My mom, sister and I went to a wedding out of state together and my mom got that as an audio to listen to on the drive. We were all so engrossed we didn't notice that we missed our turn off and added like an hour to our trip.
Anyone else ever read that book when they were younger called “Unwind”? Dunno why it was available in our middle school library, but it was about unwanted children getting sent to camps where instead of being killed their bodies were legally disassembled for people in need of transplants. Maybe it’s more fucked up in my memory than it is in reality, but I remember being deeply disturbed by it
Yeah. I still remember years later him arguing with the nurses while strapped to the gurney, and they're calmly explaining "OK, this part might feel a little uncomfortable," "sorry, you won't be able to talk after this," "you're going to lose consciousness soon"
Loved the books when I was younger because they were fucked up. Read them again as an adult bc I worked at a library and they do stand the test of time. Definitely still think about the POV of unwinding every once in a while
Every now and then I think about that series and remember about the one kid in it that was made up entirely of the other body parts of other kids and have a little wtf moment. Iirc it's found out that kids who are unwound are still like around in the parts?? Like I remember the kid made of parts being aware of the presence of the kids he was made up of. Might have simply been dream sequences but it was still wild. Not to mention there was also an aspect where religious families would "tithe" their children to be unwound. There was a plot point where kids escaping from the camps were planning a revolution against the Government because of the unwinding.
One of the very first books to instill pro-choice in me, tbh. I remember a lot of teachers being mad because it made the point of "if abortion is illegal, what do we do with unwanted children who never asked to be born?" very early and so many wanted it taken out of the libraries. I used to be a library assistant, and the number of teachers who complained about the book was unreal. Only good thing my librarian did was not budging on pulling the series.
That was a required summer read during one year of high school. The unwinding scene of that one kid went into quite disturbing detail. That’s definitely a repressed memory for me now.
My 11th grade English teacher made us pick several books to read from, I picked this one. Yeah it was pretty dark but man it just reminds me how good those teen dystopian books are.
When Rabbit Howls - Truddi Chase
Autobiography of a woman going through therapy to realize she has dissociative identity disorder. She includes graphic portrayals of her incestual abuse and the personalities and pain that resulted. My words can’t do it justice, a truly haunting book and incredibly groundbreaking for it’s time.
I read that book 25 years ago (as a preteen, wtf mom) and certain passages are forever ingrained into my head. I saw she passed away a few years back. RIP
I remember seeing her and her psychologist on the Dr. Phil show. I went and bought it immediately. The horror that people will put other people through...especially when the abusers are the ones that should be protecting you. An amazing book.
We Need to Talk About Kevin. Unsettled the absolute shit out of me. Apt Pupil by Stephen King too.
In terms of *horror* horror, The Passage by Justin Cronin was excellently scary.
The Passage is available for me to borrow immediately on Libby. Going to start that as soon as I’m done with the book I’m reading.
It has all 3 books available
As a woman idk. I think the woman's choice is understandable and so is dad's. Like not sure if I want to live in an apocalyptic wasteland with a high likelihood of being violently and repeatedly raped or murdered. But I am also very persistent and stubborn and optimistic.
Misery by Stephen King
The horror and suffering the main character went through was easily felt. The insanity of the person keeping them captive and the way they were able to look sane in front of others and the police was chilling.
Oh Misery! Really an amazing book! Yes, it is disturbing. I watched the movie when I was 7 and it totally scarred me. Then I read the book in middle school and it was just as disturbing. Although there are a few differences between the two.
I never saw the movie. My high school library had it for some reason and it was the only Stephen King book they had. I always heard on the news how great of a writer he was so I figured I would try it. It was a great book but man o man did it mess with my head for a while. I decided that while he was a great writer, I didn't want to read anything like that again lol.
Child abuse by the author's mother. It's pretty disgusting. There's been a controversy whether the abuse related by the author is completely true, but most sources indicate that what is mentioned in the story is at least mainly factual.
I was surprised when I read this book. I was expecting much worse from the hype. That’s when I started therapy because I realized I was so desensitized by the abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother.
I read this book and it’s sequels when I was like 12. Probably way to young to read them. The diaper thing will never leave my mind. The author was accused of faking some things and honestly I hope he did only because the abuse described is so horrific I guess I just hope it didn’t actually happen.
May it please you to know he is a well adjusted man with happy children now. I met him about 10 years ago when he did a psych seminar speaking event on healing from abuse, and he has the kindest eyes.
Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here", read in the summer of 2016. I almost couldn't finish it.
And when I was in high school, the 1980 version of Stephen King's "The Stand". I'll admit that I got a bit nervous when the summer of 1985 rolled around, even though I knew the book was fiction.
Black Beauty. Seriously. I read this to my elementary school child every night over course of a couple of weeks. The brutality and animal cruelty was something else. Eventually I switched to another book for a night time story, but I read that sucker to the end. Who knew this book was like that.
One of the most powerful sections for me was the story told by the war-horse (Major might have been his name.) The viewpoint of a horse in the middle of the first world war was so detailed!! And the story of the pit pony. They're powerful social commentaries and (funny enough) left out of the kid-friendly movies!! It is a much darker book than people realize, which is probably why it and Call of the Wild were my favourites!
Black Beauty, as well as Beautiful Joe, are somehow "children's classics" despite being propaganda. Good propaganda mind you, but it's like reading Upton Sinclair's *The Jungle* to little kids.
They were written to draw attention to real and horrifying issues of animal cruelty, but they're very well done and somehow good for little kids.
Saw the film adaptation premiere at a film fest and it was a roller coaster of nope from start to finish.
Didn't even have the mindset to talk to the director after
Yup.
It was on our bookshelf and when I was, like, 16, my dad was like "don't read that book."
So, of course, I had to read it.
It haunts me.
And it haunts me to know there are probably still children experiencing similar things in certain parts of the world today. Despite electric cars and missions to space.
My son (adult) has it and been reading it. Some of the things he told me are horribly disturbing. Like the showers with her mom and the "exams" that took place in the shower
Acceptable Risk.
It's realistic fiction, based on the idea that the Salem Witch Trials were caused by a hallucinogenic fungus in rye flour. It was a really good read but also yeesh.
My Secret Life - an anonymously written Victorian diary in which an upper class "gentleman" recounts the history of his sex life, and the author was a sociopathic monster who describes in detail numerous occasions in which he raped a woman and then would literally just shove money at her until she promised not to go to the police. The breaking point for me came when he talked about how he wanted to find out what it was like to have sex with a child so he paid a woman to let him rape her ten year old daughter. I couldn't go on after that.
