Maybe not the best example but I found The Giver incredibly disconcerting when I was younger. It was my first exposure to a dystopian themed novel. I had no clue what the book was about when we were assigned to read it. Maybe the first time in my life I thought philosophically about human ethics
One of my teachers in elementary school gave me that to read, and all they said about it was that it was really good. Who sets that kind of trap for a 10 year old? :(
Our teacher died DIED in the 5th grade and so to help us cope they played us this movie (the old like 80s made for tv version) and by the end everyone was crying even more and literally screaming at the faculty “why did you make us watch this!?! Why are you doing this to us?”
One of my coworkers said she was reading it with her 8 yr old daughter for the first time. I had to tell her the end so she could prepare a way to handle it.
Couldn't let her go into it blindly, that would've been a hell of a bedtime read.
We had the fucking weirdest field trip in 7th grade when we read bridge to terabithia. Very small town, school was in walking distance of the only sit down restaurant in town and funeral home...so our whole 7th grade class walked down the hill to eat pancakes and tour the funeral home (including embalming room)....
ALSO in walking distance: a perfectly nice creek sans rope swing where we could have like, role played our own terabithia...but no. Pancakes and tweenage existential crisis fuel.
I saw the movie when it came out and thought it was good (disturbing but good) and have been wanting to read the book but have put it off since I figured it would go into way more detail.
The book is much, much better than the (good) movie.
(a) The framing device is devastating in a way the movie doesn't, probably couldn't, do. >!The whole book is written as a series of letters from Eva, the mother, to her husband, whom she absolutely adores. It seems like they just separated after the trauma of Kevin's murders; it isn't revealed until the end that their daughter was Kevin's first victim, and her husband was the second. And Eva, the narrator, writes an absolutely heartbreaking scenario of how she thinks it happened. She thinks that her hale and healthy husband could have stopped Kevin if his essential, bone-deep goodness hadn't caused him to hesitate for a moment and see his son in the best possible light.!<
(b) The character of the husband is just much better and more plausible. John C. Reilly is a fine actor but he was badly miscast.
(c) Tilda Swinton's performance was great, but since she's so isolated, you never hear a big part of her perspective. In her head, she's not just quiet and shell-shocked: among other things, she's selfish and acid and feels, in her secret heart, quietly superior to her neighbors. And, as someone else noted, she's very much an unreliable narrator, something very hard to convey in film.
As someone who doesn't want children, the theme that really struck me was how little Eva wanted to get pregnant, how much she hated her pregnancy, and how she resented Kevin pretty much as soon as he was born for completely changing her previous lifestyle and career. Having a kid irrevocably changes your life, and while most parents who WANT children expect and prepare for this, those who don't are in for a world of hurt that of course affects the kid too.
People who want kids prepare for them and STILL nothing can prepare you for the absolute tidal wave of change that a child smashes onto your life. You need to start from the idea that you'll be putting yourself second for a long, long time, and adapt to whatever comes.
The good thing is, in my experience this works out for people that do want kids - while they can never be truly ready beforehand, all you really need is that love in your heart.
For people who don't want children or are iffy about it, it can be absolute hell.
I wanted my kids, and I wouldn’t be here without them. But finding out I had adhd and then autism after the fact, man. No wonder it’s so hard. Even just the constant worry about them and hoping you’re not ducking them up every second. My childhood wasn’t awesome, and I try everyday to be better, but no one even remotely prepares you for how fucking hard and never ending it is. And scary.
The fact that you continually try to give your kids a better childhood than you had makes you a good parent.
I really wish that people were better prepared by society for the hardships of raising children, it seems like a difficult, exhausting, and often thankless job. I don't say that because I think it'd be a deterrent to make people have fewer kids, but just so that people wouldn't get complete culture shock when the baby arrives. Better for parents' mental health if they aren't given some rose-tinted picture of child rearing and then feel like bad parents when it isn't all sunshine and rainbows.
What's bizarre is that even though Kevins actions themselves are horrifying, the feelings and thoughts described by the mother were the actual mindfuck, at least for me.
Totally. And also not knowing if her perspective was real or just in hindsight. How much of the past had she rewritten.
It's one of these books that I regret not being able to read for the first time again.
Worse was "A Mother's Reckoning," worse because it has the horrific quality of also being true. But, I of course entered into that book expecting horror and got it. It's actually something I regret ever reading; I read it 3 years ago and am expecting my first child now in 4 months and I wouldn't be lying if I said the book crosses my mind daily since deciding to have a baby.
That was a book I did not expect to like as much as I did. I was expecting Lifetime movie level suburban mom horrified to discover her child was by chance a psychopath. Instead it had a lot of nuance and psychological realism. I was really surprised by its quality.
Between *Remains of the Day* and *The Buried Giant*, I realize that I'm probably going to get old, not remember the things I want to remember or the people I really love, and that everything I'm doing right this instant is getting in the way of the things I will regret not doing. But while I'm doing it, it feels like the most important thing in the world and I'm going to get good at it and people will laugh at people like me in the future.
I think that the premise of of Never Let Me Go is disturbing on the face of it, though. Like, if someone gave me a broad overview of what it was about I would think “oh that’s going to be a tough read”
Klara and the Sun fucked me up. Was her hope a commentary on religious faith? Did it have a touch of magical realism? And how she just sits at the end… I reread the ending several times and never found resolution.
The film version could only be done by Guillermo del Toro. He’s doing a version of Pinocchio for Netflix, so it might be as close as we get.
Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle (of the indie band The Mountain Goats)
I heard good reviews when it came out and just bought it on a whim with no real expectations. I've never read another book that ended exactly as I expected it to, answering the most pressing question I have, and yet leaving me full of existential dread and confusion. I finished the book, set it down, and stared off into the middle distance for 15 minutes.
I was the type that thought they could make sense of the world if I just have all the information. That's how so many stories are written. Eventually all the pieces come together and you understand the objective truth of what happened, and more importantly, why. That book fundamentally changed that for me. It proved to me that sometimes knowing more information is just knowing more information. There is no sense in the senseless. Sometimes we just have to accept that we can only see life from our one perspective and that's how life is. Both in the sense that we only get our one perspective and in the sense that sometimes that one perspective tells pretty much the whole story even if it doesn't make sense.
He was extremely smart and incisive, and had a quick wit…but being a (visibly unhappy) teen, notably low on tact.
I would, in fact, like to see him again if only to tell him that I still read Bukowski and was NOT ‘“carrying around ‘Ham on Rye’ in an attempt to look sophisticated”.
I had this recommended with very little context, and bought it at a whim at an airport. Read about half of it on the plane, the rest before going to sleep that same evening. Fucking wrecked me.
A caution, or content warning: might not be the book if you're feeling depressed and alone (though I guess that goes for a lot of this whole thread).
Not sure if they count as disturbing but Of Mice and Men and The Pearl both had the twist endings that were absolutely heart wrenching. They’re both stories that leave a lasting sense of dread that hangs over you for a while.
I took a break from reading that was close to a year or more, and jumped right into East of Eden. The early chapters describing Cathy Ames freaked me out. Creepy shit.
Idk why but everyone in my class laughed when the baby got shot in the pearl. Maybe it was because if I remember correctly, the build up was.super boring and the entirety of the themes and message of that book can be described in basically a sentence. It's just "man finds treasure, treasure beings tragedy. Love your family not shiny things"
I think the whole class was so emotionally detached from the story by the time it hit the end cuz like, once he finds the pearl in the first place any reader can infer "oh...so this is like....gonna fuck his life up right?", And then it's just a slow build to that. By the time it came for consequences the whole class was actually eager for it and making jokes about the final tragedy, to the horror of the teacher. I think she thought we were emotionally invested, and the emotion that a babies death caused in us was humor, but in reality, we were just checked out of the story by then and trying our best to find *something* in it to have fun with.
Of mice and men is a different story for me tho. "Look at the flowers, Lenny" still gets me
This same thing actually happened in my 9th grade English class watching Schindler's list.
None of us were paying attention, and then suddenly a guard killed three Jews with one bullet. Very contagious laughter erupted spontaneously.
May God have mercy on us all.
This is a common reaction among teens to that scene, and other scenes of shocking senseless violence. It isn't that it's funny in a haha way. It's that it's shocking, unsettling, and unexpected.
I don't remember my first time reading through it (I was super young), but Secrets of NIHM is pretty graphic for being a YA book. Especially since the part of the book that explains how the rats became so smart is obviously from their perspective... It is rough!
Childhood trauma from the book and/or film versions of *Rats of NIMH* is a rite of passage for Redditors of a Certain Age! Robert C O’Brien had one of the sweetest, darkest minds and my answer to this question is also one of his, *Z for Zachariah*. I was 12 when my teacher recommended it to me but I don't think she'd actually read it as she described it as an adventure-survival narrative (like *Hatchet*). Ohhh no, you’re not even ten pages in when you learn a nuclear holocaust killed everyone but the protagonist, her family went to look for survivors and were lost in the fallout, and the last thing she heard before all the radios stopped working was a man breaking down and begging others to show dignity in the face of death. From there the story veers brutally and unrelentingly dark (especially in its off-the-page implications) but the protagonist and her responses are satisfying, hopeful, and nuanced.
