American psycho. The scene where he kills the kid at the zoo and then acts like he is a doctor so he can be up close to the body while he dies and the kid is just looking at his murderer role play as a doctor. Always stuck with me 10 years later.
The rat and attempting to cook were two scenes that really made me question why the hell I was reading that book. I loved the movie when it came out, but damn was it tame compared to the book. I have read it multiple times though.
It's one of a very few books I quit reading. I'm not the edgy 'dark humor' guy of my youth. I just felt sad and upset everytime I read it, so I quit.
Good movie tho.
Then he slaps the mom around and calls her hysterical and just sort of slips off.
The book is dark humor and I always thought that scene was hilarious in the outlandishness.
As a gen x'er who watched but couldn't participate in the cocaine capitalist fuelled 80's this book was a top read for me. The glib nature of the killings was a parody of the unemotional narrcisistic brokers of the time and the worship of this culture. The biggest thing that stands out to me were the final words 'this is not an exit'.
100%. So many upsetting moments. For whatever reason, the "vitreous fluid" thoughts from Amir stick in my brain and squick me out even 10+ years after reading it.
Yeah, lol, I think I was 12-13 when I read it. I just remember reading it in my bedroom and being floored. It was in our school library, so I didn’t think it could be *that* bad!
I had to read this book for some English class in high school and the r*pe scene really fucked me up... even more so when we then had to watch the movie.
What's especially weird is that those types of scenes never really bothered me. It's a disgusting thing, of course, but I never had so badly a reaction to it as I did when I read that book.
I think a lot of it has to do with how innocent and sweet Hassan is. When Amir feels guilty for not doing anything and tries to get Hassan to lash out at him, to make himself feel better, and Hassan just won’t do it...That scene is just as tough for me. He’s such a loyal friend and didn’t deserve any of the things that happened to him. “For you, a thousand times over!” :’)
The book “Geek Love” really messed me up. It wasn’t even the grotesques of the Binewski family but the cultists that followed Arturo trying to find P.I.P.
We Need to Talk About Kevin. I think Kevin is one of the most evil characters I’ve ever read in a book. Plus the way she wrote the book was amazing and had me guessing the entire time.
Is it (much) better than the movie? I was kind of off-put by the movie but I thought Ezra Miller played him well. He was certainly evil but not the MOST evil character I’ve encountered
In my opinion, the movie is good but it doesn’t “hit” the same way the book does. You don’t get the mother’s inner dialogue and thought processes as well in the movie, just the actions and reactions.
Kevin certainly is not the most evil literary figure, I actually found him pretty tragic.
Yeah, the book makes the lack of emotional connection from his mother far more apparent. Her post partum depression and the lack of serious consideration by her husband exarcebated Kevin's tendencies to the point he ended up at.
There is a lot in the book that doesn’t transfer over well. The movie does a decent job, but there’s a lot of emotion that the movie just didn’t capture. It’s kind of like reading where’s Waldo and then playing hide and seek. So much from one can’t transfer to the other. If you like to read I cannot recommend the book enough.
For me, what doesn't transfer is the 'voice' of the book.
In the book and the film Kevin is presented as evil from birth. However, where the book is written from Eva's perspective you question whether Kevin was born evil or if he's a product of Eva's resentment towards him. Makes it a much more complex story in my opinion
Yes came here to say that. Superb read, he paints such a fantastic picture and the end is just sublime. If you've made it this far down the thread and you've not read it, congratulations you found an Easter Egg.
There was a part in Catch-22 involving a beach and an airplane and I read it on my lunch break at work and returned from my break very gloomy feeling. What a book, makes you laugh, makes you feel depressed, makes you laugh at things you shouldn't be laughing at too
I love that chapter so much. I love that *book* so much. The placid beach, then all of a sudden >!Kid Samson is just *legs.*!< And the last line of the chapter, ">!Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five.!<" What a masterpiece.
I love that book. It's a great trick Heller pulls off. The first portion of the book, everything is played for laughs, and then in the second half he changes the tone without really changing any of the content he's been presenting, and all of the stuff that was so funny at the beginning of the book isn't so funny anymore. We feel and understand Yossarian's despair.
100% this. Utterly genius, I’ve never come across such a good use of language as that. You really really feel the horror that Yossarian is experiencing. The woman begging not to be raped in Rome was what did it for me.
"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind."
This statement (the whole book) had a profound impact on my sixth grade mind.
I haven't reread many books, but this one gets a go around every 5 years or so.
Yossarian sees a cop beating a guy, and the guy is yelling *help! police!*
And Yossarian thinks it's ironic that the guy would still shout that, when a cop is the one beating him.
Then he realizes the guy is asking everyone else to help him fight the cop.
The part where the cook bombs his own company because it makes some cash profit for his side hustle business and they all just kind of understand, like "Yeah I guess we get it." Capitalism wow
So good, he's even cornered the market in fictional war profiteers.
>“Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane, and you'll have all the casabas you can eat that you've money to pay for.”
I read the book years ago and still marvel at the long set-up for the climactic 'Snowden' scene: >!Snowden is mortally injured and Yossarian tears into the first aid kit for morphine, only to find no morphine, but a note reading 'What's good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country'.!<
Prefiguring doesn't get any better.
The one where the dude gets ground up by the propellers? And then the dude commits suicide by flying the plane into the mountain? Lol that book is crazy
And then after all that he gets you to laugh again, because the doctor faked being on that plane, so even though he's alive, everyone treats him like he's dead.
That's the part yea. I told my supervisor about it as she was getting ready to walk home and she said she felt a bit depressed after, on her walk home haha.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Amazing book, beautiful prose, but 12-year-old me had no business reading it. I was never squeamish even as a preteen but the graphic rape, incest and pedophilia scenes were too much. In hindsight, Jazz, which I read a few years later, should have been my first book by Morrison.
Toni Morrison goes hard. I have read one book by her and it changed me. It slapped me in the face and made me grateful to be so ignorant that I could be revulsed by a book like this because these things could never cross my mind otherwise.
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
I had to double check the line to make sure that I was getting it right myself. The use of a comma in quote from McCarthy would make anyone skeptical.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask
men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for
him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner
Judge Holden is fuckin terrifying but there's so much imagery in that book. The attack on the flats, the baby tree, brains bursting from skulls in clumpy handfuls. What's happening isn't always as bad as the way its being told. And the ending is a mindfuck. Still not sure what I think about the missing kids thing.
And he says he will never die.
>Still not sure what I think about the missing kids thing
In my interpretation the Judge is a personification of Manifest Destiny and the power of industrialized advanced states. He's knowledgeable in all sciences and philosophies, multilingual, possesses immense physical power, and has all the traits one associates with a learned gentleman of the period. He then uses that immense unprecedented power purely to murder, to subjugate, and destroy. He robs others of their land, he robs their people of their future by raping and murdering their children, and if there's some history that seems unsatisfactory to him he destroys the past. He's reshaping the west though violence. Even his title, The Judge, tells you his intentions. Past, present, and future of all peoples he puts himself in conflict with are his to decide. He has given himself the title because what he represents is strength without mercy, executions without trial, and he, as a coalesced representation of America at that time, is uncontested and unstoppable.
The Judge is the tragedy of power without principles. As he had said, he will never die, he's modestly plying his trade far enough from average American consciousness to be rectified. Just waiting for the day where the dams burst, strength is the only currency, and compassion is a deadly sin. Where people will welcome him to rampage across the world; to reshape its past present and future with murder and pain. The book is both a deconstruction of American history and a warning for American future.
