The Bible series, but things really jumped the shark with the Book of Mormon.
The Bible did fuck me up as a kid.
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.
Matthew 5:28-5:29
Reading this as a super religious + horny 12 year old was terrifying. I felt extreme guilt for not maiming myself for a few years before I finally realized religion was bullshit.
My wife was raised Southern Baptist, she has a lot of sex hang ups, despite having been out of the church for about 30 years.
You are not alone in this.
"If a man is considered guilty for what goes on in his mind, then give me the electric chair for all my future crimes."
-Prince 1989
Did you cut your d*ck ?
That one is crazy how the main character does shitty things like wiping out civilizations just out of spite, then he impregnates a teenage girl and the baby grows up and is all nice and loving but says he is actually his dad and he/his dad love everyone. So much gaslighting.
Indeed, among the religious books I have read, the Book of Mormon takes the top position on the loony pile. What kind of indoctrination and drugs do you need to believe that?
Grooming the youth, that’s the kind of indoctrination you need. As a missionary, the only non-indoctrinated adults who got into the BoM were, let’s say, simple.
I had full access to the internet growing up (the secret was to be awake when other sleep lol) and reading the bible made me feel like I was viewing age inappropriate content then anything else
American Psycho contained scenes so graphic that I’d have to pause and stare out the window briefly before I could go on.
I used to sell books and this elderly couple came up to the counter saying they were buying it as a Christmas present.
So I told them "Hey, it's not my place to say what is or is not a good Christmas present, but before I sell it to you, could I get you to just flip the pages, randomly stick your finger in, and start reading?"
They thought I was kidding, but they did it...
"OH MY GOD!"
"Yeah..."
"OH MY GOD!"
Better they find out then than AFTER I sold it to them!
So did they buy it or what
They did not...
Jesus christ ! There's just some things you don't talk about in public.
That's a pretty interesting encounter. Glad you helped them know what they were about to do.
It was more self preservation. I didn't want them coming back after the fact. ;)
I entered this post to say exactly that.
There comes a point in the book when the constant one-upping the last scene just makes me need two or more sessions to get through the chapter. The last "Girls" chapters are specially gruelling.
It was the hamster that finally got me. Was sitting outside at my school's union, between classes, and just couldn't believe what I was reading.
::: spoiler Gore
For me it was the scene wher Pat like grabs the vocal cords of one of the women after drilling a hole through the mouth and then rips them out of the mouth.
:::
At first I thought the book was really boring with all of the brands and clothes descriptions that took half of the chapters. After that the senseless killings and brutality got to me in the end.
I had the same experience, why all this stuff about brands and clothes? Then the juxtaposition totally disturbed me. Then I started working with people in the corporate world...
I thought it was like a coping mechanism to make him more adjusted. Sometimes when he doesn't describe brands or simply there aren't any designer products, he loses his mind very quickly.
It could also be about corporate behavior but I haven't had the chance to meet anyone that entrenched.
It is absolutely a coping mechanism for those types in reality. Scary accurate.
Yeah first time I read a grueling book. Couldn't believe how much worse literature gore affects me compared to onscreen blood.
Pausing is a regular thing with books for me, disturbing or no
The pause was forced was my point. I couldn't go on otherwise because I was overwhelmed.
Aside from the occasional designed-to-offend ones, probably The Road. Only book I've ever read that haunted me
I got offended at the lack of punctuation or anything. Didn't get far. Fuck you Oprah and fuck your book club.
Hm I wonder how the next scene will go. Gray ash huh? Well I guess I should have seen that coming.
I read it and then watched the movie and it was depressing. His other book Outer Dark involves brother sister incest, child murder, and cannibalism! Very cheery.
Anytjing that marquis de sade wrote. Dont read it. Its the work of someone who pretended to "pose interesting questions" while write the worst rape fanfiction with his dick in his hand.
Trigger warning: just straight up awful assault
!There is a scene in which a father is forced to raped his underaged daughter and then gets shot while cumming inside her. The daughter of course gets spared. Oh wait no. She gets raped a gun point, mutilated and then rape killed again. Repeat this fof roughly 400 pages. Oh wow, so challenging and insightful! I truly believe that de Sade was horrified by this! Fuck off. !<
it is horrific - but you're missing some of the context.
De Sade partly wrote it as a fuck-you to the establishment in and of itself
Partly as a satire of the aristocracy - and you can't understate exactly how much he hated them - which is why he casts them as rapist pedophiles that prefer young boys
And partly as an attempt to catalog horrors of abuse and mental illness and the suffering of the common man at the hands of those in power
If you've come across the short story Guts at some point, it's apparently part of the book Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I haven't read the whole book so not sure what the other stories are like but this story is really trying to be both gross and fucked up.
That's one of my favourite books. If you take it in the sort of gory comedy horror genre (thinking evil dead), it's actually pretty great and has more depth to it than just horror stories.
Some of his later books get much worse, more gory, and far less interesting. He's really just going for shock value in a lot of them. I stopped reading after the pink sock in Pygmy (couldn't even finish the book).
I looked it up again when writing this comment and even though most reviews are negative they do make it sound pretty interesting. I've put it in a maaaybe list.
If you want to start with another less horrifying book by him (that isn't fight club), I'd highly recommend Rant or invisible monsters
Rant was fantastic, and I also agree wholeheartedly with everything everyone says about Guts.
I read Guts for the first time in an issue of playboy when I was in my early teens... I still vividly remember reading the titular bit at the end. And also how it affects his family....
Goddamn.
Naked Lunch by Christopher Burroughs
The Trial by Franz Kafka. Anything by Kafka is pretty mental.