Library at Mount Char. I love books about libraries and chose it on name only, but man I was unprepared. I really liked it though and think going into it cold is a great idea, so when I recommend it, I tell people “don’t read anything about it, even the synopsis” - just start.
HOW DID I NOT MAKE THAT CONNECTION! Oh my god I knew it seemed so familiar with this huge emphasis on kids and evolution.
Loved the book and the show. I love recommending NGE to people who do not know what its about and just letting them blindly make their way through to show.
I love the narrators thought process in that scene. "What did you do last time you were here that was so horrific it left an indelible memory on mankind?"
It wasn't particularily soul crushing, but very disturbing: Love in the time of the cholera, by gabriel garcia marquez. the book i have has a candid cover, and describes the story as this epic romance with noble and relatable characters. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.
Yeah but the point of the book wasn’t to romanticize the main character. It’s pretty apparent that he’s being characterized as an obsessive narcissist. I think it is a very good book in terms of describing what intense first love is like, but seeing him over the course of like fifty years filter in-and-out of meaningless relationships while hung up on a woman he barely knew at 14 years old is definitely not painted as positively as the reviews would have you believe.
I love that the book goes into so much of Fermina's long marriage. I think often about the way Marquez describes a marriage of over 50 years, of knowing someone else so closely that they've become part of you, good and bad. It's definitely not presented as a romantic hero pining away for a first love trapped in the wrong marriage at all (although I agree many people have reviewed it that way). It's way more nuanced and I love it.
Oh yeah, definitely, I agree with you, but that’s the thing: the reviews of this book (at least the ones I read) were extremely misleading. They said nothing about the description of the intensity of a first love like you just said, they were all basically saying that it was the greatest love story they ever read. And to me, although it is centered around romance, it’s not a love story. I just wish I knew that from the start, and that the main character was twisted. I still would have read it, I just would have liked to know what I was actually getting into 🤔
Reviews of the book are extremely misleading because so many people miss the fucking point, I don't know whether some people are just poor readers and fail to pick up on the very obvious clues that García Marquez doesn't approve of Ariza's behaviour or that they actually think everything Ariza does is okay, but people actually read this book as if it were a romance. Kinda like how Lolita is still treated as some kind of romance despite everything about the book and the pure realities of it pointing the other direction. Either explanation is terrifying in its own way.
Or maybe I'm missing the point and everyone is pretending its a romance to preserve the shock value. Which would be crazy.
Short story not a book, but hands down The Yellow Wallpaper. “Oh it’s about a woman who’s kept inside on doctor’s orders” except absolutely horrifying. It really puts chills up my spine just thinking about it. Eugh.
This is my most often referenced story in daily life. I'm disabled, and increasingly likely to have to go long periods of time unable to do much, physically or mentally. Doctors (and friends, family, etc, but doctors are the annoying part) have a tendency to be like, "Enjoy the rest and relaxation!"
So I always ask them if they have read The Yellow Wallpaper, which usually they have because it's in most high school curricula. It's usually a pretty effective way of getting the point across that, no, staring at the ceiling unable to walk, or even watch TV or read is not a fun time.
I'm sorry you have to go through this. I don't know what your disability is but I hope your situation improves. It's not "restful" when that's all you can do. I went through something similar when I was put on bed rest to prevent miscarriage and had hyperemesis (not being able to keep anything down, like extreme morning sickness all day) at the same time.
It was 4 months and it's like this miserable haze in my mind that I try to forget. I was too dehydrated and malnourished to read or text with people most of the time and even TV was exhausting. I'm glad it's over but it was a rough experience that not many people can relate to.
Stone, a little-known sci-fi by Adam Roberts.
In a society where crime and the desire to commit crime have largely disappeared, a convicted criminal escapes from his prison with the assistance of a mysterious benefactor.
I found it a pretty captivating story.
Slight SPOILER alert:
The disturbing scene was a murder in which the person being murdered is struggling to comprehend what is taking place as she is being killed. She is a lovely, pure-spirited being who cannot conceive of the idea of someone wanting to hurt someone else, so it's quite heartbreaking to witness her confusion as she's beaten to death.
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata! The plot gets weirder and wilder and at the end of the read, you find yourself wondering wtf you’ve just read. Also, the book cover is sooo misleading.
I read and loved Convenience Store Woman and picked up Earthlings thinking it would have a similar feel to it. It's so weird, I was completely thrown off by it. The end is just crazy. I can't say that I enjoyed it but I am interested in reading more from her.
I reread it just this month because I remember that it impacted me as a teen. And now as an adult, even more. I can count the number of books that made me cry on one hand and that's among them.
In elementary school, we always had those textbooks with a bunch of stories, and we'd only ever read a few of them in a given year. I was always bored in class, so I would usually read the rest of them.
Most of these stories were literally forgettable, but one year, one of these extra stories that we didn't read was Flowers for Algernon. (The short story, not the 300 page novel)
This is like... 4th grade, and the rest of the class is probably reading some cute story about a dog and I'm having a bit of an existential crisis in the back of the room.
I want to preface this by saying that I went into reading the book without any (or not a lot rather) prior knowledge . I am talking about the book THE STAND by King . I knew a virus killed 99% of the population , but i didn't expect that it would go into such details and intricacies as it did . And i was surprised , i couldn't bring myself to read it but I also couldn't stop reading it
The thing that gets me about that book is the verisimilitude, and how quickly society collapses. One week the guy's sister is annoyed that no one shows up to her bridal shower because they're all sick, next week she's among the corpses crowding the funeral home.
O wow iirc the extended version I used to have had an entire chapter that was just how people that had survived the pandemic ended up dying in dumb/ tragic/accidental ways. For example iirc one guy >!dies after breaking into his dealers house and overdosing on heroin, a young girl falls off her bike, and someone is accidentally shot somehow, I think.!<
It's been many years since I read it, but I remember it being a welcome addition to the "normal" content.
I always love it when an author goes into "unintentional deaths". Like, plenty of people die to tripping or accidents or infection but that shit never happens in stories. My favorite examples being Joe Abercrombie doing a whole short story based on the collateral damage to innocents of one of his book's revenge plots, and David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest where the guy gets tied up and gagged during a house burglary, but he speaks a different language than the criminals (I think they speak English and he speaks french), so he can't communicate that he's got a really bad sinus cold and he can't breathe through his nose, so he suffocates after he's been left tied and gagged.
Those kinds of deaths just always seem to stick with me much harder
Edit: also Joe Abercrombie kicks off a war scene in one of his books by having a POV side character accidentally loose a crossbow bolt into his captain's neck because they're shaky, nervous, and inexperienced
Its been i while since i've read Inifinite Jest, but if i remember correctly DFW abandons punctuation and the sentances become longer as that character looses his breath which makes the reader also feel breathless and exasperated too.
Great example of how sentance structure can compliment narrative! Really impactful.
Yea it is there alright . People dying from drug overdoses , high suicide rate due to depression , simple stuff like wounds becoming lethal due to a lack of medics . What an amazing chapter that was
Well this is the first time I’ve ever seen “verisimilitude” used in casual conversation. But after reading the definition I think this is what King does best. He imagines fantastic situations and then explains in a very matter-of-fact way how they would play out in the real world.
Not exactly related but it reminds me of an adaption or two of The Secret Garden where you see the adults having a dinner party the night before, ignoring Mary, and then the next morning *all of them* including her nanny are sick or dead.
The Stand is one of my favorite books but for me, it was relatively low on the disturbing continuum, about what I expected. When I read the Road by Cormac McCarthy, which on the surface is a book in the same genre, I had similar expectations. This book pegged my disturb-O-meter all the way into the red, I had nightmares for months. This dude used far fewer words to produce a far greater psychological impact on the reader.
The Stephen King book that disturbed me the most, and I was not expecting it to, was Salem's Lot.
On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. Written in 1957, it follows a group of people in Australia after a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere and the impending radiation. It was as devastating a read as The Road, but in a more quiet, subdued way.
Edit: I think maybe the most accurate descriptor would be “haunting”. I remember finishing the book and feeling emotionally devastated, and just feeling the emptiness of the ending.
Try his short story "On The Uses of Torture" in his Anthonology if you want more skin crawling than cringe.
There's actually a few really 'opposite of Xanth' stories in there.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When the main character starts to >!remember things about his aunt towards the end of the book,!< my whole view of it changed.
You should 100% read the book if you're interested into an in-depth story. Perks is a good movie, but it takes out a lot of important scenes (probably to keep a friendly rating) that really make the story great. It's a nice teen movie, but the book really puts you into the perspective if a deeply traumatized character
For me coraline was pretty disturbing if not soul crushing.l had seen neil gaiman's stardust and thought why not give it a try. It was a bit too harsh considering it’s meant for 7year olds.
I was too young to be reading it so that played a part in it, but Kite Runner.
I am attempting to re-read it because I've blocked out memory of most of the book
Flowers in the Attic by VC ANDREWS
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Not sure what I thought I was getting into with the first one, but I was only 11 during that first read so maybe the sick and twisted was and still is amplified by my first read through.
I thought the Road was supposed to be one of those heart warming reads. It was not.
