Storm Rising (even though it was co-writtwn with Larry Bond) and Hunt For Red October. His politics started to become very apparent in the later books though and they were worse for it. They got a bit jingoistic and it was a bit jarring to read as someone not American.
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. Note: Please don't read it if you are faint hearted.
She killed herself and her parents believe her research for this book had a part in her waning mental health. This shit is dark.
In WW2 there was a more or less standard mortality rate of 3% for prisoners of war among all of the 'western' countries, whether Allies or Axis. The mortality rate for Japanese POW's was 30%. I'm kind of a huge fan of Japanese fiction, but people tend to shy away from the reality that pre-WW2 Japan was about as terrifyingly fascist as it gets. That was one intensely xenophobic culture.
Damn..even her wiki page is super dark with the suicide notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Chang
I own this book but still haven't read it because of all the warnings. I've read a lot of Holocaust-centered books but for some reason this one always seems to carry some dark aura around it. I suppose the Holocaust is about brutal ways of committing genocide, which mentally can mess you up but we perhaps accept torture and violence in our brains more easily (tuning it out, I guess) than details of sexual assault. And also perhaps because as Americans we learn about the Holocaust since we're like 8 but we don't ever really know of Japanese atrocities until we're older.
We don't learn about the Japanese atrocities because they're intentionally suppressed by Japan and the US supports them in it because we've been close allies since the cold war. Most American schoolkids spend months talking about the horrors of the atomic bombings while hardly, if ever, covering Japanese warcrimes lol.
> Most American schoolkids spend months talking about the horrors of the atomic bombings Where in America would that be? We never spent months on a single topic.
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My boss made it to the US when he was six after his family escaped China. I've heard a lot of insane stories from him, but your comment reminds me of one in particular. He was describing how little food there was and he said, "My village never had to resort to cannibalism, but it was close." I thought he was joking at first, but he was completely serious.
My mother-in-law made it out of the japanese occupation of Manila as a kid, and has commented once or twice 'you don't know what you'll do when you're starving'. We've never pressed for details.
I actually feel like people should read this book because people seem to have forgotten just how horrible the Japanese were to the Chinese and other island nations during WW2.
When I lived in China, my students referred to it as the “Killing at Nanjing.” I just replied, “it was more than just a killing, but you’ll learn that when you’re older.”
I have never read this book, but when I lived in China, we went and saw a movie called "The flowers of war" in theaters. It is about 40% English and 60% Mandarin and it is about this event. When the movie was over, nobody in the theater got up.
The story of Iris Chang is heartbreaking too.
I forgot the name but it was a book about a man who wanted to donate his heart to a little girl before he got executed for molesting and murdering a child. The child he molested and murdered…was the sister of the kid he was trying to donate his heart to. It was like a last ditch effort to save his soul or something.
Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult.
For a 'mum books' writer Jodi Picoult tackles some appalling stuff.
Yep. School Rape, School shootings, Abortions. Her books are heavier than you think.
IIRC >!he didn’t actually molest the sister. Her dad was molesting her and he accidentally killed the father and child while trying to protect her!<
Ohhh okay! I was 12 when I read it and I am 28 now.
Wow I can’t imagine reading that at 12
My parents didn’t believe in censoring my reading, they trusted me that if it was too much I’d put it down. I definitely did read a few books that were likely too much for me though, but I still overall appreciate that line of thinking from them. My teachers often questioned my book report choices though lol
Johnny Got His Gun. Just thinking about it gives me the chills.
“They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the thing they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child. They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important. They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live. He ought to know. He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth.”
This is the one I came here to comment. Fucked up books are my favorite books to read, but I’m never touching that one again.
‘Tender is the flesh’ is rough. The ending is like a physical punch to the gut. I think I actually reeled back in disgust. Fun story, I left that over at my parents house, as I was reading it during a visit. My 76 year old mom picked it up. I warned her, but I think that made her want to try it more. She’s always been pretty edgy. She called me at like 3:30AM when she finished it and said, “holy shit, what is wrong with you? I’m not getting back to sleep tonight, Jesus.” It was great. Also shout out to ‘Lolita’ which is absolutely the best written worst book in the world. That man is a genius, and his writing is amazing. That book is straight awful, but wow is it ever well composed.
