Books you read when you were young that absolutely shocked/disturbed you

[pepperlandgirl]

My younger sister is doing a big project for her Honors English class. The book she chose to do it on is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I haven't read this book for 6 years, but offering her suggestions, giving feedback, and proof-reading as brought back some surprising memories.

When I was in 6th grade, I read the book, having never heard of it before. At that point, I was too young to recgonize foreshadowing, and I really didn't understand that sometimes the bad guys win. When the lead character (just blanked on his name) died, I was absolutely shocked. I completely didn't see that coming. I was horrified! I still think about it to this day, and I can apply logic to it. (It's pretty obvious now). But I will never forget the total disappointment and revulsion I felt when he was wheeled into his room after his lobotomy. I have refused to read the book since then, and last week my sister was watching the movie, I couldn't even watch with them.

Maybe one day I'll be able to read it again, or at least watch it, but I don't think that'll happen for awhile.
So, which book were you totally blindsided by when you were younger, before you understood foreshadowing/symbolism/unhappy endings? Does it still affect you on any level?

[jayjay]

I read Sister Carrie when I was in my teens and hated it. It was the first Realist novel that I'd ever read and I kept expecting some kind of decisive, logical ending, but everybody just kept going from either innocent to cynical to being a total user (Carrie) or from intelligent to stupid to insane (all the men, apparently). And then it just ends. Like some sort of surrealist vignette...everybody's miserable: the end. Gawd...I still hate the thing...

jayjay

[AHunter3]

Orwell's 1984 gave me the bone-deep creeps when I read it as a young teenager in the early 1970s.

[Nacho4Sara]

I read Sophie's Choice by William Styron when I was 14. I wasn't familiar with the Meryl Streep movie, and only later did I realize that the flashback to the Nazi camp (I won't spoil it; if you've read the book or seen the movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about) is a famous literary/film moment.

It was a hard book to read, but I couldn't put it down. I read it in like four days. By the time I got to the ending, I thought I was numb, but, well, wow. Reading that scene was like having my heart torn out. It was the most horrific thing I ever read in my life. Afterward, I cried for hours and then I couldn't pick up another book (those days I was reading five books a week) for over a month. I didn't want to read anything. I was in book shock.

I picked up the book a few weeks ago and tried reading it, but I couldn't. Instead, I just skipped to that end scene and tried to read that, but I couldn't do that either. The words on the page were so intimately connected to this huge pain I remember feeling, but they didn't have the same effect 6 years later. I can't really explain why I didn't want to read it again; just that I wanted to preserve how I felt when I read it the first time, because it affected me so hugely.

[Johanna]

Oh, thanks. You just reminded me of my most traumatic literary moment in my youth. When I was 13 I read Zorba the Greek and was completely unprepared for the scene where a guy whips out a pocketknife and beheads the widow all of a sudden. I was so sickened and horrified by this that I never read any more Kazantzakis. I now understand that this novel had depths of meaning I couldn't possibly have grasped at that age, and I won't really know what was in it unless I go back and read it as an adult. (Wasn't Zorba promoted as a life-affirming, joyous tale?) But there are a lot of other books higher on my list if I ever get the chance to read them.

[Yumanite]

This is not a book, but it is certainly my first disturbing reading disturbance -- I read Hans Cristian Andersen's "The Litte Mermaid" when I was about 5. It was most certainly the first tragic ending I had ever encountered. I remember crying.

I did recover pretty quickly, though. It caused me to brood on the story for a week or so, and as a result I learned a lot about what makes fairy tales what they are, and why a person might favor the unhappy, 'life is not fair' ending. It became a favorite for me, although I didn't read it again until the evil Disney movie came out.

[GilaB]

This has less literary cachet than most of the things posted, but here goes...
I read Michael Chrichton's Andromeda Strain when I was in fourth or fifth grade, and it gave me the willies for weeks. I couldn't go to sleep without imagining some evil mutant outer space virus coming and killing us all without warning. Bio-based things are still the way to make me freak out about a book (like The Hot Zone), because now I know how possible it all is, but when I went back and read Andromeda last year, it seemed kind of silly.

[Crunchy Frog]

pepperlandgirl - the character's name is RP MacMurphy. I'm dead sure his initials are RP, but I'm only marginally sure that the R stands for Randall.