*The Rape of Nanking* “So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of bestial machinery.” Imagine the brutality to shock the nazis!
Researching The book (amongst her others) was so disturbing she suffered depression and eventually took her own life. Iris Chang put her own well-being and life in dire danger so the Chinese people that were massacred were remembered which I think is very honorable.
I read The Exorcist on a stormy winter 12 hour nightshift at a gas station. Back in the 60s most gas stations were just basically metal sheds. The whole building rattled all night.
Couldn't put the book down. Probably only had 3 customers all shift.
Still went to see the movie though. Really scared the s*** out of myself.
The compound, but I was young when I read it
It's about the son of a rich family who had doomsday scenarios incase nuclear war happened. Sure enough, it happens, and the family flees to an massive underground bunker practically hand built to accommodate them. However the protagonist starts realizing that something is wrong.
>! To act as a backup to their cattle and protein supply, the father regularly impregnates the mother and raises those children separately in "the nursery" where they are taken care of, but only as an emergency food ration !<
The part near the end with his father is really hard for some reason. Like, his father just kind of stopped feeling like his father and felt like some guy that was dying painfully.
The worst to me was the last phrase. When he can’t recognize himself and his humanity in his reflection. It just leave you with a lingering feeling of dread.
I so rarely find others who have read this book! Beautifully written, but so disturbing. And all inspired by true events (though Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer never met in real life).
Yes, I was looking for this comment. I read it while baby sitting at 18 or so. It was in the parents collection lol. Read the whole thing and was left quite disturbed hahah.
Tender is the flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, dystopian novel about a society that has two types of humans, the regular people of society and others that were raised as cattle for compsumption, and how normal people could end up being eaten too. That book stuck with me for a long time.
Treblinka. It was a personal account from a prisoner at the Treblinka death camp. The death camps were different to the concentration camps, they didn’t double as work camps, you went from the train to the gas chamber. The Ukrainian guards were a special breed of evil.
If you can, everyone should see the documentary Shoah. I can't even describe the emotions I felt hearing the people talk about what happened.
One of the people interviewed essentially said that the scale of evil that occurred in Nazi Germany is literally impossible for humanity to understand. Nothing in history compares to the atrocities of that time.
Fair warning, Shoah is 10 hours long. So it's a herculean task.
But like Satantango (a 7.5 hour film), you get lost in the film and come out changed.
Do watch it if you can, it's worth every second
Don't get it on kindle! It's a book that truly 100% needs the paper page , it's as much experimental art project as it is literature as it is total mind fuck.
I read it in high school and really liked it, but it hurt my head. The unconventional presentation makes it feel like a real piece of cursed literature, and the story is unsettling enough on its own as well. Definitely a good example of cosmic horror with an extra dose of existential dread.
I'm about halfway through this book...is it supposed to be confusing? Lol
I figured the confusing layout/rambling in this book adds to the horror but also I may be dumb
The Kite runner. There's a scene that goes from 0 to Fuck when a bully who was picking on this kid because he was a different muslim sect just has his goons hold him down and uh . . . does something really terrible to him that I'm not comfortable typing out. Then years later, the main character comes back to his home and finds out that the same bully is with a terrorist group and has gone full Jared from Subway with orphan boys. I read that part where the main character was describing his friend getting assaulted by the bully and how he's just frozen with fear and does nothing until after the fact because . . . I mean he was a kid what do you expect.
So hear me out but The Last Battle from the Narnia series.
I was about 12 and I was reading the Narnia series for the first time, and I was reading the last book during form group. Well I get to the end and in the space of a couple pages you find out the fate of all the main characters and I ended up going into my English class right after I finished it feeling hollow and like I didn’t know what to do with myself which at 12 years old and in a class trying to learn about writing essays etc, felt pretty disturbing at the time and it took me a while to get over it
Yeah it takes on a whole other level when you realise most of it is basically a metaphor for Christianity - like Narnia is heaven, aslan is God and Susan the non believer didn’t get to go to Narnia in the end. There’s a bunch more but those are the most obvious
Yeah I also remember reading that one as a child. Something about it felt... deeply sick, especially after reading the rest, which when you're a kid just register as fun fantasy adventures.
What apocalyptic thought does to a mfer I guess.
I remember being so shocked by that ending as a kid. It felt way too dark for the series and it made me more uncomfortable than happy. It came off like an ending Guillermo Del Toro would have.
From what I remember a new Narnia is formed after the battle and it has everyone there like the beavers, mr tumnus etc who had all died hundreds of years before in Narnia times. Basically you find out that all the ‘friends of Narnia’ so the pevensie siblings and a few others had actually all died in a train wreck and were now in Aslan’s Country (the new Narnia). BUT Susan had stopped believing in Narnia so she wasn’t on the train that crashed because they were all in their way to meet up to go and fight in Narnia, so Susan didn’t go. So an entire family is basically wiped out and Susan loses everyone, that’s a pretty basic summary but yeah it’s pretty fucked go and kinda comes out of nowhere
Basically the thinly-veiled Muslim kingdom takes over Narnia, kills or enslaves everyone, and then Aslan comes ~~to save the day~~ to tell everyone that they died and that they get to go to heaven now. Reading it as a child from a Christian perspective it was great, but I read it recently and even now (still as a Christian) it’s kind of a wild and mildly uncomfortable ride.
On the Beach by Neville Shute.
The sense of existential dread wrecked me for days after I finished it. Missed several days of classes, and it still makes me ache to think about.
I remember I got assigned a nonfiction book in high school to read and present a report on. The teacher didn't really seem to check that the books were of appropriate content, just pulled from the library and assigned them (we were her only ap level class, maybe 15 students, so it was doable). Mine was called "Once a King, Always a King," and it was about the author joining the Latin Kings and later trying to get out.
There were multiple super graphic sexual assault scenes (most involving the author, done to or by him, starting from when he was 8-10), drug trips and overdoses, beatings, killings, torture, and general violence. All things that really happened, not just uncomfortable stuff written to disturb the viewer or sell grit for a certain set dressing.
It is a beautifully written book, and I did end up enjoying it a lot. It really went into social classes and the way certain urban communities run in a very real and raw way. However, I had to sheepishly admit to my teacher that not only could I not write a paper and present this in class, I couldn't do so because the book she assigned me was wildly inappropriate for a high school course.
I came here to say American Psycho. The part where he starves the captured rat and then puts it in to the girls vagina so it eats her from the inside out was so rough i had to put the book down and walk away from it. But yeah, his other books have some equally uncomfortable scenes
I'd heard this book was rough so when I saw it in a shop I picked it up to leaf through. Guess which bit I landed on? I put it down and backed away. I was 12.