Now imagine being German and having to read several works by that loony in middle school.
William S. Burroughs, not Christopher! Unless that's I joke I'm missing...
Oh sbit
Was just talking about this yesterday because of the "would you pick the man or the bear" question going around. The novel Bear by Marian Engel is quite literally about a woman who falls in love with and tries to have sex with a large bear. It won the Governor General's award in Canada.
Also The Wasp Factory is seriously fucked up.
I can't remember the name of the book now, but in high school we read a 'true' story of child abuse. I'm sure it was edited to both tone down and turn up certain elements, but it was pretty much a brutal shock to people who are mostly from decent families that love them. Whether the kids were rich, poor, or middle class in my school, just about everyone there could at least return home to parents that didn't commit those horrors.
I remember the diapers, the exposure to the elements, and the way the other children were pitted against the abused kid, and honestly? It was the emotional abuse that was the worst to read.
Like reading https://elan.school - just completely outside of what happy people can imagine.
I think the book you're referring to is The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. That book make me sick to read, and yes, it is based on a true story. One of very few books I've ever finished with a sense of profound disgust and vowed never to return to - not because it's a bad book, on the contrary Ketchum manages to capture the wrongness of it all in compelling detail - but the subject of its story was just completely unpalatable. I was too young for that story when I read it and that was my first real taste of the sort of horrible fucked up shit that humans can do to each other. And God, there was an awful lot of horrible fucked up shit in that story. Sylvia Likens (the real life poor dead girl the book is based on) deserves to have her story told to the world but part of me wishes I didn't read it.
The Wasp Factory and We Need to Talk about Kevin (both have scenes of an older child abusing the trust of a younger sibling, which really bothered me at the time).
Kevin is a TOUGH read. Very well written though.
The Reckoning by Grisham.
Death in Her Hands by Moshfegh.
The Long Walk by King.
The Children of Hurin by Tolkien.
Angela's Ashes by McCourt.
Already mentioned but The Road, definitely.
The Children of Hurin is one of my favourite books. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember I loved it for the beautiful prose and just how sad (and messed up) the story is.
So honestly the train in IT was pretty fucked up and I probably shouldn't have read it as young as I was. 100 years of solitude has its own fucked-up-ness and God of small things is also fucked up at the end, but all very different types of fucked up...
Probably not as fucked up as other entries, but I read Geek Love in grade school. The original meaning of geek, which was someone who bit the head off a chicken. Bunch of weird shit about a messed up carnie family. Not a terrible read I guess but holy shit was I not prepared.
Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy.
It's kinda hard to describe. I recon it's a parable about American colonization and the genocide of the native people. Like a map of how a project like that gets done and who benefits from it.
It's like a melodrama in that it's light on plot, and character motivation, but without the extreme circumstances unless you count the pervasive, persistent, and senseless violence. (that the characters themselves barely seem to notice) Not exactly a supernatural tale, but filled with dream logic, oh and the literal Christian Devil is one of the main characters.
This is the only book Ive ever read twice, back to back. I got to the end and was like WTF, turned to the first page and started again.
"Mangez le si vous voulez" (Eat him of you wish)
A book relating events that happened in 1870 in a French village. From a misunderstanding one guy is beaten, released, tortured and ultimately burned alive with people bridging toast to collect the fat that was dripping from the fire.
All the events happened in a single day that goes from mundane to horror.
The Silence Of The Lambs, arguably more disturbing than the film as you know more of what the characters are thinking.
Red Dragon too for the same reason. The way he writes really gets you into the characters mind. I still get chills thinking about the part with the reporter in wheelchair. He describes the victim thought process as he's dropped off outside his office building. Even after all the killer did to him, he starts thinking he'll be set free, and you start to think that too, ::: spoiler spoiler
just moments before he is set on fire and rolled down the hill.
:::
Another one that really distributed me was when he describes the killer just watching a family in their house. They are completely unaware that he has been watching them and that they'll be his next victims.
I read that book 25 years ago and I still remember vivid details of it.
The Area X series (Southern Reach Trilogy) is fucked up!
Ok let me give you a couple reasons if you haven't read it
There's this place, and it seems to be growing that has a weird effect on reality and the longer you stay there the stronger the effect. It centers around a lighthouse in a rural area. The government runs experiments but it's hush hush and nobody knows anything about it. BTW it's getting bigger.
People that leave the area x, might be doppelganger or so changed, it's the same to outside observation.
It's seriously a really good stuff and absolutely fucked up
Annihilation is the film adaptation, and it's quite different
Love the film, but just couldn't get into the book
The film is a fun but I liked the books a little better. Both are hard to follow but the movie was even more so for me.
Not sure if I'd call Area X fucked up but if you liked it definitely take a look at Borne (same author). It mixes the weirdness of area x with bioengineering and much more relatable characters.
did you read the second book? Control goes into that storage room and he realizes that there isn't a storage room there and then he realizes its the scientist is in in the wall and maybe its the doppelganger hiding there and its trying to close the room on him essentially eating him! That part is seriously fucked up. And then WTF happens to Control when he gets to the bottom of the lighthouse stairs? My wife thinks he turns into one of the white rabbits.
Yeah the second book was probably more disturbing, then the third went a bit off the rails. I should probably reread them at some point. I don't remember what happened to Control but the Psychologist's ending was pretty disturbing too.
On the Beach by Nevil Schute. Read it as a kid and didn't realize what I was getting into. Kept waiting for the ending to have some kind of silver lining. Something. Then the last of humanity fucking dies and the last character commits suicide.