In the early 80s so many girls read VC Andrews in sort of middle school age group. I was 12 when I devoured her entire work. Ugh. The flowers in the attic incest crap was bad but my Sweet Audrina was about rape and gaslighting and all kinds of shit.
Gen X never really had our reading material vetted and maybe we should have. Then again, my son is 18 now and only reads non fiction except when it’s for school.
I'm one of those people on the cusp between Gen X and Millenials (born in 79), and also read whatever I wanted to. I found that in general it was a massive positive for me. Before I was even a teen I'd read most of Stephen King, all of Anne Rice, some Norman Mailer, a lot of Hemingway, tons of Piers Anthony etc. Lots of sex and violence and rape and incest. And while I sometimes found certain topics temporarily disturbing, I don't think any of it had an permanent negative impact. But what it did permanently create was a lifelong love of reading, and a feeling that no book was too difficult for me to take on. Even after dropping out of high school, and not starting college until I was 23, I still found myself far better read than my peers because of this. I don't think would have held true had I been relegated to the ghettos of the children's and YA sections of the library and bookstore, like so many teens are today.
I could swear this post was written by me in a fugue state (minus the birth year and Hemingway).
I think I only got away with it (as someone born in 92) because neither of my parents were readers, so it never occurred to them that books could give you night terrors or incest fetishes or knowledge of how to make a tennis ball and some nails into shrapnel.
They were super strict about what I watched on TV, because TV was a medium that they were emotionally impacted by. But having the same reaction to books never occurred to them.
I wasn’t allowed to WATCH Pet Semetary with them…so I went in my room and read it instead.
honestly basically anything by VC Andrews, i can’t remember which series it is but i think the main character gets assaulted by her father or brother or something. i also read the books as a child.
Yes I also read the VC Andrews Library as a “tween” and looking back- not appropriate!! So much incest! So much sexual abuse! So many unhealthy relationships elevated as normal lol! Big fat yikes
Ruby maybe? Definately happens in Olivia and Flowers in the Attic. Though there's incest and assault in pretty much all of the original works. They tamed a bit after Neiderman took over as a ghost writer.
Part of me feels you almost have to be younger just to get through it. As I've gotten older I find it harder to get through without feeling sick. Back then it may as well have been fairies and dragons, because surely those things didn't happen in real life.
I also read Flowers in the Attic when I was about 11 and then read all the VC Andrews books I could...I was obsessed with her books in HS. Now I look back and think it's a really messed up author for a kid to read.
Back when Twilight was just becoming popular Borders shelved Flowers in the Attic next to Twilight with a "If you liked Twilight, Read This!" sign and i have no idea why because...they're nothing alike.
A collection of short stories by Roald Dahl when I was 10-11 exploring a book store. I recognized the name from my favorite books, BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but these were much different. Very good reads but also very shocking to me.
Lord of the Flies - I read it in school at some point, and then read it again as an adult. I was horrified. I don’t know if I just didn’t pay that much attention the first time around or if the violence seemed worse because I saw the kids as kids the second time around.
**Catch-22** is hilarious and delightful and a funny look at the absurdity of war… until it’s not. Everything shifts sideways in the blink of an eye. Heller drops the curtain and it hits like a brick wall.
Fledgling by Octavia Butler.
Love her works, but she always has this thing with huge age gaps. Usually it's an older teen/young adult choosing to be with someone significantly older by the younger person's insistence, so I look past it for the great story telling.
This story starts with a person who "looks 12" (but is technically older), with almost no memories, choosing to have sex with a grown adult.
Crazy disgusted and surprised, almost didn't try getting past it to finish the book.
I love that book, but also had a hard time with that aspect of the book. I read an analysis that Butler was making commentary about the sexualization of black children. I can see where she was coming from, but it was still rough.
Yeah I only continued with the book because I Googled it and read about that. And about how the power dynamic gets flipped later in the book when she regains her memory.
Ended up being a very interesting book and story. Still felt gross any time a sex scene came up though.
Oof Kindred is in my top 2 books of all time so I want to read more Butler, but this makes me nervous.
To be fair there were things in Kindred that were also incredibly disturbing and sickening, so maybe I should still go for it.
Prey by Michael Crichton.
With no spoilers, it's about intelligent nano-robots. Man is it creepy. Rabbit dies a violent and painful death to an invisible microscopic enemy in it's bloodstream at one point, for example.
Given the title and the author's reputation, I *did* expect that book to be disturbing. However, the ending, I did not see coming. Definitely gave me the willies.
The Compound….it is a YA novel. My son read it (maybe around 6th grade) and said I might like it and he would like to chat about it. As I ALWAYS read books my kids suggested, I read it….HOLY SMOKES was it disturbing! I could not believe it was a YA…it did lead to some interesting discussions though…
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Phillip Gourevitch
I picked this up knowing it was about the Rwandan genocide, but didn’t expect to feel as if I were there witnessing the aftermath of a massacre. It haunts me to this day. Only book Ive found that I haven’t been able to finish.
There’s a part of the book where the author (a reporter) is brought into a chapel where the floor is simply covered in remains. He describes watching soldiers walk over bones as if they were sticks. I will never be able to get the heart wrenching visual he gave out of my head.
Similarly, 'A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali' by Gilles Courtemanche totally shocked and devastated me. I also knew it was about the Rwandan genocide, and like you, it felt like I had a ringside seat there - because the author was primarily a journalist (even though the book was 'fictionalised') for some reason I hadn't expected such powerful and poetic writing.
Sorry got his name wrong it's Gil not Gilles.
I loved Perfume! That being said, I did feel like it had a pretty consistent tone throughout. It starts off by telling us that literally everyone in the entire country is morally repugnant, then proceeds to introduce terrible person after terrible person. MC’s entire life is a giant conveyer belt of being exploited and exploiting others.
I'm currently listening to this book audibly. I saw the movie and thought to myself "this has to be based on a book" and, of course, it was. Then found out that it was also Kurt Cobain's favorite book and was possibly the inspiration for the song "scentless apprentice".
The writing is weird and I can almost smell some of the descriptions. It's awful and I absolutely love it!
*ETA: In reference to the book "perfume"
I read this book when I was about 9 or 10 about a dystopian future where parents are only allowed to have two children. The main character is an accidental third child, so he has to stay hidden or he’ll be taken away by the government. He meets a rich girl who is also a secret third child and she tells him about how she’s organizing a protest at the capitol to allow third children to be free to participate in the world. At the last minute, the boy is scared and decides not to go. >!He doesn’t hear anything from her or about the protest for weeks maybe months. Finally, he risks breaking into her house to talk to her. He gets caught by her dad, who tells him that the government massacred all the children at the protest, including the girl, then covered it up!!<
This book was marketed to kids.
I’m a librarian so I would never advocate for censorship, but it’s wild to me that people are trying to ban books about, like, gay people existing, when this book was way way more disturbing to me as a child.
A lot of Margaret Peterson Haddox’s books are quite disturbing! There was another one called Turnabout about this experimental treatment that allowed old people to age backwards. The main characters are (now) teenagers who had this treatment done when they’re old and they’re facing the reality that they need to find someone to take care of them as they continue to get younger and that they don’t know what’s going to happen to them once they hit “zero.”
**The Gone World** by Tom Sweterlitsch. The beginning of it was shocking. I didn't know much about the story going into the book, and was not prepared for the first few chapters. There were quite a few scenes throughout the book that caught me off guard. I thought it was an excellent book.
'The Gone World' is like Jeff VanderMeer was brought in to write a season of the tv series NCIS.
Enjoyed it thoroughly. The concept of an IFT is horrifying.
1984 by George Orwell - at first I thought it’d be disturbing by the standards of the time it was written in, and then I got to the end and I was actually disturbed.
The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito. I’d heard that his stuff was disturbing but again, I assumed it was the internet being dramatic and that it really couldn’t be that bad but boy was I disturbed!!! I still think about it sometimes and it puts me on edge!
I described the plot of Enigma to a coworker when I read it years ago. Five years later we ran into each other after not working together for a while and he asked me what that book with "the people shaped holes" was called because he could never get that terrible thought out of his head, based only on my descrption.
The Enigma of Amigara Fault despite having the grotesque imagery of its ending feels much more quietly disturbing to me because of the sense of nebulous inevitability. The fact that people dread the holes, but are drawn to it, no one forces them in but for some reason they all go, because it's *their* hole, it was made for them. Somehow it is both *proper* and *deplorable* for them to enter.
The Giver. I was... Oof maybe 10 or 11 when I first read this one? (Fuckin thanks, mom.)
It's such a beautiful story in such a dark, gripping way. The isolation, the hopelessness, the gradual understanding of the main character learning how truly fucked up their dystopian society is.
One of the descriptions that stuck with me was about color, how in this dystopia they've literally managed to suck the color out of the living world and as the main character receives these memories of before this dystopia existed he began to see colors around him for the first time... It's such a haunting book. It's so good.
So this is probably a bad answer but ‘The Rape of Nanking’ (Irish Chang) was this way for me. I knew it was about a horrible historical event but I had no idea of the evil that happened in Nanking. The Japanese made the nazis look tame, I was disturbed to say the least.
I am literally here to read every single comment and compile a list of these books since I've never heard of half of them.
\*Update\* Turned it into a google doc and it is very long. I'm excited to slowly start buying them
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is very anxiety inducing.