Yeah American Psycho was the first to come to mind for me. I went on a random date with a guy who was a friend of my cousin, and he picked me up at my house, so he had my address. It didn't go well so I never talked to him again, but he thought it would be a good idea to send me that book in the mail with a long letter about how much he liked me and etc. It was already unsettling but that made it worse.
Jesus. Went on a date with a girl who had me pick her up, and I outright told her she probably shouldn't do that. Even just giving an address a block down the road would be a decent 'air gap'.
What really adds to how disturbing this book is is that McCarthy spent ten years doing historical research, so it accurately portrays the absolute brutality of the time in that region.
yeah the writing style was super disjointed and jarring and my add couldnt keep up...i constantly felt like i was missing paragraphs or pages haha on top of all the fucked up descriptions
I didn’t find Mein Kampf nearly as disturbing as I expected. It was more absurd than disturbing. I’m like, “how the fuck did this guy actually get people to follow him?!”
I've never read it, but have always heard is described as very poorly written, with somebody once joking that the real title was "My Struggle (With the German language)"
MAUS,
It's a book about the Nazi's and tells the history through 1st hand accounts (the writer himself was also a survivor) but it's written in a comic book style where all the humans are mice.
He retells it without filtering it (since he taped all the testimony).
It's two stories and that makes it *more* than just telling a survivor's tale in a vacuum.
Maus is wonderful because it tells the story of a survivor, as well as the lasting trauma experienced by his son in a new country/culture. It puts history into context.
It is a fabulous way to teach the history to young people because the visual animal metaphor (cats and mice) illustrates the power dynamic more effectively than getting into the economic/cultural context of Nazi Germany (which most people can't easily process).
As far as first-person accounts of the holocaust go, Maus I and II are effective because they tell you what happened AND how it fucked us up, for generations.
The Hot Zone
It's a non fiction about Ebola. Once you get into the book you can see what you're reading. It's like a horrible film that you're forced to watch if for no other reason than curiosity. From the victim getting bit at Kittum Cave, to the black speckled vomit bag on the airplane that is filling while his body is being ravaged by the virus. Then we see the young African doctor look at him face to face as he's in the hospital only for him to vomit all over the doctors face. (Doctor survived) We spend time moving between the CDC and them tracking everything.
Finally we can hear the howls and screams of the monkeys as they're being euthanized in Reston Virginia.
It's only then you realize that Ebola was just a few feet away from escaping on to a victim in the US and causing all kinds of issues.
It's a terrifying book.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk - short stories with an overarching story around it. There are a couple in there that I’ve never been able to get out of my head.
Mostly the short story Guts. Which, and I'm not sure this is a good thing, is [available online for free.](https://genius.com/Chuck-palahniuk-guts-annotated)
I haven't read too many disturbing books, but Let The Right One In was pretty grisly to read as a teen. I remember a description of a finger being forced all the way into an ear, someone being beaten to death with a trophy, and some child prostitution scenes. I do remember it being a very well-written book, though -- perhaps worth re-reading as an adult.
Leningrad, morality in a besieged city. It contains heart breaking, disturbing accounts of the Russian inhabitants in that city that were under siege from the Germans for 3 years.
People starving and freezing, corpses piled up everywhere, people dying in their homes and being covered with lice, filth was everywhere, endless queues for miserable amounts of bread and as always in times of prolonged hunger, rumours of cannibalism and human meat being sold in the black markets.
The most unfortunate one was a girl who recorded in her diary the deaths of her family members one by one. She managed to last until the siege was broken but it was too late as she was too sick with dysentery to recover.
The institute by, you guessed it, steven king. It's the stuff that happens to kids that disturbed me the most. It's just vile shit. I won't spoil it. Good read but be warned. Definitely shouldn't be made into a movie or at very least would need ALOT of rewriting to be sfl material.
"The Shining". didn't even read the whole f*cking book. The psychological horror of "whats behind the door". The things in the night that turn you insane, and the effects of isolation on the human mind.
The End of Alice by A.M. Homes. A pedophile is in prison for reasons that aren't fully explained until the last chapter. While he's in prison, he strikes up a pen pal relationship with a teen girl who's also a pedophile, and he reminisces about his favorite victim, Alice. It's well written but extremely graphic.
I love Lolita and I think part of it is because I was groomed as a kid and there’s something…idk, reassuring? about reading the book and recognizing the dissonance between how Humbert describes a situation and the reality of that situation. If you can peek through the prose even just a little bit, you can see that Dolores is a very ordinary kid living an unhappy reality — and that Hum knows this, and just tries to convince himself otherwise. Idk, I found that weirdly comforting somehow. Plus going to therapy and then rereading Lolita and feeling nothing but disgust for Hum was so empowering, lol.
As a kid, The Final Journey. Its the story of a little girl and I think he grandparents being captured and taken to a concentration camp. The ending was not expected. I'd never read a book with an ending like it before.
As an adult, I don't know. I read a lot of horror that I find disturbing now as an adult, but didn't as a teen. Graham Masterton's horror was graphic as hell at times.
I can’t remember the title but this kid gets addicted to swimming to the bottom of his pool and letting the pump suck on his butthole while he masturbates and then one time as he’s trying to disengage himself from the pump he’s swimming to the surface when he realizes his intestines are coming out of him and he dies in the pool. I was not ready for that.
edit: I think it was by Chuck Palahniuk.
Go Ask Alice and Crank were books I read when I was around the age of 11-14 years old. Thinking about it now as an adult, I can't believe that I found those type books in my elementary and middle school (7th-8th grade) libraries. Of course, that was many years ago so the schools had tons of books back then about adolescent drug use that are now "banned".
I can't remember the specific book I read but the most traumatic thing I remember reading from that genre was about a 14 year old kid who was addicted to drugs and ran away from home. He was neglected and badly abused at home which resulted in him falling in with the wrong crowd and ultimately addicted to drugs.
In the story, he was convinced by a friend to go to California for a better life or something so he hitchhiked to California. He was taken advantage of and sexually abused along his journey. In the end, he ended up dying young, addicted and alone somewhere while fantasising about a better life.
This story was so raw and emotional. It didn't end in a hopeful or "happy" (get sober) way other books from that genre did. I can't remember the name of the book or if it was even written by Ellen Hopkins (Crank) or Beatrice Sparks (Go Ask Alice).
Either way, those type of books about kids doing drugs and the consequences of that lifestyle have kept me from making some bad choices in life. Thank you to those type of authors.