Reading Spectrum 7th grade math workbook was the first time I considered ending it all
Firefly by Piers Anthony (the writer of the Xanth fantasy series).
There's way too much talk of erections around dead bodies, but by far the worst part is the long section with a woman describing in way too much detail how much she enjoyed being raped as a five year old, acting it out and everything. Anthony is a messed up dude.
Was just about to post this. I read it in the 90s, expecting something more along the lines of a scifi Xanth style story. Got a traumatising, f'd up sexual fever dream. To this day some of the shit from that story pops in my head sometimes.
It's incredibly messed up. I don't recommend it.
I think it was called "Welcome to Night Vale". After painfully reading page after page of absurd drivel that was probably "written" by a drunk AI, I finally gave up. It really reads like the output of a low-quality Markov chain. My daughter insists it isn't, but then they managed to simulate that very, very well (I have worked with Markov chains before, so I have a bit of experience how that looks like).
It is very rare that I give up on a book, maybe one in several thousands. But this one was a perfect waste of paper and ink, worse than some books we had to read in school, which is probably the harshest criticism I can offer.
I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was eleven. Some of the nonsense rhyme still comes back to me when I'm tired - she's a good fisherman, catches hens, puts em inna pens / wire, briar, limber lock, three geese inna flock.
I also read She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb when I was in high school. Both are extremely fucked when it comes to talking about mental health and hospitalizations.
I really wish I could remember the name of it, but it's about a lawyer who effectively puts the devil on trial, except it's really messed up in parts. There's this entire sequence involving a girl, a young child, who over time seduces the main character who describes in great detail the experience of screwing this child, only for it to be revealed that the girl was the devil/a demon of some sort whose sole purpose is to corrupt the main character. The majority of the book was great, but that particular sequence was well into distasteful and disturbing.
I think it was called Son of the Endless Night, but I'm not certain if that's correct.
I'm currently rereading A Clockwork Orange and yep, it's pretty fucked up.
The Wasp Factory. I mean the whole book is disturbing but the ending....
In the Arab world were I live there are tons of them, but maaaan..where do I start..
Is it just like America where the most religious dudes watch the sickest porn?
Which one pops to mind first, even if it's not the most fucked up one you've come across? Alternatively, any of the options have a published English translation (though I imagine these'd probably be the tamer of the bunch)?
I for one am super interested.
Which one pops to mind first, even if it's not the most fucked up one you've come across?
what I remember for sure, is the general theme of these books ( made me really disgusted and depressed ) which.. is hatred..
alot of things that we consider wrong, you name it.. are normalized.. Not directly but they're presented in a certain way, that is justifiable...like.. say racism...homophobia.. Murder... Etc..
Edit : Of course, that's wrong no matter how they try to justify them..
Takes place in NYC, a story about Dr. Joseph Lister who works for the Mafia under a guy named Lucky Lusiano, so this Doctor guy works inside a building that looks like any normal building, but it's actually a secret club, for the Mafia.. And other shady people..
Inside that building there's a butchery ( or butcher shop ), where he inspects the human meat that will be served to the club members..
So one day he decides to get that story out, and he goes to the FBI..👀.. He spoke to the head of the FBI who told him to act normal and go to work the next day..
The next day he walks in to that building were he saw the FBI director standing next to Lucky Luciano, and his family on their knees... I'll let you guess what happens next
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
🍖🥩🍗🍔🍟🌭🍲🍞
:::
That's not the only fucked up part, a lot of restaurants, famous ones like McDonald are serving human meat, and people love it because it's actually delicious... The author claims..
From where they're getting this meat ? Homeless people... Again according to the author..
So this author views men as sex toys, like on the first page... aside from that there's something really interesting going on for this novel, she descibes her sexual experiences ( yuck I must tell you ), but she says she's doing it for "research purposes".. ( lol, i know ), like she quotes verses from the Hadith ( Hadith is any book that gathers and curates all of Prophets Mohamed's sayings and deeds, the two Major ones are Sahih Muslim & Sahih Bukhari ) and she tells us that she's having random sex with strangers to apply the stuff Prophet Mohammed did with his wives... her reasoning is: if we're going to take Prophet Mohammed as a roll model, we might as well .... include his sex life...( she triggered a lot of Muslims because of this, but I'll give this one another read to fact check some stuff despite how cringy it is )
published English translation
You'd be right, you guys don't even get the real translation of the Qur'an and Hadith... just a watered down version... peaceful and cheerful..
Go Ask Alice
Very good book but it goes through a young women's journey through SA, and hard addiction.
Didn't read it all but only the opening when I was personally too young. Anyway the book lucky by the author of the lovely bones. I've read books with serious content in it like the first broken earth book and deeds of paksenaeian both which have rape/dubious consent but I was more than mature enough to handle that.
My Advanced English class in High School made me read the stort story Bloodchild.
It's so creepy because you read the repeated sexual abuse of a minor through the eyes of the perpetrator who continuously justifies his acts and misrepresents Lolita's reactions. He's a very unreliable narrator. First he even becomes her stepdad to have better access to her. Then her mother dies, through a car accident just before she can call the police on him. Again this is recounted through Humberts eyes, so I'm thinking it was actually murder.
I haven't finished the book yet, it's kind of hard to read. It's been a few years, and I should be somewhere in the middle IIRC.
Don't know if a VN counts as a book, but Song of Saya
Not really quite as bad as the others here, but I read the first two books of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind as a young teen before getting squicked out by it. The female lead almost gets sexually assaulted four times (one of them being when she rides into the middle of a battlefield completely naked for incredibly contrived reasons). The entire first half of the second book is the author's BDSM fantasy forced into plot relevancy. But perhaps the worst I read was some evil ritual that involved the villain cutting off and eating the genitals of a young boy.