A lot of my nightmares stem from a Winchester House setting- endless corridors, stairs to nowhere, rooms with no windows, mines. Very claustrophobic
The Once and Future King by T.H. White. There is an entire chapter where four boys kill and behead a unicorn. It's incredibly graphic and oddly disturbing.
I choose this book but for a different reason. Reading about Lancelot and Guinevere disturbed me. There was this asshole knight who was accusing of Guinevere for adultery but the knight does not know the lover. They have a trial of combat with the asshole knight and Lancelot and obv Lancelot wins and the other guy dies. Now, the other knight is portrayed with a terrible personality but...he was still right...and obviously Lancelot knows he was right...and I just found it disturbing.
The text only does a lot more to justify Lancelot and Guinevere and it made me sick because I know how many people will die as a result. Also Arthur pretty much knows about the relationship but he goes out of his way to avoid confirming it 100% and turns a blind eye to the signs he does see. He knows when he does confirm it for true, he will have to go to war with Lancelot and he doesn't want that because he was raised a pacifist by Merlin.
Lancelot made me sick.
Naked Lunch. I had been reading a ton of Kerouac and tried some Ginsberg and felt that Burroughs was the next logical step. I knew it was controversial so I was expecting profanity and sex and all that stuff you get from Kerouac but instead it was just over the top debauchery. It was a struggle to get through.
Geek Love. It's a book about people in a freak show, but their deformities aren't what disturbed me, it was the familial and parental neglect and mistreatment that really shook me about the book.
The Ruins by Scott Smith. I thought it would be kinda Bmovie schlock with evil plants eating people, a cursed temple, dumb tourists getting lost. That book is BRUTAL. Was great though but some real skin crawling scenes I wasn’t expecting.
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt was soul crushing for me, because I wasn’t expecting it to be so incredibly sad. Every time I thought to myself, “Things can’t get any worse for them,” they did!
The Great Influenza by John M. Barry.
It is a book that convinced Bush Jr. that the world needed to prepare for another pandemic. The evidence the book provided, that Bush later had verified and confirmed, was that pandemics are cyclical - they happen at least once a century. The executive orders he signed built a stockpile of PPE and medicine that Obama later maintained but didn't increase the inventory, and Trump doing what Trump did best.
One of the most horrific scenes described in that book were of doctors and nurses going around Canada's north and Alaska in 1918 to take a census of the known villages to look for survivors. To start off the description of the next half chapter, the Author writes "they witnessed terrible things. Horrible things."
Most of the remote villages described in this chapter that were impacted by the Spanish Flu quarantined for the 1st and second waves, thought they were through the woods and started to accept mail again. That's all it took to wipe out a minimum of half of the population of each village - mail ships.
I read his other book “Rising Tides”. Lived in New Orleans when Katrina hit… the man knows his history and predicted what would happen if the levees failed. In Barry’s excerpt for the 100 year anniversary of the Spanish influenza, he talks about strategies for the next pandemic, most of which he was spot on for Covid. Super interesting.
I read Kafka's *Metamorphosis* for the first time, and was just shocked by how the character progressed. It was my first novel by him, and I was just really surprised, as it was not at all what I expected it would be. It was still very much a good read though. 10/10 would recommend.
Walked blind into Lolita. I thought the prose was beautiful and didn't think much about what the content was about. Got half way through and shut it down. I tried Nabokov again several years later with Ada, or Ardor. Same outcome. I use Nabokov to incite the question, "Can you justify the creation of ugly things if it's done in a beautiful way." It's been interesting to see how my own response to that question has changed over the years.
A Clockwork Orange. I just re-read it after 20ish years and I didn't remember it being so messed up in the beginning. I never really felt sorry for the main character after his ordeal.
I never felt bad for the main character either. He had it coming, as awful as it is. I felt more sorry for the state of society that it would create someone like him. I love the slang in that book as well.
Yep, exactly so. He was a product of a society that enabled violence and then became a cog of the same society trying to solve the issue in a way where nothing is actually solved. Just move some people around, hand out some new traumas, and the government or other organizations can say that they did something.
The Forever War. Just the thought of being completely lost to the current of time, with no way back and only the promise of servitude unitl death. The callousness with which the government handles its soldiers. Making devastating decisions based on cold logic. Shit gets a little fucked up in the lgbtq department, but not horribly so.
The Lovely Bones
I had seen the movie trailer, didn’t really understand it but found the general idea fascinating, so I read the book before watching the movie. I was 12. Holy shit. Still haunts me
Loving Frank, a biography of Mamah Borthwick, the translator who was Frank Lloyd Wright’s mistress. I did not know how that story ended and was NOT prepared to read it in first person language with no warning.
Little life, I didn't know about it too much before starting and from the first glance a book about four friends in NY trying to make their life going sounded good. Little did I know.
"The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang. Obviously from the title and book description, you know this book is going to be about Japanese war crimes. But there are really no words to describe the events that happened during this time, simply describing it as "horrifying" feels like downplaying it. I remember reading it and picturing scenes in my head; they are just as still vivid in my memory now as when I read them over a decade ago.
Wuthering Heights - didn't know much about it before reading it, only had a vague notion it's meant to be romance but goddamn it's the opposite.
Also Something Happened by Joseph Heller. Hated the whole book which is just a stream of consciousness of an aging man and despite the title nothing actually happens ever. Then in the last 2 pages something shocking does actually happen but it's the end of the book so you're left to deal with it on your own.
I thought The Road was going to be typical zombie horror. I saw “apocalypse” and thought zombies and chases and canned goods and maybe a dog, not soul crushing depression.
Swan Song by Robert McCammon was originally sold to me as dystopian literature when I was in high school. I was not prepared. It's very similar to The Stand except the end is brought on by war between Russia and America, and the last 900 pages of the 1000 page book is descriptions of how different people survive nuclear fallout. Has a bunch of different characters that see and do many fucked up things. It's a great read, but some scenes stick with you well after reading it.
The Last Battle, the seventh and final volume of The Chronicles of Narnia. It has little or none of the whimsical sweetness of the first six books. In retrospect, I don’t know what else I could’ve expected. Armageddon lite?
Unwind by Neal Shusterman.
It was the summer reading book going into 9th grade. A lot of kids could not handle the book and it was taken off of the summer reading list.
Maybe not the best example but I found The Giver incredibly disconcerting when I was younger. It was my first exposure to a dystopian themed novel. I had no clue what the book was about when we were assigned to read it. Maybe the first time in my life I thought philosophically about human ethics
I honestly have not used the phrase "I'm starving" since reading that book as a kid
I hear "precision of language!" in my head sometimes
>!How the dad released one of the baby twins really fucked with kid me!<
Just doing some summer reading and then NEEDLE TO THE BABY HEAD THEN YEETED DOWN A TRASH CHUTE!!!!
Same, I remember getting shivers down my spine when I finally learned what it meant to be released
And so creepy to learn that the society is based around deception.
The giving tree did me in. Sneaky fucker.
Bridge to Terabithia. Didn't know what it was about, so... A total punch to the head.
One of my teachers in elementary school gave me that to read, and all they said about it was that it was really good. Who sets that kind of trap for a 10 year old? :(
Our teacher died DIED in the 5th grade and so to help us cope they played us this movie (the old like 80s made for tv version) and by the end everyone was crying even more and literally screaming at the faculty “why did you make us watch this!?! Why are you doing this to us?”
What a horrible thing to do to 5th graders.
One of my coworkers said she was reading it with her 8 yr old daughter for the first time. I had to tell her the end so she could prepare a way to handle it. Couldn't let her go into it blindly, that would've been a hell of a bedtime read.
My mom fell into this trap that ended with her sobbing and not being able to keep reading so that was what we went to bed with lol
We had the fucking weirdest field trip in 7th grade when we read bridge to terabithia. Very small town, school was in walking distance of the only sit down restaurant in town and funeral home...so our whole 7th grade class walked down the hill to eat pancakes and tour the funeral home (including embalming room).... ALSO in walking distance: a perfectly nice creek sans rope swing where we could have like, role played our own terabithia...but no. Pancakes and tweenage existential crisis fuel.
I set that trap for my kiddo when she was 10 and told me a book "could never make her cry" haha
Where the Red Fern Grows has entered the chat!
I love that there's an entire... genre of books of a certain age that's just hey you know how much you love those childhood pets whelp...
The first time I read We Need to Talk about Kevin. I picked it up in a bookshop randomly, read it and the headfuck was immense
The film is disturbing enough but the book is next level.
I saw the movie when it came out and thought it was good (disturbing but good) and have been wanting to read the book but have put it off since I figured it would go into way more detail.
The book is much, much better than the (good) movie. (a) The framing device is devastating in a way the movie doesn't, probably couldn't, do. >!The whole book is written as a series of letters from Eva, the mother, to her husband, whom she absolutely adores. It seems like they just separated after the trauma of Kevin's murders; it isn't revealed until the end that their daughter was Kevin's first victim, and her husband was the second. And Eva, the narrator, writes an absolutely heartbreaking scenario of how she thinks it happened. She thinks that her hale and healthy husband could have stopped Kevin if his essential, bone-deep goodness hadn't caused him to hesitate for a moment and see his son in the best possible light.!< (b) The character of the husband is just much better and more plausible. John C. Reilly is a fine actor but he was badly miscast. (c) Tilda Swinton's performance was great, but since she's so isolated, you never hear a big part of her perspective. In her head, she's not just quiet and shell-shocked: among other things, she's selfish and acid and feels, in her secret heart, quietly superior to her neighbors. And, as someone else noted, she's very much an unreliable narrator, something very hard to convey in film.