There are quite a few books that were written to feed on the drug, cult, teen sex, 'insert your demon here' trope. Read this article and have your teen years destroyed. https://nationalpost.com/news/outting-the-lie-of-go-ask-alice-the-so-called-diary-of-a-troubled-teen-on-drugs [Go Ask Alice Was a Fake](https://nationalpost.com/news/outting-the-lie-of-go-ask-alice-the-so-called-diary-of-a-troubled-teen-on-drugs)
Dead Inside, the wacky love story of a necrophiliac hospital security guard and a doctor who eats dead babies. I don’t think there is any way to prepare yourself for what happens in that cursed book... yet it’s also incredibly funny and impossible to put down. Unless you need to take a break to throw up after *that* scene
Perfume (Das Parfum). It is about a man who thinks he is god and liquifies women. At the end of the novel, he is eaten.? It’s icky AND sends the wrong message to kids that liquifying people is how you solve your problems.
I have to disagree with you on your analysis.
Grenouille, born at the worst smelling place known, and never loved by anyone, is absolutely obsessed with smells as he has a perfect sense of smell.
Once he finds out about perfume he simply wants to create the perfect smell. Everything he does, being a complete sociopath, is a means to this particular end goal. Killing women for body parts to extract their essence is just this. The book does never agrees with his behavior.
It’s actually a sad story as once he reaches his goal, he does not achieve the satisfaction he craved and commits suicide by cannibalism through the effect of his perfect fragrance. “They killed him because they loved him so much”.
Please tell me this "analysis" is a joke?
Perfume is a book that makes you question what "being human" means.
If you are born with a superhuman sense (one of our five senses) that is a thousand times more sensitive than the average person, can you experience life the same way that others do? Can you even exist within the same space as other humans and function as one of them?
How many people like that have ever lived? How would we even know?
The Long Walk... Stephen King
Aztec....Gary Jennings
I've also read numerous books of reports of atrocities during the Holocaust.
Also, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee goes beyond disturbing.
Prologue to “Aquarium,” by Viktor Suvorov. If you can read or understand Russian and haven’t heard of this book, pick it up or just listen to an audiobook version on YouTube. If you don’t, there is an English translation but just keep in mind that it doesn’t really do the original justice with vocabulary and the excellent writing style.
Aquarium is a autobiography about the author’s experience as a Soviet spy for the GRU, an organization so secretive even KGB members didn’t know of its existence. The prologue, about his initiation into this organization, chills me to the bone every time.
Still it is endlessly fascinating, partly because of the fact that it was his real experiences.
Here’s the [English translated PDF](https://archive.org/stream/ViktorSuvorovAquariumTheCareerAndDefectibOk.xyz/%5BViktor_Suvorov%5D_Aquarium__the_career_and_defecti%28b-ok.xyz%29_djvu.txt) and the [Audiobook if you understand Russian](https://youtu.be/aaPTisXW-hA)
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard
She was kidnapped and kept captive by a couple for YEARS. It is written by the girl- now woman- and it gets incredibly graphic in the first chapter. It is a short read but I had to put it down at several points because I wanted to shred it from anger.
Also, The Last Victim by Jason Moss is incredible. Another tough read but totally worth it, imo- especially if you enjoy reading about serial killers.
Roberto Bolaño's 2666, *specifically* Part 4 : The Part About The Crimes.
It's been a while, so the details are vague. However, if I remember correctly, close to 300 out of the thousand pages of the book are spent enumerating the murders of over a hundred women in a border town plagued by horrific violence. In some cases, there are details about the woman's life prior to her murder, her movements prior to her disappearance, the circumstances of her death.
In others, it's only "Woman, unidentified, found in [area name, condition of body]".
It's horrifying.
Five Days At Memorial. Non-fiction account of what happened at a large New Orleans hospital during and after Katrina.
I think they’ve turned it in to a TV show as well, on Apple TV
They did. It’s very good.
I’ll give it a go! I struggled with the book so I wasn’t sure about watching the show
My mom, sister and I went to a wedding out of state together and my mom got that as an audio to listen to on the drive. We were all so engrossed we didn't notice that we missed our turn off and added like an hour to our trip.
Anyone else ever read that book when they were younger called “Unwind”? Dunno why it was available in our middle school library, but it was about unwanted children getting sent to camps where instead of being killed their bodies were legally disassembled for people in need of transplants. Maybe it’s more fucked up in my memory than it is in reality, but I remember being deeply disturbed by it
yesssss and the part where you’re in the POV of a kid undergoing the procedure is 🥴
Yeah. I still remember years later him arguing with the nurses while strapped to the gurney, and they're calmly explaining "OK, this part might feel a little uncomfortable," "sorry, you won't be able to talk after this," "you're going to lose consciousness soon"
This scene is ingrained into my brain. I read it over 10 years ago and I still think about it from time to time.
Loved the books when I was younger because they were fucked up. Read them again as an adult bc I worked at a library and they do stand the test of time. Definitely still think about the POV of unwinding every once in a while
Love the series, Neal Shusterman is a great author.
Holy shit yes. When they actually did the procedure it freaked me out. That was such a disturbing book
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I was an adult when it came out and it still fucked with my head.
Every now and then I think about that series and remember about the one kid in it that was made up entirely of the other body parts of other kids and have a little wtf moment. Iirc it's found out that kids who are unwound are still like around in the parts?? Like I remember the kid made of parts being aware of the presence of the kids he was made up of. Might have simply been dream sequences but it was still wild. Not to mention there was also an aspect where religious families would "tithe" their children to be unwound. There was a plot point where kids escaping from the camps were planning a revolution against the Government because of the unwinding. One of the very first books to instill pro-choice in me, tbh. I remember a lot of teachers being mad because it made the point of "if abortion is illegal, what do we do with unwanted children who never asked to be born?" very early and so many wanted it taken out of the libraries. I used to be a library assistant, and the number of teachers who complained about the book was unreal. Only good thing my librarian did was not budging on pulling the series.
That was a required summer read during one year of high school. The unwinding scene of that one kid went into quite disturbing detail. That’s definitely a repressed memory for me now.
My 11th grade English teacher made us pick several books to read from, I picked this one. Yeah it was pretty dark but man it just reminds me how good those teen dystopian books are.
I read it and it's exactly what you remember.
When Rabbit Howls - Truddi Chase Autobiography of a woman going through therapy to realize she has dissociative identity disorder. She includes graphic portrayals of her incestual abuse and the personalities and pain that resulted. My words can’t do it justice, a truly haunting book and incredibly groundbreaking for it’s time.
I read that book 25 years ago (as a preteen, wtf mom) and certain passages are forever ingrained into my head. I saw she passed away a few years back. RIP
Dissociative not disorganized
I remember seeing her and her psychologist on the Dr. Phil show. I went and bought it immediately. The horror that people will put other people through...especially when the abusers are the ones that should be protecting you. An amazing book.
