This looks like an excellent candidate for our new forum, Cafe Society.
See you there!
I was pretty upset after reading a book called “You Are All Sanpaku”, which means in Japanese that you have whites showing below your irises. He made out like it was a sign of major illness, and recommended massive changes in your diet, like eating nearly all brown rice for a few months. When I discussed it with someone, though, they quickly pointed out that he was describing Western eyes as sicklier than Japanese because they were more open. So basically, he was just using racial stereotyping.
Haven’t seen this one up yet, but The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid, and Heinlein is king. Also the two short stories The Man Who Sold the Moon and Requiem.
And isn’t Requiem a cool word?
Ben
Along the same lines as The Exorcist and other such scary stuff is The Other, a very strange book with a surprise ending.
But the ones that disturbed me the most were about war, because unlike the horror stuff, this can and has happened to millions and millions. Hiroshima was right up there, but the most disturbing to me was All Quiet on the Western Front which, for those who haven’t read it yet, is a German soldier’s story of World War One.
Mind bending. You get done with it and you get sick at the mere mention of the word war. The other thing is: was Hitler really in the same war and of the same blood as the author of this novel, Erich Maria Remarque? Doesn’t seem possible.
I remember reading a bunch of John Bellairs(sp?) books sometime during elementry school. I forget the name of the book, but I couldn’t sleep for days after reading this part where this monster/thing in a hooded robe with tentacles instead of arms grabs a dog and sucks all the meat and flesh from its head. You never really find out how, it just put the dogs head up under its hood…
brrrrrrr…
one book that grosses me out until this day is the “book of morman.” what a world-class piece-of-trash that is.
I am not a huge King fan, but that’s my favorite book of his. However, I was *horribly[/] disturbed by the scene where the guy kicks the dog to death. I still can’t read that part and will skip over it every time I re-read the story. I can’t stand stories of cruelty to animals (somehow, I have no problem reading serial killer novels, etc…?)
I was very disturbed as a child by MOST of the Bradbury I read, and I HATED the fact that The Lottery was set on my birthday! :eek: I’d have to second many of the stories I’ve seen here.
(*&^%())_&% coding error! Shows how disturbed I am thinking about all these stories!
Anyone ever seen “Requiem for a Dream?” I know it’s a movie, but it’s also a book and the two are exactly the same. Anyway, it is about four people: A guy named Harry in his early 20s, his best friend Tyrone, his girlfriend Marion, and his mom Sara. Harry and his best friend are drug dealers. In the end, Harry gets his arm amputated because it was terribly infected from his heroin needle, his girlfriend is emotionally scarred because she performed in a violent sex show for more crack, Tyrone gets beat up in jail because he’s black, Sara gets a closed skull labotomy. There are no heroes or “good guys” in this movie. It sucked. I don’t know how people like my mom or my brother can sit around and watch something like that. Now my brother is in some kind of cult where he and his friends just sit around and watch Requiem for a Dream with the door closed and the lights off. I also think that he’s addicted to heroin.:mad:
I used to have that book. Tales for the Midnight Hour by J.B. Stamper. The one that bothered me the most was the story about the woman whose who had a black dog that died on the same day as her husband. She had the dog stuffed and once a year she would take the dog to her husband’s grave on the anniversary of their deaths “so they could all be together again.” One year she has her grandson come over to help her carry the dog since she’s not able to pick it up anymore. The grandson hates the dog and at one point tries to burn it with a match. The next day he’s found dead in the exact same way as the grandfather years before and the dog had bloody saliva on its mouth.
When I read that, my sister had a black dog. I never liked that dog so you can imagine how scared I was of it after that story entered my head.
I am unsure if I missed it (after first two pages I just skimmed for titles) but I would like to Nominate A Farewell To Arms by Hemmingway. Definately depressed the hell out of me when i read it
Just FYI, the Cassie Bernall story is largely fiction. According to witnesses of her murder, she never mentioned anything about face, and neither did her killer. Her killer (can’t recall which one killed her) simply said “Peekabo” and then shot her before she could respond.
However, Eric Harris did ask a girl named Valeen Schnurr if she believed in God, and she said yes. He then asked “why?” and procedeed to shoot her. She survived.
</hijack>
Right now I can’t think of any books that disturbed me, but I’m sure there was one.
Shirley Jackson was asked to change the date- when the story was accepted, the only thing the magazine asked of her was to change the date to the date of the issue itself. She had no problem, so it was changed.
There’s a delightful little essay about this and all the hate mail she recieved in a fiction anthology edited by (the late) Charles Boehner.
Other than that, my disturbing book was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I picked that one early. And I still can’t get the “Hellfire” sermon out of my mind when I go to sleep at night.
Cyn
Just be aware that breaking the seal will void your warranty.
(I’ve waited several years to use that joke.)
I read Bio of a Space Tyrant part 1 by Piers Anthony. I’d read most of his Xanth and Blue Adept series so I wasn’t prepared for this really depressing story. To make it worse, I read it in one sitting. An all nighter at 12 or 13, I think.
IIRC, the basic story is about a space ship full of desperate immigrant types. Pirates attack. They kill the men and rape the women. Pirates attack again. They kill the women and rape the children. The main character is forced to cut open his dead girlfriend by the pirates to look for some message hidden inside her. Children set up defenses and enjoy watching animal porn that they find on the ship. Pirates attack again. Kill most of the children. Main character finds sanctuary on a planet. He discovers that the first planet they stopped at would have welcomed them since the immigrants were all bi-lingual (spanish/english). The immigrants just didn’t consider their ability to speak Spanish as a “skill” when they were asked whether or not they had any usefull skills. There’s a lot more that I’ve since forgot (blocked out is more like it ;)), but most of it is just as depressing.