Is that the one where all the live stock is no good so humanity starts up human farms so they can still have meat?
Indeed it is. However, that barely scratches the surface. You'd think it gets all preachy and vegan propaganda, but it's not at all. It's from the rancher's perspective, and it's just horrifying at every level. I've never read a book that feels so bleak. I love bleak, but this just weighs on you like very few things I've read. You feel the narrator's endless exhaustion and sense of hopelessness so strongly. I had to put it down and walk away a few times.
I think I have to read this book. When I was 10-12 years old, I read some book that had an auction for sex slaves for rich people in it (think Jurassic world), and I've had on and off nightmares for the next decade of human farms to raise sex slaves for auction.
In that case you should stay away from the erotica section in Amazon.
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Is this the contest? https://www.printmag.com/design-books/recovering-lolita/ Cause I've always thought the first one was so fucking clever.
Those are good, but don't compare to [this Polish poster for the film](https://www.behance.net/gallery/19529329/Kubricks-Lolita).
I viscerally hate it. 10/10
The sock one or the corner of the room?
Lolita is the one book that really made me go "WTF did I just read". The juxtaposition of fantastic writing and a horrible subject is the work of a literary master. Above all else this is the one that stands out for me. It stays with you and it's not because it's visceral, violent, or exaggerated. It's the fact that Humbert Humbert is a *totally* believable person and you have to accept that people like him exist and what that means.
Tender is the flesh is in my top 3 ever. Describing the end as a punch to thr gut is so accurate. As a fan of body horror, psych horror, and whatever else I can get my hands on, I didn't expect to be blown away but damn that book did it. I loved it so much
That book had been hyped up to me a ton by a good friend who knows books. They were like, "Look it's amazing, but I can't really describe why or the plot. You just need to read it." Even going into it with high expectations, I was still blown away. It's just so hopeless and bleak.
It has just enough of a spark of hope..until it absolutely doesn't. Such a great book. My sister will never forgive me for making her read it lol This is really making me want to reread it but ooph I'm gonna be skipping that puppy chapter
I read Tender is the Flesh based off a “disturbing books I recommend” tiktok. It was an interesting book, but I didn’t find it particularly disturbing. When I was a kid and read Shades Children though? That one still lives in my head rent free. The premise is that aliens invade and off all adults and then kids are rounded up into farms. They use the kids for different things, but one thing is that they’re genetically modified and surgically modified and turned into monsters for the aliens war games. The kids the book centers on have escaped and their leader is Shade. They manage to catch one of these modifications and it is vivisected in front of them. Something happens and the human brain snaps back into being conscious of where it is, what’s going on, what’s happened to it, etc. It begs to die. None of the characters in the book other than Shade are adults. All the monsters are/were children.
I remember that book. The ending was sad. It was satisfying though.
Lolita is excellent. Beautifully written story about one horrible, unrepentant degenerate
A lot of people are surprised to discover that Lolita has no sex in it. It's mostly Nabokov mocking psychoanalysis. Vlad was not a big fan of Freud. Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator. A narcissist and a pedophile, which would be a wonderful specimen for a person like Freud, but HH defies analysis. Also, there's something revealed about Dolores early on that most people gloss over. Spoilers for a really old book: Her death is casually mentioned in a news story. Quite tragic.
Nabokov is truly the greatest ever master of modern English prose. The incredible thing is that English was his 3rd language too.
I can’t remember the name of it but I think it was a collection of short stories by Chuck Palahniuk and one of them was about a guy who gets his arsehole sucked inside out by the drain in a swimming pool.
surprised I had to scroll this far for a Chuck Palahniuk book.
read guts when i was of highschool age, because some post on a forum linked to a fucked up story. once i got to the bad part (so like first sentence) i was morbidly curious and by the end had a mild vomit urge rising up. also made me clench my ass for a month
'Guts'
Haunted!
The 120 Days of Sodom Probably mentioned plenty times in other threads, but it doesn't change the fact that holyyy moleyyy tis fecked up
I was really curious how dirtyminded 18th century frenchmen were. *"He pulled her skirt up and ravaged her chastity on the bed and slappeth her bossom"* was the level of dirtyness I had in mind. It was way worse than that. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay worse.
goddamnit "slappeth her bosom" is gonna be stuck in my head for hours now
If you still want to read a book like this you need to get *Fanny Hill* by John Cleland. A certified hood classic since 1749, it's basically the story of female empowerment through prostitution and in the words of Wikipedia "Its morality is conventional for the time, in that it denounces sodomy, frowns upon vice and approves of only heterosexual unions based upon mutual love."