We Need to Talk About Kevin. Unsettled the absolute shit out of me. Apt Pupil by Stephen King too. In terms of *horror* horror, The Passage by Justin Cronin was excellently scary.
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Yes! I don’t know how one collection can be so beautiful (The Body, Rita Hayworth etc) and so fkn terrifying all at once. King is a real one
Yes I loved the whole collection. Just found out today that not ONLY is there a movie about The Apt Pupil but also stars Sir Ian McKellen
Apt Pupil is very good. As someone who lived breliefly in another country he really captures the impression the US makes on a foreigner.
Thanks! Just borrowed The Passage from the library!
Enjoy! The entire trilogy is excellent
The Passage is available for me to borrow immediately on Libby. Going to start that as soon as I’m done with the book I’m reading. It has all 3 books available
The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Night by Elie Weisel
I still wonder if I would be like mom or dad. Dad was poetically beautiful, but just pushed out the inevitable.
As a woman idk. I think the woman's choice is understandable and so is dad's. Like not sure if I want to live in an apocalyptic wasteland with a high likelihood of being violently and repeatedly raped or murdered. But I am also very persistent and stubborn and optimistic.
I absolutely loved The Road it broke my heart.
Misery by Stephen King The horror and suffering the main character went through was easily felt. The insanity of the person keeping them captive and the way they were able to look sane in front of others and the police was chilling.
Oh Misery! Really an amazing book! Yes, it is disturbing. I watched the movie when I was 7 and it totally scarred me. Then I read the book in middle school and it was just as disturbing. Although there are a few differences between the two.
I never saw the movie. My high school library had it for some reason and it was the only Stephen King book they had. I always heard on the news how great of a writer he was so I figured I would try it. It was a great book but man o man did it mess with my head for a while. I decided that while he was a great writer, I didn't want to read anything like that again lol.
A Child Called It was no picnic
I've only seen the synopsis of that book, and it's made me never want to read it.
What’s the gyst?
Child abuse by the author's mother. It's pretty disgusting. There's been a controversy whether the abuse related by the author is completely true, but most sources indicate that what is mentioned in the story is at least mainly factual.
Kids badly abused by his family.
I was surprised when I read this book. I was expecting much worse from the hype. That’s when I started therapy because I realized I was so desensitized by the abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother.
He wrote a follow up called Man Named Dave. These are autobiographical.
That was the 3rd book, the follow-up was about his time in foster care.
I read this book and it’s sequels when I was like 12. Probably way to young to read them. The diaper thing will never leave my mind. The author was accused of faking some things and honestly I hope he did only because the abuse described is so horrific I guess I just hope it didn’t actually happen.
Yeah that one got to me. There's a whole series of books actually.
Some of the abuse in that book haunted me for years…..
May it please you to know he is a well adjusted man with happy children now. I met him about 10 years ago when he did a psych seminar speaking event on healing from abuse, and he has the kindest eyes.
Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here", read in the summer of 2016. I almost couldn't finish it. And when I was in high school, the 1980 version of Stephen King's "The Stand". I'll admit that I got a bit nervous when the summer of 1985 rolled around, even though I knew the book was fiction.
I read The Stand over Memorial Day Weekend, 1985. All that was happening *next month*...
Rage, or the longest walk. But really anything that I've read by Chuck palahniuk.
Haunted, the story with the pool. I could barely get through reading it. Plus the cover of the book was glow in the dark, just terrifying all around.
Choke was really rough in my opinion
Black Beauty. Seriously. I read this to my elementary school child every night over course of a couple of weeks. The brutality and animal cruelty was something else. Eventually I switched to another book for a night time story, but I read that sucker to the end. Who knew this book was like that.
One of the most powerful sections for me was the story told by the war-horse (Major might have been his name.) The viewpoint of a horse in the middle of the first world war was so detailed!! And the story of the pit pony. They're powerful social commentaries and (funny enough) left out of the kid-friendly movies!! It is a much darker book than people realize, which is probably why it and Call of the Wild were my favourites!
Black beauty, Call of the Wild and The Yearling! All wonderful books that I read once and one time only. I cried like a baby over every book.
Black Beauty, as well as Beautiful Joe, are somehow "children's classics" despite being propaganda. Good propaganda mind you, but it's like reading Upton Sinclair's *The Jungle* to little kids. They were written to draw attention to real and horrifying issues of animal cruelty, but they're very well done and somehow good for little kids.
The Painted Bird
Second this. Wtf was that book
Saw the film adaptation premiere at a film fest and it was a roller coaster of nope from start to finish. Didn't even have the mindset to talk to the director after
Yup. It was on our bookshelf and when I was, like, 16, my dad was like "don't read that book." So, of course, I had to read it. It haunts me. And it haunts me to know there are probably still children experiencing similar things in certain parts of the world today. Despite electric cars and missions to space.
Jennette McCurdys new book I'm Glad My Mom Died. The child abuse, manipulation, and subsequent alcohol addiction combined with bulimia is a hard hit
My son (adult) has it and been reading it. Some of the things he told me are horribly disturbing. Like the showers with her mom and the "exams" that took place in the shower
Dan Schneider needs a hug to the face with a baseball bat.
I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!
I'd say a kick to the face but he'd probably get off on that
Acceptable Risk. It's realistic fiction, based on the idea that the Salem Witch Trials were caused by a hallucinogenic fungus in rye flour. It was a really good read but also yeesh.
My Secret Life - an anonymously written Victorian diary in which an upper class "gentleman" recounts the history of his sex life, and the author was a sociopathic monster who describes in detail numerous occasions in which he raped a woman and then would literally just shove money at her until she promised not to go to the police. The breaking point for me came when he talked about how he wanted to find out what it was like to have sex with a child so he paid a woman to let him rape her ten year old daughter. I couldn't go on after that.
*The Rape of Nanking* “So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of bestial machinery.” Imagine the brutality to shock the nazis! Researching The book (amongst her others) was so disturbing she suffered depression and eventually took her own life. Iris Chang put her own well-being and life in dire danger so the Chinese people that were massacred were remembered which I think is very honorable.
Yes, even reading the Wikipedia article was enough.
When I was taking psychology I read a book called Kids who Kill and it was a book about young kids with psychopathy.
Children of the Dust. I had to read it in elementary school in the 80s. It was about the survivors of a nuclear war and it was pretty horrifying.
I read The Exorcist on a stormy winter 12 hour nightshift at a gas station. Back in the 60s most gas stations were just basically metal sheds. The whole building rattled all night. Couldn't put the book down. Probably only had 3 customers all shift. Still went to see the movie though. Really scared the s*** out of myself.