So yeah, I stopped reading it.
I came here to talk about this exact series.
I think I read up to about book 8 and every one had some fucked up rape/bdsm shit.
"La catedral del mar" and "Los herederos de la tierra" by Ildefonso Falcones, and one more vote for "The road".
Day of the Oprichnik. I only wanted to read it because it is banned in Russia.
The Phoenix Project
The only Phoenix Project I can find is about IT and business.
May be relevant - that book was super difficult to understand what it's trying to recommend
Naked Lunch.
"The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection."
I mean thats definitely not the worst part. Dr Benway's medical experiments, the old people smother party, some horrific overdoses...
We need to leave then some surprises.
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite is an experience.
I read the A Child Called It series which is an autobiography about the abuse David Pelzer suffered at the hands of his mother and his experience with foster care.
Some pretty fucked up shit happened to this man. The fact that he grew up to be a functioning human being let alone put it all behind him is incredible.
As a fan of transgressive fiction, I've read quite a lot of fucked up books. Here's what I came up with off the top of my head - sorry, it's quite a long list!
Some different types of fucked up here (horrible fucked up and fun fucked up):
Cows by Matthew Stoke (not very well written, but very fucked up, a sick classic)
Anything by Carlton Mellick III, but especially Aspeshit, which is like Evil Dead on acid (semi literally). But he's definitely 'fun fucked up' not grotesquely nasty without humour. All Bizarro is fucked up and worth checking out.
Apocalypse Culture I and II are both intentionally fucked up compendiums of short pieces and art that will make you sick and angry, but also make you think about a lot of different things. Feral House have plenty of fucked up books that are worth reading.
Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard - experimental writing unlike most other Ballard books, but significantly more fucked up in parts. All Ballard is great and fucked up at some point; High Rise has one of the best opening paragraphs of any book, ever. Crash is probably second to Atrocity Exhibition in fucked-up-ness.
Marquis de Sade - Justine, 100 Days of Sodom. Juliette: (mentioned elsewhere) horrible imagination-run-wild in the worst way, but aimed at antagonising people against the aristocracy and satirising the extreme cruelty and nastiness of those in power, probably including himself.
UK publisher Creation books (and imprint Attack!) did "anti-books" as they called them - some fucked up stuff of all kinds there: from fun stupidity like Raiders of the Low Forehead to some really horrible stuff by Peter Sotos that was unreadable (even to me).
The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love tells you all you need to know about human beings and a lot you never needed to know (eyeball licking fetishism is a thing, apparently).
Nick Cave's 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' is a wonderful pieces of fucked-up-ness and the reason for my username: a mute hillbilly recounts his sordid, psychotic life while drowning in quicksand, with biblical imagery and references, poetic 'Deep South' language, and lots of unpleasantness, especially from his parents. Kind of an ugly sibling to 'The Wasp Factory's.
Clive Barker's works can be pretty fucked up - Books of Blood is still his best work, in my opinion.
Supervert's 'Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish' was disappointing, badly written, and fucked up in boring but nasty ways. I'd avoid it, but it's a long time since I read it, so maybe I forgot a lot about it. I remember being bored and irritated, and little else.
Most Will Self books are pretty to very fucked up, particularly his early stuff.
Harry Crews was a wonderful writer, with some pretty fucked up stuff in Feast of Snakes and A Childhood - The Biography of a Place.
Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and William Burroughs all have lots of great fucked up work.
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is fucked up in terms of layout and typesetting as well as storyline. Some really effective parts, some get a little bogged down in their own cleverness. But very much worth reading. Not fucked up in terms of gore or sex, as far as I remember!
Patrick Suskind's Perfume is brilliant and fucked up, and possibly the only book that can change your sense of smell.
James Joyce - Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are fucked up in terms of experimental style and language, and are wonderful pieces of writing, despite being notoriously 'difficult'.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's biographical books are wonderful and fucked up. 'The Spiritual Journey' is one of the best still.
That's enough for now - I'm sure I'm missing a lot!
I read Hunter S Thompson's book about the Hells Angels when i was in high school and i regret it, i also really fucking hate bikers. Just rolling packs of rapists.
I've heard of Bikers Against Child Abuse that plays upon the stereotype to guard kids against their abusers and provide a protective presence as the kids testify in court 🤔
Good for them. But i've also heard of public relations so i don't trust these things. Im sure priests also offer support services for victims of child abuse.
Well, there are bikers and then there are bikers.
Also sexual predators are often victims themselves. It is not far fetched that some would try to help people is a similar situation. But it is also not far fetched to think that some become perpetrators of similar actions.
The Happy Man, a small novel I picked up for something to read.
Wish by Peter Goldsworthy. J.J. has always been more at home in Sign language than in spoken English. Recently divorced, he returns to school to teach Sign. His pupils include the foster parents of a beautiful and highly intelligent ape named Eliza.
I recently read The Parable of the Sower and it really affected me, both because I felt empathy for the characters and because I saw some uncomfortable parallels in the recent history of our world.
I also was disturbed by The Sparrow. Though frankly I wouldn't recommend it for a lot of reasons.
Battle Royale is intensely violent, in a really personal way.
For graphic novels, From Hell is a really rough read honestly, but also really interesting
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward!
Another I haven't actually read this comment but this post reminded me of The Turner Diaries and Thought Slime's video about it.
The Bible series, but things really jumped the shark with the Book of Mormon.