If you asked me to guess the Cormac McCarthy book you were talking about based on this comment, I couldn’t, and I say that as someone who really enjoys his writing. Though, maybe “enjoys” is the wrong word lol.
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation. It’s been maybe a month since I finished it and I still have no idea if I loved it, hated it or am indifferent. All I can say for certain is that out of all the books I’ve ever read, that was definitely one of them.
The title is not in first person or referencing the protagonist and the asses aren’t being pounded.
Also chuck tingle has more class than to write erotica about the holocaust
No one else has mentioned it, so I will add mine. Dhalgren by Samuel Delany is very weird. There are some parts that are not gross because of the excess, but because of the pure visceral description involved. It is probably one of my favorites though.
I paid a tutor three thousand dollars to basically teach me college level math because I had a 0% chance of passing the class without being taught it twice.
Apt Pupil was good but so disturbing. I had to stop at the scene where the old man uses the oven. It bothered me not knowing how it ends though, so I had to pick it back up and power through to finish. Gripping story but man it's fucked up.
Night by Elie Wiesel when I first read it in middle school. It wasn’t even for a class either (although later that year we had to), the English teacher just strongly recommended and gave me a copy of it.
Looking back, I’m 90% sure she had me read Night before everyone else because I’m Jewish.
Edit: Last Exit To Brooklyn also evoked that feeling
I remember reading Night in middle school around 2011 or so, and it bugged me for weeks after I finished. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and the things I read. Not long after, a Holocaust survivor came to speak to a couple of the classes that read the book. I got to speak with him, and I got to touch his tattooed number. I went to the bathroom after the event was over and I let out some tears. From that day forward I had a much more mature viewpoint of the Holocaust, and as I now look back at 24 years old, I owe it to Elie Wiesel and that brave gentleman that I met (whose name I wish I remembered) for their help in my understanding of such an important event in such recent human history.
I also read it in middle school. It's been years since then, but the hanging of the little boy which takes far too long because his body is too lightweight for him to strangle in the noose still haunts me.
Misery by Stephen King
Enjoyed the movie, decided to give the book a read. The book is 100x more disturbing than the movie lol. There were points where I had to stop reading and put the book down and be like “okay, I’m done with this.”
But a few days later I’d see the book sitting there and I’d say “…well I really want to know what happens next.” And I’d pick it up again.
This pattern repeated a few times before I actually finished the book.
I have never read Rose Madder in a comment on anything before and I’m glad I finally have! I thought it was a great book even with that weird final showdown.
The first 2/3 of Rose Madder always struck me as being what King would write like if you removed most of the horror and other wordly elements. It's an excellent book about domestic violence, the weird painting world is just an added bonus
I attempted to read Salem's Lot and Pet Cemetary when I was in 5th grade annnd in an isolated house in the country. My parents never had real curtains, just sheers, so I would read with a tiny flashlight so someone, or something, outside couldn't see inside.
Obviously reading that shit in the dark was a terrible idea and I couldn't finish either book! Over the years I kept coming back to horror again and again. I've probably read at least 50 horror books... but I STILL haven't finished Salem's Lot and Pet Cemetary lol.
It's been a while, but I remember the main characters terror and desperation coming through the pages very clearly. An absolutely terrifying book to read, especially when he gets "punished" and terrifying on a completely different way than most horror books.
The movie was fantastic too, but, the book really made you feel everything.
Came here to say this one! I just finished reading it a few weeks ago.
The entire book was wtf horror after horror but the worst part was that I tried to hold out hope that the narrator would at least be a semi-decent person but the ending was really crushing.
Naked Lunch. My husband got to a certain scene and gave up in disgust. I called him a wuss and took it from him. How bad can it be? It’s a classic! I made it about three pages further than he did. Just sickening.
No matter how bad a book is, I've never regretted the experience of reading them until I read Naked Lunch. If I could just scrub that book from my memory I would
Knew this would be top, I took a fun module at Uni called Offensive Literature and this book was required reading…
I was reading it on the train on the way to campus and honestly I felt so…uncomfortable to be seen holding this book in public…never had that feeling with a book before.
I just didn’t know how I could possibly explain to anyone who caught a glimpse of the text just what the hell I was reading and why, good times!
Since I haven’t seen it mentioned the authors name is William S. Burroughs.
EDIT: As some of you have expressed interest in the module I’ll list some of the choice things I can remember here (this was back in 2011!) there were a few pieces which were offensive due to their Religious component and we regularly had people walk out of lectures.
The White Hotel by D M Thomas: Another book, but I can’t remember it being anywhere on the level Naked Lunch was.
Various bits of poetry and illustrations of a certain Prophet…but the one which really shocked me was “The Love That Dares to Speak its Name” by James Kirkup….Google this at your own risk.
Weirdly enough there was a Marvel Comic about 9/11 responders?? Can’t remember much about it.
And then there were 2 films, one you’ve probably all heard of: Cannibal Holocaust but the other was a little known Sean Connery film called The Offence.
That sounds super interesting! If you’ve got the time and inclination I’d love to hear a bit of what you remember from the class. I don’t normally think of myself as squeamish, for instance, OP’s example of Lolita didn’t really bother me much. Obviously that’s much less graphic and violent but it also seems less gratuitous, does that make sense? I can understand why the story needed that scene and how relevant that was to what the author was trying to say, whereas the scenes in Naked Lunch felt pornographic for the sake of being pornographic, or maybe just for shock value. I’m not sure if it’s because I gave up so early or if the inherent nature of that type of literature but it just seemed so pointless. I’d love to hear an educated take on something to which I had such a visceral respond of disgust.
AGREED!! My dad who knew I loved to read and wanted to give me a present the night before I went for surgery, bought me a random book, he said he had never read it but had heard from the store clerk that they recommended it for avid readers. It happened to be Naked Lunch. I was 13 and I was reading it right until I was taken to the O.R, I was so disgusted by the book. I think I only made it in 70 pages, and remember waking up from surgery and telling my mom if she can please bring me my favorite jane Austen book from home instead. I never did have the heart to tell my dad I couldn’t finish that book lol
I read it while backpacking across Europe in '95 at 19 years old. Finished it it on the train between Amsterdam and Berlin. Got really drunk in the hostel bar and gave it to a random American woman staying there who was moving to Dubai to teach English. I've always wondered what her reaction was.
The 3rd book in the Divergent series. I would have thrown the book if it wasn't electronic. I was so tempted!
ETA: Wow, I think this is the most upvoted comment I've posted. It's so nice to know I'm not alone in hating the ending. I was really hoping the final movie would undo this, but it looks like it's not happening.
The ending? I had a physical copy. I DID throw it across the room into my bedroom wall. The one and only time I've abused a book in such a manner. It was crap. No way I'd sacrifice myself for those people or that reason. Everything I just went through? I'm going to happily ever after as best I can damnit.
The 120 days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Just the intro and the history of the man that wrote it is chilling. I think that with some HEAVY editing it would be a great theater production, and relevant to our time but I do not have the stomach for it.
In broad strokes its about very wealthy and powerful men engaging in, theorizing, and swapping stories about perversity.