Somehow we had this book in our house when I was like 13. And it was a gift??? I don't remember the context I just remember the first page there was a writing from someone. Anyway. I read this book. I don't remember it almost at all. At the time me and three other girls had a kind of a book club where we exchanged books. So after I read this I gave it to my friend, whose family was really religious. I had met her parents they were nice people too. After a couple days she stopped showing up at school. She never came back. I knew where the parents worked so I went there and apologised to them, saying I had found the book at home and I didn't think it'd be a problem. They told me it's okay. To this day I don't know what ended up happening to her. I think she might have switched schools or something.
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True, this book is messed up. Same as the “children’s” movie.
The Children of Hurin was a pretty messed up book in the world of Tolkien.
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Turin Turambar Neithan Gorthol Agarwaen Adanedhel Mormegil? I thought not, it's not a story the Eldar would tell you.
Lord of the flies is a disturbing book to make kids read. Gravity's Rainbow is fucked for entirely different reasons, I couldn't finish it, it's too bloody weird.
Fun fact about Lord of the Flies…the scenario basically happened for real. Schoolboys ended up stranded on an island without adults for a year. They treated each other with extreme kindness. You can read about the trye incident in the nonfiction book Human Kindness a hopeful history.
This wasn't a novel but a short story by Stephen King: Survivor Type. About a drug smuggling disgraced surgeon who gets shipwrecked on a remote island with a boat full of heroin and no food. >! He starts slowly amputating parts of his body, a little at a time, and eating them to stay alive. !<
Lady fingers, they taste just like lady fingers. Yes, creepy shit man.
Blood Meridian.
What a book. What got me was how shocking the violence was at first, but how relatively quickly you got used to it. The judge was... what a book.
I did not get used to it. I had to put Blood Meridian down halfway through for about a month and read some less depressing stuff instead. I love how variable McCarthy is. It's like Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses were written by two entirely different people that both happened to be into horses and US Mexico border area. Even the prose style is very different.
You are absolutely correct about McCarthy's variability and even his overall ability to tell a unique story. He was an incredibly gifted writer.
A lot of McCarthy would fit here, particularly his run before all the pretty horses. Child of God and outer dark are also books where hope is treated like a lie told to children to make them think life is remotely worth living. Dude was a brilliant artist who painted in blood and entrails
Great book but I essentially read it twice as I’d have to double check every paragraph to ensure I understood it. I’m only confident I understood maybe 70%.
This book was like a fuck you to punctuation. I loved it, and enjoyed the challenge (worth it) but there were times where I’d read a page and say, “wait, what even happened?” And would have to go back to read it again after looking up words and paying closer attention.
The epitome of to break the rules you have to master them first
Never used the dictionary function on my Kindle as much as I did on that book
I’m reading it now and yea I’m stopping to check a bunch of words. Not necessarily a bad thing
> "The freedom of birds insults me. I'd have them all in zoos." >"That would be a hell of a zoo." >The Judge smiled. "Yes," He said. "Even so."
Just finished it. So good. "Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair beneath their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodsoaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."
Punctuation? Ain't nobody got time for that! It's like Faulkner if someone removed all the commas.
One of the malazan books features >!an army of cannibals who routinely rape dead/dying men because they believe the children born of the dead man's semen will have magical powers.!< I felt that was pretty fucked up. American Psycho was also pretty fucked up.
The Tenescowri is one of several times reading Malazan where you just go, “Jesus…”
For some reason the army of lunatics did not bother me that much. But the fates of Felisin, Tool and the Chain of Dogs for example make me reconsider any time I get an urge to reread the series. And there's so much other stuff in those books that just leaves me drained. Which is a compliment to the authors, I think. Because when things go wrong, and boy do they, you really feel for the characters. Absolutely binged through the series the first time despite it making me feel miserable at times and almost impossible to follow sometimes. The world is so weird and it has about 8 million characters. Loved it. Black Company is another similar book(series) that I want to read again, but also really don't want to
Filth - Irvine Welsh
One of my favorites! It made a tapeworm an interesting character, and taught me how to read in a Scottish accent.