The Bible did fuck me up as a kid.
Matthew 5:28-5:29
Reading this as a super religious + horny 12 year old was terrifying. I felt extreme guilt for not maiming myself for a few years before I finally realized religion was bullshit.
My wife was raised Southern Baptist, she has a lot of sex hang ups, despite having been out of the church for about 30 years.
You are not alone in this.
"If a man is considered guilty for what goes on in his mind, then give me the electric chair for all my future crimes."
-Prince 1989
Did you cut your d*ck ?
That one is crazy how the main character does shitty things like wiping out civilizations just out of spite, then he impregnates a teenage girl and the baby grows up and is all nice and loving but says he is actually his dad and he/his dad love everyone. So much gaslighting.
Indeed, among the religious books I have read, the Book of Mormon takes the top position on the loony pile. What kind of indoctrination and drugs do you need to believe that?
Grooming the youth, that’s the kind of indoctrination you need. As a missionary, the only non-indoctrinated adults who got into the BoM were, let’s say, simple.
I had full access to the internet growing up (the secret was to be awake when other sleep lol) and reading the bible made me feel like I was viewing age inappropriate content then anything else
American Psycho contained scenes so graphic that I’d have to pause and stare out the window briefly before I could go on.
I used to sell books and this elderly couple came up to the counter saying they were buying it as a Christmas present.
So I told them "Hey, it's not my place to say what is or is not a good Christmas present, but before I sell it to you, could I get you to just flip the pages, randomly stick your finger in, and start reading?"
They thought I was kidding, but they did it...
"OH MY GOD!"
"Yeah..."
"OH MY GOD!"
Better they find out then than AFTER I sold it to them!
So did they buy it or what
They did not...
Jesus christ ! There's just some things you don't talk about in public.
That's a pretty interesting encounter. Glad you helped them know what they were about to do.
It was more self preservation. I didn't want them coming back after the fact. ;)
I entered this post to say exactly that.
There comes a point in the book when the constant one-upping the last scene just makes me need two or more sessions to get through the chapter. The last "Girls" chapters are specially gruelling.
It was the hamster that finally got me. Was sitting outside at my school's union, between classes, and just couldn't believe what I was reading.
::: spoiler Gore For me it was the scene wher Pat like grabs the vocal cords of one of the women after drilling a hole through the mouth and then rips them out of the mouth. :::
At first I thought the book was really boring with all of the brands and clothes descriptions that took half of the chapters. After that the senseless killings and brutality got to me in the end.
I had the same experience, why all this stuff about brands and clothes? Then the juxtaposition totally disturbed me. Then I started working with people in the corporate world...
I thought it was like a coping mechanism to make him more adjusted. Sometimes when he doesn't describe brands or simply there aren't any designer products, he loses his mind very quickly.
It could also be about corporate behavior but I haven't had the chance to meet anyone that entrenched.
It is absolutely a coping mechanism for those types in reality. Scary accurate.
Yeah first time I read a grueling book. Couldn't believe how much worse literature gore affects me compared to onscreen blood.
Pausing is a regular thing with books for me, disturbing or no
The pause was forced was my point. I couldn't go on otherwise because I was overwhelmed.
Aside from the occasional designed-to-offend ones, probably The Road. Only book I've ever read that haunted me
I got offended at the lack of punctuation or anything. Didn't get far. Fuck you Oprah and fuck your book club.
Hm I wonder how the next scene will go. Gray ash huh? Well I guess I should have seen that coming.
I read it and then watched the movie and it was depressing. His other book Outer Dark involves brother sister incest, child murder, and cannibalism! Very cheery.
Anytjing that marquis de sade wrote. Dont read it. Its the work of someone who pretended to "pose interesting questions" while write the worst rape fanfiction with his dick in his hand.
Trigger warning: just straight up awful assault
it is horrific - but you're missing some of the context.
De Sade partly wrote it as a fuck-you to the establishment in and of itself
Partly as a satire of the aristocracy - and you can't understate exactly how much he hated them - which is why he casts them as rapist pedophiles that prefer young boys
And partly as an attempt to catalog horrors of abuse and mental illness and the suffering of the common man at the hands of those in power
If you've come across the short story Guts at some point, it's apparently part of the book Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I haven't read the whole book so not sure what the other stories are like but this story is really trying to be both gross and fucked up.
That's one of my favourite books. If you take it in the sort of gory comedy horror genre (thinking evil dead), it's actually pretty great and has more depth to it than just horror stories.
Some of his later books get much worse, more gory, and far less interesting. He's really just going for shock value in a lot of them. I stopped reading after the pink sock in Pygmy (couldn't even finish the book).
I looked it up again when writing this comment and even though most reviews are negative they do make it sound pretty interesting. I've put it in a maaaybe list.
If you want to start with another less horrifying book by him (that isn't fight club), I'd highly recommend Rant or invisible monsters
Rant was fantastic, and I also agree wholeheartedly with everything everyone says about Guts.
I read Guts for the first time in an issue of playboy when I was in my early teens... I still vividly remember reading the titular bit at the end. And also how it affects his family....
Goddamn.
Naked Lunch by Christopher Burroughs
The Trial by Franz Kafka. Anything by Kafka is pretty mental.
Now imagine being German and having to read several works by that loony in middle school.
William S. Burroughs, not Christopher! Unless that's I joke I'm missing...
Oh sbit
Was just talking about this yesterday because of the "would you pick the man or the bear" question going around. The novel Bear by Marian Engel is quite literally about a woman who falls in love with and tries to have sex with a large bear. It won the Governor General's award in Canada.