Along the lines of disturbing, one of the first real novels I remember reading was Stephen King's The Shining. I was 11 or 12 I think. Before reading that book, I had never had my emotions stirred by written words. It amazed me that a book of all things could scare the hell out of me like that.

More along the lines of the OP, I was completely blindsided when, at the age of 13, I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Tom Robinson wasn't supposed to die! He was innocent, why wasn't he allowed to be free? However, unlike pepperlandgirl aversion to the story in question, this twist from the norm only got me more interested in the story and I've read it many times since.

[Rosebud]

As often happens I'm drawing a blank as far as my own experiences go, so I'm going to borrow one from my brother.

When I was in the 10th grade, and he was 10 years old, I had to read "Of Mice and Men" for my English class. He got hold of it when I brought it home, and read it straight through in about a day. He was clearly very much affected by Lenny's death-- it's one of those things that reminds me of how proud I am of him, that he read this classic at 10 when I hadn't touched it 'til I was 15, and that it touched him so.

[Mauvaise]

When I was about 10 or 11 my mother decided that I should spend the summer reading some "classics", so she put together a list. I had just finished a book and wanted something light, I wasn't in the best of moods and didn't feel like thinking hard or being depressed so I asked my mom for a suggestion.

She told me I should read Animal Farm. "It's cute. The animals talk." (In her defense it had been years since she read the book, and she never was the best of students.)

I remember throwing the book across the room in tears when I finished it. I was depressed the rest of the afternoon and pissed at my mother for weeks. I still haven't been able to bring myself to reread this book.

[PlanMan]

In my early teens (or likely before) I read Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon which takes place in (pre-Disnney) central Florida, from just before a nuclear war through the aftermath. An assortment of residents of small town near Orlando survive - too far from the Air Force bases in Tampa and Cape Canaveral, altho' they saw glows on the horizon. One of them is the town banker who is concerned, of course, about money. He wants to call the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta (don't remember if he started by trying to reach DC), the Operator (no Direct Dial Long Distance way back then) tells him no calls are going out of state. So he remembers there is a branch of the Fed. Reserve in Jacksonville, so he asks the Operator to try it, the Operator says, "I'm sorry sir, Jacksonville doesn't seem to be there any more."
I was sitting in Jacksonville (still am) reading those words, not all that long after the Cuban Missle Crisis. Big Time Creepy. I just got a "creepy" up my back typing this.

[A Friend of the Devil]

When I was a kid, I read some books that were definitely not kid books:

On the Beach by Neville Shute

Fail-Safe - don't remember the author

1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell

While I'd like my own boy to raed these for himself (along with a ton of other classics), I'd rather it be when he's a little older and we can talk them over.

[MentalGuy]

I have to give another nod to 1984. I don't remember my age but I was in high school so probably 14 or 15. The final line sent chills through me. I also still have a greater than normal fear of rats from reading that book.

[Snooooopy]

Originally posted by A Friend of the Devil
When I was a kid, I read some books that were definitely not kid books:

On the Beach by Neville Shute

Fail-Safe - don't remember the author

Gaah! You sure did have a thirst for nuclear destruction!

I read "Fail-Safe" in high school. Quite a shocking ending.

[Rosebud]

Ok, remembered one of my own. When I was a pre-teen, my mom used to pick up bags and bags of used paperbacks at thrift shops. She was and is an avid reader. She stored her finds in our laundry room (only place there was enough space) and I'd frequently raid them.

When I was about 11, I got hold of a copy of "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" via the laundry room stash. I knew just enough about sex to have some idea of what was going on. I don't think I read the entire book, but the last line has stuck with me for 18 years. I was extremely disturbed by it and had long discussions with an older (13, I think) friend of mine about it. Yet it never crossed my mind to ask my mom about it.

"Animal Farm" has been mentioned several times in this thread and I think that's interesting-- I also read it when I was 11. For some reason there were a number of copies of it sitting in my 6th grade class room. We also had some freaky collections of science fiction stories in our library and reading rooms, but I'm just remembering I went on about those in another thread a while back...

[AwSnappity]

I read Carrie and Cujo when I was about 11 years old. They didn't really scare me, but I could certainly recognize the popular people in Carrie. The mother freaked me out, though.

[Balance]

I think I overloaded all of my shock circuits so quickly that it didn't really register.