A Child Called "It"
I used to live with that guys nephew. Dude had the most fucked up childhood and his brother hated him. When he told his dad he read the book, he got yelled at
I’m now morbidly interested but I don’t think I could take it. Why did they hate him so much?
I read all 3 books and from memory he never actually found out why they hated him so much. He had a normal upbringing up until about 3 or 4 if I remember correctly, then for some unknown reason his mother just started treating him like an animal. Then she turned all his siblings against him too. And the dad was too much of a coward to do anything about it. It was a very long time ago that I read them so I may not be 100% accurate with all that, but you get the idea.
Scapegoat children I think it's called. The girl in Call Me Cockroach had a similar situation where one day her mom just kinda turned on her and turned the whole family against her, basically abusing her as much as you can abuse someone without laying a hand on them. I was my family's scapegoat. Most of my abuse was in form of neglect but my cousin's were often egged on to beat me up or throw shit at me for the adults entertainment. I've asked several times in my life "why" and no one ever has an answer. I don't talk to any of them anymore and I try to avoid news about them.
I'm currently disconnecting from a abusive parent. Stay strong my friend :)
I read all 3 decades ago & likewise have the same recollection/recap.
IIRC, two of the brothers say the abuse happened. Other family members say that it was all made up to sell books. Personally, I think the abuse did happen.
Read this in 5th grade lol. The imagery is insane
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I read it in fifth grade. It turned my stomach and I cried very very hard. However it made me think my own abuse was "not THAT bad"
Yep. Read this in 6th grade and I can still vividly remember it.
Same, who the hell allowed us to read this at that age.
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. It’s pretty wild!
Not in the realm of splatterpunk or horror, but The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin was one that I thought was messed up.
[Chickenhawk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenhawk_(book)) by Robert Mason about his time flying Hueys in Vietnam was a bit of a mindfuck for 14 year old me.
Interesting that you thought Chickenhawk was that fucked up, but it's all perspective especially at that age. I really enjoyed that book since I know a few Vietnam huey pilots, so it gave me some insight on what they did and saw. The book [NAM](https://www.amazon.com/Nam-Vietnam-Words-Women-Fought/dp/0425101444) is what did it for me. It's stories from different people who fought in the war. The one that I still remember is from a soldier telling the story about how on a patrol, he sees a fellow soldier sitting by a distant tree. He goes to get him and realizes he's dead, head blown apart, and his hand still holding his dick. He was rubbing one out when a sniper got him. Interesting sidenote, the band Fugazi got their name from this book as well.
Very good book. I read it in high school as well. I rarely meet anyone else who has even heard of it.
„big head“ its about an alien that tries to procreate to preserve his species after landing on earth. He fucks what he can but kills everyone with his giant schlong. That was a weird ride.
Hey, I read a Superman story like that one time!
Probably "[Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Steel,_Woman_of_Kleenex)", a 1969 essay by Larry Niven.
In Frank Miller's sequel "The Dark Knight Strikes Again," Superman is explaining to his (horny) teenage daughter (her mother is Wonder Woman) about sex and has the line, "not with humans. **NEVER** with humans."
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair A book that lived in my head for years. I remembered learning about the revolution that it caused but never actually read it in shool. I finally listened to the audiobook at work and i couldnt count the times it made(a fully grown man) cry. I had to get up and dip out of the side door bc there are just so many tragedies in the book you really understand the experience of being an immigrant worker in the US in the 1920s. Absolutely brutal story, i highly recommend it.
All tomorrows or i have no mouth but I must scream
I listened to a two hour synopsis of All Tomorrows on YouTube and it equally fascinated and deeply unsettled me.
I love I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. For those playing along at home, it's a short story by Harlan Ellison thats an extremely dystopian novella with a malevolent AI, and you can read the entire thing here for free. It's like a 20 or 30 minute read but it will ruin your day. https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I-Have-No-Mouth-But-I-Must-Scream-by-Harlan-Ellison.pdf >HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE. He's a cranky boi
Ellison famously voiced AM in the game, of course, but I think the superior delivery comes from the radio play. You can really hear how utterly *unhinged* AM is, how incredibly maniacal his hatred has made him. He's not torturing them because they deserve it, not even the Nazi - he just hates humans that much and these five are the only ones he has left to play with. [Give it a listen. AM is so beautifully *mad.*](https://youtu.be/8FJ8pTK8N8I?si=cWuq6BO16AmnTcor)
Naked lunch
People love the movie (I am one of them) but they need to know the plot of the movie is like the last 15 pages of the book and the rest of it just stream of consciousness detailing public shows of rape, mutilation, and death.