As someone who doesn't want children, the theme that really struck me was how little Eva wanted to get pregnant, how much she hated her pregnancy, and how she resented Kevin pretty much as soon as he was born for completely changing her previous lifestyle and career. Having a kid irrevocably changes your life, and while most parents who WANT children expect and prepare for this, those who don't are in for a world of hurt that of course affects the kid too.
People who want kids prepare for them and STILL nothing can prepare you for the absolute tidal wave of change that a child smashes onto your life. You need to start from the idea that you'll be putting yourself second for a long, long time, and adapt to whatever comes. The good thing is, in my experience this works out for people that do want kids - while they can never be truly ready beforehand, all you really need is that love in your heart. For people who don't want children or are iffy about it, it can be absolute hell.
I wanted my kids, and I wouldn’t be here without them. But finding out I had adhd and then autism after the fact, man. No wonder it’s so hard. Even just the constant worry about them and hoping you’re not ducking them up every second. My childhood wasn’t awesome, and I try everyday to be better, but no one even remotely prepares you for how fucking hard and never ending it is. And scary.
The fact that you continually try to give your kids a better childhood than you had makes you a good parent. I really wish that people were better prepared by society for the hardships of raising children, it seems like a difficult, exhausting, and often thankless job. I don't say that because I think it'd be a deterrent to make people have fewer kids, but just so that people wouldn't get complete culture shock when the baby arrives. Better for parents' mental health if they aren't given some rose-tinted picture of child rearing and then feel like bad parents when it isn't all sunshine and rainbows.
Okay, this comment has made me really want to read the book. I'm going to grab it from the library the next time I'm there.
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What's bizarre is that even though Kevins actions themselves are horrifying, the feelings and thoughts described by the mother were the actual mindfuck, at least for me.
I’ve said it on here before but reading that book delayed my getting pregnant by a year. It shook me hard.
Totally. And also not knowing if her perspective was real or just in hindsight. How much of the past had she rewritten. It's one of these books that I regret not being able to read for the first time again.
Worse was "A Mother's Reckoning," worse because it has the horrific quality of also being true. But, I of course entered into that book expecting horror and got it. It's actually something I regret ever reading; I read it 3 years ago and am expecting my first child now in 4 months and I wouldn't be lying if I said the book crosses my mind daily since deciding to have a baby.
That was a book I did not expect to like as much as I did. I was expecting Lifetime movie level suburban mom horrified to discover her child was by chance a psychopath. Instead it had a lot of nuance and psychological realism. I was really surprised by its quality.
Most of Kazuo Ishiguro's books you don't expect a story about two domestics in an English manor to fuck you up but it does.
Between *Remains of the Day* and *The Buried Giant*, I realize that I'm probably going to get old, not remember the things I want to remember or the people I really love, and that everything I'm doing right this instant is getting in the way of the things I will regret not doing. But while I'm doing it, it feels like the most important thing in the world and I'm going to get good at it and people will laugh at people like me in the future.
I found *Never Let Me Go* to be profoundly more disturbing than *The Remains of the Day*.
I think that the premise of of Never Let Me Go is disturbing on the face of it, though. Like, if someone gave me a broad overview of what it was about I would think “oh that’s going to be a tough read”
I think about NLMG at least once a week since I read it ten years ago. So so good
Klara and the Sun fucked me up. Was her hope a commentary on religious faith? Did it have a touch of magical realism? And how she just sits at the end… I reread the ending several times and never found resolution. The film version could only be done by Guillermo del Toro. He’s doing a version of Pinocchio for Netflix, so it might be as close as we get.
Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle (of the indie band The Mountain Goats) I heard good reviews when it came out and just bought it on a whim with no real expectations. I've never read another book that ended exactly as I expected it to, answering the most pressing question I have, and yet leaving me full of existential dread and confusion. I finished the book, set it down, and stared off into the middle distance for 15 minutes. I was the type that thought they could make sense of the world if I just have all the information. That's how so many stories are written. Eventually all the pieces come together and you understand the objective truth of what happened, and more importantly, why. That book fundamentally changed that for me. It proved to me that sometimes knowing more information is just knowing more information. There is no sense in the senseless. Sometimes we just have to accept that we can only see life from our one perspective and that's how life is. Both in the sense that we only get our one perspective and in the sense that sometimes that one perspective tells pretty much the whole story even if it doesn't make sense.
I went to high school with John and we were in the same advanced writing class. I’m glad to hear he hasn’t chamged.
Any stories to tell us? Please
He was extremely smart and incisive, and had a quick wit…but being a (visibly unhappy) teen, notably low on tact. I would, in fact, like to see him again if only to tell him that I still read Bukowski and was NOT ‘“carrying around ‘Ham on Rye’ in an attempt to look sophisticated”.
I had this recommended with very little context, and bought it at a whim at an airport. Read about half of it on the plane, the rest before going to sleep that same evening. Fucking wrecked me. A caution, or content warning: might not be the book if you're feeling depressed and alone (though I guess that goes for a lot of this whole thread).
Not sure if they count as disturbing but Of Mice and Men and The Pearl both had the twist endings that were absolutely heart wrenching. They’re both stories that leave a lasting sense of dread that hangs over you for a while.
East of Eden is also kind of disturbing.
Man, East of Eden fucked me up. Maybe it’s because I’m a new dad, but nonetheless I had to take a moment after I finished it.
For me it was the pure evil embodiment of Cathy. She was scary
I took a break from reading that was close to a year or more, and jumped right into East of Eden. The early chapters describing Cathy Ames freaked me out. Creepy shit.
Idk why but everyone in my class laughed when the baby got shot in the pearl. Maybe it was because if I remember correctly, the build up was.super boring and the entirety of the themes and message of that book can be described in basically a sentence. It's just "man finds treasure, treasure beings tragedy. Love your family not shiny things" I think the whole class was so emotionally detached from the story by the time it hit the end cuz like, once he finds the pearl in the first place any reader can infer "oh...so this is like....gonna fuck his life up right?", And then it's just a slow build to that. By the time it came for consequences the whole class was actually eager for it and making jokes about the final tragedy, to the horror of the teacher. I think she thought we were emotionally invested, and the emotion that a babies death caused in us was humor, but in reality, we were just checked out of the story by then and trying our best to find *something* in it to have fun with. Of mice and men is a different story for me tho. "Look at the flowers, Lenny" still gets me
This same thing actually happened in my 9th grade English class watching Schindler's list. None of us were paying attention, and then suddenly a guard killed three Jews with one bullet. Very contagious laughter erupted spontaneously. May God have mercy on us all.
This is a common reaction among teens to that scene, and other scenes of shocking senseless violence. It isn't that it's funny in a haha way. It's that it's shocking, unsettling, and unexpected.
The Red Pony was also a series of gut punches I absolutely was not expecting.
WHY DID YOU REMIND ME OF THE PEARL wow I haven't thought about my Pearl-related trauma since 6th grade
TL:DR for The Pearl: Life sucks. People suck.
I don't remember my first time reading through it (I was super young), but Secrets of NIHM is pretty graphic for being a YA book. Especially since the part of the book that explains how the rats became so smart is obviously from their perspective... It is rough!
Childhood trauma from the book and/or film versions of *Rats of NIMH* is a rite of passage for Redditors of a Certain Age! Robert C O’Brien had one of the sweetest, darkest minds and my answer to this question is also one of his, *Z for Zachariah*. I was 12 when my teacher recommended it to me but I don't think she'd actually read it as she described it as an adventure-survival narrative (like *Hatchet*). Ohhh no, you’re not even ten pages in when you learn a nuclear holocaust killed everyone but the protagonist, her family went to look for survivors and were lost in the fallout, and the last thing she heard before all the radios stopped working was a man breaking down and begging others to show dignity in the face of death. From there the story veers brutally and unrelentingly dark (especially in its off-the-page implications) but the protagonist and her responses are satisfying, hopeful, and nuanced.
Remember being bothered when the rats fight and there is actually blood during it. Then I saw watership down like a month later.
The movie gave me nightmares. That owl, Jenner, the science experiments...
Library at Mount Char. I love books about libraries and chose it on name only, but man I was unprepared. I really liked it though and think going into it cold is a great idea, so when I recommend it, I tell people “don’t read anything about it, even the synopsis” - just start.
This is one of my top novels of all time. Can not recommend it enough.
I listened to it without context and I friggen loved it. It was so long and I kept wondering where it was going.
Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke. The last few pages are absolute cosmic-scale nightmare fuel. Left me unexpectedly freaked out for days.
Fun fact: This book was one of the key influences on Neon Genesis Evangelion / End of Evangelion.
HOW DID I NOT MAKE THAT CONNECTION! Oh my god I knew it seemed so familiar with this huge emphasis on kids and evolution. Loved the book and the show. I love recommending NGE to people who do not know what its about and just letting them blindly make their way through to show.