Needless to say… I didn’t read any of the rest of the series. I did screw up and read the entire works (at that time) of Clive Barker two summers later. :eek: :eek: :eek: Don’t be fooled boys and girls… Steven King is a boyscout.
I actually love Bradbury’s slightly disturbing sense of humor, so it’s interesting to see how many people he creeps out!
One of my worst has to be Sounder, which my second grade teacher read aloud to the class—the graphic description of the dog’s ghost coming back with its face half blown off by the shotgun blast, ohmygod, that gave me nightmares.
I also was grossed out by The Chocolate War, mainly because of all the throwing-up that goes on in the book (hey, I was nine).
Three nameless books that will stick with me forever:
-the gory mystery I read that involves Druids/necrophilia where this dead naked woman creeps into bed with this teenage boy
-a novel about children surviving nuclear holocaust, complete with graphic descriptions of radiation-induced illnesses
-ghost story book about guys living in a house where a man murdered his wife. They know the wife’s ghost is around because she was diabetic and the insulin left over in the fridge is being gradually used up.
As an adult, Pet Sematary totally creeped me out.
God, this very thread has creeped me out. There’s been ample mention of Where the Red Fern Grows, but it deserves another. I think, like others, it was required reading. I sobbed for hours after reading it, the kind of crying where you can’t barely breathe and keep gulping for air but it just makes the crying hurt even more. My mom asked me what was wrong and I remember being slumped by the side of the bathroom incoherently babbling, “and . . . then . . . the dog . . . is sad . . .” Utterly devastating. And then there was a Wilbur Smith book one of my parents was reading where a guy stepped on a puppy to torture someone else. 
Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark was the shizznat. I still love it. I had a creepy book called Always Room For One More that had something to do with an elevator that crashed and killed everyone on it.
There was also the coat hanger abortion scene in Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight.
Lois Duncan’s young adult series were sometimes a little too adult for me: Down a Dark Hall, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Killing Mr. Griffin were scaaaary.
There was also a really young kids’ book called The Tailypo about some guy who cuts the creature’s tail off and maybe eats it and then the Tailypo comes looking for its tail, wandering around the cabin saying "Tailypooo . . . Tailypooo . . . I want my Tailypoooo . . . " I loved it, Mom borrowed it, and to this day I can hear her voice doing the Tailypo’s voice (shudder).
I’ll also never forget the oft-neglected Judy Blume book Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself as one of my first exposures to the Nazis and the Holocaust. When Sally has all her little play-fantasies about being back in those days, and she mentions the lampshades in the room, uuuuugggghh.
Another vote here for George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984. I read it in about 1959 when I was 17. The whole bleak picture stayed with me for a long time, but the book within the book that described how it all came to be was fascinating.
The most disturbing things in it for me were the rat scene, and the last four words of the book. The rat scene disturbed me, not so much for the horror of rats gnawing on someone’s face, but the ultimate betrayal when Winston screams, "Do it to her! I tried to tell myself that no horror would be so great as to make me betray someone I loved, but the thought that I might be weak enough to do that really bothered me.
Then ending the book with “He loved Big Brother,” left me feeling utterly helpless. Even someone with the courage of Winston Smith could be beaten.
Another thing that disturbed me was a short story called The Lottery. Some person was selected by lottery to be stoned to death by the whole village. It seemed so senseless, which is why it was so horrible. I don’t remember the name of the author. Anybody?
Short stories by Poe, like The Telltale Heart and The Pit and the Pendulum were disturbing, too, but I read them at a fairly young age.
“Hello, I must be going.” --Groucho Marx
Books already mentioned:
The Cask of Amontillado – For the love of God, Montresor. For the love of God! Yow!
’Salem’s Lot – The child vampires.
the Bradbury story about Venus – I thought I was the only one in the world who remembered that story!
Flowers for Algernon – Facing the disintegration of intellect – like perhaps with Alzheimer’s or something – has always been my greatest fear. That story tore me apart.
1984 – Rats on face. 'Nuff said.
The Birds – One of the few movies ever to give me the willies. Psycho was another.
The Monkey’s Paw – Yow, again.
Of Mice & Men – My seventh grade Social Studies teacher actually read this aloud to us at the end of class every day, unless someone did something bad enough for him to punish us by skipping it that day. (You didn’t want to be the one to make him do that.) He edited the language, of course, but that didn’t make the ending any easier to take. We were stunned. It was probably one of the best experiences I had in school, though. And I liked school.
The Steadfast Tin Soldier – Sob! even now.
The Lottery – complete willies
The Hot Zone – read as a grown-up. Very frightening.
"It" from some Hitchcock book – There was only part of this book still whole when I started reading it, but this story was in it. I think “it” accreted around a skeletong and came to life in a swamp or something.
And, am I the only one who freaked on the tale about the little goblins in the forest who stared at the light? You know, where the woodsman took them home and then later took them back out into the woods at night . . .
“the heebiest of all possible jeebies.” – Legomancer, that was a most excellent phrase.
RR
Oops! The Lottery is by Shirley Jackson. That’s what I get for not reading the entire thread before I posted. I got thru about page 3.