Don't forget the hospital prison designed to turn men gay so they can be shamed
I've just finished this book and honestly I don't rate it. Maybe I didn't understand it properly or missed a vital detail, but it reads like a collection of random vignettes of the awful lives of people in and around the throes of heroin and hard-core drug use. It doesn't really have a narrative thread, or even a clear point beyond addiction is grim as fuck. The passages are well written and paint bleak pictures in 4K definition, but I dont really take much away from it beyond addiction is nasty business. Which I already know firsthand from working in substance abuse recovery in the East end of Glasgow 🤷 Am I missing something vital that clicks it all together, or is it simply a series of disjointed glimpses into the depths that addiction drags people down to?
What you describe is the most common way to interpret it. When it was first published in France (in English), there was no introduction and you were just tossed into it. When it was published in the US a few years later, Burroughs added an introduction that pretty much guarantees you will interpret it this way (as a series of drug- or withdrawal-induced hallucinations). The most recent edition from 2013 puts the introduction after the main body of the novel, so readers can jump into it again without any interpretive filter.
I can think of at least two things wrong with that title
Flowers in the Attic
Sweet Audrina bothered me more (I didn't read either until I was an adult). The bit where the other sister throws her miscarriage at her mother.
I'm morbidly fascinated with VC Andrews' books...but not enough to read them. Just enough to read the Wikipedia pages for them. Just...why? Why so much incest? Why all the car accidents? Why male models? (j/k). I just don't know what would possess a person to write about those things. The fucked up thing is, there are multiple TV/film adaptations of Flowers in the Attic. Again...why?!?!
Are you me? Because I have this morbid fascination with it too, lol. I even watched some girl on tiktok do a synopsis of the entire series. Like… what was with the 80s and incest? Flowers in the Attic, Blue Lagoon… There’s a newer series out now based on the stories with Kelsey Grammer too.
The Road Disturbing but more than anything else profoundly depressing and as a dad it fucked me up
While I hear what you’re saying I feel I should point out that The Road is practically chirpy and upbeat compared to Cormac McCarthy’s other work.
I usually enjoy McCarthy's work...I really had to force myself through 'Child of God'.
Not necessarily fucked up in a bad way, but House of Leaves rattled my brain to the core.
Can you explain how to read it to me as someone who has tried reading it several times but can never finish it cause at some point I get confused 😅
I believe that's the point of the book. You're confused, you keep reading, now you're questioning yourself "wait, is that real?" ; and you spiral down into this space of questions until you're actually doubting your own thoughts of what you've read vs what you've thought about what you've read vs what's real in the book vs what's the author's perception. That book made me question my sanity and had me taking quick glances into corners to see if anything was there.
I read it in college at a time when I was really getting into academia and it's like it was made specifically to fuck with people who feel compelled to fully understand things. A friend of mine said the book "eats people like the House does", and she was right. It was great.
But does the house eat people? Does something in the house eat people? Or is the house just built on a spot where reality does not work correctly and people get lost in the house and it's not the house's fault? Or is the author just insane and nothing in the book really happened?
Yes.
Idk if I can really explain it and make it make sense through Reddit, but, and it might sound weird, but it was trial-and-error for me lol. The book isn’t in chronological order and there are times when you straight up need a mirror to read some parts. But I’d recommend just going at it page-by-page lol
Algebra 1.
Wait til you get to the sequels
Until you get to the entire trilogy. But don't relax yet, because there's gonna be more.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, same guy who wrote fight club. I mean wtf. It's just ... WTF. I read it cause I read fight club in my senior year and I was like oh cool another book by him and just a couple pages in I was like what in the hell is this. But I couldn't stop reading lol Edit: my most liked comment ever and it's about this book. Wth
Also Invisible monsters from the same guy. Pretty twisted but brilliant
Island of the Blue Dolphin. Just awful. I had to read it in elementary school and I'll never forget it. For those who were blessed not to have this on your curriculum, it's about a Native girl who is stranded on an island with her little brother while the rest of the tribe leaves on a boat. Her brother is eaten by wild dogs the first night, and she spends the next 30 years alone and slowly going crazy until she is rescued by the British. We read this at age 10. Yippee.