I remember reading Shield of Three Lions when I was six. There was a little introductory material, a little scene-setting, then everyone around the protagonist (a young girl) was slaughtered, her home was sacked, and she witnessed a brutal rape and murder. That stands out in my memory in part because I read it while sitting in my first grade reading class, while kids around me were still struggling with the little "cat/dog/boy/girl" story we were assigned. My teacher--foolish creature that she was--didn't believe that I could actually read the book, and made me read aloud from it. By chance, she pointed out that passage to read, and I took a certain grim satisfaction in watching her go pale and frantically shush me. Then she asked if I understood it, so I explained it to her in considerable clinical detail until she shushed me again.

The first time I read that passage was an eye-opener. I was sure the girl had gotten away clean then, suddenly, horrible nastiness happened right in front of her. In later years I was sometimes depressed and often disgusted by books (Lord of the Flies, anyone?--what a piece of tripe), but I was never shocked again.

[Kyla]

In seventh grade, I had one of those English textbooks with many short stories and novellas. One of them was a story by (I think) Ray Bradbury. I can't remember the title, but it took place on Venus. On Venus, it rains constantly, but every eleven years, it stops for one hour. It's that day, and all the kids are eagerly anticipating seeing the sunshine for the first time. But in the morning, the class bullies lock up a more unfortunate girl in a closet. The rain stops, and everyone is delighted, they run outside for an hour. The rain starts again, they come back in, and realize that the girl is still locked up. She's missed the entire thing.

I can't remember the title, but the fact that I can recall all those details proves how much that story shocked me (I do not have the greatest memory for such things). It was such a short, simple story, but the idea of missing the only hour of sunshine for eleven years horrified me.

[Dr.Pinky]

I read Naked Lunch around 16. Almost got physically ill. Read it 5 years later, and found all the black humor I'd missed the 1st time.

[HeyHomie]

I read The Catcher in the Rye my junior year in high school. I got physically ill at one point, because I so identified with the main character. It was the scene where Holden was remembering playing checkers with a (female) friend of his, and it comes out that she was being molested by her stepfather. It turned my stomach, in part because I knew a couple of girls who were going through the same thing.

In 7th grade we read Flowers for Algernon, and I was brought to tears.

I'm also reading a disturbing book right now. She Said YES: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall. It's teaching me how wildly out of touch I am with today's teens; and I was a teen just a 15 years ago . Ugh. And the youth minister asked me to help out with the youth group at our church. Double ugh.

[Hamadryad]

"R.P." stands for "Randall Patrick."

When I was in 2nd grade our teacher read a short story to us. It was from a short book of horror stories. It was about a little boy who was afraid to go in the basement and his dad forces him to spend the night down there and in the morning the father discovers "The ripped and torn, bloodied body of his only son."

I was 7. That freaked me the heck out. It's the only thing I've been read aloud which I remember. I wasn't hip on the basement and the closet and under my bed ANYHOW...that story about paralyzed me. In retrospect I've wondered more than once what the hell my teacher was thinking.

(standard "I was an early reader" blah blah because heaven forbid anyone should NOT call attention to what little geniuses they were )

[Tansu]

This is going to mark me out as an ultra-wuss.

I found parts of The NeverEnding Story disturbing. I started to suffer from insomnia while I was reading the part of the book where Bastian loses touch with his real identity. I've always been scared of the idea of going mad or losing the self.

[Ukulele Ike]

Hamadryad:

That story is "The Thing in the Cellar" by David H. Keller. Just in case you want to go back and read it again (snicker). It's in about a jillion different anthologies.

Keller was a physician and psychiatrist who spent most of his life in the military. He wrote dozens of contes cruels for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines through the 1930s and 1940s, and died in 1966. Some other of his REALLY ghastly stories you might "enjoy" are "The Dead Woman," "Tiger Cat," "The Doorbell," and "The Revolt of the Pedestrians."

Keller's work isn't thought much of these days by SF/Horror aficionados and critics...but EVERYBODY remembers when they first read "The Thing in the Cellar" !



Dr. Pinky beat me to my entry for the OP: I tried Naked Lunch when I was going through my teenage beatnik phase, and those scenes of homosexual rape during the hanging were just too much for me...couldn't finish the novel until after I got through college.

...Also my first experience with an underground comic, back around 1969 or 1970...Kim Deitch's SUNSHINE GIRL. Sunshine Girl was a big fat woman with a flower for a head, and there was a splash panel of her being crucified. Freaked me right out.

