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

“bridesmaid” IIRC

Ohh. Well, that is kind of creepy for his poor steam shovel…But it’s nice that she can still be productive and useful for society. Then again, I thought The Giving Tree was nice and sweet, so what do I know? :slight_smile:

I dunno if I mentioned this already, but Roald Dahl’s The Witches- did anyone else secretly fear um, the idea of witches after this book? It felt so REAL the way he wrote it, and ugh. To this day it leaves an impact. Things like human suffering and injustice never really got to me (I know, I’m so sympathetic) but the idea of things that could be real left an impact on me.

War of the Worlds gets my vote. I was too young to be reading such a book and took it all at face value and it scared the bejesus out of me. Also already mentioned, **The Lottery **and **I Am the Cheese **really shocked me as a kid.

[OT]
I think romansperson’s (way back at the beginning of this thread, a year ago) “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” was about one Gary Krist. I looked in the file we have on him at work but could not find the name of the book. He kidnapped an Emory student heiress and buried her in the box with a straw or something to breathe through. This happened in 1968. The really scary thing is Krist went through medical school and about five years ago applied for medical licenses in several states. Luckily, he was denied.
[/OT]

After seeing some of these posts, I feel the need to start a new thread on V. C. Andrews: Hack or Real Author?

Edgar Allen Poe wrote a short story called “The Black Cat” that i had to read for a class assignment. Some of the images in there were a bit disturbing to say the least! i about lost it when he jabbed the cats eye out with a knife. and the ending where the cat sat atop the corpe’s head staring ad the man with “a solitary eye of fire…” that line got to me. Reading all these posts makes me want to go out and check out these books!

And also the Scary Stories books were pretty disturbing for me when i was younger. Particularly the one about the horse that is supposed to kill his owner as fortold by an old gypsy woman. The accompanying drawing really had a role in how scary it was.

Im gonna have to see if i cant find that book again so i can read “The Drum” because its being talked about quite a bit it seems.

if anyone wants to read “The Black Cat” it can be found here

http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/blackcat.html

I never found “The Drum” to be as disturbing as many other seem to have.

I think most of the Scary Stories books would’ve been a lot less memorable if it hadn’t been for the illustrations. I read dozens of books of spooky tales and the only ones that stand out are those… because of the pictures.

I like The Black Cat so much, I made a modern version of it for an English class. Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, although mysterious and strange, seldom disturb me. I remember reading The Chancellor, by Jules Verne. That really disturbed me, as did The Lottery. And everytime I read The Giver, I get a different interpretation. Sometimes I think he and the kid died, other times I think they made it to another place.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Horrifying little story.

The Chronicles of Narnia when Aslan died. ::sob::

A book whose author I don’t know called “Christiane F” which might or might not have been made into a film, and may or may not have had a cameo by David Bowie.

It was about the punkish drug culture in Berlin in the late 70’s or so. Really freaked me out about heroin and needles.

Woah, this thread came back from the dead!

Czarcasm:

Hehe, I like that.

As to the OP, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses when I was quite young shocked me. Well, attempting to read Ulysses is a better way of putting it. In my youthful ignorance, I never imagined a book could be absolutely beyond my comprehension. My, that was a come-down.

Geeze - it’s been years since I thought of that book – I remember being near panic when the narrator’s Master discovered that his boy’s Cap was fake, and the decision to strike him down lest the whole secret plan be revealed… the Masters’ ability to detect poison and refuse to eat, and the Achilles’ heel of alcohol. What a great series!

My own top candidate for being creeped out was a short story called “A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy.” It appeared in one of the SF magazines of the early 70s, so I would have been 9 or 10 when I read it. It deal with a young boy’s discovery that manadatory food additives were once found to cause high suggestibility and retard brain development – but that all books containing that research have been destroyed, and all food now contains small measures of the substance. He’s a chemistry prodigy, and is able to reconstruct the work. He’s eventually found by the government and sent to a special school, along with other juvenile “offenders” - and force-fed quantities of this substance, turning him into a mindless drone. The last sentence has him at breakfast, laboriously picking out the words, “A bowl of Biskies makes a growing boy,” on the side of the cereal box, and noting, simply, “Those were the last words he ever read.”

Yikes.

Scared the crap oiut of me.

  • Rick

John Bellairs has tons of books…some of them are with Lewis (and Rose Rita Pottinger, whom he meets at the end of the aforementioned book) but more of them are Johnny Dixon/Professor Childermass books…for a good start on that series, try The Curse of the Blue Figurine. House w/a Clock In Its Walls is definitely my favorite by him.

Bellairs definitely has the creep factor down pat… one of his (Eyes of the Killer Robot?) had a missing-eyes (bleeding eye sockets, maybe) thing going on that grossed me out.

He died a couple years back and this guy Brad Strickland has written books under the Bellairs name—not as good as original Bellairs.

The only book that comes to mind is “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo. This book was assigned reading in junior high, and after ten years I remember so much from the novel I could write a paper on it. I recommend this book to every one, you won’t be dissappointed.

Janis said:

I have never been a huge fan of S.King but I picked up the collection of short stories a couple years ago that this was in. This novella just FREAKED ME OUT ENTIRELY, and I was 31 at the time and have been an avid reader my whole life. Something about the premise, the first walker to die, the mass acceptance of the walk by the public, the sudden realization that the walk will not end until 99 children are dead, etc., that just left me completely unable to breath when I finished it in the middle of the night.

Christ that story is powerful stuff. I still dislike 99.9 percent of S.King’s work but I’ll never dismiss him as having no talent again.
Oh, and reading Salem’s Lot (what was I thinking!) at the 10-12 year old range just scared the beejebus out of me too!