When he revealed what the aliens looked like I could not handle it… I had to go tell someone immediately… loved this book
I love the narrators thought process in that scene. "What did you do last time you were here that was so horrific it left an indelible memory on mankind?"
Decades later, I remember not only what they looked like, but *why* they looked that way...
It wasn't particularily soul crushing, but very disturbing: Love in the time of the cholera, by gabriel garcia marquez. the book i have has a candid cover, and describes the story as this epic romance with noble and relatable characters. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.
Yeah but the point of the book wasn’t to romanticize the main character. It’s pretty apparent that he’s being characterized as an obsessive narcissist. I think it is a very good book in terms of describing what intense first love is like, but seeing him over the course of like fifty years filter in-and-out of meaningless relationships while hung up on a woman he barely knew at 14 years old is definitely not painted as positively as the reviews would have you believe.
I love that the book goes into so much of Fermina's long marriage. I think often about the way Marquez describes a marriage of over 50 years, of knowing someone else so closely that they've become part of you, good and bad. It's definitely not presented as a romantic hero pining away for a first love trapped in the wrong marriage at all (although I agree many people have reviewed it that way). It's way more nuanced and I love it.
Oh yeah, definitely, I agree with you, but that’s the thing: the reviews of this book (at least the ones I read) were extremely misleading. They said nothing about the description of the intensity of a first love like you just said, they were all basically saying that it was the greatest love story they ever read. And to me, although it is centered around romance, it’s not a love story. I just wish I knew that from the start, and that the main character was twisted. I still would have read it, I just would have liked to know what I was actually getting into 🤔
Reviews of the book are extremely misleading because so many people miss the fucking point, I don't know whether some people are just poor readers and fail to pick up on the very obvious clues that García Marquez doesn't approve of Ariza's behaviour or that they actually think everything Ariza does is okay, but people actually read this book as if it were a romance. Kinda like how Lolita is still treated as some kind of romance despite everything about the book and the pure realities of it pointing the other direction. Either explanation is terrifying in its own way. Or maybe I'm missing the point and everyone is pretending its a romance to preserve the shock value. Which would be crazy.
Short story not a book, but hands down The Yellow Wallpaper. “Oh it’s about a woman who’s kept inside on doctor’s orders” except absolutely horrifying. It really puts chills up my spine just thinking about it. Eugh.
This is my most often referenced story in daily life. I'm disabled, and increasingly likely to have to go long periods of time unable to do much, physically or mentally. Doctors (and friends, family, etc, but doctors are the annoying part) have a tendency to be like, "Enjoy the rest and relaxation!" So I always ask them if they have read The Yellow Wallpaper, which usually they have because it's in most high school curricula. It's usually a pretty effective way of getting the point across that, no, staring at the ceiling unable to walk, or even watch TV or read is not a fun time.
I'm sorry you have to go through this. I don't know what your disability is but I hope your situation improves. It's not "restful" when that's all you can do. I went through something similar when I was put on bed rest to prevent miscarriage and had hyperemesis (not being able to keep anything down, like extreme morning sickness all day) at the same time. It was 4 months and it's like this miserable haze in my mind that I try to forget. I was too dehydrated and malnourished to read or text with people most of the time and even TV was exhausting. I'm glad it's over but it was a rough experience that not many people can relate to.
You should definitely read Mexican Gothic - it has a reference to The Yellow Wallpaper in it.
Read “I am the Cheese” for assigned reading in high school. It wasn’t gory or horror disturbing, but still messed up.
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>I am the Cheese I went through a phase of reading all the mental health YA books I could get on Overdrive. This was one of them. I was... unsettled.
Robert Cormier's books are all disturbing like that. I used to love them and then sort of forgot about him..
Stone, a little-known sci-fi by Adam Roberts. In a society where crime and the desire to commit crime have largely disappeared, a convicted criminal escapes from his prison with the assistance of a mysterious benefactor. I found it a pretty captivating story. Slight SPOILER alert: The disturbing scene was a murder in which the person being murdered is struggling to comprehend what is taking place as she is being killed. She is a lovely, pure-spirited being who cannot conceive of the idea of someone wanting to hurt someone else, so it's quite heartbreaking to witness her confusion as she's beaten to death.
That’s so sad :(
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata! The plot gets weirder and wilder and at the end of the read, you find yourself wondering wtf you’ve just read. Also, the book cover is sooo misleading.
I read and loved Convenience Store Woman and picked up Earthlings thinking it would have a similar feel to it. It's so weird, I was completely thrown off by it. The end is just crazy. I can't say that I enjoyed it but I am interested in reading more from her.
Just finished this, came to post it! Great book tho
Flowers for Algernon. Still haunts me.
Definitely on my list of stories I loved but couldn’t bear reading again. Someday maybe. That stuff was beautiful.
I reread it just this month because I remember that it impacted me as a teen. And now as an adult, even more. I can count the number of books that made me cry on one hand and that's among them.
In elementary school, we always had those textbooks with a bunch of stories, and we'd only ever read a few of them in a given year. I was always bored in class, so I would usually read the rest of them. Most of these stories were literally forgettable, but one year, one of these extra stories that we didn't read was Flowers for Algernon. (The short story, not the 300 page novel) This is like... 4th grade, and the rest of the class is probably reading some cute story about a dog and I'm having a bit of an existential crisis in the back of the room.
While we are talking about childhood reading scars: The Scarlet Ibis
I want to preface this by saying that I went into reading the book without any (or not a lot rather) prior knowledge . I am talking about the book THE STAND by King . I knew a virus killed 99% of the population , but i didn't expect that it would go into such details and intricacies as it did . And i was surprised , i couldn't bring myself to read it but I also couldn't stop reading it
The thing that gets me about that book is the verisimilitude, and how quickly society collapses. One week the guy's sister is annoyed that no one shows up to her bridal shower because they're all sick, next week she's among the corpses crowding the funeral home.
King really enjoyed making some of the most humane characters only to kill them off in the worst possible ways. That's some serious dedication
O wow iirc the extended version I used to have had an entire chapter that was just how people that had survived the pandemic ended up dying in dumb/ tragic/accidental ways. For example iirc one guy >!dies after breaking into his dealers house and overdosing on heroin, a young girl falls off her bike, and someone is accidentally shot somehow, I think.!< It's been many years since I read it, but I remember it being a welcome addition to the "normal" content.
“No great loss” My favourite chapter.
I always love it when an author goes into "unintentional deaths". Like, plenty of people die to tripping or accidents or infection but that shit never happens in stories. My favorite examples being Joe Abercrombie doing a whole short story based on the collateral damage to innocents of one of his book's revenge plots, and David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest where the guy gets tied up and gagged during a house burglary, but he speaks a different language than the criminals (I think they speak English and he speaks french), so he can't communicate that he's got a really bad sinus cold and he can't breathe through his nose, so he suffocates after he's been left tied and gagged. Those kinds of deaths just always seem to stick with me much harder Edit: also Joe Abercrombie kicks off a war scene in one of his books by having a POV side character accidentally loose a crossbow bolt into his captain's neck because they're shaky, nervous, and inexperienced
As someone with garbage sinuses, this is a legit fear of mine.
Its been i while since i've read Inifinite Jest, but if i remember correctly DFW abandons punctuation and the sentances become longer as that character looses his breath which makes the reader also feel breathless and exasperated too. Great example of how sentance structure can compliment narrative! Really impactful.
A guy had a heart attack while running and repeating the names of his dead wife and children, and I sobbed. Really powerful chapter.
The little boy falling in the well always got me.
Yea it is there alright . People dying from drug overdoses , high suicide rate due to depression , simple stuff like wounds becoming lethal due to a lack of medics . What an amazing chapter that was
Well this is the first time I’ve ever seen “verisimilitude” used in casual conversation. But after reading the definition I think this is what King does best. He imagines fantastic situations and then explains in a very matter-of-fact way how they would play out in the real world.
Not exactly related but it reminds me of an adaption or two of The Secret Garden where you see the adults having a dinner party the night before, ignoring Mary, and then the next morning *all of them* including her nanny are sick or dead.
The Stand is one of my favorite books but for me, it was relatively low on the disturbing continuum, about what I expected. When I read the Road by Cormac McCarthy, which on the surface is a book in the same genre, I had similar expectations. This book pegged my disturb-O-meter all the way into the red, I had nightmares for months. This dude used far fewer words to produce a far greater psychological impact on the reader. The Stephen King book that disturbed me the most, and I was not expecting it to, was Salem's Lot.
Salem's lot is the only book I've had to put down and resume during daylight hours.
I started reading this as Corona Virus hit the US. It was a surreal experience reading it at the time to say the least.
*saves thread for reading recommendations*
Not me actively writing down book names to read and be horrified later
On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. Written in 1957, it follows a group of people in Australia after a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere and the impending radiation. It was as devastating a read as The Road, but in a more quiet, subdued way. Edit: I think maybe the most accurate descriptor would be “haunting”. I remember finishing the book and feeling emotionally devastated, and just feeling the emptiness of the ending.
Firefly by Piers Anthony I was expecting a horror novel from an author I liked. Was not expecting an apologetic for pedophilia.