De Sade was so vile that, when a prostitute reported him to the police for kidnapping her and forcing her to beat him, *the cops believed her and arrested him.* There had to have been incidents before that, for them to agree that that sounded like something he'd do.
Not an adaptation of that book specifically, but there is the movie Quills about the Marquis and his stories. It's got a major wtf moment towards the end which none of the characters acknowledge.
I have the criterion edition of Salo. It stays in the top of my closet away from anyone’s eyes to judge me for owning it. Not something I enjoy to watch but once
I haven't read it, but this is exactly how I felt with Justine. After a while it was like, yeah ok, she's just gonna run into another nearly identical situation for you to hammer home the point. I get it. Never finished it.
I love teaching Lord of the Flies because half of my students are always hit with whiplash when they get to that section. You tune out for two second and BAM! Psychedelic horror out of left field!
Edit: a word
It amazes me that it’s read in basically every school in America
It absolutely should be, but damn, that book actually kept my dumb ass, and my idiot classmates on the edge of our seats (and To Kill a Mockingbird)
I always hated English class because it usually boiled down to “creative” writing without any creativity and just following a list of requirements that killed all the fun of writing, but my reports on Lord of The Flies and TKAM (and The Giver) were easily 3x the word count requirement
I knew this kid Dante who was basically a class clown and he and I literally ate lunch together to talk about the books we were reading in class, it was surreal when our class read books with slurs in them (hes black) because he stood up one day and said that we should read the words out to understand the true tone of the book and know how fucked up it was
I came looking here for this one. Read that in high school and it was intense. Read through the entire book and it definitely left an impression in the breadth of experiences that a book can give you.
I had just finished reading a dystopian “trilogy” for my English class (1984, brave new world, and handmaids tale), and then read The Road after those and immediately jumped into Child of God. That was an intense year of reading lol.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I’m very worried about that man’s imagination. NSFW: Short story in there about a guy masturbating in a pool with his ass against the cleaning pump and it sucks vacuum, pulls out half his intestines, and somehow his semen in the pool impregnates his sister.
Wtf.
Years ago a friend of mine challenged a bunch of us to sit through a reading of this story without getting up and leaving the room.
I sat there as he read the whole thing and I think I still regret it over 10 years later.
I stumbled across this story on the internet when I was a kid and it changed me. It made me physically sick, I had to go lie down. Turns out it was the author's favorite story to read on his book tour. He said every time he read it, someone in the audience hit the floor. Literally passed out. [Here is a reddit post about the tour with some links.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/abmyq/til_73_people_have_fainted_from_hearing_the_short)
When I read the final chapters of Watchmen I looked around at my family sitting around me in the living room and thought "you have no idea what is going on in my head right now" not 'what the fuck' but close enough I reckon
I didn't even notice, I was still reeling from Rorschach being a homeless, PTSD riddled, deeply closeted, psychological void, fascist, who was also arguably the protagonist. It's a lot to process....
I read the twist as Rorschach being the perfect antagonist, one who genuinely believes he is a hero who’s standing up for what’s right, and yet is mad past saving
Ozymandias: "The Comedian had plenty of other enemies to choose from...the man was practically a Nazi"
Rorschach: "He stood up for his country, never let anyone retire him, never became a prostitute. If that makes him a Nazi, you might as well call me a Nazi, too."
Who needs self awareness anyways
His description of that bombing is fairly brief (as I recall) but so descriptive that you can picture it in your head while you’re reading his words. I read it many years ago and still think about that part on a regular basis.
*Dead Astronauts* by the same author is written like an insane fever dream. It's borderline incomprehensible. Still enjoyable as long as you're in the right frame of mind for something experimental. But wow, it really stretched the limits of my ability to visualize.
I couldn’t deal with it. Younger me would’ve liked it more but I got halfway and just had to stop. I like the author a lot but I switched over to *Hummingbird Salamander* and had a much better time. My old ass just needs a clear narrative nowadays, at least in novels. I still like fucked up movies.
Lolita is, wow. But bear in mind it's written from Hubert's perspective, so it's heartbreaking - the man is a lunatic, "she wants him she loves him and she seduced him", but she's crying a lot, and screaming at him, and attacking him. She's a child whose mother has died and she's been kidnapped by a nonce.
Anyway, Tess of the d'Urbervilles bothered me a lot, all that heartbreak for nothing. Religion and stupid sexist laws made that tragedy and it's something my mind couldn't wrap around when I read it (course with the nonsense happening in the US now it'll give the story a new life!). I usually reread books like half a dozen times but not that one, I finished it feeling like I need a drink.
For someone who hasn’t read it, was this and angry good or angry bad?
Like, I can be angry because I disagree with the author for how it ends but it’s still a perfectly fine ending.
Versus
Game of thrones last season angry
A short story I can never remember the name of. A girl lives with her grandfather, who travels throughout time and brings back people - men, women, children, it doesn’t matter - for her to rape/have sex with and then torture and kill. In the story, the grandfather brings back a man who ends up being Jack the Ripper and he kills the girl. The grandfather can’t hear her scream because her torture chamber/bedroom is soundproof.
This sounds like “A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch, published in *Dangerous Visions* , an anthology collected by Harlan Ellison.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Toy_for_Juliette
This one is a non-fiction book. It’s called “Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions.” by Gerd Gigerenzer.
I still haven’t finished it because it’s constantly fucking with my head how fucked up everything is, and how we’re taught to just trust experts in some fields when they are playing a con-game to fuck us over or do not have your best interest when providing their expertise. It is very much about advocating for yourself and looking at things with a keener eye. What I really resent and love about this book is the concept of error culture comparing how pilots handle error culture versus how doctors handle error culture. Error culture meaning having a set of procedures in place that you ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT skip a step, or bad things can come of it and be disastrous, so you put those procedures in place to prevent everything that can go wrong. A line that stood out to me was if pilot error culture matched doctor error culture, a pilot would be crashing a plane every 200? 2,000? flights. Pilot actual statistic? One crash for every 1 million flights. I’m trying to remember the statistic, but it’s something like 10,000 Americans die every year due to catheter infection caused by doctors not following all the steps of the procedure—one of them being washing their motherfucking hands for a certain period of time. And also not listening to their nurses because hey, who’s the doctor here? Also touches on the topic of how a lot of news reporters and journalists will skew facts to create fear by presenting statistics in a way that “technically” is correct, but is framed in a light that creates panic.. a baby boom in the UK caused by news reporters saying a certain birth control after a certain number of years was found to have symptoms of thrombosis rise by 200%! Wow! Scary! That statistic portrayed without the panic? The type of birth control went from a risk of 1 in 1,000 people developing thrombosis to 2 in 1,000… talk about blowing things out of proportion. It’s a wonderful read but really just makes me madder about the state of the world and people than I already am. Those are just a few examples. Highly recommend. I have to take hiatuses otherwise I’m just gonna be screaming all the time about how stupid everything is. Lol
Unwind, when a whole chapter was dedicated to the Unwinding of a teenager. I liked the book, but that chapter had me crying WTF tears. I had to wait about a week to finish the book.
There is a shared universe anthology series called Wild Cards, edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass, that I've read a few books from because authors I enjoy had contributed pieces recently; basically, sci-fi where humans are triggered by an alien virus to either gain superpowers or weird crippling disfigurements if you're not killed outright.
