Loved that book! I got it at a Scholastic book sale.
When I was a kid, I found a book that belonged to my dad. It was a comic book, and the main character was a talking frog. Clearly, a child appropriate book, right?
When the book in question is Robert Crumb’s The Yum-Yum Book, maybe not so much. The scene where Oggie, the protagonist frog/college student, gets all fucked up on drugs and murders a couple of ladybug housekeepers (by jumping up and down on them) messed me up for a good long time.
If 12 counts, then there’s only one book that springs instantly to mind.
I read House of Leaves way, way way too early.
Me and my big family had just moved into a big house to accommodate new additions. There were long corridors running the whole length of the house, which was pretty damn long. There was a grand staircase with no light.
There was old Victorian plumbing which groaned and growled around my lonely attic room at night.
The house had previously been an old person’s home, and before that an orphanage.
I was home alone for a week.
Again, I’m stretching the thread’s definition…
I was a young adult when I began to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I got halfway through, and I got so depressed, I had to lay it down. The monster was a complete outcast, through no fault of his own.
Years later, after I saw Young Frankenstein, I was able to go back and finish the book.
That’s an awesome story. But I was an adult the first time I heard it - a few years ago there was a pre-halloween event for adults with professional storytellers, and this was one of the stories. Since kids weren’t allowed to the event, I guess people thought these stories would be tramatic for kids.
Does she survive? /curious
It’s Out, Out by Robert Frost. Here’s a link to the text. The line at the end, “And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” is pretty chilling.
Lots of good stories and books here. Some I’ve read, others I’ve avoided. But no one has touched on the stories that most effed me up.
I’ve mentioned before that I grew up with a fascination for all things nautical. And so early on I found the works of Edward Rowe Snow. Most of his books were collections of somewhat related incidents from nautical history, often focusing on New England or North Atlantic connections.
It was through ERS that I first heard about the wreck of the Essex, and so I sought out every version I could find about the harrowing events of that voyage. I also read Moby Dick for the first time when I was 9 years old. When the one whaler, tangled in the lines around the whale’s body, kept having his arm flapping towards Ahab, as if inviting him to join him in death, I was pretty freaked. Nothing like imagining being Ishmael and getting into Queequeg’s coffin to survive the wreck, of the Pequod, but those two images were hugely affecting.
The stories that ERS told about cannibalism during survival situations were so matter-of-fact, it just was something unpleasant people try to survive. And those were pretty common.
It was the really odd stories of his that freaked me out. There was one story about a painting of a ghost ship that had been found around Bermuda - a crew of corpses in the rigging and on the deck. There was even a plate of the original painting. What I remember of the story wasn’t so much about the ship and the theories about what killed the crew - it was the story of a young artist who had wanted to try making a copy of the painting, for his own reasons. He was told he could study the painting in situ, and make a copy of it, but he was not to work on the copy after midnight. Ever.
Of course, he did. And he disappeared!
At the time that freaked me out more than anything else I’d ever read, because I knew Edward Rowe Snow wouldn’t lie in one of his books*. Some dark forces really did that! :eek:
When Terrifiel, in his excellent post about Margaret Ronan, mentions Encyclopedia Brown, I was reminded of Donald J. Sobol’s book of nautica: Great Sea Stories. In addition to some boilerplate sea mysteries, or catastrophes, like the Marie Celeste or the sinking of the HMS Victoria, it included an account of the possibly fraudulent report of the finding of the *Octavius* ghost ship. The image of the woman and boy frozen solid, watching an equally frozen crewmember trying to strike a fire was too poignant to forget.
Of course the great thing about a true nautica collection is that unless one recognizes the incident from the title, you never know whether any given story was going to be horrible, or wonderful, or something else.
*I know better, now.
A short story by, of all people, Gerald Durrell. It’s presented as a true story, in a collection of his typical autobiographical stuff. The gist of it is that the narrator’s snowed in, in this huge old house, with a cat and a dog for company. One day he’s sitting in the living room when he notices, in the big mirror over the mantelpiece, that the door’s ajar. That’s funny, he thinks, I thought I shut that…and when he turns around, the door’s closed.
An unidentified Something then eats the cat’s reflection and comes after the narrator, but for me, no moment in literature has ever out-creepied the moment when he realises the mirror world has dislocated itself from the real one. I read this when I was thirteen or fourteen, the most self-conscious age known to man, and for MONTHS afterwards I wouldn’t close the bathroom door all the way when I had a bath because there was a mirror in the bathroom and AAAAIIIIEEEE.
