[blatant hijack]
Ukelele Ike, I apologize. I plead long and faithful service, youth and inexperience, and a complete lack of coffee this morning.
(And I would have taken this to email, but he doesn’t have it displayed.)
[/blatant hijack]
I suspect the reference is to one of the opening scenes of the book (and the first movie), the big wedding of the Corleone sister. After the wedding, when the guests are enjoying the food and entertainment, Sonny Corleone slips upstairs and is shagging the bridesmaid Lucy.
Another vote for Bridge to Terabithia. Some friends and I were discussing a similar point - What was the first book you remember reading in which one of the main characters died? Everyone was settling on Lord of the Flies, which I hadn’t read because I was in another school district that year. So I mentioned Terabithia, and my friend Lisa looked at me wide-eyed and said “Oh, my god…I completely forgot about that one. Wow. I cried for two days.”
Some other disturbances: Since we’re on a Bradbury kick, howzabout his short story “The Veldt”? The virtual reality system that comes to life?
Here’s one that I doubt anyone will have read - my rather eccentric 10th-grade English teacher assigned it: The Execution of Mayor Yin, and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It’s still available, I’m happy to see. IIRC, the author (Chen Jo-Hsi) had emigrated from China, but actually returned to the mainland during the Cultural Revoluiton in a fit of patriotic fervor. In '75 or '76 she narrowly escaped to HK, and from there went to Canada.
Her stories are an odd mixture of grotesque, horrifying, and occasionally funny. One, “Chairman Mao Is A Rotten Egg,” details the inquisition that results when a four-year-old boy yells the title phrase in school. Another, whose title I forget, portrays a neighborhood rumored to be on the motorcade route for Nixon’s visit. The authorities forbid the neighborhood from hanging their wash, since that might give Nixon the (correct) impression that Chinese people were too poor to have clothes dryers.
GAH! Okay, I’m going to be creeped out for the next half hour…thanks a LOT, jayjay!
I just remembered – I was pretty disturbed when I read Robinson Jeffer’s “The Roan Stallion”. It’s a long poem about a woman who sort of falls in love with a horse – I haven’t read it in a long time, even though I really love Jeffers. It’s probably time to reread it.
Crikey- I’m glad I found out about this book now rather than when I was six…
BTW, let me rehash an old “ID this book” thread:
When I was about 10-12 or so (1980) I got a book of horror stories for children. This was a collection, not an anthology (IIRC,) although I think it was one of those children’s books where the author isn’t actually named. I found it to be enormously disturbing. Some of the stories:
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a patchwork monkey comes to life, and anyone injured by it slowly turns into a patchwork monkey
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a boy meets an old man in his neighborhood who owns a box containing a cockatrice, which they unleash. (Yeah, THAT was a good idea…)
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a guy invents a machine that gives you the ability to fly, and he and his son or nephew go flying around in the clouds at night, only to find a floating squid monster that lives in the clouds
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a girl opens her neighbor’s mail and finds a tiny, embryonic creature which she throws away in disgust. Light makes the creature grow larger, so it ends up chasing her around the house getting bigger and bigger.
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I also have vague memories of a picture of a big Bush-baby like creature with huge eyes, but I don’t remember the story associated with it.
This book really, really scared me as a child, and I’d like to try to find it again, but I can’t remember the title to save my life. Has anyone heard of it?
-Ben
another vote for All Summer in a Day here…
I remember reading it on a gloomy February day in Michigan, just before we had the “draw the sun from memory” contest in my elementary school, and having a momentary thought of “what happens if the sun never comes back?”
I warned you…
I have to admit that I’ve read that story once. I have never more than glanced at the pages/websites since. Even when I went to find the URL, I no more than read the first paragraph to validate that it was, in fact, the correct story.
This story is… shudder
jayjay
I got the three volumes of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series in elementary school. I’m really glad-they were a good introduction to folktales and urban legends. The only story that really scared me was a generic vampire-creeps-through-the-window with frightening illustrations. The illustrations are positively disturbing.
Eeewwwwww…thanks for the link, I guess.
Two things spring to mind:
Domain by James Herbert. Better-than-usual-quality shlock horror; modern day London gets destroyed in a surprise nuclear attack, and the few survivors find that the local rat population has some nasty human-flesh-eating ideas. The multiple PoV storytelling is very disturbing, since you know that half of the people are going to end up (with their families) as so much irradiated rat meat.
Pig’s Dinner was a short story by another shlock horror writer, Graham Masterton (generally a clinically revolting writer!), from a collection called Flights of Fear. It’s about a farm worker who witnesses a friend accidentally chewed up by some kind of immense farm machinery (a grinder/slicer/dicer animal feed funnel kind of thing). The friend, as he’s slowly chopped up, claims to feel no pain. Later, the narrator is attacked by one of the boars he tends, and is horrifically wounded. Rather than live the rest of his life without a leg and genitals, he decides to take the painless way out his friend recommended – but discovers that the grinder is not nearly as pleasant (or quick) an experience as he’d been led to believe.