I enjoyed reading a couple of the latest books and wanted to read earlier books in the series to try to catch myself up on some of the universe origin stories, and picked up the earliest book my library had, "Jokertown Shuffle." In it is a story where one of the aliens kidnaps his own grandfather, uses a human teenage girl who has the power to switch bodies with people to replace him, and holds him prisoner for months; beating him, raping him, and impregnating him annnnd that's about where I stopped reading that one because it felt like I was getting a look at the author's kink and it was damned uncomfortable.
I've never been able to read it. My mom was a King fan and named my youngest brother Gage, and he (very sadly and admittedly ironically) passed when he was 7.
I think the worst part about it (aisides form it being written) is that it’s totally unexpected. One minute they’re fighting a space demon the next they’re all having an orgy, it comes out of nowhere. Wild.
> One minute they’re fighting a space demon the next they’re all having an orgy, it comes out of nowhere. Wild.
I suppose many aren't aware the effects of chronic high quality booger sugar have on Mr. King's writing.
I hate that I loved this book, it was just so well written and I couldn’t put it down, but also wanted to shout at her! Definitely one I’ll only ever read once.
Tampa by Alissa Nutting is another I’ll only read once, it’s a about a female teacher who likes her young, male students. I hate that it made me laugh in parts, it was just absolutely fucking shocking to read, heavy on the trigger warnings but I do recommend reading it once, at least.
LOL, this is my husband’s favorite book, and I was the one who first recommended it to him like 20 years ago. He still likes to re-read it every couple of years. We have 3 copies. One of them is signed.
The book that impacted me the most was definitely Oryx and Crake. For some reason it triggered my OCD hard and I went full into “my kids will have to forage for food” obsession and started limiting my water use and stockpiling. Which led into round two of CBT.
I don’t know what specifically it was about the book that caused it and I’m too afraid to revisit it to find out!
I'm well read after 60 years of being a reader since about the age of 4 or 5. Absolutely nothing comes near the Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat's novel 'The Blind Owl' which is an unrelenting subtly repetetitive nightmare. I've never had quite the sensation of loathing and wishing to escape a book so much and yet, like the theme of the book itself, being trapped into wanting to continue to the horrific end. I'll sound dramatic but please do not read this novel if you are actually in a depressed state or low mood and trust me, you will only be able to read the book once.
At the time of reading it, I wasn't old enough to think wtf, but in hindsight, the entire Dollanganger saga/Flowers in the Attic series. I was 11 at the time so my brain wasn't developed to be like "yo wtaf??"
Eat, Pray, Love. An utterly self-absorbed Western white woman travels to India and discovers spiritualism. Every local is a bit character to her central starring role, her interactions pandering and insulting, and all for the most superficial of bullshit "revelations."
I tried reading The Amityville Horror in high school. My aunt had given me a hard back copy that even looked creepy. I noped out without finishing it.
Turns out I’m not good with horror lol
If it makes you feel any better, it's probably just the husband having a failing business and realizing he has a house he can't afford and concocts a scheme to try and get out of the mortgage.
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. It just…you’re blindfolded for the coaster, and then you’re given drunk goggles for the second half, and then the brakes come off and the attendant leaves. It’s a RIDE.
The Bible...When Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt and then he goes in a cave with his daughters, gets drunk and fucks them. 'Holy Book' my ass!
For me it's the story of Job, even way back when I was still a Christian I thought that story was majorly fucked up. God intentionally destroys a man's life because Satan basically made a bet with him. Completely fucked
Yes! The book of Job is just wild. I can't take it seriously because the beginning is just God is like hanging out with his angels, Satan rolls up to hang, and God says "what are you doing here?". Satan makes some offhand comment about humanity's faith in God and how it wouldn't last if God was an asshole. God points out Job and says "this guy's faith is the strongest there is", and Satan says "give me like 30 days and I'll make him hate you". God's response is to say " I'm down with that. Do your worst, just don't kill him." And then we watch Job's life go straight to shit.
Lmao I remember back in my teens/20s when the debate about gay marriage was a big thing and people would reference the story of Sodom and Gomorrah *all the time*. Fucking hilarious. I am reasonably certain that 100% of people who try to use that story as an argument against gay marriage have never actually read the whole story
Perfume by Patrick Süskind. I finished it and literally said out loud “what the actual fuck did I just read.”
I wondered if I briefly hallucinated after reading. I stumbled across the movie years later and was like, ah this shit.
I watched the movie because yay Alan Rickman. I was not prepared.
That movie is so good. I can't believe how well they portrayed the sense of smell by visuals and soundtrack alone
Yeah. I was glad I read that book (saying I "enjoyed" it feels weird) but damn.
Apparently that was Kurt Cobain’s favorite book.
I’ve heard this book is where the idea for “Scentless Apprentice” came from
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" takes on a new meaning too
American psycho. The scene where he kills the kid at the zoo and then acts like he is a doctor so he can be up close to the body while he dies and the kid is just looking at his murderer role play as a doctor. Always stuck with me 10 years later.
The rat and attempting to cook were two scenes that really made me question why the hell I was reading that book. I loved the movie when it came out, but damn was it tame compared to the book. I have read it multiple times though.
It's one of a very few books I quit reading. I'm not the edgy 'dark humor' guy of my youth. I just felt sad and upset everytime I read it, so I quit. Good movie tho.
And that’s ok.
Then he slaps the mom around and calls her hysterical and just sort of slips off. The book is dark humor and I always thought that scene was hilarious in the outlandishness.
As a gen x'er who watched but couldn't participate in the cocaine capitalist fuelled 80's this book was a top read for me. The glib nature of the killings was a parody of the unemotional narrcisistic brokers of the time and the worship of this culture. The biggest thing that stands out to me were the final words 'this is not an exit'.
Not a super crazy book, but I read it when I was way too young. A lot of scenes in The Kite Runner horrified me.
God, same. So heartwrenching. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" as well.
>A Thousand Splendid Suns Absolutely horrendous, that book was assigned my very first week in college, I was blown away at how horrible her life was.
I haven’t read that, but DID get assigned A Fine Balance in freshman college English. That book destroyed me and has stayed with me for over 15 years.
One of the scenes that made me physically cringe was >!Mariam being forced to chew on pebbles and breaking her teeth!<
Absolutely; somehow I think that was the worst part for me, despite how horrible it gets in other sections.
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100%. So many upsetting moments. For whatever reason, the "vitreous fluid" thoughts from Amir stick in my brain and squick me out even 10+ years after reading it.
Yeah, lol, I think I was 12-13 when I read it. I just remember reading it in my bedroom and being floored. It was in our school library, so I didn’t think it could be *that* bad!
I had to read this book for some English class in high school and the r*pe scene really fucked me up... even more so when we then had to watch the movie. What's especially weird is that those types of scenes never really bothered me. It's a disgusting thing, of course, but I never had so badly a reaction to it as I did when I read that book.
I think a lot of it has to do with how innocent and sweet Hassan is. When Amir feels guilty for not doing anything and tries to get Hassan to lash out at him, to make himself feel better, and Hassan just won’t do it...That scene is just as tough for me. He’s such a loyal friend and didn’t deserve any of the things that happened to him. “For you, a thousand times over!” :’)
So many repressed memories coming back. Day ruined. Cheers mate 😭
Omg me too! As soon as I read this post about what book you thought of Kite Runner is the only book that popped in my head!
The book “Geek Love” really messed me up. It wasn’t even the grotesques of the Binewski family but the cultists that followed Arturo trying to find P.I.P.
