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/lit/ - Literature

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[ERROR] No.2038442 [Reply] [Original]

heya /lit/,
what is the most disturbing novel you've ever read?

>> No.2038444

The Corrections.

I read it, and was really disturbed that people think Franzen is any good.

>> No.2038449

Knockemstiff

>> No.2038450

I can't really think of anything that's really gotten under my skin, except this King short in some collection. I forget what it was called, basically some teenagers go swimming in the middle of nowhere at night and this oil-creature starts killing them off. They get stuck on one of those floating docks and it just....waits for them. For some reason that story really stuck with me. I always think of it whenever I'm out swimming.

>> No.2038453

>>2038444
aaahhhhh
niggas got jokes

>> No.2038456

>>2038450
I always found The Regulators to be a little disturbing. King is a schlocky fuck, but he has his moments.

>> No.2038457

>>2038450
I remember that. Whenever it touched them their skin dissolved like acid right? All it had to do was wait for them to get tired and sit down and it would come up through the cracks between the boards.

>> No.2038465

Kafka's Country Doctor and The Shining

>> No.2038469

If Pynchon's style wasn't so comical, Gravity's Rainbow would be deeply disturbing. Fucking kids? Finding their bodies split open in the dark? Yup.

>> No.2038470

The Mothman Prophecies. Shit made me so paranoid, I'd get really freaked out reading it at night, especially near my windows. Ostensibly it's a true story, which makes it even worse.

>> No.2038482

The weird sex in Gravity's Rainbow was off-putting.

Almost every page of Blood Meridian was extremely disturbing. Tree of dead babies, need I say more?

>> No.2038484

Dunno about most disturbing book, but there was a scene I read recently that got to me. The book was Suffer the Children by John Saul and it wasn't very believable but there were a few scenes that were....egh. Basically there's this man who gets drunk and beats his youngest daughter half to death, to the point of catatonia almost. Luckily her older sister, who saw what happened, takes care of her. A few years go by and children start disappearing. Then the mute daughter is found holding an arm belonging to one of the missing children. She is promptly institutionalized.

Spoilers just to not be a bastard of the creepiest scenes the children were lured to a cave and trapped there, the crazy girl let them starve to death but first she flogged them, made them play tea party with seaweed and sand sandwiches, pushed their faces into dead cat guts, etc. All the while acting as though it was the most natural thing in the world

Most of the book is dumb but there's a few pages that are just, egh. Like I said.

>> No.2038490

>>2038442
the amityville horror. i know its fake, but goddamned if i didnt see jodie the pig from my 2nd story window every single night for a week. it really gave me the creeps.

>> No.2038492
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>> No.2038500

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

>> No.2038532
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It's easily among the most depressing things I've ever read, as well.

>> No.2038543

IT
But it's mostly because I watched the movie when I was 5 so every time it got to a really scary scene I remember seeing it when I was 5.

>> No.2038551

>>2038450

That particular tale is The Raft, from his short story collection Skeleton Crew, lest I'm mistaken.

>> No.2038555

>>2038500

Not to be a dick to you, because I read it with interest too, but that book was one of the most overblown self-indulgent scraps of garbage I ever read. The entire story was Blake Butler trying to make profound-sounding statements in every paragraph and it came off as immensely long-winded.

>> No.2038567

>>2038450
Now I want to see Creepshow. I loved that movie when I was a teen.

>> No.2038568
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The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker

>> No.2038571

>>2038555

Yeah, I'll admit, I found little of it to be profound or meaningful. Just immensely disturbing with its imagery.

>> No.2038745

>>2038490
I have to agree. I was younger when I read it and I only read late at night. What made it even worse was, I know this might sound weird, but the book was old, so it had an old smell to it, and so every time I would fan the book open to the page I left off on, I smelled it and then read the book.
The part about the pig always scared me and when the dad went into the basement to fix/feed the furnace. Shiiittttt Christ.

>> No.2038755

It's not a proper novel but ugh, this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090426215845/http://arentboynamed.wordpress.com/

>> No.2038759

>>2038492
I really think I never met an old sci-fi paperback cover I didn't like.

>> No.2038769

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
The Collector

>> No.2038774

>>2038745
That's my biggest problem with E-Books. While I love my Nook and read on it. I still love going to the library and taking in the smell. There's nothing better. Does that make me weird?

>> No.2038789

>>2038774

no, but looking to 4chan for validation does

>captcha: desATO ICAME

>> No.2038799

I'm gonna echo the other two people and say Gravity's Rainbow.

>> No.2038800

>>2038789
This is true. Maybe they will make a feature with smell o' vision for e-books.

>> No.2039279

The Shining.

I don't really reed creepy books, I like nice things.

>> No.2039289

Rats in the Walls by HP Lovecraft.

I could hear the damn scratching in my sleep.

>> No.2039290
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Sucks to your assmar, Piggy.

>> No.2039303

the holy bible

>> No.2039304

Naked Lunch. Seriously, that thing made me want to puke.

>> No.2039323

>>2039304

It made me want to smile.