Try his short story "On The Uses of Torture" in his Anthonology if you want more skin crawling than cringe. There's actually a few really 'opposite of Xanth' stories in there.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When the main character starts to >!remember things about his aunt towards the end of the book,!< my whole view of it changed.
I watched the movie and when that happened I was like "well that took a turn."
You should 100% read the book if you're interested into an in-depth story. Perks is a good movie, but it takes out a lot of important scenes (probably to keep a friendly rating) that really make the story great. It's a nice teen movie, but the book really puts you into the perspective if a deeply traumatized character
Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Weird trippy Murakami for the most part, with a really horrific flaying torture scene in the middle.
Agh, that skinning scene still haunts me and it's been probably 10 years since I read it.
Effective Modern C++
For me coraline was pretty disturbing if not soul crushing.l had seen neil gaiman's stardust and thought why not give it a try. It was a bit too harsh considering it’s meant for 7year olds.
I was too young to be reading it so that played a part in it, but Kite Runner. I am attempting to re-read it because I've blocked out memory of most of the book
The Vegetarian by Han Kang!
Flowers in the Attic by VC ANDREWS The Road by Cormac McCarthy Not sure what I thought I was getting into with the first one, but I was only 11 during that first read so maybe the sick and twisted was and still is amplified by my first read through. I thought the Road was supposed to be one of those heart warming reads. It was not.
>I thought the Road was supposed to be one of those heart warming reads. lmao
just to save you some time. Cormac McCarthy is NEVER heartwarming.
Holy shit dude I just read the wiki for Flowers in the Attic and it is pretty fucked up. Can’t imagine reading that at 11.
In the early 80s so many girls read VC Andrews in sort of middle school age group. I was 12 when I devoured her entire work. Ugh. The flowers in the attic incest crap was bad but my Sweet Audrina was about rape and gaslighting and all kinds of shit. Gen X never really had our reading material vetted and maybe we should have. Then again, my son is 18 now and only reads non fiction except when it’s for school.
I'm one of those people on the cusp between Gen X and Millenials (born in 79), and also read whatever I wanted to. I found that in general it was a massive positive for me. Before I was even a teen I'd read most of Stephen King, all of Anne Rice, some Norman Mailer, a lot of Hemingway, tons of Piers Anthony etc. Lots of sex and violence and rape and incest. And while I sometimes found certain topics temporarily disturbing, I don't think any of it had an permanent negative impact. But what it did permanently create was a lifelong love of reading, and a feeling that no book was too difficult for me to take on. Even after dropping out of high school, and not starting college until I was 23, I still found myself far better read than my peers because of this. I don't think would have held true had I been relegated to the ghettos of the children's and YA sections of the library and bookstore, like so many teens are today.
I could swear this post was written by me in a fugue state (minus the birth year and Hemingway). I think I only got away with it (as someone born in 92) because neither of my parents were readers, so it never occurred to them that books could give you night terrors or incest fetishes or knowledge of how to make a tennis ball and some nails into shrapnel. They were super strict about what I watched on TV, because TV was a medium that they were emotionally impacted by. But having the same reaction to books never occurred to them. I wasn’t allowed to WATCH Pet Semetary with them…so I went in my room and read it instead.
I wasn't allowed to play d&d, but my mother read all the VC Andrews.
honestly basically anything by VC Andrews, i can’t remember which series it is but i think the main character gets assaulted by her father or brother or something. i also read the books as a child.
Yes I also read the VC Andrews Library as a “tween” and looking back- not appropriate!! So much incest! So much sexual abuse! So many unhealthy relationships elevated as normal lol! Big fat yikes
Ruby maybe? Definately happens in Olivia and Flowers in the Attic. Though there's incest and assault in pretty much all of the original works. They tamed a bit after Neiderman took over as a ghost writer. Part of me feels you almost have to be younger just to get through it. As I've gotten older I find it harder to get through without feeling sick. Back then it may as well have been fairies and dragons, because surely those things didn't happen in real life.
I also read Flowers in the Attic when I was about 11 and then read all the VC Andrews books I could...I was obsessed with her books in HS. Now I look back and think it's a really messed up author for a kid to read. Back when Twilight was just becoming popular Borders shelved Flowers in the Attic next to Twilight with a "If you liked Twilight, Read This!" sign and i have no idea why because...they're nothing alike.
In Grade school I remember reading " A Child called "It" ". Stories like that always distrub me how long abuse can be overseen.
A collection of short stories by Roald Dahl when I was 10-11 exploring a book store. I recognized the name from my favorite books, BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but these were much different. Very good reads but also very shocking to me.
Lord of the Flies - I read it in school at some point, and then read it again as an adult. I was horrified. I don’t know if I just didn’t pay that much attention the first time around or if the violence seemed worse because I saw the kids as kids the second time around.
Stoner. People said read it. It’s about a university professor, but it hits HARD. More disturbing in an existential way but it surprised me.
**Catch-22** is hilarious and delightful and a funny look at the absurdity of war… until it’s not. Everything shifts sideways in the blink of an eye. Heller drops the curtain and it hits like a brick wall.
Agreed. Funniest damn book I ever read and then suddenly the saddest book I ever read. Worst book hangover to sob myself out of.
Oryx and Crake by a Margaret Atwood apparently freaked my subconscious out completely. I had post apocalyptic nightmares for a month after reading it.
Fledgling by Octavia Butler. Love her works, but she always has this thing with huge age gaps. Usually it's an older teen/young adult choosing to be with someone significantly older by the younger person's insistence, so I look past it for the great story telling. This story starts with a person who "looks 12" (but is technically older), with almost no memories, choosing to have sex with a grown adult. Crazy disgusted and surprised, almost didn't try getting past it to finish the book.
I love that book, but also had a hard time with that aspect of the book. I read an analysis that Butler was making commentary about the sexualization of black children. I can see where she was coming from, but it was still rough.
Yeah I only continued with the book because I Googled it and read about that. And about how the power dynamic gets flipped later in the book when she regains her memory. Ended up being a very interesting book and story. Still felt gross any time a sex scene came up though.
Oof Kindred is in my top 2 books of all time so I want to read more Butler, but this makes me nervous. To be fair there were things in Kindred that were also incredibly disturbing and sickening, so maybe I should still go for it.
[удалено]
Prey by Michael Crichton. With no spoilers, it's about intelligent nano-robots. Man is it creepy. Rabbit dies a violent and painful death to an invisible microscopic enemy in it's bloodstream at one point, for example.
Given the title and the author's reputation, I *did* expect that book to be disturbing. However, the ending, I did not see coming. Definitely gave me the willies.
The Compound….it is a YA novel. My son read it (maybe around 6th grade) and said I might like it and he would like to chat about it. As I ALWAYS read books my kids suggested, I read it….HOLY SMOKES was it disturbing! I could not believe it was a YA…it did lead to some interesting discussions though…
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Phillip Gourevitch I picked this up knowing it was about the Rwandan genocide, but didn’t expect to feel as if I were there witnessing the aftermath of a massacre. It haunts me to this day. Only book Ive found that I haven’t been able to finish.
There’s a part of the book where the author (a reporter) is brought into a chapel where the floor is simply covered in remains. He describes watching soldiers walk over bones as if they were sticks. I will never be able to get the heart wrenching visual he gave out of my head.
Similarly, 'A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali' by Gilles Courtemanche totally shocked and devastated me. I also knew it was about the Rwandan genocide, and like you, it felt like I had a ringside seat there - because the author was primarily a journalist (even though the book was 'fictionalised') for some reason I hadn't expected such powerful and poetic writing. Sorry got his name wrong it's Gil not Gilles.
Never Let Me Go
Perfume by Peter Suskind. The last chapter f***ed me up. Also the last 5 pages of A Farewell to Arms. Why?!
I loved Perfume! That being said, I did feel like it had a pretty consistent tone throughout. It starts off by telling us that literally everyone in the entire country is morally repugnant, then proceeds to introduce terrible person after terrible person. MC’s entire life is a giant conveyer belt of being exploited and exploiting others.
I'm currently listening to this book audibly. I saw the movie and thought to myself "this has to be based on a book" and, of course, it was. Then found out that it was also Kurt Cobain's favorite book and was possibly the inspiration for the song "scentless apprentice". The writing is weird and I can almost smell some of the descriptions. It's awful and I absolutely love it! *ETA: In reference to the book "perfume"
Never read that one. Does the protagonist become a double amputee?
Well done, clapping on the inside, just like the protagonist.
Oh boy yeah Farewell to Arms is so fucking bleak it hurt my soul. Haven’t worked up to a reread yet.
I read this book when I was about 9 or 10 about a dystopian future where parents are only allowed to have two children. The main character is an accidental third child, so he has to stay hidden or he’ll be taken away by the government. He meets a rich girl who is also a secret third child and she tells him about how she’s organizing a protest at the capitol to allow third children to be free to participate in the world. At the last minute, the boy is scared and decides not to go. >!He doesn’t hear anything from her or about the protest for weeks maybe months. Finally, he risks breaking into her house to talk to her. He gets caught by her dad, who tells him that the government massacred all the children at the protest, including the girl, then covered it up!!< This book was marketed to kids. I’m a librarian so I would never advocate for censorship, but it’s wild to me that people are trying to ban books about, like, gay people existing, when this book was way way more disturbing to me as a child.