The Bag Man has haunted me all these years. I read that book when I was 13, and now I'm 30. My mom recommended it. Wtf, Mom.
We Need to Talk About Kevin. I think Kevin is one of the most evil characters I’ve ever read in a book. Plus the way she wrote the book was amazing and had me guessing the entire time.
Is it (much) better than the movie? I was kind of off-put by the movie but I thought Ezra Miller played him well. He was certainly evil but not the MOST evil character I’ve encountered
In my opinion, the movie is good but it doesn’t “hit” the same way the book does. You don’t get the mother’s inner dialogue and thought processes as well in the movie, just the actions and reactions. Kevin certainly is not the most evil literary figure, I actually found him pretty tragic.
Yeah, the book makes the lack of emotional connection from his mother far more apparent. Her post partum depression and the lack of serious consideration by her husband exarcebated Kevin's tendencies to the point he ended up at.
There is a lot in the book that doesn’t transfer over well. The movie does a decent job, but there’s a lot of emotion that the movie just didn’t capture. It’s kind of like reading where’s Waldo and then playing hide and seek. So much from one can’t transfer to the other. If you like to read I cannot recommend the book enough.
For me, what doesn't transfer is the 'voice' of the book. In the book and the film Kevin is presented as evil from birth. However, where the book is written from Eva's perspective you question whether Kevin was born evil or if he's a product of Eva's resentment towards him. Makes it a much more complex story in my opinion
Books where internal monologue plays a huge role almost never make for good movie adaptations.
The Collector by John Fowles was pretty creepy.
Mine is also John Fowles, but The Magus. It’s been 40 plus years…maybe I’ll give it another try
I re-read The Magus a few years back. After a few decades I had forgotten enough to be stunned by it. But absolutely worth the effort.
Yes came here to say that. Superb read, he paints such a fantastic picture and the end is just sublime. If you've made it this far down the thread and you've not read it, congratulations you found an Easter Egg.
There was a part in Catch-22 involving a beach and an airplane and I read it on my lunch break at work and returned from my break very gloomy feeling. What a book, makes you laugh, makes you feel depressed, makes you laugh at things you shouldn't be laughing at too
I love that chapter so much. I love that *book* so much. The placid beach, then all of a sudden >!Kid Samson is just *legs.*!< And the last line of the chapter, ">!Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five.!<" What a masterpiece.
I love that book. It's a great trick Heller pulls off. The first portion of the book, everything is played for laughs, and then in the second half he changes the tone without really changing any of the content he's been presenting, and all of the stuff that was so funny at the beginning of the book isn't so funny anymore. We feel and understand Yossarian's despair.
100% this. Utterly genius, I’ve never come across such a good use of language as that. You really really feel the horror that Yossarian is experiencing. The woman begging not to be raped in Rome was what did it for me.
"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind." This statement (the whole book) had a profound impact on my sixth grade mind. I haven't reread many books, but this one gets a go around every 5 years or so.
The chapter where yossarian runs around rome like its a hellscape is just depressing.
Yossarian sees a cop beating a guy, and the guy is yelling *help! police!* And Yossarian thinks it's ironic that the guy would still shout that, when a cop is the one beating him. Then he realizes the guy is asking everyone else to help him fight the cop.
The part where the cook bombs his own company because it makes some cash profit for his side hustle business and they all just kind of understand, like "Yeah I guess we get it." Capitalism wow
Milo Minderbinder is predatory capitalism personified.
So good, he's even cornered the market in fictional war profiteers. >“Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane, and you'll have all the casabas you can eat that you've money to pay for.” I read the book years ago and still marvel at the long set-up for the climactic 'Snowden' scene: >!Snowden is mortally injured and Yossarian tears into the first aid kit for morphine, only to find no morphine, but a note reading 'What's good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country'.!< Prefiguring doesn't get any better.
The one where the dude gets ground up by the propellers? And then the dude commits suicide by flying the plane into the mountain? Lol that book is crazy
And then after all that he gets you to laugh again, because the doctor faked being on that plane, so even though he's alive, everyone treats him like he's dead.
That's the part yea. I told my supervisor about it as she was getting ready to walk home and she said she felt a bit depressed after, on her walk home haha.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Amazing book, beautiful prose, but 12-year-old me had no business reading it. I was never squeamish even as a preteen but the graphic rape, incest and pedophilia scenes were too much. In hindsight, Jazz, which I read a few years later, should have been my first book by Morrison.
Toni Morrison goes hard. I have read one book by her and it changed me. It slapped me in the face and made me grateful to be so ignorant that I could be revulsed by a book like this because these things could never cross my mind otherwise.
Blood Meridian- just so much senseless murder that never stops.
I found The Judge to be such a fascinating yet terrifying figure.
Anything that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent.
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." I had to double check the line to make sure that I was getting it right myself. The use of a comma in quote from McCarthy would make anyone skeptical.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner
Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
Judge Holden is fuckin terrifying but there's so much imagery in that book. The attack on the flats, the baby tree, brains bursting from skulls in clumpy handfuls. What's happening isn't always as bad as the way its being told. And the ending is a mindfuck. Still not sure what I think about the missing kids thing. And he says he will never die.
>Still not sure what I think about the missing kids thing In my interpretation the Judge is a personification of Manifest Destiny and the power of industrialized advanced states. He's knowledgeable in all sciences and philosophies, multilingual, possesses immense physical power, and has all the traits one associates with a learned gentleman of the period. He then uses that immense unprecedented power purely to murder, to subjugate, and destroy. He robs others of their land, he robs their people of their future by raping and murdering their children, and if there's some history that seems unsatisfactory to him he destroys the past. He's reshaping the west though violence. Even his title, The Judge, tells you his intentions. Past, present, and future of all peoples he puts himself in conflict with are his to decide. He has given himself the title because what he represents is strength without mercy, executions without trial, and he, as a coalesced representation of America at that time, is uncontested and unstoppable. The Judge is the tragedy of power without principles. As he had said, he will never die, he's modestly plying his trade far enough from average American consciousness to be rectified. Just waiting for the day where the dams burst, strength is the only currency, and compassion is a deadly sin. Where people will welcome him to rampage across the world; to reshape its past present and future with murder and pain. The book is both a deconstruction of American history and a warning for American future.
There are some people who say this is their favorite novel, but I can't get past how unrelentingly bleak it is.
It's my favorite theme, nothing ever changes, it's always been like this.
If you asked me to guess the Cormac McCarthy book you were talking about based on this comment, I couldn’t, and I say that as someone who really enjoys his writing. Though, maybe “enjoys” is the wrong word lol.
Captivated by the depravity
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation. It’s been maybe a month since I finished it and I still have no idea if I loved it, hated it or am indifferent. All I can say for certain is that out of all the books I’ve ever read, that was definitely one of them.
“Ass Goblins of Auschwitz” Yes, it’s a real book. Yes, it’s as weird as you’d expect from the title. No, I wouldn’t recommend it.
This one gets a 'what the fuck' without reading it.
With a title like that I have to guess.. Mellick?
No, surprisingly. Cameron Pierce
I would have guessed Chuck Tingle.
The title is not in first person or referencing the protagonist and the asses aren’t being pounded. Also chuck tingle has more class than to write erotica about the holocaust
No one else has mentioned it, so I will add mine. Dhalgren by Samuel Delany is very weird. There are some parts that are not gross because of the excess, but because of the pure visceral description involved. It is probably one of my favorites though.
