My vote: as a young lad of 11, I was once at my grandfather’s house. While there I came upon an old edition of the works of E.A. Poe. I started reading “The Premature Burial”-and it creeped me out for years! I still don’t like that story-full of coffins, morbid Victorian funerals, and people getting buried alive!
Joining the many wussies here, I was a nervous youth and never read anything scary, as in horror stories, when I was very young. Scariest ones I recall as a slightly older youth were H.P. Lovecraft. In particular there was one about some “thing” that was of an unearthly color.
If “disturbed” includes “emotionally charged” then I’d have to vote for the ending of The Grapes of Wrath. And I threw Jude the Obscure across the room once. NEVER read Thomas Hardy if you’re already depressed. (Although that’s a good way to get depressed, if that’s your goal.)
Erm, that’s by Flannery O’Connor.
Gosh, I must be really twisted because I can’t recall ever
being shocked by anything I read as a child, including Dracula when I was 9. (With apologies to Hamadryad for having been an early reader)
Not only do I get the author wrong, it totally knocks the irony out of my other post.
As if that weren’t enough, merely reading Soda’s description of the dog scene in Waterland put me into a blue funk for a good half-hour.
I knew I shouldn’t have opened this thread. 
I had to read John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony and The Pearl and Marjorie Rawlings’ The Yearling in eighth grade.
I never forgave my eighth-grade English teacher for inflicting those awful books on us. I hate stories about dead animals and dead babies. We read The Red Pony first, then The Pearl right after that, and right after we finished with John Steinbeck, we had to read The Yearling. How depressing - three morbid books in a row. My English teacher said that we needed to read those books because they were about “learning to face reality.” The only thing those books did for me was to make me dread English class, which I usually loved. As soon as we were finished with those books, I gave my copies of them away to my best friend, because she was a year younger than I was and she would probably have to read them the next year. In spite of my depressing experience in eighth-grade English, I eventually decided to be an English major.
Wow! I remember reading this, I think it was in my 6th grade English text. I remember being crushed that the one girl misses the hour of sunshine.
The one book that leaps to mind is Stephen King’s (writing as Richard Bachman at the time) novella “The Long Walk”. Our library in elementary school had a special section of books for 7th grade only (we had no middle school, our elementary went from K-7, HS went from 8-12), but if you were in the gifted program, you could read any book, even the ones from the 7th grade only section.
God knows how this book made it past the librarian’s eyes for grade-school children, but I picked it up in 5th grade. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s basically sort of a post-apocalyptic story of an annual competition where 100 young boys (ages 12-17?) were selected to compete in The Long Walk…which was basically that you started walking, and you had to keep a minimum pace of 4 mph. If you fell below that, you got warned. If you walked for an hour with no additional warnings, one warning would be taken away (this allowed for activities like public peeing, etc. without being eliminated). If you accumulated 3 warnings, you got what they referred to as “buying your ticket”…you didn’t realize that this was a euphamism for being shot to death until about a third of the way through the story when the first kid is graphically slaughtered. The contest goes on until 1 kid is left.
That was some scary stuff to a 5th grader…in fact, the concept still creeps me out to this day.
Stephen King’s short stories scared the crap out of me when I was in elementary school, but I don’t remember any books that really shocked me…
Until I read The World According to Garp in my freshman year of college. To this day, I still can’t receive oral sex in a parked car. :eek:
–sublight.
You know what the most disturbing part about this thread is? Not the fact that kids read stuff which scare them to death, but the fact that I want to go to the library right now and get all of these books. I’m a truly disturbed person sometimes.
And Olentzero? Just writing about that made me physically ill. I’d love to read that book again, because it was interesting and complicated (to say the least) but I don’t think I’ll ever work up the nerve to do it, because of that poor dog. It’s even worse when the poor guy describes how hard he works to gain the dog’s trust again, and the dog just won’t trust him anymore. I cried.
I remember reading “The Lottery” freshman year of uni. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
I think books that are nonfiction or are based on a nonfiction event are what creeped me out most when I was a kid. I remember reading this 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. At least the woman was found and the kidnappers arrested. More recently, The Hot Zone was both thoroughly revolting and ultimately terrifying to me.