Utterly repellent.
I remember “The October Game” – I had a choral director who read it to us in class every year on Halloween. Of course, it’s not all that effective when you know the ending, and those of us who were four-year choir students (like me) ended up hearing it several times.
(As a side note, I was in The Sound of Music my junior year of high school, and aforementioned choral director was (of course) always the music director for the spring musical. At the end of the first number [first in the stage version, anyway], when all the nuns are supposed to call out “Maria! Where’s Maria?” and so forth, he once cracked everyone up at one rehearsal by ominiously intoning the final line of “The October Game.” :D)
Anyway…
Not a freak-out, exactly, but I had Dandelion Wine inflicted on me in sixth grade. Soured me on Bradbury for good (though I’ll admit to enjoying The Martian Chronicles).
(Of course, Bradbury is probably responsible for all sorts of trauma. I also remember being freaked out by “The Veldt,” and that one story in The Martian Chronicles about the automatic house still gives me the willies.)
I remember being quite depressed by My Brother Sam is Dead – can’t remember the author’s name. Sure, we saw it coming, but still…
I was also freaked out by Asimov’s rather obscure short story “Rain, Rain, Go Away” (it’s in Buy Jupiter). I’ll blow the ending because really, it’s not all that good a story: the Sakkaro family moves in next door to our protagonists, and they seem to be a perfectly normal family, except that they’re afraid of water. Protagonists find out why when they get caught in the rain after an outing at an amusement park – they’re made of sugar. The image of melting people (outside of the Wicked Witch of the West, I guess) really disturbed me, though (unlike a lot of this stuff) I don’t get creeped out thinking about it anymore.
Medievalist2 – I also hated junior high English but went on to major in it…in fact, I’ll be studying it in grad school next year. And I too had to suffer through “The Pearl” in seventh grade.
Also, I must second the recommendation of A Canticle for Leibowitz – one of my favorites. 
When I was nine, I read a fictional children’s book about a young Confederate soldier’s adventures during the War Between the States called (appropriately) Johnny Reb, by Merritt Parmalee Allen.
There was a spectacularly gory bit depicting the goings-on in a field hospital after a battle. Piles of fly-blown, freshly-amputated limbs figured largely in that chapter. I was also, however, fascinated. Didn’t stop me from finishing the book, but I had to take time out to go throw up.
Hey Pepper!
A book of some of the most horrifying H.P. Lovecraft stories, given to me when I was in 4th grade.
Think about it - a 4th grader reading The Haunter of the Dark and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. :eek:
Oh yes - The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. Another book guaranteed to make a 4th-grader wake up at night screaming, because the pig-monsters are coming up through the basement… (shudder)
Ahh!!! SHE LIVES!!! 
I have to agree about “Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark”. One story in particular gave me the creeps. It was about the guy who was dragged by something until his he burned up, and then later the protagonist goes back to that place where the other guy got dragged away. And the protagonist sees the guy, only it’s a pile of ashes!
Yeah, yeah, I know. Not very scary, but I was in 2nd grade at the time.
Anyway, I came across that book in BestBuy a few months ago, and I had to buy it, just for old times sake. The stories are silly, but the pictures are still very disturbing
I’ve read a lot of the stories and books mentioned in this thread, many before I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and none of them really bothered me at all. Weird…
“Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures” by Andre Norton.
This one scared me so bad as a young lad that I threw the book away! I found it again a few years ago at my local library, and it still packs quite a punch even for an adult reader. The “patchwork monkey” story has a killer ending.
When I was about nine I read a (long) short story called The Willows… nothing like being in broad daylight with several people nearby and still having the liver scared out of me. Around the same time I managed to get my hands on Medea and a couple of books featuring the work of Frieda Khalo and H. Bosch, both of which I suspect of not only scarring me for life but also seriously twisting my appreciation for art.
Around the age of 12 I started reading a lot of non-fiction and science fiction. To this day I still can’t finish Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, way too disturbing. John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, Stand On Zanzibar, and The Shockwave Rider managed to insidiously weird me out.
Aiiiiiiiiieeeeeee–you had to go and remind me.
The stories ranged from vaguely creepy to silly, but the pictures in those books. They still give me the shivers. Remember the story “The Thing”? Dumb story–but the corpse-like charcoal sketch that went with it…eeeugh.
Yeah, by Stephen Gammell. He’s great.
If you want to see him doing something less grisly, try Cynthia Rylant’s THE RELATIVES CAME, a Caldecott Honor book from 1985. Charming.
The two books that got to me when I was younger were The Ox Bow Incidentby Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.
Don’t know exactly why, they were just depressing I suppose.