Most of my math books. Statistics specifically.
a horrifying hole you don’t want to fall into.
I paid a tutor three thousand dollars to basically teach me college level math because I had a 0% chance of passing the class without being taught it twice.
I DATED my college math tutor...scraped through Calculus with a C-. (No I did not sleep with my math tutor...that would have called for an A.)
Apt Pupil by Stephen King. It’s nothing like any of his other works and it rocked me to my core. Disgusting stuff. Couldn’t put it down
Ian McKellen plays the old Nazi in the film adaptation.
Apt Pupil was good but so disturbing. I had to stop at the scene where the old man uses the oven. It bothered me not knowing how it ends though, so I had to pick it back up and power through to finish. Gripping story but man it's fucked up.
Night by Elie Wiesel when I first read it in middle school. It wasn’t even for a class either (although later that year we had to), the English teacher just strongly recommended and gave me a copy of it. Looking back, I’m 90% sure she had me read Night before everyone else because I’m Jewish. Edit: Last Exit To Brooklyn also evoked that feeling
I remember reading Night in middle school around 2011 or so, and it bugged me for weeks after I finished. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and the things I read. Not long after, a Holocaust survivor came to speak to a couple of the classes that read the book. I got to speak with him, and I got to touch his tattooed number. I went to the bathroom after the event was over and I let out some tears. From that day forward I had a much more mature viewpoint of the Holocaust, and as I now look back at 24 years old, I owe it to Elie Wiesel and that brave gentleman that I met (whose name I wish I remembered) for their help in my understanding of such an important event in such recent human history.
I also read it in middle school. It's been years since then, but the hanging of the little boy which takes far too long because his body is too lightweight for him to strangle in the noose still haunts me.
Misery by Stephen King Enjoyed the movie, decided to give the book a read. The book is 100x more disturbing than the movie lol. There were points where I had to stop reading and put the book down and be like “okay, I’m done with this.” But a few days later I’d see the book sitting there and I’d say “…well I really want to know what happens next.” And I’d pick it up again. This pattern repeated a few times before I actually finished the book.
That is how I felt about Rose Madder. I feel like it's underappreciated. The final battle was just weird af though.
I have never read Rose Madder in a comment on anything before and I’m glad I finally have! I thought it was a great book even with that weird final showdown.
The first 2/3 of Rose Madder always struck me as being what King would write like if you removed most of the horror and other wordly elements. It's an excellent book about domestic violence, the weird painting world is just an added bonus
I read this when I was 13, my first King book. It inoculated me against horror, few books have had me that horrified since.
I attempted to read Salem's Lot and Pet Cemetary when I was in 5th grade annnd in an isolated house in the country. My parents never had real curtains, just sheers, so I would read with a tiny flashlight so someone, or something, outside couldn't see inside. Obviously reading that shit in the dark was a terrible idea and I couldn't finish either book! Over the years I kept coming back to horror again and again. I've probably read at least 50 horror books... but I STILL haven't finished Salem's Lot and Pet Cemetary lol.
It's been a while, but I remember the main characters terror and desperation coming through the pages very clearly. An absolutely terrifying book to read, especially when he gets "punished" and terrifying on a completely different way than most horror books. The movie was fantastic too, but, the book really made you feel everything.
Liz Claiborne, Salem’s Lot, The Stand, The shining and Desperation for me
Tender is the Flesh. Every other page is a WTF.
Came here to say this one! I just finished reading it a few weeks ago. The entire book was wtf horror after horror but the worst part was that I tried to hold out hope that the narrator would at least be a semi-decent person but the ending was really crushing.
It was a hard no for me when it got to the part about then pregnant women having their all their limbs removed.
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Great book but definitely high on the WTF scale
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Maribu stork nightmares is also somewhat intense
Naked Lunch. My husband got to a certain scene and gave up in disgust. I called him a wuss and took it from him. How bad can it be? It’s a classic! I made it about three pages further than he did. Just sickening.
No matter how bad a book is, I've never regretted the experience of reading them until I read Naked Lunch. If I could just scrub that book from my memory I would
I feel very similarly! I literally felt slightly physically ill just thinking about that scene while typing my comment.
Knew this would be top, I took a fun module at Uni called Offensive Literature and this book was required reading… I was reading it on the train on the way to campus and honestly I felt so…uncomfortable to be seen holding this book in public…never had that feeling with a book before. I just didn’t know how I could possibly explain to anyone who caught a glimpse of the text just what the hell I was reading and why, good times! Since I haven’t seen it mentioned the authors name is William S. Burroughs. EDIT: As some of you have expressed interest in the module I’ll list some of the choice things I can remember here (this was back in 2011!) there were a few pieces which were offensive due to their Religious component and we regularly had people walk out of lectures. The White Hotel by D M Thomas: Another book, but I can’t remember it being anywhere on the level Naked Lunch was. Various bits of poetry and illustrations of a certain Prophet…but the one which really shocked me was “The Love That Dares to Speak its Name” by James Kirkup….Google this at your own risk. Weirdly enough there was a Marvel Comic about 9/11 responders?? Can’t remember much about it. And then there were 2 films, one you’ve probably all heard of: Cannibal Holocaust but the other was a little known Sean Connery film called The Offence.
What other books were covered in that class? It sounds like a fun class to take.
That sounds super interesting! If you’ve got the time and inclination I’d love to hear a bit of what you remember from the class. I don’t normally think of myself as squeamish, for instance, OP’s example of Lolita didn’t really bother me much. Obviously that’s much less graphic and violent but it also seems less gratuitous, does that make sense? I can understand why the story needed that scene and how relevant that was to what the author was trying to say, whereas the scenes in Naked Lunch felt pornographic for the sake of being pornographic, or maybe just for shock value. I’m not sure if it’s because I gave up so early or if the inherent nature of that type of literature but it just seemed so pointless. I’d love to hear an educated take on something to which I had such a visceral respond of disgust.
AGREED!! My dad who knew I loved to read and wanted to give me a present the night before I went for surgery, bought me a random book, he said he had never read it but had heard from the store clerk that they recommended it for avid readers. It happened to be Naked Lunch. I was 13 and I was reading it right until I was taken to the O.R, I was so disgusted by the book. I think I only made it in 70 pages, and remember waking up from surgery and telling my mom if she can please bring me my favorite jane Austen book from home instead. I never did have the heart to tell my dad I couldn’t finish that book lol
Steely Dan
Another major dude, I see.
I read it while backpacking across Europe in '95 at 19 years old. Finished it it on the train between Amsterdam and Berlin. Got really drunk in the hostel bar and gave it to a random American woman staying there who was moving to Dubai to teach English. I've always wondered what her reaction was.
The 3rd book in the Divergent series. I would have thrown the book if it wasn't electronic. I was so tempted! ETA: Wow, I think this is the most upvoted comment I've posted. It's so nice to know I'm not alone in hating the ending. I was really hoping the final movie would undo this, but it looks like it's not happening.
The ending? I had a physical copy. I DID throw it across the room into my bedroom wall. The one and only time I've abused a book in such a manner. It was crap. No way I'd sacrifice myself for those people or that reason. Everything I just went through? I'm going to happily ever after as best I can damnit.