[John Corrado]

This'll mark me as a wuss (and a slow reader in comparison, I'm sure), but:

When I was in third grade, I ordered a book of horror stories from the Scholastic Reader (or whatever that little pamphlet was that got passed out with a good two dozen books you could order through the schools).

In retrospect, it wasn't a very *good* book; upon reading it again years later, I recognized most of the stories as old urban legends and tales oft-told (The Hook, The Girl Who Had Spiders in Her Hair-Do, The Ghost Hitch-hiker, etc.).

But at the time, the first story of the anthology scared the wildest beejezus out of me. I still remember the ending lines: "Her sister came back into bed, and in relief, she reached up and felt the fur collar that her sister always wore... and then felt the bloody stump of her neck where her head used to be." Yep, pathetic, overwrought, and kept me awake in absolute, stark terror for the next three nights. It was *years* before I worked up the nerve to read any of the other stories in that book.

[Bottle of Smoke]

I don't recall any particular book that disturbed me in the way some of the previous posts have mentioned, but I do remember reading The Wolfen when I was about 13 years old.

I thought it sounded cool, like it was going to be about regular wolves or something (it came on the tail end of me reading Call of the Wild in school). Jesus, I don't think I slept for a month after I read it.

[Suo Na]

Sybil really creeped me out. How could so many people be sharing the same mind? Of course, now I know it was a hoax but when you're 11....

The other book that disturbed me was Wisconsin Death Trip. For some reason my high school library had it, and it was my first encounter with photos of dead people.

[belladonna]

I can remember reading Black Beauty when I was around eight and crying for hours when Beauty's horse friend Ginger was beaten/worked to death and then carted off by the knacker.
Bridge to Tarabithia (sp?) was another one--our fouth grade teacher read that one aloud to us and when I realized that the girl actually died I came undone.
More recently--my sis recommended 'Go Ask Alice'--a short little diary of a teenager type book that I read in about an hour. When I got to the end I just felt empty. I still haven't forgiven my sister for doing that to me.

[Poysyn]

I am a very easily disturbed person, obviously

-When I was young, around 4 or 5, I read "The Little Match Girl", I was horrified by the fact that a lead character would die in a fairy tale, my first "non-happy ending" story.

-When I was older I read "Lord of the Flies" I was disguted and horrified by the murders and the brutal slaying of the wild pig.

-Just last year I read a book called "Hush", it was a "suspenseful thriller", I cried for an hour over this book. It bothered me that much.

[Balance]

Originally posted by Hamadryad
(standard "I was an early reader" blah blah because heaven forbid anyone should NOT call attention to what little geniuses they were )

Sorry, Hamadarling, didn't mean to brag (given the percentage of early readers here, there's not much point). That's just the way it happened. To balance it out, I'll point out that I was such a twisted little $&@% that I enjoyed the book, even if it did scar me for life.

Tansu, don't feel bad--that part always creeped me out, too, for much the same reasons.

[Olentzero]

Wasn't so much a book as Joyce Carol Oates' A Good Man is Hard to Find. All that senseless violence at the end just drained me. Even now, I can't go back and read the damn thing; I just go flat emotionally and won't continue.

Oddly enough, one of my favorite short stories is Oates' Journey (IIR the title C).

Haven't read Fail-Safe, have read On the Beach, will definitely have to see if I can locate Alas, Babylon. I get such a frisson from reading about a man-made Armageddon. It's sick.

[yojimbo]

As a kid I picked up "The Amityville Horror" and read it in one night as I was too frightened to sleep. It scared the bejesus out of me and I got scared if I was in a house on my own for quite a while afterwards.

1984 blew my mind but it didn't really scare me it just made me look at things differently.

[Zoff]

I read that Bradbury story years ago and I still think about it. I can't remember the name of the story, either, but I'm pretty sure the girl's name is Margaret. My recollection is that the sun comes out in such a long interval that Margaret would never live to see the sun. I could be wrong, though. I still think about the heartbreak of Margaret when she misses the sun.

[gold1]

When I was about 10, I read "diary of a mad housewife" (my parents let me read whatever I wanted), and I remember being struck by the absolute deadness and horror of being an adult, particularly a married female. Though I'm now one myself, I think that book really scared me to the point of complete paranoia when I find my life being "invaded" by my husband, and I continue to highly value my freedom.