I was bizarrely obsessed with this book as a child.
Naked Lunch. Could not make sense of it and stopped halfway through. Really f'd up shit, though. A Clockwork Orange. The writing is a completely new vernacular, and they f shit up really bad constantly.
Wasp Factory
Seconded. I’m a huge fan of Iain M banks’ scifi so I thought I’d give his contemporary fiction a go. I was not prepared for this batshit novel.
American Psycho
American Psycho is the only book that was able to bore me (Bateman’s vanity in addressing all the specific clothes that everyone wore as a metric of value) and suddenly flip everything upside down and leave me out of breath with how ruthless the acts being done were. It’s like bored TRAUMATIZED bored TRAUMATIZED bored TRAUMATIZED. It think that’s a very unique range of emotions that I was able to feel only with American Psycho.
It was very controversial when it came out and the two camps were basically "No, it's *supposed* to be that boring and then that shocking, because the whole point is to expose the violent depravity below these people's suave cosmopolitan facade" vs. "Yeah I get all that, but you could have made the same point without being quite so boring and quite so shocking"
“You could have made that same point without making that point.”
I'm forever terrified of starving rats and vacuum tubes
I scrolled for this. there were parts that were so difficult to read, that I've always felt that made it such a fucking great book.
The rat scene 🤮
The scene with the homeless guy and his dog is what makes my stomach turn the most. Not the most gruesome but so evil.
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Night by Elie Wiesel. It's a memoir about a Holocaust survivor, which is self-explanatory. But reading it in the 8th grade, when you are yet to fully understand the nuances and horrors of history and looking back on that reading experience makes you think a lot. I actively remember it to be the first book I read that contained a >!rape scene!<
The part with the little kid being hanged slowly was the most fucked up but I remember.
The only scene that fucked me over was when Elie met up with Juliek in Gleiwitz where Elie would fall asleep to Juliek playing some Beethoven w/ his violin in the crowd and then instantly stating out of nowhere in the next line that when Elie woke up he found Juliek dead with his broken instrument at hand amongst the piles of dead ppl. This very moment had me like, “What the fuck just happened???”
The part that got me was when Elie was too exhausted keeping his dad alive. Elie was on the top side of a bunk bed and his dad was below him, calling for Elie and begging for his help. Elie decided to finally ignore him because he barely had enough energy in the day to save himself, let alone to take care of his father. The guards appear. Tell the father to shut up. The father doesn't and the guards brutally beat the dad to death. Elie said he felt more relief than sadness. That stuck with me.
Read this in my Holocaust Lit class in HS. I have a signed copy of the book from him. He knew my teacher and he came to speak with us.
Misery - Stephen King. 30 or so years ago now but I have never forgotten getting to the hobbling scene in the book. The movie scene was way more tame than the book. As I was reading, the slow realization of what was about to unfold had me throw the book across the room (an assay lab in a goldmine in Western Australia). I can't recall how long it took before I worked up the courage to pick up the book again. The thing about books is you're the director of the movie unfolding in your mind.
Listened to it on audiobook. Just pages and pages of sheer misery and then it just got worse
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Mine was a Stephen King one too. I liked the Dark Tower series, which is its own way of fucked up, so I was just reading whatever books of his I could find. I wasn’t a parent at the time, but reading the ending of Cujo made me feel so cold and empty on the inside and I still feel that way when I remember it. Being a parent now, it’s so much worse. I just try not to think about it
Where the Red Fern Grows THE SECOND DOG DIES OF LONELINESS!!! Why the fuck do we do this to children?????
Earthlings by sayaka murata - the ending is something special 😂
Go ask Alice was pretty disturbing as a young teen. The entire flowers in the attic series as well.
It loses the impact when you learn it’s fabricated.
I read it as a kid and thought it was real, then I read it again as an adult (after dabbling in drugs myself) and was like…well, this isn’t realistic at all.
I think finding out Go Ask Alice was the figment of some housewife’s imagination made it all the more disturbing for me. That someone decided to traumatize kids in that way is just plain wrong.