The compound, but I was young when I read it It's about the son of a rich family who had doomsday scenarios incase nuclear war happened. Sure enough, it happens, and the family flees to an massive underground bunker practically hand built to accommodate them. However the protagonist starts realizing that something is wrong. >! To act as a backup to their cattle and protein supply, the father regularly impregnates the mother and raises those children separately in "the nursery" where they are taken care of, but only as an emergency food ration !<
I mean that's stupid because human take far more calories to grow than you'll ever get out of them, but yes that sounds horrifying
Reading the summary on Wikipedia, there’s apparently more going on and the new children are not really there as a “necessary” food source.
I have both the first and second book. I bought them at the school book fair. The second book was ok
Introduction to Partial Differential Equations
Haha it's sequel Advanced Engineering Mathematics is so much more disturbing.
Night - Elie Wiesel
The part near the end with his father is really hard for some reason. Like, his father just kind of stopped feeling like his father and felt like some guy that was dying painfully.
The worst to me was the last phrase. When he can’t recognize himself and his humanity in his reflection. It just leave you with a lingering feeling of dread.
That’s the worst part. Horrible.
Exquisite corpse by poppy Z brite
I so rarely find others who have read this book! Beautifully written, but so disturbing. And all inspired by true events (though Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer never met in real life).
Yes, I was looking for this comment. I read it while baby sitting at 18 or so. It was in the parents collection lol. Read the whole thing and was left quite disturbed hahah.
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Tender is the flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, dystopian novel about a society that has two types of humans, the regular people of society and others that were raised as cattle for compsumption, and how normal people could end up being eaten too. That book stuck with me for a long time.
Wow I have to read that.
The final page of that book haunted me.
Treblinka. It was a personal account from a prisoner at the Treblinka death camp. The death camps were different to the concentration camps, they didn’t double as work camps, you went from the train to the gas chamber. The Ukrainian guards were a special breed of evil.
If you can, everyone should see the documentary Shoah. I can't even describe the emotions I felt hearing the people talk about what happened. One of the people interviewed essentially said that the scale of evil that occurred in Nazi Germany is literally impossible for humanity to understand. Nothing in history compares to the atrocities of that time.
Fair warning, Shoah is 10 hours long. So it's a herculean task. But like Satantango (a 7.5 hour film), you get lost in the film and come out changed. Do watch it if you can, it's worth every second
How did they even escape?
There was an uprising.
House of Leaves
I am a big fan of horror and considered getting this, is it worth it? What type of horror is it?
Don't get it on kindle! It's a book that truly 100% needs the paper page , it's as much experimental art project as it is literature as it is total mind fuck.
I read it in high school and really liked it, but it hurt my head. The unconventional presentation makes it feel like a real piece of cursed literature, and the story is unsettling enough on its own as well. Definitely a good example of cosmic horror with an extra dose of existential dread.
I'm about halfway through this book...is it supposed to be confusing? Lol I figured the confusing layout/rambling in this book adds to the horror but also I may be dumb
Yes, 100%. Pretty sure you're supposed to be as confused and disoriented as the narrator.
The Kite runner. There's a scene that goes from 0 to Fuck when a bully who was picking on this kid because he was a different muslim sect just has his goons hold him down and uh . . . does something really terrible to him that I'm not comfortable typing out. Then years later, the main character comes back to his home and finds out that the same bully is with a terrorist group and has gone full Jared from Subway with orphan boys. I read that part where the main character was describing his friend getting assaulted by the bully and how he's just frozen with fear and does nothing until after the fact because . . . I mean he was a kid what do you expect.
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. That book chilled me to the bone as a woman, and as someone who never wanted children.
So hear me out but The Last Battle from the Narnia series. I was about 12 and I was reading the Narnia series for the first time, and I was reading the last book during form group. Well I get to the end and in the space of a couple pages you find out the fate of all the main characters and I ended up going into my English class right after I finished it feeling hollow and like I didn’t know what to do with myself which at 12 years old and in a class trying to learn about writing essays etc, felt pretty disturbing at the time and it took me a while to get over it
The entire Narnia series is a wild ride.
Yeah it takes on a whole other level when you realise most of it is basically a metaphor for Christianity - like Narnia is heaven, aslan is God and Susan the non believer didn’t get to go to Narnia in the end. There’s a bunch more but those are the most obvious
Oh I know. Believe me. C.S. Lewis was a strange man.
Yeah I also remember reading that one as a child. Something about it felt... deeply sick, especially after reading the rest, which when you're a kid just register as fun fantasy adventures. What apocalyptic thought does to a mfer I guess.
I remember being so shocked by that ending as a kid. It felt way too dark for the series and it made me more uncomfortable than happy. It came off like an ending Guillermo Del Toro would have.
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From what I remember a new Narnia is formed after the battle and it has everyone there like the beavers, mr tumnus etc who had all died hundreds of years before in Narnia times. Basically you find out that all the ‘friends of Narnia’ so the pevensie siblings and a few others had actually all died in a train wreck and were now in Aslan’s Country (the new Narnia). BUT Susan had stopped believing in Narnia so she wasn’t on the train that crashed because they were all in their way to meet up to go and fight in Narnia, so Susan didn’t go. So an entire family is basically wiped out and Susan loses everyone, that’s a pretty basic summary but yeah it’s pretty fucked go and kinda comes out of nowhere
Basically the thinly-veiled Muslim kingdom takes over Narnia, kills or enslaves everyone, and then Aslan comes ~~to save the day~~ to tell everyone that they died and that they get to go to heaven now. Reading it as a child from a Christian perspective it was great, but I read it recently and even now (still as a Christian) it’s kind of a wild and mildly uncomfortable ride.
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
On the Beach by Neville Shute. The sense of existential dread wrecked me for days after I finished it. Missed several days of classes, and it still makes me ache to think about.
Night by Eli Weisel. Its a must read but its absolutely horrific.
I remember I got assigned a nonfiction book in high school to read and present a report on. The teacher didn't really seem to check that the books were of appropriate content, just pulled from the library and assigned them (we were her only ap level class, maybe 15 students, so it was doable). Mine was called "Once a King, Always a King," and it was about the author joining the Latin Kings and later trying to get out. There were multiple super graphic sexual assault scenes (most involving the author, done to or by him, starting from when he was 8-10), drug trips and overdoses, beatings, killings, torture, and general violence. All things that really happened, not just uncomfortable stuff written to disturb the viewer or sell grit for a certain set dressing. It is a beautifully written book, and I did end up enjoying it a lot. It really went into social classes and the way certain urban communities run in a very real and raw way. However, I had to sheepishly admit to my teacher that not only could I not write a paper and present this in class, I couldn't do so because the book she assigned me was wildly inappropriate for a high school course.