[Zsofia]

I read The Shining in middle school, and although it certainly wasn't the first horror book I'd ever read, or the first Stephen King book with bits that affected me, the part with the dead woman in the bathtub had me sleeping with the light on for a whole month. I still can't go into people's bathrooms with the shower curtain closed - even if I'm just there to wash my hands, I have to open the curtain and check before I'm irrevocably committed to that bathroom. Because I can't think of any more awful way to die than on the toilet with your pants down while the dead woman in the bathtub gets you.

[The Man Who]

Originally posted by Zoff
I read that Bradbury story years ago and I still think about it. I can't remember the name of the story, either, but I'm pretty sure the girl's name is Margaret. My recollection is that the sun comes out in such a long interval that Margaret would never live to see the sun. I could be wrong, though. I still think about the heartbreak of Margaret when she misses the sun.

The title appears to be "All Summer in a Day."

I'll put in another vote for "Flowers for Algernon." Boy , that one stuck with me for a long time.

-Myron

[Kakkerlak]

The Bradbury story about the Venusian hour of sunlight is called All Summer in a Day.

A few hours before my mother died I read her the opening chapter of Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" there in the hospital. My recollection of how sad it was is pretty mushed up now with my recollection of that night.

My Side of the Mountain: You mean you can actually say NO to grown-ups?

The Godfather: What the hell, he's screwing the bride ! I had never considered that people wrote about sex (the violence and betrayal parts didn't faze me).

Those old fifties sci-fi anthologies sustained me as a kid. The only one that ever really creeped me out was a short story called An Egg a Month from All Over.

[Zappo]

When I was about 13 or so, I read a book by James Kuneteka and Whitley Streiber called Warday. It dealt with two journalists who journeyed across what was left of the US after a nuclear war between the US and the USSR (they were still The Evil Empire back then) decimated both countries and turned Europe back into a colonial power. This was back in 1983 or so when a lot of folks thought the world was going to end in a nuclear fireball, and here this book predicted that we'd all go boom in 1987.

Fortunately we didn't, but the book disturbed the heck out of me.

Another handy Zappo hint: Don't read Stephen King's The Stand when you and your family are all suffering from severe colds. I did, and I was freaked out for weeks.

Yer pal,

Zappo

[Soda]

I started reading Stephen King at a young age, and although most of them scared the crap out of me, I kept on reading. Animal Farm was also really scary, as was Lord of the Flies.

One recent read that troubled me to no end was The Collector by John Fowles. It is a fantastic book but I still hated it, if you know what I mean. It was just so disturbing. I can't say why without completely spoiling it for anyone who wants to read it, so I won't.

I also read Waterland by Graham Swift. There is one scene where the narrator's wife has completely lost her mind and kidnapped a baby, and while the narrator is trying to convince her to give the baby to him, their dog thinks their arguing is a game and wants to play with them. The man is so frustrated with the situation and the dog that he finally kicks the dog, in the head. The worst part is how he describes the sound as the dog's jaw breaks. I just started crying. It was terrible.

I just realized this is slightly off-topic. Oh well...

[Gundy]

When I was about 9, I read the short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. I thought it was terrifying, the way the little kids were stoning their mother to death. And then...everyone goes on with their lives. Freaked me right out.

I love Shirley Jackson, by the way. I've got a couple of her anthologies, and some of her stories still shock me.

[jayjay]

A massively disturbing Bradbury story is "The October Game". It's online at this site. I have to warn you, it's not truly gory or explicit, but it's very disturbing.

jayjay

[egkelly]

My vote: as a young lad of 11, I was once at my grandfather's house. While there I came upon an old edition of the works of E.A. Poe. I started reading "The Premature Burial"-and it creeped me out for years! I still don't like that story-full of coffins, morbid Victorian funerals, and people getting buried alive!

[pluto]

Joining the many wussies here, I was a nervous youth and never read anything scary, as in horror stories, when I was very young. Scariest ones I recall as a slightly older youth were H.P. Lovecraft. In particular there was one about some "thing" that was of an unearthly color.

If "disturbed" includes "emotionally charged" then I'd have to vote for the ending of The Grapes of Wrath. And I threw Jude the Obscure across the room once. NEVER read Thomas Hardy if you're already depressed. (Although that's a good way to get depressed, if that's your goal.)

[gobear]

Wasn't so much a book as Joyce Carol Oates' A Good Man is Hard to Find

Erm, that's by Flannery O'Connor.

Gosh, I must be really twisted because I can't recall ever
being shocked by anything I read as a child, including Dracula when I was 9. (With apologies to Hamadryad for having been an early reader)

[Olentzero]

Not only do I get the author wrong, it totally knocks the irony out of my other post.