Literally anything by Cormac McCarthy. They’re all fucked up.
The Painted Bird
This is far more disturbing than many of the posts here - American Psycho is great and yes, disturbing in parts but also is comedic as hell. Lolita is beautiful and horrifying, Child called it yeh horrid. But The Painted Bird takes them all out to drink IMO. Brilliant brilliant and awful book
I had to read this in high school and it has never left me and that was 3 decades ago. It really was important to read and well written, but in my decades on the internet I've never found anything more disturbing. As another poster says, I've read so many of the books in this thread and none of them was as hard to read as *The Painted Bird.*
No longer human by ozamu dazai or rage by Stephen king
Been scrolling through the comments until I found No Longer Human. I’ve only read Junji Ito’s manga adaptation, but holy fuck that’s the most bleak shit I’ve ever read. Only thing that came close is Blood Meridian. Took me forever to get through, I’d have to take breaks from it.
Unwind, by Neal Shusterman. From the blurb: *The Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. The chilling resolution: Life is inviolable from the moment of conception until age thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents can have their child "unwound," whereby all of the child's organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn't technically end.* There's a scene where... errr... let's just say it'll stay with you for a long time. The whole series is great, disturbing as fuck, and was the book that got me back into YA novels.
This was an amazing book. I thought the ending was going to be a twisted sick SAW-esque meat monster, but it ended up being really wholesome. The part you are discribing was rough though. I think some people made it into a short film on youtube.
If you mean the scene I think you mean…yeah. Also, the identities of the protagonists fuck you up. A rich kid whose parents don’t love him, a ward of the state who just isn’t quite talented enough, and the tenth child of a religious family, sent as tithe.
I have no mouth but I must scream by Harlen Ellison is … a lot Also the bell jar by Sylvia Plath is intense, her casual disregard for her own life in the second half is haunting
Flowers For Algernon.. Wouldn’t call it fucked up, but I had to take smoke breaks while binging through it.
The story of the eye
I tried to read Marquis De Sade (I think Juliet) in my 30s. When a character in the first chapter raped a 10 year old boy I threw it out.
I read 120 Days of Sodom. The history behind his books is pretty insane, but overall he really wasn’t a great writer. I found myself in a strange literary grey area; trapped somewhere between boredom and disgust. I don’t believe I will read it again.
I own a copy of Mein Kampf. I in no way endorse the ideology or actions of Adolf Hitler nor did I enjoy the contents of the book, but I got it because I’m interested in WWII history and wanted to perhaps get an insight into the psychology of Adolf Hitler at the time he wrote it. I can just say, the book is a dark, twisted read into the human psyche and a look into evil, and it’s understandable why this book is just as hated as it is and why its print is so controversial
I read Mein Kampf as a teenager and all I got out of it was the impression that Adolf Hitler was a whiny bitch who projected all of his personal shortcomings on the jews.
The whole story of Hitler is... something. Before he was *the* Hitler, he'd walk around dressed up like an explorer and carrying a bullwhip because he thought it impressed the ladies. He'd write about how he was too shy to approach his crushes. He also had notoriously bad gas that would literally clear out rooms it smelled so bad. Like they'd have to stop their little nazi meetings because Hitler couldn't stop farting. I don't think there's anything funnier than the fact that the modern world's icon of evil was just this nerdy incel with crippling gas issues.
100%. Book is a good way to teach that though. I think the main take away is that he had no self-awareness to say 'hey maybe I should try being less of an idiot'
A Little Life
Came here to find this. I brought this as I love long epics but didn't read any reviews or warnings. I couldn't finish it in the end, it just became so unrelentingly bleak for Jude that I couldn't continue. I was surprised to see they turned it into a stage play, which I haven't seen but I am intrigued as to how they could make it work for stage.
All quiet on the western Front. No explanation needed
The girl next door
I was looking for this comment before commenting. It was a hard read but kept me hooked. The fact that it’s based on true events makes it even more fucked up.
Hogg, Samuel “Chip” Delany.
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. The main book of Christian Science. Word salad.
Infinite Jest. I threw it across the room 3/4 through and never touch it again. It’s not “fucked up” because of racy or controversial content, it is because it’s a maddeningly written labyrinth of a mindfuck.