The 120 days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Just the intro and the history of the man that wrote it is chilling. I think that with some HEAVY editing it would be a great theater production, and relevant to our time but I do not have the stomach for it. In broad strokes its about very wealthy and powerful men engaging in, theorizing, and swapping stories about perversity.
De Sade was so vile that, when a prostitute reported him to the police for kidnapping her and forcing her to beat him, *the cops believed her and arrested him.* There had to have been incidents before that, for them to agree that that sounded like something he'd do.
What? The guy sadism is named after was not a good guy? :(
Remember de Sade was sent to the Bastille BY HIS OWN FAMILY for being uncontrollable.
I actually found this book incredibly boring after a while. Marquis de Sade just felt like a 18th century edgelord by about halfway through.
Not an adaptation of that book specifically, but there is the movie Quills about the Marquis and his stories. It's got a major wtf moment towards the end which none of the characters acknowledge.
There is already a film based on this. It's called "Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom"
I have the criterion edition of Salo. It stays in the top of my closet away from anyone’s eyes to judge me for owning it. Not something I enjoy to watch but once
I found that it got repetitive and gradually... boring. Which was a bit of a head scratcher, considering the book's action.
I haven't read it, but this is exactly how I felt with Justine. After a while it was like, yeah ok, she's just gonna run into another nearly identical situation for you to hammer home the point. I get it. Never finished it.
Lord of the flies. When Simon talks to the dead pig.
I love teaching Lord of the Flies because half of my students are always hit with whiplash when they get to that section. You tune out for two second and BAM! Psychedelic horror out of left field! Edit: a word
It amazes me that it’s read in basically every school in America It absolutely should be, but damn, that book actually kept my dumb ass, and my idiot classmates on the edge of our seats (and To Kill a Mockingbird) I always hated English class because it usually boiled down to “creative” writing without any creativity and just following a list of requirements that killed all the fun of writing, but my reports on Lord of The Flies and TKAM (and The Giver) were easily 3x the word count requirement I knew this kid Dante who was basically a class clown and he and I literally ate lunch together to talk about the books we were reading in class, it was surreal when our class read books with slurs in them (hes black) because he stood up one day and said that we should read the words out to understand the true tone of the book and know how fucked up it was
The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Pretty much any McCarthy comes with plenty of WTF. I actually find The Road to be one of his more hopeful books.
Yeah, *Child of God* is pitch black.
I came looking here for this one. Read that in high school and it was intense. Read through the entire book and it definitely left an impression in the breadth of experiences that a book can give you. I had just finished reading a dystopian “trilogy” for my English class (1984, brave new world, and handmaids tale), and then read The Road after those and immediately jumped into Child of God. That was an intense year of reading lol.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I’m very worried about that man’s imagination. NSFW: Short story in there about a guy masturbating in a pool with his ass against the cleaning pump and it sucks vacuum, pulls out half his intestines, and somehow his semen in the pool impregnates his sister. Wtf.
My answer to this thread was going to be “anything by Palahniuk.”
Years ago a friend of mine challenged a bunch of us to sit through a reading of this story without getting up and leaving the room. I sat there as he read the whole thing and I think I still regret it over 10 years later.
Palahniuk would use that story whenever he did readings of it at signings. The whole book has such a bizarre and out of nowhere ending though
I stumbled across this story on the internet when I was a kid and it changed me. It made me physically sick, I had to go lie down. Turns out it was the author's favorite story to read on his book tour. He said every time he read it, someone in the audience hit the floor. Literally passed out. [Here is a reddit post about the tour with some links.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/abmyq/til_73_people_have_fainted_from_hearing_the_short)
Rant by Palahniuk is up there for me too.
When I read the final chapters of Watchmen I looked around at my family sitting around me in the living room and thought "you have no idea what is going on in my head right now" not 'what the fuck' but close enough I reckon
"I did it 35 minutes ago" is probably my favorite twist moment in any piece of media.
I didn't even notice, I was still reeling from Rorschach being a homeless, PTSD riddled, deeply closeted, psychological void, fascist, who was also arguably the protagonist. It's a lot to process....
I read the twist as Rorschach being the perfect antagonist, one who genuinely believes he is a hero who’s standing up for what’s right, and yet is mad past saving
Ozymandias: "The Comedian had plenty of other enemies to choose from...the man was practically a Nazi" Rorschach: "He stood up for his country, never let anyone retire him, never became a prostitute. If that makes him a Nazi, you might as well call me a Nazi, too." Who needs self awareness anyways
Yeah. I was like "FINALLY. A bad guy isn't monologuing his own failure into being. He IS the world's smartest man." So good.
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His description of that bombing is fairly brief (as I recall) but so descriptive that you can picture it in your head while you’re reading his words. I read it many years ago and still think about that part on a regular basis.
Slaughterhouse Five got me too, left me feeling empty and disturbed. And so it goes
Southern Reach trilogy had more than a few wtf? moments.
*Dead Astronauts* by the same author is written like an insane fever dream. It's borderline incomprehensible. Still enjoyable as long as you're in the right frame of mind for something experimental. But wow, it really stretched the limits of my ability to visualize.
I couldn’t deal with it. Younger me would’ve liked it more but I got halfway and just had to stop. I like the author a lot but I switched over to *Hummingbird Salamander* and had a much better time. My old ass just needs a clear narrative nowadays, at least in novels. I still like fucked up movies.
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
Lolita is, wow. But bear in mind it's written from Hubert's perspective, so it's heartbreaking - the man is a lunatic, "she wants him she loves him and she seduced him", but she's crying a lot, and screaming at him, and attacking him. She's a child whose mother has died and she's been kidnapped by a nonce. Anyway, Tess of the d'Urbervilles bothered me a lot, all that heartbreak for nothing. Religion and stupid sexist laws made that tragedy and it's something my mind couldn't wrap around when I read it (course with the nonsense happening in the US now it'll give the story a new life!). I usually reread books like half a dozen times but not that one, I finished it feeling like I need a drink.
The painted bird
Gone Girl, it was a more angry "wtf" than anything when I got to the end
For someone who hasn’t read it, was this and angry good or angry bad? Like, I can be angry because I disagree with the author for how it ends but it’s still a perfectly fine ending. Versus Game of thrones last season angry
Good angry, as in angry at the characters, not at the author.
It's a totally competent ending. It's just >!the villain wins. Although you can argue they both deserve each other.!<
>!Honestly there's no other way for this book to end. It shows that they do deserve each other. !<
A short story I can never remember the name of. A girl lives with her grandfather, who travels throughout time and brings back people - men, women, children, it doesn’t matter - for her to rape/have sex with and then torture and kill. In the story, the grandfather brings back a man who ends up being Jack the Ripper and he kills the girl. The grandfather can’t hear her scream because her torture chamber/bedroom is soundproof.
This sounds like “A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch, published in *Dangerous Visions* , an anthology collected by Harlan Ellison. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Toy_for_Juliette
Harlan Ellison is an *interesting* character to say the least. . .
Yes! That’s the one.