The Grapes of Wrath depressed me enough that I wanted to slit my own wrists for about a week. And to think John Steinbeck also wrote Travels With Charley. Why couldn’t we have read that one instead?
The only totally nonfiction book I can remember reading that gave me the willies was The Stepford Wives.
The Stepford Wives was nonfiction?
Hot DAMN! Sign ME up for one of them robots!
Ooooh. I remember that one, and yes, I still think about it also. The other Steven King story that’s stuck with me is called “Survivor Type” about the doctor that gets stranded on a deserted island with a kilo or two of heroine. He is imobilzed by a bad foot injury. His foot begins to decay, so he snorts a bunch of heroin and amputates his own foot. He’s also starving, so, after a while, on the verge of madness, he eats his foot. Its downhill from there, with the doctor continuing to snort heroin and amputating parts of himself when he gets hungry, until he’s a full fledged heroin addict, with no limbs, chewing on his fingers of his one remaining hand.
How does he think this stuff up?
I see someone else mentioned Flowers for Algernon, I’d forgotten about that one.
Snooooopy - if you can find it, pick up a copy of A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller. Another nuke book but with twists, very good read, not quite as depressing as the other two.
When I was in grade six or seven, my English teacher loaned me a copy of Johnny got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo. That book scared the bejeezus out of me.
Just thought of another one. I was (am) a big Arthur C. Clarke fan - long before Kubrick did 2001 - and in one of his short story collections I read “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Can’t give too much of the plot without being a Spoiler - but it’s about a group of computer programmers who trek to Tibet, set up a computer (this is when they were building-size) to help the monks list all of the names of God. The ending really creeped me out.
and in honor of Mr. Clarke, I violate my rule, and repeat my sig in the same thread
Yikes! I remember when I was in high school and a friend showed me the Metallica video which had clips from the movie version of JGHG. I actually tried to explain it to my wife recently. Can anyone come up with a more disturbing scenario than some guy who gets his arms, legs, and face blown off, gets lobotomized, and ends up trapped in the hell of his own, inescapable world of hallucinations?
You know what really, really scared me as a kid? Let’s put it this way: what is little Ben scared of most? Hmmm… there’s the Devil, and there’s dogs. I know- let’s make a movie called Devil Dog, Hound of Hell and air it on TV!
And speaking of the Devil, as a teenage fundie I loved to read the Elric books, but was a little… disturbed by the hero’s religious lifestyle. That, and the fact that I thought anyone killed by Stormbringer went to hell. At least there were no dogs involved.
-Ben
Apparently, a lot of teachers were using the same reading list. I went through the “Red Pony” “The Pearl” stories in junior high school in Charlotte, NC. Depressing.
“Animal Farm” was the one that did a number on me, and it gave me the first hint that any authority should be viewed with suspicion, regardless of political orientation.
I also read a lot of pseudo-nonfiction, too, particular in the UFO/strange tales line. I remember one about a premature burial in which the family opened the coffin and saw the body of their daughter horribly contorted, and the scratch marks on the inside of the lid where she tried to get out. The old Barney/Betty Hill alien abduction case in New Hampshire I remember vividly, especially the parts about the “scientific” experiments performed on them.
What also freaked me out reading the report on the Chicago riots of '68 when I was 9. Not so much reading it but looking at the pictures of teens with blood streaming down their face, cops beating protesters. (Of course, at the same time I was reading Sgt. Rock “BUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDA” so I don’t know what overall effect it had.)
What really freaked me was reading “Helter Skelter.” Not just the words, which were bad enough, but the photos, where the bodies had been whited out (although they didn’t white out the fork that had been left in the flesh of one of the victims.) Years later, another version of the story reprinted the photos in full, and they didn’t look as bad as I expected they would be.
But what REALLY sent me down the road into the realm of the gruesome was a film they showed us in kindergarten, back in 1966 in Warren, Ohio. I don’t know the reason why, but there was a big “stranger danger” drive going on at the time, which people putting stop-sign shaped signs in their windows telling kids they can knock on the door of anyone “bothers” them.
I can still remember seeing the film in the gym, about these two girls who were kidnapped by this weirdo. At the end, they escape. The weirdo grabs one of them. The other girl crawls into a drainage pipe. The guy walks down the hill with one girl and the last image shows the girl in the drainpipe, looking up at the man and SCREAMING!