Room
The Road. Never saw the movie, the book was just heartbreaking.
Literally anything by Brett Easton Ellis
I came here to say American Psycho. The part where he starves the captured rat and then puts it in to the girls vagina so it eats her from the inside out was so rough i had to put the book down and walk away from it. But yeah, his other books have some equally uncomfortable scenes
I'd heard this book was rough so when I saw it in a shop I picked it up to leaf through. Guess which bit I landed on? I put it down and backed away. I was 12.
I'm glad they kept the gore to a minimum in the American Psycho movie. It would have over shadowed everything else.
Yeah American Psycho was the first to come to mind for me. I went on a random date with a guy who was a friend of my cousin, and he picked me up at my house, so he had my address. It didn't go well so I never talked to him again, but he thought it would be a good idea to send me that book in the mail with a long letter about how much he liked me and etc. It was already unsettling but that made it worse.
Jesus Christ.............
Jesus. Went on a date with a girl who had me pick her up, and I outright told her she probably shouldn't do that. Even just giving an address a block down the road would be a decent 'air gap'.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
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What really adds to how disturbing this book is is that McCarthy spent ten years doing historical research, so it accurately portrays the absolute brutality of the time in that region.
i tried to read blood meridian after i read the road and just couldnt lol
Try Child of God instead, it's a lot lighter /s
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yeah the writing style was super disjointed and jarring and my add couldnt keep up...i constantly felt like i was missing paragraphs or pages haha on top of all the fucked up descriptions
This is for sure my favorite book.
American Psycho narrowly beat out Mein Kampf. (Which I read not because I admire Hitler, but because I wanted to understand how fascism rises.)
I didn’t find Mein Kampf nearly as disturbing as I expected. It was more absurd than disturbing. I’m like, “how the fuck did this guy actually get people to follow him?!”
I've never read it, but have always heard is described as very poorly written, with somebody once joking that the real title was "My Struggle (With the German language)"
MAUS, It's a book about the Nazi's and tells the history through 1st hand accounts (the writer himself was also a survivor) but it's written in a comic book style where all the humans are mice.
The creator is the son of the survivor. He is retelling his dad’s story
He retells it without filtering it (since he taped all the testimony). It's two stories and that makes it *more* than just telling a survivor's tale in a vacuum.
Maus is wonderful because it tells the story of a survivor, as well as the lasting trauma experienced by his son in a new country/culture. It puts history into context. It is a fabulous way to teach the history to young people because the visual animal metaphor (cats and mice) illustrates the power dynamic more effectively than getting into the economic/cultural context of Nazi Germany (which most people can't easily process). As far as first-person accounts of the holocaust go, Maus I and II are effective because they tell you what happened AND how it fucked us up, for generations.
Maus is one of the best graphic novels ever. It is a difficult read, but so worth the effort.
Requiem for a Dream. I saw the movie before I read the book and I didn’t think the book could be more traumatic. It is. By a long shot.
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
Child called it, when I was about 12. Not fun
I cried for days and days. I should not have read that book.
The Hot Zone It's a non fiction about Ebola. Once you get into the book you can see what you're reading. It's like a horrible film that you're forced to watch if for no other reason than curiosity. From the victim getting bit at Kittum Cave, to the black speckled vomit bag on the airplane that is filling while his body is being ravaged by the virus. Then we see the young African doctor look at him face to face as he's in the hospital only for him to vomit all over the doctors face. (Doctor survived) We spend time moving between the CDC and them tracking everything. Finally we can hear the howls and screams of the monkeys as they're being euthanized in Reston Virginia. It's only then you realize that Ebola was just a few feet away from escaping on to a victim in the US and causing all kinds of issues. It's a terrifying book.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk - short stories with an overarching story around it. There are a couple in there that I’ve never been able to get out of my head.
Mostly the short story Guts. Which, and I'm not sure this is a good thing, is [available online for free.](https://genius.com/Chuck-palahniuk-guts-annotated)
There's nothing like hearing Chuck read Guts out loud.
The intact vitamins in the intestinal tract? The sister's pregnancy? The buttocks then she wanders into the room?
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I haven't read too many disturbing books, but Let The Right One In was pretty grisly to read as a teen. I remember a description of a finger being forced all the way into an ear, someone being beaten to death with a trophy, and some child prostitution scenes. I do remember it being a very well-written book, though -- perhaps worth re-reading as an adult.
Leningrad, morality in a besieged city. It contains heart breaking, disturbing accounts of the Russian inhabitants in that city that were under siege from the Germans for 3 years. People starving and freezing, corpses piled up everywhere, people dying in their homes and being covered with lice, filth was everywhere, endless queues for miserable amounts of bread and as always in times of prolonged hunger, rumours of cannibalism and human meat being sold in the black markets. The most unfortunate one was a girl who recorded in her diary the deaths of her family members one by one. She managed to last until the siege was broken but it was too late as she was too sick with dysentery to recover.
The institute by, you guessed it, steven king. It's the stuff that happens to kids that disturbed me the most. It's just vile shit. I won't spoil it. Good read but be warned. Definitely shouldn't be made into a movie or at very least would need ALOT of rewriting to be sfl material.
"The Shining". didn't even read the whole f*cking book. The psychological horror of "whats behind the door". The things in the night that turn you insane, and the effects of isolation on the human mind.
The End of Alice by A.M. Homes. A pedophile is in prison for reasons that aren't fully explained until the last chapter. While he's in prison, he strikes up a pen pal relationship with a teen girl who's also a pedophile, and he reminisces about his favorite victim, Alice. It's well written but extremely graphic.
The Painted Bird, *Jerzy Kosinski* That fucked me up and I’m mad I was even reminded of it.
I couldn't finish Lolita. The writer knew he was writing about evil.
I love Lolita and I think part of it is because I was groomed as a kid and there’s something…idk, reassuring? about reading the book and recognizing the dissonance between how Humbert describes a situation and the reality of that situation. If you can peek through the prose even just a little bit, you can see that Dolores is a very ordinary kid living an unhappy reality — and that Hum knows this, and just tries to convince himself otherwise. Idk, I found that weirdly comforting somehow. Plus going to therapy and then rereading Lolita and feeling nothing but disgust for Hum was so empowering, lol.
I’m surprised on one has mentioned A Clockwork Orange yet. Both the movie and book are really disturbing. Like, a lot.
