When I was in grade school, I was a big fan of the Scholastic Book Club. I ordered something from it every month.
One month, there was a book featured called Tailchaser’s Song. It was a book about cats. A fantasy book about cats. Can’t ask for anything better, right?
I dunno why Tailchaser’s Song made such a big impression on me. Maybe it was my mood- the same day, I was freaked out of my mind by the ending of Animal Farm. Regardless, TS scared the living shpoiks outta me. I slept in my mother’s bed that night, or rather, lay awake, thinking about cats with red claws and animated mounds of flesh.
I had trouble sleeping for a further seven months.
Recently, I bought Tailchaser’s Song again. Just to see what all the fuss had been about. I had trouble getting into the story, I knew all the big plot twists, and just couldn’t see what had scared me so much in seventh grade. I slept perfectly fine. Sort of an anti-climax.
My sister was traumatized by the old King in Babar dying from a bad mushroom. She won’t eat them to this day, some 40 years ago, but it’s fine for those of us who like “wrinkles and green-ness and death”.
The Choose Your Own Adventure stories were kind of creepy to me, because of their having been written in the second person. So, if you made a bad decision, it wasn’t just some random character that died; no, you died. I still remember having been shot with a laser in the future, and having that give me nightmares for weeks.
I remember being disturbed by Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop, where a dog is having a conversation with a plant that it’s eating at the same time. I liked the book, but it was creepy.
Around 5th grade I checked out two books from the library, one about UFOs and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. I couldn’t finish either of them. Somehow, reading them both creeped me the frack out.
But I seemed fine with other UFO and monster books after that.
The only thing like that that I can think of offhand was the part of Tom Sawyer where he and Becky were lost in the cave. That was pretty intense … not sure how old I was when I first read that, but I’m guessing under 10.
Oh, I remember another one… speaking of scary cats. There was a book in the Time-Life science series or something, about mental illness. It contained, among other things, an account of an artist who painted cats, and showed several examples of how his work changed, becoming weirder and more distorted, as he descended into paranoid schizophrenia… it was pretty disturbing to me.
If you’re still considered a child at 12 (by the standards of this OP), I was really upset by Stephen King’s Carrie. Somehow I managed to buy the thing at an airport newsstand while I was on trip with my dad to Florida. I was like, I’m bored. He was like, go buy something to read.
My dad really didn’t notice what the book was, I guess, and he didn’t know who Stephen King was, so I read the whole book.
The sex and how mean those kids were grossed me out more than the telekenisis supernatural crap. I was not ready to read anything like that. The thing was, I had to finish it because it was actually pretty compelling. Also I had been taught in school to always finish any book I started.
It was a really long time before I had the guts to pick up anything else by Stephen King.
The first and only time I have ever cried while reading a book. It is because of that book that I must know at least something about the book’s ending if it involves animals; especially dogs.
I tell this to people and one girl in particular told me…"Oh, then you should read “Where the Red Fern Grows”…Yeah…F that.
I wasn’t traumatized, and I was probably just reacting as the author would have me, but I remember getting really annoyed at all the people telling the little boy his carrot seed would never come up in The Carrot Seed.
Wait Till Helen Comes made me never want to go to the country or swim in a lake. Bunnicula made me absolutely petrified of rabbits when I was little. Of course, all those illustrations in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books are wonderful nightmare fuel, especially the one full page picture of the face with the eye sockets. I still have my copy from when I was kid, and that page is ripped out and long gone.
My father taught me to read at a very early age and encouraged me to read anything and everything I could get my little paws on.
One day, at about age 6 or 7, I discovered THE COLLECTED GHOST STORIES OF M. R. JAMES. I read the first couple and had the screaming heebeejeebees that night. And promptly went back and read some more. Lather, rinse, repeat until the book was finished.
I’ve read that book many times since then and slept quite soundly afterwards. For the life of me, I can’t remember what was happening in my life at that time that would have sent me up the wall.
I read The Andromeda Strain in fifth or sixth grade, and it completely freaked me out. I had trouble sleeping for a bunch of weeks after that, because I found biology based stuff fascinating even then, and so I thought it all plausible. Oddly enough, all the Holocaust books that I read around then (it was my Depressing Books phase) didn’t bother me nearly as much, even though, as the granddaughter of survivors, it ought to have seemed more immediate.
There was an ABC book with rhyming poems I read as a kid and the pictures were ghastly, kinda like Nightmare Before Christmas meets Winnie the Pooh. I saw it once as an adult, and yeah, the pictures were still as messed up as I remember them. I really wish I could remember the name of it.
The Carpet Baggers was the first one, and then came the one which more than likely started me boppin’ mah baloney: Tropic of Cancer by Henry("I want to piss in your palatial womb!") Miller.
But I don’t think you’d call that “traumatized”, do y’all?
Except, of course, if it happened in public!
ahem
Excuse me…
I just love these kinda threads becausgggggggggggggggggg