Ro Carter, that’s The Girl in the Box by Ouida Sebestyen. Deeply creepy and very moving.
Did anyone else read John Bellairs when they were kids? The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt, The Curse of the Sorcerer’s Skull, and (oh, kill me now) The Lamp From the Warlock’s Tomb? The last scared me so badly when I was about ten that I refused to go near the damn bookshelf that held the book. There’s a moment, when the main character is in the warlock’s tomb, redoing the incantation to seal in a demon, and nearby there’s a dummy seated in a chair, which has the warlock’s ashes sewn into it…
::goes and hides in a corner::
I finally re-read that book recently. I no longer want to stay at least eighty miles from any copies of it, but I can easily see why it freaked me out.
1984 also made me miserable for weeks. I was eleven when i read it. It was grim, grimy, terrible. Great book, nut not when I was eleven.
Right, and there’s a scene in (I think) The Curse of the Blue Figurine, where the main character is walking down a windy, moonlit road, and sees something that looks like a paper plate blowing back and forth. It gradually blows up to his feet, and it’s a death mask. I still think of that blasted scene on windy, moonlit nights.
Dude! When you said a book of short horror stories, I immediately thought of the exact story you mentioned. I think it’s the only horror story that’s ever literally given me nightmares.
I also am right on board with Bridge to Terabithia. That is, on board with being traumatized by it. I am NOT DOWN with that shit.
Don’t dismiss Newberies because of it, though. Recent winners have been rockin: consider The Tale of Despereaux (which I’m currently reading to my class) and The Graveyard Book (which I read when I was in the hospital at the birth of my daughter). Both are excellent books, not especially traumatizing.
Totally agreed; I was about to post the same thing. What a delight to read!
My fifth grade teacher was reading that one to the class. I was out sick toward the end, came back, and Matt Baker (damn you, Matt Baker!), when asked what had happened in the book, just blurted out the ending. I sat in that chair, feeling like I was going to throw up, for what seemed like hours.
I was devastated.
In retrospect (damn you, Matt Baker!), it’s a tiny bit funny.
I bought the book as an adult. Part of me was a little convinced that Matt Baker had made up the ending. He hadn’t, of course. Damn you, Matt BAKER!
I remember that too, I think. The cover looks familiar. Is that the one with “Obstinate Uncle Otis,” about the guy who disbelieves himself into nonexistence? Or the one about the book bound in human skin that had a drawing of a very thin, hungry dragon in it? Heheheheheh. Love those stories.
Oh, ugh! I read The Tale of Despereaux about two years ago and it traumatized me. Seriously. The dungeon, the description of the beatings, the breaking of cartilage in the “cauliflower” ears, the unrelenting and irredeemable dumbitude of Miggory Sow, the insufferable bitchiness of Princess Pea…I kept waiting for some sort of moral good to come out of this obvious allegory, only it never came. I was truly disturbed by it, and can’t figure out for the life of me why it’s a children’s book or children’s movie.
(However, I agree that not all Newberry Books are traumatizing. For example, there’s…uh…well, there’s…er…let me get back to you on that… 
)
Yes - The House with a Clock in its Walls. Excellent book, but gave me nightmares as a kid. I recently re-read it, and it’s still kind of creepy but a good read.
I was traumatized on by books on something that I haven’t seen mentioned…aliens. I used to read all kinds of books on alien abductions and encounters and they freaked me the heck out. One of them even had a list of symptoms of people who had been abducted and didn’t know it and I HAD some of them! Made it hard to sleep for months.
That reminds me… I remember a book I read when I was ten years old or so. It was about a little kid who is staying at a small hotel - more like a B&B - over the summer. ISTR it was his uncle’s or aunt’s hotel, and he was helping out, but got bored and started prying into the personal lives of some of the guests. Turns out one of them was an alien in human shape but who was all blue (dunno how he concealed that from everyone). There was a real air of menace to the story. Don’t know how it ended.
Insert your own Blue Man Group or Andorian joke here.
I’d completely forgotten about Behind the Attic Wall! I know exactly where my copy is: buried in the bottom of a cardboard box in my parents’ storage room with a crucifix tied around it. That book is evil, I tell you. Evil.
I was often freaked out by books I read as a child, but the honour of “first book to really scare me” goes to Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin which my mother read to me before I was three. I absolutely lost it and have not re-read the story to this day. I pre-read all Potter’s books before reading them to my daughter just in case there is another that is equally brutal. Funny thing is I have yet to meet anyone else who was at all bothered by the book as a kid.