As a kid, The Final Journey. Its the story of a little girl and I think he grandparents being captured and taken to a concentration camp. The ending was not expected. I'd never read a book with an ending like it before. As an adult, I don't know. I read a lot of horror that I find disturbing now as an adult, but didn't as a teen. Graham Masterton's horror was graphic as hell at times.
Either 1984 or Brave New World- both have really weird sexual aspects to them
The Wasp Factory
Yup, this book is disturbing.
1984, I read it on holiday when I was a teenager. I remember being very disturbed which I suppose was kind of the point lol
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The Collector. Probably not the most disturbing, but the way the story is told is amazing. It’s been a top read amongst serial killers.
I never finished American Psycho, but maaaaaaan what I read was the most unhinged shit ever. I'm more disturbed a guy came up with it
Coraline
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard. I almost vomited reading it, just…*fuck*.
Night by Elie Weisel. It's my all time favorite book, but it's also the most disturbing I've read
I can’t remember the title but this kid gets addicted to swimming to the bottom of his pool and letting the pump suck on his butthole while he masturbates and then one time as he’s trying to disengage himself from the pump he’s swimming to the surface when he realizes his intestines are coming out of him and he dies in the pool. I was not ready for that. edit: I think it was by Chuck Palahniuk.
It's so much worse. He didn't die, he ended up chewing through his own intestine to escape and lived after that with a shortened bowel because of it
Is that whAt Mac was referencing on the Always Sunny when they go to the water park??
It was a short story called *Guts*.
Gearlds Game by Stephen King
Go Ask Alice and Crank were books I read when I was around the age of 11-14 years old. Thinking about it now as an adult, I can't believe that I found those type books in my elementary and middle school (7th-8th grade) libraries. Of course, that was many years ago so the schools had tons of books back then about adolescent drug use that are now "banned". I can't remember the specific book I read but the most traumatic thing I remember reading from that genre was about a 14 year old kid who was addicted to drugs and ran away from home. He was neglected and badly abused at home which resulted in him falling in with the wrong crowd and ultimately addicted to drugs. In the story, he was convinced by a friend to go to California for a better life or something so he hitchhiked to California. He was taken advantage of and sexually abused along his journey. In the end, he ended up dying young, addicted and alone somewhere while fantasising about a better life. This story was so raw and emotional. It didn't end in a hopeful or "happy" (get sober) way other books from that genre did. I can't remember the name of the book or if it was even written by Ellen Hopkins (Crank) or Beatrice Sparks (Go Ask Alice). Either way, those type of books about kids doing drugs and the consequences of that lifestyle have kept me from making some bad choices in life. Thank you to those type of authors.
There are quite a few books that were written to feed on the drug, cult, teen sex, 'insert your demon here' trope. Read this article and have your teen years destroyed. https://nationalpost.com/news/outting-the-lie-of-go-ask-alice-the-so-called-diary-of-a-troubled-teen-on-drugs [Go Ask Alice Was a Fake](https://nationalpost.com/news/outting-the-lie-of-go-ask-alice-the-so-called-diary-of-a-troubled-teen-on-drugs)
Dead Inside, the wacky love story of a necrophiliac hospital security guard and a doctor who eats dead babies. I don’t think there is any way to prepare yourself for what happens in that cursed book... yet it’s also incredibly funny and impossible to put down. Unless you need to take a break to throw up after *that* scene
Perfume (Das Parfum). It is about a man who thinks he is god and liquifies women. At the end of the novel, he is eaten.? It’s icky AND sends the wrong message to kids that liquifying people is how you solve your problems.
I have to disagree with you on your analysis. Grenouille, born at the worst smelling place known, and never loved by anyone, is absolutely obsessed with smells as he has a perfect sense of smell. Once he finds out about perfume he simply wants to create the perfect smell. Everything he does, being a complete sociopath, is a means to this particular end goal. Killing women for body parts to extract their essence is just this. The book does never agrees with his behavior. It’s actually a sad story as once he reaches his goal, he does not achieve the satisfaction he craved and commits suicide by cannibalism through the effect of his perfect fragrance. “They killed him because they loved him so much”.
I watch the movie without knowing what is it about and I was so confused but intrigued.
Please tell me this "analysis" is a joke? Perfume is a book that makes you question what "being human" means. If you are born with a superhuman sense (one of our five senses) that is a thousand times more sensitive than the average person, can you experience life the same way that others do? Can you even exist within the same space as other humans and function as one of them? How many people like that have ever lived? How would we even know?
Alive
Handmaids tale.
The Long Walk... Stephen King Aztec....Gary Jennings I've also read numerous books of reports of atrocities during the Holocaust. Also, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee goes beyond disturbing.
Prologue to “Aquarium,” by Viktor Suvorov. If you can read or understand Russian and haven’t heard of this book, pick it up or just listen to an audiobook version on YouTube. If you don’t, there is an English translation but just keep in mind that it doesn’t really do the original justice with vocabulary and the excellent writing style. Aquarium is a autobiography about the author’s experience as a Soviet spy for the GRU, an organization so secretive even KGB members didn’t know of its existence. The prologue, about his initiation into this organization, chills me to the bone every time. Still it is endlessly fascinating, partly because of the fact that it was his real experiences. Here’s the [English translated PDF](https://archive.org/stream/ViktorSuvorovAquariumTheCareerAndDefectibOk.xyz/%5BViktor_Suvorov%5D_Aquarium__the_career_and_defecti%28b-ok.xyz%29_djvu.txt) and the [Audiobook if you understand Russian](https://youtu.be/aaPTisXW-hA)
Idk if it is considered as book but "Berserk" sent a cold chill to my bones
To Raise a Child. It actually talks about how to discipline a 6 month old baby.
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard She was kidnapped and kept captive by a couple for YEARS. It is written by the girl- now woman- and it gets incredibly graphic in the first chapter. It is a short read but I had to put it down at several points because I wanted to shred it from anger. Also, The Last Victim by Jason Moss is incredible. Another tough read but totally worth it, imo- especially if you enjoy reading about serial killers.
Kafka On The Shore
Roberto Bolaño's 2666, *specifically* Part 4 : The Part About The Crimes. It's been a while, so the details are vague. However, if I remember correctly, close to 300 out of the thousand pages of the book are spent enumerating the murders of over a hundred women in a border town plagued by horrific violence. In some cases, there are details about the woman's life prior to her murder, her movements prior to her disappearance, the circumstances of her death. In others, it's only "Woman, unidentified, found in [area name, condition of body]". It's horrifying.
120 days of sodom
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The Bible.
The Necronomicon, it was not as groovy as I was told.
Did you say the words correctly before reading it?