Also The Wasp Factory is seriously fucked up.
I can't remember the name of the book now, but in high school we read a 'true' story of child abuse. I'm sure it was edited to both tone down and turn up certain elements, but it was pretty much a brutal shock to people who are mostly from decent families that love them. Whether the kids were rich, poor, or middle class in my school, just about everyone there could at least return home to parents that didn't commit those horrors.
I remember the diapers, the exposure to the elements, and the way the other children were pitted against the abused kid, and honestly? It was the emotional abuse that was the worst to read.
Like reading https://elan.school - just completely outside of what happy people can imagine.
I think the book you're referring to is The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. That book make me sick to read, and yes, it is based on a true story. One of very few books I've ever finished with a sense of profound disgust and vowed never to return to - not because it's a bad book, on the contrary Ketchum manages to capture the wrongness of it all in compelling detail - but the subject of its story was just completely unpalatable. I was too young for that story when I read it and that was my first real taste of the sort of horrible fucked up shit that humans can do to each other. And God, there was an awful lot of horrible fucked up shit in that story. Sylvia Likens (the real life poor dead girl the book is based on) deserves to have her story told to the world but part of me wishes I didn't read it.
The Wasp Factory and We Need to Talk about Kevin (both have scenes of an older child abusing the trust of a younger sibling, which really bothered me at the time).
Kevin is a TOUGH read. Very well written though.
The Reckoning by Grisham.
Death in Her Hands by Moshfegh.
The Long Walk by King.
The Children of Hurin by Tolkien.
Angela's Ashes by McCourt.
Already mentioned but The Road, definitely.
The Children of Hurin is one of my favourite books. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember I loved it for the beautiful prose and just how sad (and messed up) the story is.
So honestly the train in IT was pretty fucked up and I probably shouldn't have read it as young as I was. 100 years of solitude has its own fucked-up-ness and God of small things is also fucked up at the end, but all very different types of fucked up...
Probably not as fucked up as other entries, but I read Geek Love in grade school. The original meaning of geek, which was someone who bit the head off a chicken. Bunch of weird shit about a messed up carnie family. Not a terrible read I guess but holy shit was I not prepared.
Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy.
It's kinda hard to describe. I recon it's a parable about American colonization and the genocide of the native people. Like a map of how a project like that gets done and who benefits from it.
It's like a melodrama in that it's light on plot, and character motivation, but without the extreme circumstances unless you count the pervasive, persistent, and senseless violence. (that the characters themselves barely seem to notice) Not exactly a supernatural tale, but filled with dream logic, oh and the literal Christian Devil is one of the main characters.
This is the only book Ive ever read twice, back to back. I got to the end and was like WTF, turned to the first page and started again.
"Mangez le si vous voulez" (Eat him of you wish)
A book relating events that happened in 1870 in a French village. From a misunderstanding one guy is beaten, released, tortured and ultimately burned alive with people bridging toast to collect the fat that was dripping from the fire.
All the events happened in a single day that goes from mundane to horror.
The Silence Of The Lambs, arguably more disturbing than the film as you know more of what the characters are thinking.
Red Dragon too for the same reason. The way he writes really gets you into the characters mind. I still get chills thinking about the part with the reporter in wheelchair. He describes the victim thought process as he's dropped off outside his office building. Even after all the killer did to him, he starts thinking he'll be set free, and you start to think that too, ::: spoiler spoiler just moments before he is set on fire and rolled down the hill. :::
Another one that really distributed me was when he describes the killer just watching a family in their house. They are completely unaware that he has been watching them and that they'll be his next victims.
I read that book 25 years ago and I still remember vivid details of it.
The Area X series (Southern Reach Trilogy) is fucked up!
Ok let me give you a couple reasons if you haven't read it
There's this place, and it seems to be growing that has a weird effect on reality and the longer you stay there the stronger the effect. It centers around a lighthouse in a rural area. The government runs experiments but it's hush hush and nobody knows anything about it. BTW it's getting bigger.
People that leave the area x, might be doppelganger or so changed, it's the same to outside observation.
It's seriously a really good stuff and absolutely fucked up
Annihilation is the film adaptation, and it's quite different
Love the film, but just couldn't get into the book
The film is a fun but I liked the books a little better. Both are hard to follow but the movie was even more so for me.
Not sure if I'd call Area X fucked up but if you liked it definitely take a look at Borne (same author). It mixes the weirdness of area x with bioengineering and much more relatable characters.
did you read the second book? Control goes into that storage room and he realizes that there isn't a storage room there and then he realizes its the scientist is in in the wall and maybe its the doppelganger hiding there and its trying to close the room on him essentially eating him! That part is seriously fucked up. And then WTF happens to Control when he gets to the bottom of the lighthouse stairs? My wife thinks he turns into one of the white rabbits.
Yeah the second book was probably more disturbing, then the third went a bit off the rails. I should probably reread them at some point. I don't remember what happened to Control but the Psychologist's ending was pretty disturbing too.
On the Beach by Nevil Schute. Read it as a kid and didn't realize what I was getting into. Kept waiting for the ending to have some kind of silver lining. Something. Then the last of humanity fucking dies and the last character commits suicide.
Reading Spectrum 7th grade math workbook was the first time I considered ending it all
Firefly by Piers Anthony (the writer of the Xanth fantasy series).
There's way too much talk of erections around dead bodies, but by far the worst part is the long section with a woman describing in way too much detail how much she enjoyed being raped as a five year old, acting it out and everything. Anthony is a messed up dude.
