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 :rolleyes: )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.