>> No.2039526

On Love and Other Demons by G.G. Marquez

had to do a book report on it, at the end I even told my teacher how much I fucking hated it

>> No.2039527

Anything by Ligotti. "Purity" comes to mind, but it's a story rather than a novel.

>> No.2039534

either Ballard's Crash or The Elementary Particles.

>> No.2039554

a black dude for christmas

>> No.2039561

"I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream"

Really fucking disturbing short story.

As for novels, "Melmoth the Wanderer" is rather chilling.

>> No.2039578 [DELETED] 
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The Wasp Factory gave me some pretty weird dreams after reading it in a sitting, but The Atrocity Exhibition has to be up there.

> mfw I read the chapter "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Regan"

>> No.2039601
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>The Elementary Particles

>> No.2039726

The Painted Bird

>> No.2039786

I don't think it'd bother me as much now but when I was around 12 or so I took out The Great and Secret Show from the library because I liked The Thief of Always.

And then I realized that when Clive Barker writes books there's a pretty fucking huge difference between the ones he does for kids and the ones he does for adults. Mainly loads of gore sex and phallic imagery everywhere.

>> No.2039829

Probably 'A Turn of the Screw'. Bitch was horribly repressed & hysterical to the extent she scared the poor kid to death. I was on the edge of my seat the whole story thru, hoping something, anything would stop her from hurting the children... and it didn't. I appreciate that kind of merciless payoff.

'Lord of The Flies' also disturbed & depressed me in the extreme. It's too close to truth for comfort re: the human condition. Easy to see why Ballard considered it one of the greatest books in the english language.

>>2039578
The Wasp Factory disppointed me, honestly-- it was grotesque in a cartoony way, but not effectively horrifying. The Big Reveal at the end was interesting enough to dissipate the Shirley Jackson vibe I felt hung over the majority of the narrative, yet it didn't do much to make me want to revisit the story. Not a shit twist, per se, but a twist altogether too late to invest me further in the author's work.

>> No.2039846

Anyone here read King Leopold's ghost?

>> No.2039854

>>2039829
The Turn of the Screw probably violated me as well, but more because it was so boring and so fucking stupid

also The Stranger, Existentialism is about the most depressing useless shit around

>> No.2039856

It's not really very disturbing, but the closest I ever came to slitting my wrists was after reading 1984 in two afternoons when I was 14. Maybe it was just going through it so swiftly, or so young, but the first half of the book is actually kinda hopeful, and the second half is like a portrait of bleak, depressive, unrelenting suicidal despair. I was just mopey and quiet for three or four days afterwards. "But you waste all this time destroying people and remaking them so that they really love your fascist regime and want it to succeed only to kill them? AND THEY THANK YOU FOR IT?" Dammit, I still get twisted up thinking about it.

Nothing else has ever had that kind of impact, but I don't read as much as I used to.

>> No.2039860

>>2039856
haha I know what you mean

Gulliver's Travels got to me as a kid

The horse people (no, I can't remember how to spell their fucking name) chapter with the Yahoos depressed the fuck out of me. I didn't get at that age (like 10) that it was supposed to be a satire.

>> No.2039868

>>2039854

Boring, fine. Everybody's got different thresholds for fic written in more conservative, less-animated periods of human history, and the preamble to the story proper -is- a total bore; it's all setup. Totally killed my interest in the book the first time I tried to read it.

But where's the stupid come in? It's a psychological suspense story with an extremely unreliable narrator, built around social stratification, sexual repression & primitive superstition. The fact that James constructed a 'ghost story' with no ghosts marks him as brighter than a great many writers of his era.

>> No.2039874

American Psycho had it's moments for gruesome descriptions.

Naked Lunch didn't disturb me really, but it was kind of wtfamireading at some points.

>> No.2039877

>>2039874
The torture scene in 1984 where he's yelling "DO IT TO JULIA" was pretty chilling too.

>> No.2039921

That odd-man-out chapter in Trainspotting, 'Bad Blood', where Davie befriends the guy who raped his girlfriend & gave her (& Davie) HIV, then when dude is on his deathbed Davie gives the man photos of his own child, raped & mutilated with a drill.

Nevermind that the photos were faked-- it's the fact that Davie, the least flaky, least fucked individual in the whole novel was driven to the most cold-blooded form of revenge I've ever read. His rage was palpable to the extent that I believed Davie'd actually done it...

[/spoiledforeveryonebecauseIcan'tblacktext]

>> No.2039925

parts of a clockwork orange i suppose

>> No.2039926

or maybe deadeye dick, the first time i read it, that fucked me up.

>> No.2039968

>>2039926

The end of Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle', when John & Mona discover the Lorenzan mass suicide by ice-9... That passage harrowed the hell out of me.

>> No.2040251

>>2038450
OH GOD, they made an episode of some TV show out of that story. It was every bit as scary; very well done.

>> No.2040274

>>2039526
I'd like to hear the reasons why you
hated it so much. I, on the contrary, found it to be a very entertaining story, much like all the works from Marquez.

>> No.2040284
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I read Bram Stoker's Dracula at age 8. It catalysed my OCD and I havent' been the same since

>> No.2040287
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>>2040284
haven't*