Was just about to post this. I read it in the 90s, expecting something more along the lines of a scifi Xanth style story. Got a traumatising, f'd up sexual fever dream. To this day some of the shit from that story pops in my head sometimes.
It's incredibly messed up. I don't recommend it.
I think it was called "Welcome to Night Vale". After painfully reading page after page of absurd drivel that was probably "written" by a drunk AI, I finally gave up. It really reads like the output of a low-quality Markov chain. My daughter insists it isn't, but then they managed to simulate that very, very well (I have worked with Markov chains before, so I have a bit of experience how that looks like).
It is very rare that I give up on a book, maybe one in several thousands. But this one was a perfect waste of paper and ink, worse than some books we had to read in school, which is probably the harshest criticism I can offer.
I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was eleven. Some of the nonsense rhyme still comes back to me when I'm tired - she's a good fisherman, catches hens, puts em inna pens / wire, briar, limber lock, three geese inna flock.
I also read She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb when I was in high school. Both are extremely fucked when it comes to talking about mental health and hospitalizations.
I really wish I could remember the name of it, but it's about a lawyer who effectively puts the devil on trial, except it's really messed up in parts. There's this entire sequence involving a girl, a young child, who over time seduces the main character who describes in great detail the experience of screwing this child, only for it to be revealed that the girl was the devil/a demon of some sort whose sole purpose is to corrupt the main character. The majority of the book was great, but that particular sequence was well into distasteful and disturbing.
I think it was called Son of the Endless Night, but I'm not certain if that's correct.
I'm currently rereading A Clockwork Orange and yep, it's pretty fucked up.
The Wasp Factory. I mean the whole book is disturbing but the ending....
In the Arab world were I live there are tons of them, but maaaan..where do I start..
Is it just like America where the most religious dudes watch the sickest porn?
Which one pops to mind first, even if it's not the most fucked up one you've come across? Alternatively, any of the options have a published English translation (though I imagine these'd probably be the tamer of the bunch)?
I for one am super interested.
what I remember for sure, is the general theme of these books ( made me really disgusted and depressed ) which.. is hatred..
alot of things that we consider wrong, you name it.. are normalized.. Not directly but they're presented in a certain way, that is justifiable...like.. say racism...homophobia.. Murder... Etc..
Edit : Of course, that's wrong no matter how they try to justify them..
Takes place in NYC, a story about Dr. Joseph Lister who works for the Mafia under a guy named Lucky Lusiano, so this Doctor guy works inside a building that looks like any normal building, but it's actually a secret club, for the Mafia.. And other shady people..
Inside that building there's a butchery ( or butcher shop ), where he inspects the human meat that will be served to the club members..
So one day he decides to get that story out, and he goes to the FBI..👀.. He spoke to the head of the FBI who told him to act normal and go to work the next day..
The next day he walks in to that building were he saw the FBI director standing next to Lucky Luciano, and his family on their knees... I'll let you guess what happens next
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler 🍖🥩🍗🍔🍟🌭🍲🍞 :::
That's not the only fucked up part, a lot of restaurants, famous ones like McDonald are serving human meat, and people love it because it's actually delicious... The author claims..
From where they're getting this meat ? Homeless people... Again according to the author..
CW: Homophobia, Racism
Ok.. I'm genuinely worried about the mental state of this author..
basically this guy wrote a novel about himself, where he turned himself into a... a gifted fucker... shall we say...
would somebody tell this guy this is not a real flex? his crush irl won't be impressed
CW: dehumanizing objectification
So this author views men as sex toys, like on the first page... aside from that there's something really interesting going on for this novel, she descibes her sexual experiences ( yuck I must tell you ), but she says she's doing it for "research purposes".. ( lol, i know ), like she quotes verses from the Hadith ( Hadith is any book that gathers and curates all of Prophets Mohamed's sayings and deeds, the two Major ones are Sahih Muslim & Sahih Bukhari ) and she tells us that she's having random sex with strangers to apply the stuff Prophet Mohammed did with his wives... her reasoning is: if we're going to take Prophet Mohammed as a roll model, we might as well .... include his sex life...( she triggered a lot of Muslims because of this, but I'll give this one another read to fact check some stuff despite how cringy it is )
You'd be right, you guys don't even get the real translation of the Qur'an and Hadith... just a watered down version... peaceful and cheerful..
Go Ask Alice
Very good book but it goes through a young women's journey through SA, and hard addiction.
Didn't read it all but only the opening when I was personally too young. Anyway the book lucky by the author of the lovely bones. I've read books with serious content in it like the first broken earth book and deeds of paksenaeian both which have rape/dubious consent but I was more than mature enough to handle that.
My Advanced English class in High School made me read the stort story Bloodchild.
That was pretty WTF for me at the time.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
It's so creepy because you read the repeated sexual abuse of a minor through the eyes of the perpetrator who continuously justifies his acts and misrepresents Lolita's reactions. He's a very unreliable narrator. First he even becomes her stepdad to have better access to her. Then her mother dies, through a car accident just before she can call the police on him. Again this is recounted through Humberts eyes, so I'm thinking it was actually murder.
I haven't finished the book yet, it's kind of hard to read. It's been a few years, and I should be somewhere in the middle IIRC.
Don't know if a VN counts as a book, but Song of Saya
Not really quite as bad as the others here, but I read the first two books of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind as a young teen before getting squicked out by it. The female lead almost gets sexually assaulted four times (one of them being when she rides into the middle of a battlefield completely naked for incredibly contrived reasons). The entire first half of the second book is the author's BDSM fantasy forced into plot relevancy. But perhaps the worst I read was some evil ritual that involved the villain cutting off and eating the genitals of a young boy.