As if that weren't enough, merely reading Soda's description of the dog scene in Waterland put me into a blue funk for a good half-hour.

I knew I shouldn't have opened this thread.

[Medievalist2]

I had to read John Steinbeck's The Red Pony and The Pearl and Marjorie Rawlings' The Yearling in eighth grade.
I never forgave my eighth-grade English teacher for inflicting those awful books on us. I hate stories about dead animals and dead babies. We read The Red Pony first, then The Pearl right after that, and right after we finished with John Steinbeck, we had to read The Yearling. How depressing - three morbid books in a row. My English teacher said that we needed to read those books because they were about "learning to face reality." The only thing those books did for me was to make me dread English class, which I usually loved. As soon as we were finished with those books, I gave my copies of them away to my best friend, because she was a year younger than I was and she would probably have to read them the next year. In spite of my depressing experience in eighth-grade English, I eventually decided to be an English major.

[Jadis]

Originally posted by Kyla
In seventh grade, I had one of those English textbooks with many short stories and novellas. One of them was a story by (I think) Ray Bradbury. I can't remember the title, but it took place on Venus. On Venus, it rains constantly, but every eleven years, it stops for one hour. It's that day, and all the kids are eagerly anticipating seeing the sunshine for the first time. But in the morning, the class bullies lock up a more unfortunate girl in a closet. The rain stops, and everyone is delighted, they run outside for an hour. The rain starts again, they come back in, and realize that the girl is still locked up. She's missed the entire thing.

Wow! I remember reading this, I think it was in my 6th grade English text. I remember being crushed that the one girl misses the hour of sunshine.

The one book that leaps to mind is Stephen King's (writing as Richard Bachman at the time) novella "The Long Walk". Our library in elementary school had a special section of books for 7th grade only (we had no middle school, our elementary went from K-7, HS went from 8-12), but if you were in the gifted program, you could read any book, even the ones from the 7th grade only section.

God knows how this book made it past the librarian's eyes for grade-school children, but I picked it up in 5th grade. For those of you who haven't read it, it's basically sort of a post-apocalyptic story of an annual competition where 100 young boys (ages 12-17?) were selected to compete in The Long Walk....which was basically that you started walking, and you had to keep a minimum pace of 4 mph. If you fell below that, you got warned. If you walked for an hour with no additional warnings, one warning would be taken away (this allowed for activities like public peeing, etc. without being eliminated). If you accumulated 3 warnings, you got what they referred to as "buying your ticket"....you didn't realize that this was a euphamism for being shot to death until about a third of the way through the story when the first kid is graphically slaughtered. The contest goes on until 1 kid is left.

That was some scary stuff to a 5th grader....in fact, the concept *still* creeps me out to this day.

[Sublight]

Stephen King's short stories scared the crap out of me when I was in elementary school, but I don't remember any books that really shocked me...

Until I read The World According to Garp in my freshman year of college. To this day, I still can't receive oral sex in a parked car.

--sublight.

[Soda]

You know what the most disturbing part about this thread is? Not the fact that kids read stuff which scare them to death, but the fact that I want to go to the library right now and get all of these books. I'm a truly disturbed person sometimes.

And Olentzero? Just writing about that made me physically ill. I'd love to read that book again, because it was interesting and complicated (to say the least) but I don't think I'll ever work up the nerve to do it, because of that poor dog. It's even worse when the poor guy describes how hard he works to gain the dog's trust again, and the dog just won't trust him anymore. I cried.

I remember reading "The Lottery" freshman year of uni. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

[romansperson]

I think books that are nonfiction or are based on a nonfiction event are what creeped me out most when I was a kid. I remember reading this book (can't remember the name) that was about a woman who was kidnapped and buried underground in a coffin-like box while her kidnappers negotiated a ransom. At least the woman was found and the kidnappers arrested. More recently, The Hot Zone was both thoroughly revolting and ultimately terrifying to me.

The Grapes of Wrath depressed me enough that I wanted to slit my own wrists for about a week. And to think John Steinbeck also wrote Travels With Charley. Why couldn't we have read that one instead?

The only totally nonfiction book I can remember reading that gave me the willies was The Stepford Wives.

[Ukulele Ike]

The Stepford Wives was nonfiction?

Hot DAMN! Sign ME up for one of them robots!