…then the teacher put her hand over the lens while the narrator goes on to tell us that the girls were found dead later. What scared me most of all was not the fear of strangers – it was a small town and we thought nothing of going into people’s back yards, climbing their trees, even knocking on doors if we needed something – but that last scene. What was soooo traumatic that they couldn’t show us? Huh? It must have been REALLY BAD!
“Wisconsin Death Trip” is pretty bad, but there’s a new book out from a small press that reprints an L.A. homicide detective’s scrapbook of murder scenes. He had been on the force during the '30s and '40s, maybe longer, and, for reasons unknown, decided to collect the photos taken from cases he worked on, and sometimes from those other detectives worked on. I can’t tell you the title off hand (something like “A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook”), but I flipped through a couple of the pages, and, ulp, I mean, gasp, severed torsos, ::hulp!::, shotgun to the face. ::gak:: [pause]runs off to find bathro
Actually, this thread reminded me of what really freaked me out most of all as a kid…
I was a kid back in the 1970’s, when the big news items were Jim Jones, Cambodia, etc. I remember flipping channels and seeing a few minutes of a TV movie about Jim Jones. Imagine that you’re a 6 year old child, seeing people on TV being told to drink poisoned Kool-Aid, followed by shots of the jungle full of piles and piles of bodies. And what with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, “Missing Persons” was a big catchphrase of the day, since so many journalists and suchlike were disappearing in lands controlled by totalitarian governments. (Come to think of it, before Star Wars, the late 60’s- early 70’s were the era of paranoia. Think of The Conversation, Blow Out, The Parallax View, etc.)
In the end, I ended up having a vague and pervasive phobia that one day the Secret Police would either a) make me disappear, or b) round everyone up and make us drink poisoned Kool-Aid. I remember seeing Sleeper when it first came out in theaters, and I was scared witless by the sight of Woody Allen being chased by faceless Stormtroopers who were chasing him across the countryside. Mind you, I didn’t lose sleep over this or anything, but it certainly colored my reactions to a lot of things.
-Ben
OK, it has been awhile since I read the book, and Godfather I and Godfather II both came from parts of the original book, but remind me–which part is this?
[momentary hijack]
There are probably a large number of early readers on here. That’s swell. But saying, “When I read The Grapes of Wrath at age 9” doesn’t have the same underlying ego-strokes as, “I enjoyed Flowers in the Attic even though I was reading grown-up books by the time I was 5.” So sue me and quit apologizing, people, unless you honestly think my opinion should matter one bit when you’re posting.
[/momentary hijack]
There’s a book I read in 5th grade which told about creepy discoveries. One involved a very deep well with treasure at the bottom, and supposedly a pirate’s severed hand was down there as well. There was a very graining black and white photograph printed on the cheap Scholastic Books paper.
I was a child very open to suggestion. Seeing that graining hand lying at the bottom of the grainy well…you want embarassment? For three YEARS I had to inspect the shower very carefully for fear that - get this - a hand would leap from the drain and “get” me.
I still sometimes leap from the doorway to the bed so my feet won’t get too close to the underneath where the monsters are.
And I’m a huge King, Bradbury and Matheson fan. Who’d a’ thot it?
And thank you, Uncle Bill (I believe) for pointing out that the story I had nightmares about for years is actually ubiquitous. Can’t be too blase (don’t know how to do high ASCII, sorry) about it, though, because it really did scare the living shhhhhhinola out of me.
Jesus, two years of being confused with UncleBeer, and now I got to worry about UncleBill as well. I’m changing my screenname to “Ralph.”
It wasn’t meant as a putdown, Ham…“The Thing in the Cellar” scared the crap out of me, too. I read it in an anthology called MONSTER FESTIVAL, edited by Eric Protter and published by the Vanguard Press in 1965, which featured extremely creepy full-page illustrations by Edward Gorey.
The one he did for this story was of a REALLY BIG open door, at the head of a REALLY BIG flight of stairs, and a LITTLE TINY child sitting at the top and peering fearfully over his shoulder at whatever lived down there. Shades of the “Gashlycrumb Tinies” !