So yeah, I stopped reading it.
I came here to talk about this exact series.
I think I read up to about book 8 and every one had some fucked up rape/bdsm shit.
"La catedral del mar" and "Los herederos de la tierra" by Ildefonso Falcones, and one more vote for "The road".
Day of the Oprichnik. I only wanted to read it because it is banned in Russia.
The Phoenix Project
The only Phoenix Project I can find is about IT and business.
May be relevant - that book was super difficult to understand what it's trying to recommend
Naked Lunch.
"The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection."
I mean thats definitely not the worst part. Dr Benway's medical experiments, the old people smother party, some horrific overdoses...
We need to leave then some surprises.
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite is an experience.
I read the A Child Called It series which is an autobiography about the abuse David Pelzer suffered at the hands of his mother and his experience with foster care.
Some pretty fucked up shit happened to this man. The fact that he grew up to be a functioning human being let alone put it all behind him is incredible.
As a fan of transgressive fiction, I've read quite a lot of fucked up books. Here's what I came up with off the top of my head - sorry, it's quite a long list!
Some different types of fucked up here (horrible fucked up and fun fucked up):
Cows by Matthew Stoke (not very well written, but very fucked up, a sick classic)
Anything by Carlton Mellick III, but especially Aspeshit, which is like Evil Dead on acid (semi literally). But he's definitely 'fun fucked up' not grotesquely nasty without humour. All Bizarro is fucked up and worth checking out.
Apocalypse Culture I and II are both intentionally fucked up compendiums of short pieces and art that will make you sick and angry, but also make you think about a lot of different things. Feral House have plenty of fucked up books that are worth reading.
Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard - experimental writing unlike most other Ballard books, but significantly more fucked up in parts. All Ballard is great and fucked up at some point; High Rise has one of the best opening paragraphs of any book, ever. Crash is probably second to Atrocity Exhibition in fucked-up-ness.
Marquis de Sade - Justine, 100 Days of Sodom. Juliette: (mentioned elsewhere) horrible imagination-run-wild in the worst way, but aimed at antagonising people against the aristocracy and satirising the extreme cruelty and nastiness of those in power, probably including himself.
UK publisher Creation books (and imprint Attack!) did "anti-books" as they called them - some fucked up stuff of all kinds there: from fun stupidity like Raiders of the Low Forehead to some really horrible stuff by Peter Sotos that was unreadable (even to me).
The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love tells you all you need to know about human beings and a lot you never needed to know (eyeball licking fetishism is a thing, apparently).
Nick Cave's 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' is a wonderful pieces of fucked-up-ness and the reason for my username: a mute hillbilly recounts his sordid, psychotic life while drowning in quicksand, with biblical imagery and references, poetic 'Deep South' language, and lots of unpleasantness, especially from his parents. Kind of an ugly sibling to 'The Wasp Factory's.
Clive Barker's works can be pretty fucked up - Books of Blood is still his best work, in my opinion.
Supervert's 'Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish' was disappointing, badly written, and fucked up in boring but nasty ways. I'd avoid it, but it's a long time since I read it, so maybe I forgot a lot about it. I remember being bored and irritated, and little else.
Most Will Self books are pretty to very fucked up, particularly his early stuff.
Harry Crews was a wonderful writer, with some pretty fucked up stuff in Feast of Snakes and A Childhood - The Biography of a Place.
Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and William Burroughs all have lots of great fucked up work.
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is fucked up in terms of layout and typesetting as well as storyline. Some really effective parts, some get a little bogged down in their own cleverness. But very much worth reading. Not fucked up in terms of gore or sex, as far as I remember!
Patrick Suskind's Perfume is brilliant and fucked up, and possibly the only book that can change your sense of smell.
James Joyce - Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are fucked up in terms of experimental style and language, and are wonderful pieces of writing, despite being notoriously 'difficult'.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's biographical books are wonderful and fucked up. 'The Spiritual Journey' is one of the best still.
That's enough for now - I'm sure I'm missing a lot!
I read Hunter S Thompson's book about the Hells Angels when i was in high school and i regret it, i also really fucking hate bikers. Just rolling packs of rapists.
I've heard of Bikers Against Child Abuse that plays upon the stereotype to guard kids against their abusers and provide a protective presence as the kids testify in court 🤔
Good for them. But i've also heard of public relations so i don't trust these things. Im sure priests also offer support services for victims of child abuse.
Well, there are bikers and then there are bikers.
Also sexual predators are often victims themselves. It is not far fetched that some would try to help people is a similar situation. But it is also not far fetched to think that some become perpetrators of similar actions.
The Happy Man, a small novel I picked up for something to read.
The Happy Man
Wish by Peter Goldsworthy. J.J. has always been more at home in Sign language than in spoken English. Recently divorced, he returns to school to teach Sign. His pupils include the foster parents of a beautiful and highly intelligent ape named Eliza.
I recently read The Parable of the Sower and it really affected me, both because I felt empathy for the characters and because I saw some uncomfortable parallels in the recent history of our world. I also was disturbed by The Sparrow. Though frankly I wouldn't recommend it for a lot of reasons. Battle Royale is intensely violent, in a really personal way. For graphic novels, From Hell is a really rough read honestly, but also really interesting
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward!
Another I haven't actually read this comment but this post reminded me of The Turner Diaries and Thought Slime's video about it.
Vurt by Jeff Noon
If anyone's looking for something not-quite-so-fucked-up as the suggestions here -
Creepers by David Morell
He wrote the Rambo stories too . Creepers is a great story with good twists, worth a read