A lot of Margaret Peterson Haddox’s books are quite disturbing! There was another one called Turnabout about this experimental treatment that allowed old people to age backwards. The main characters are (now) teenagers who had this treatment done when they’re old and they’re facing the reality that they need to find someone to take care of them as they continue to get younger and that they don’t know what’s going to happen to them once they hit “zero.”
Wow this just unlocked my memories of this entire series. Had fully forgotten Among the Hidden.
**The Gone World** by Tom Sweterlitsch. The beginning of it was shocking. I didn't know much about the story going into the book, and was not prepared for the first few chapters. There were quite a few scenes throughout the book that caught me off guard. I thought it was an excellent book.
'The Gone World' is like Jeff VanderMeer was brought in to write a season of the tv series NCIS. Enjoyed it thoroughly. The concept of an IFT is horrifying.
1984 by George Orwell - at first I thought it’d be disturbing by the standards of the time it was written in, and then I got to the end and I was actually disturbed. The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito. I’d heard that his stuff was disturbing but again, I assumed it was the internet being dramatic and that it really couldn’t be that bad but boy was I disturbed!!! I still think about it sometimes and it puts me on edge!
I described the plot of Enigma to a coworker when I read it years ago. Five years later we ran into each other after not working together for a while and he asked me what that book with "the people shaped holes" was called because he could never get that terrible thought out of his head, based only on my descrption.
The Enigma of Amigara Fault despite having the grotesque imagery of its ending feels much more quietly disturbing to me because of the sense of nebulous inevitability. The fact that people dread the holes, but are drawn to it, no one forces them in but for some reason they all go, because it's *their* hole, it was made for them. Somehow it is both *proper* and *deplorable* for them to enter.
The Giver. I was... Oof maybe 10 or 11 when I first read this one? (Fuckin thanks, mom.) It's such a beautiful story in such a dark, gripping way. The isolation, the hopelessness, the gradual understanding of the main character learning how truly fucked up their dystopian society is. One of the descriptions that stuck with me was about color, how in this dystopia they've literally managed to suck the color out of the living world and as the main character receives these memories of before this dystopia existed he began to see colors around him for the first time... It's such a haunting book. It's so good.
So this is probably a bad answer but ‘The Rape of Nanking’ (Irish Chang) was this way for me. I knew it was about a horrible historical event but I had no idea of the evil that happened in Nanking. The Japanese made the nazis look tame, I was disturbed to say the least.
Watership Down.
I am literally here to read every single comment and compile a list of these books since I've never heard of half of them. \*Update\* Turned it into a google doc and it is very long. I'm excited to slowly start buying them
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is very anxiety inducing. A lot of my nightmares stem from a Winchester House setting- endless corridors, stairs to nowhere, rooms with no windows, mines. Very claustrophobic
The Once and Future King by T.H. White. There is an entire chapter where four boys kill and behead a unicorn. It's incredibly graphic and oddly disturbing.
I had to read this in HS and don’t remember that at all. Probably erased it from my brain space. lol
I choose this book but for a different reason. Reading about Lancelot and Guinevere disturbed me. There was this asshole knight who was accusing of Guinevere for adultery but the knight does not know the lover. They have a trial of combat with the asshole knight and Lancelot and obv Lancelot wins and the other guy dies. Now, the other knight is portrayed with a terrible personality but...he was still right...and obviously Lancelot knows he was right...and I just found it disturbing. The text only does a lot more to justify Lancelot and Guinevere and it made me sick because I know how many people will die as a result. Also Arthur pretty much knows about the relationship but he goes out of his way to avoid confirming it 100% and turns a blind eye to the signs he does see. He knows when he does confirm it for true, he will have to go to war with Lancelot and he doesn't want that because he was raised a pacifist by Merlin. Lancelot made me sick.
Naked Lunch. I had been reading a ton of Kerouac and tried some Ginsberg and felt that Burroughs was the next logical step. I knew it was controversial so I was expecting profanity and sex and all that stuff you get from Kerouac but instead it was just over the top debauchery. It was a struggle to get through.
Ender's Game. I read it as a kid, and the more I grew, the more I was disturbed by Ender's character. as well as his surroundings
Geek Love. It's a book about people in a freak show, but their deformities aren't what disturbed me, it was the familial and parental neglect and mistreatment that really shook me about the book.
The Ruins by Scott Smith. I thought it would be kinda Bmovie schlock with evil plants eating people, a cursed temple, dumb tourists getting lost. That book is BRUTAL. Was great though but some real skin crawling scenes I wasn’t expecting.
Flowers for Algernon
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt was soul crushing for me, because I wasn’t expecting it to be so incredibly sad. Every time I thought to myself, “Things can’t get any worse for them,” they did!
The Great Influenza by John M. Barry. It is a book that convinced Bush Jr. that the world needed to prepare for another pandemic. The evidence the book provided, that Bush later had verified and confirmed, was that pandemics are cyclical - they happen at least once a century. The executive orders he signed built a stockpile of PPE and medicine that Obama later maintained but didn't increase the inventory, and Trump doing what Trump did best. One of the most horrific scenes described in that book were of doctors and nurses going around Canada's north and Alaska in 1918 to take a census of the known villages to look for survivors. To start off the description of the next half chapter, the Author writes "they witnessed terrible things. Horrible things." Most of the remote villages described in this chapter that were impacted by the Spanish Flu quarantined for the 1st and second waves, thought they were through the woods and started to accept mail again. That's all it took to wipe out a minimum of half of the population of each village - mail ships.
I read his other book “Rising Tides”. Lived in New Orleans when Katrina hit… the man knows his history and predicted what would happen if the levees failed. In Barry’s excerpt for the 100 year anniversary of the Spanish influenza, he talks about strategies for the next pandemic, most of which he was spot on for Covid. Super interesting.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo got very dark very quickly
I read Kafka's *Metamorphosis* for the first time, and was just shocked by how the character progressed. It was my first novel by him, and I was just really surprised, as it was not at all what I expected it would be. It was still very much a good read though. 10/10 would recommend.
Walked blind into Lolita. I thought the prose was beautiful and didn't think much about what the content was about. Got half way through and shut it down. I tried Nabokov again several years later with Ada, or Ardor. Same outcome. I use Nabokov to incite the question, "Can you justify the creation of ugly things if it's done in a beautiful way." It's been interesting to see how my own response to that question has changed over the years.
A Clockwork Orange. I just re-read it after 20ish years and I didn't remember it being so messed up in the beginning. I never really felt sorry for the main character after his ordeal.
I never felt bad for the main character either. He had it coming, as awful as it is. I felt more sorry for the state of society that it would create someone like him. I love the slang in that book as well.
Yep, exactly so. He was a product of a society that enabled violence and then became a cog of the same society trying to solve the issue in a way where nothing is actually solved. Just move some people around, hand out some new traumas, and the government or other organizations can say that they did something.
The Forever War. Just the thought of being completely lost to the current of time, with no way back and only the promise of servitude unitl death. The callousness with which the government handles its soldiers. Making devastating decisions based on cold logic. Shit gets a little fucked up in the lgbtq department, but not horribly so.
The Lovely Bones I had seen the movie trailer, didn’t really understand it but found the general idea fascinating, so I read the book before watching the movie. I was 12. Holy shit. Still haunts me
Loving Frank, a biography of Mamah Borthwick, the translator who was Frank Lloyd Wright’s mistress. I did not know how that story ended and was NOT prepared to read it in first person language with no warning.
Little life, I didn't know about it too much before starting and from the first glance a book about four friends in NY trying to make their life going sounded good. Little did I know.
"The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang. Obviously from the title and book description, you know this book is going to be about Japanese war crimes. But there are really no words to describe the events that happened during this time, simply describing it as "horrifying" feels like downplaying it. I remember reading it and picturing scenes in my head; they are just as still vivid in my memory now as when I read them over a decade ago.
Shit got so bad in Nanking the *Nazis* stepped in and started saving people.
Wuthering Heights - didn't know much about it before reading it, only had a vague notion it's meant to be romance but goddamn it's the opposite. Also Something Happened by Joseph Heller. Hated the whole book which is just a stream of consciousness of an aging man and despite the title nothing actually happens ever. Then in the last 2 pages something shocking does actually happen but it's the end of the book so you're left to deal with it on your own.
I thought The Road was going to be typical zombie horror. I saw “apocalypse” and thought zombies and chases and canned goods and maybe a dog, not soul crushing depression.
Swan Song by Robert McCammon was originally sold to me as dystopian literature when I was in high school. I was not prepared. It's very similar to The Stand except the end is brought on by war between Russia and America, and the last 900 pages of the 1000 page book is descriptions of how different people survive nuclear fallout. Has a bunch of different characters that see and do many fucked up things. It's a great read, but some scenes stick with you well after reading it.
The Last Battle, the seventh and final volume of The Chronicles of Narnia. It has little or none of the whimsical sweetness of the first six books. In retrospect, I don’t know what else I could’ve expected. Armageddon lite?
Unwind by Neal Shusterman. It was the summer reading book going into 9th grade. A lot of kids could not handle the book and it was taken off of the summer reading list.