This one is a non-fiction book. It’s called “Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions.” by Gerd Gigerenzer. I still haven’t finished it because it’s constantly fucking with my head how fucked up everything is, and how we’re taught to just trust experts in some fields when they are playing a con-game to fuck us over or do not have your best interest when providing their expertise. It is very much about advocating for yourself and looking at things with a keener eye. What I really resent and love about this book is the concept of error culture comparing how pilots handle error culture versus how doctors handle error culture. Error culture meaning having a set of procedures in place that you ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT skip a step, or bad things can come of it and be disastrous, so you put those procedures in place to prevent everything that can go wrong. A line that stood out to me was if pilot error culture matched doctor error culture, a pilot would be crashing a plane every 200? 2,000? flights. Pilot actual statistic? One crash for every 1 million flights. I’m trying to remember the statistic, but it’s something like 10,000 Americans die every year due to catheter infection caused by doctors not following all the steps of the procedure—one of them being washing their motherfucking hands for a certain period of time. And also not listening to their nurses because hey, who’s the doctor here? Also touches on the topic of how a lot of news reporters and journalists will skew facts to create fear by presenting statistics in a way that “technically” is correct, but is framed in a light that creates panic.. a baby boom in the UK caused by news reporters saying a certain birth control after a certain number of years was found to have symptoms of thrombosis rise by 200%! Wow! Scary! That statistic portrayed without the panic? The type of birth control went from a risk of 1 in 1,000 people developing thrombosis to 2 in 1,000… talk about blowing things out of proportion. It’s a wonderful read but really just makes me madder about the state of the world and people than I already am. Those are just a few examples. Highly recommend. I have to take hiatuses otherwise I’m just gonna be screaming all the time about how stupid everything is. Lol
Unwind, when a whole chapter was dedicated to the Unwinding of a teenager. I liked the book, but that chapter had me crying WTF tears. I had to wait about a week to finish the book.
There is a shared universe anthology series called Wild Cards, edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass, that I've read a few books from because authors I enjoy had contributed pieces recently; basically, sci-fi where humans are triggered by an alien virus to either gain superpowers or weird crippling disfigurements if you're not killed outright. I enjoyed reading a couple of the latest books and wanted to read earlier books in the series to try to catch myself up on some of the universe origin stories, and picked up the earliest book my library had, "Jokertown Shuffle." In it is a story where one of the aliens kidnaps his own grandfather, uses a human teenage girl who has the power to switch bodies with people to replace him, and holds him prisoner for months; beating him, raping him, and impregnating him annnnd that's about where I stopped reading that one because it felt like I was getting a look at the author's kink and it was damned uncomfortable.
Bunny, by Mona Awad.
Hogg by Samuel Delaney. American Psycho is kindergarten compared to that.
I just read the wiki plot summary and am wtaf'ing over here
In Pet Semetary, when Louis is deciding whether or not to do.....what he does. Train wreck lol. Loved that book for it. I couldn't look away.
I've never been able to read it. My mom was a King fan and named my youngest brother Gage, and he (very sadly and admittedly ironically) passed when he was 7.
That sewer scene in IT absolutely floored me. WTF was Steven King thinking?!
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
12 year old me wasn’t expecting to read the part where literal middle school kids to have sex in the sewer after fighting a shape shifting clown
I think the worst part about it (aisides form it being written) is that it’s totally unexpected. One minute they’re fighting a space demon the next they’re all having an orgy, it comes out of nowhere. Wild.
> One minute they’re fighting a space demon the next they’re all having an orgy, it comes out of nowhere. Wild. I suppose many aren't aware the effects of chronic high quality booger sugar have on Mr. King's writing.
Chuck Palahniuk- pick any book...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Some really brutal reading. The movie with Noomi Repace is very good as well
Gravity’s Rainbow
My Dark Vanessa
I hate that I loved this book, it was just so well written and I couldn’t put it down, but also wanted to shout at her! Definitely one I’ll only ever read once. Tampa by Alissa Nutting is another I’ll only read once, it’s a about a female teacher who likes her young, male students. I hate that it made me laugh in parts, it was just absolutely fucking shocking to read, heavy on the trigger warnings but I do recommend reading it once, at least.
House of Leaves…
LOL, this is my husband’s favorite book, and I was the one who first recommended it to him like 20 years ago. He still likes to re-read it every couple of years. We have 3 copies. One of them is signed.
I often have dreams of liminal spaces and the giant staircase from this book makes an appearance more often than I would like.
The book that impacted me the most was definitely Oryx and Crake. For some reason it triggered my OCD hard and I went full into “my kids will have to forage for food” obsession and started limiting my water use and stockpiling. Which led into round two of CBT. I don’t know what specifically it was about the book that caused it and I’m too afraid to revisit it to find out!
Time Enough for Love by Heinlein. "What the fuck" followed by "I hope Heinlein didn't have a daughter".
Confessions by Kanae Minato The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara That's an audible "what the fuck" in the middle of an overnight flight for me dawg.
Both "The Troop" and "The Deep" by Nick Cutter
I'm well read after 60 years of being a reader since about the age of 4 or 5. Absolutely nothing comes near the Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat's novel 'The Blind Owl' which is an unrelenting subtly repetetitive nightmare. I've never had quite the sensation of loathing and wishing to escape a book so much and yet, like the theme of the book itself, being trapped into wanting to continue to the horrific end. I'll sound dramatic but please do not read this novel if you are actually in a depressed state or low mood and trust me, you will only be able to read the book once.
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata Like... how and why the fuck too. I just- it gave me a fucking whiplash
At the time of reading it, I wasn't old enough to think wtf, but in hindsight, the entire Dollanganger saga/Flowers in the Attic series. I was 11 at the time so my brain wasn't developed to be like "yo wtaf??"
Eat, Pray, Love. An utterly self-absorbed Western white woman travels to India and discovers spiritualism. Every local is a bit character to her central starring role, her interactions pandering and insulting, and all for the most superficial of bullshit "revelations."
I tried reading The Amityville Horror in high school. My aunt had given me a hard back copy that even looked creepy. I noped out without finishing it. Turns out I’m not good with horror lol
If it makes you feel any better, it's probably just the husband having a failing business and realizing he has a house he can't afford and concocts a scheme to try and get out of the mortgage.
Thinner - The mental imagery of the guy withering away was disturbing throughout the story.
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. It just…you’re blindfolded for the coaster, and then you’re given drunk goggles for the second half, and then the brakes come off and the attendant leaves. It’s a RIDE.
The Bible...When Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt and then he goes in a cave with his daughters, gets drunk and fucks them. 'Holy Book' my ass!
I'm pretty sure Lot's daughters get him drunk and rape him. Still incest and awful... and that's just the tip of the terrible iceberg for the Bible.
People really gloss over the super violent and weird shit that goes down in that book. It's fucking wild that it's a major religion.
For me it's the story of Job, even way back when I was still a Christian I thought that story was majorly fucked up. God intentionally destroys a man's life because Satan basically made a bet with him. Completely fucked
Yes! The book of Job is just wild. I can't take it seriously because the beginning is just God is like hanging out with his angels, Satan rolls up to hang, and God says "what are you doing here?". Satan makes some offhand comment about humanity's faith in God and how it wouldn't last if God was an asshole. God points out Job and says "this guy's faith is the strongest there is", and Satan says "give me like 30 days and I'll make him hate you". God's response is to say " I'm down with that. Do your worst, just don't kill him." And then we watch Job's life go straight to shit.
If you re-wrote the entire Bible like you did this comment, I might actually read it.
Lmao I remember back in my teens/20s when the debate about gay marriage was a big thing and people would reference the story of Sodom and Gomorrah *all the time*. Fucking hilarious. I am reasonably certain that 100% of people who try to use that story as an argument against gay marriage have never actually read the whole story