I’ve read a lot of things over the years that were depressing, disturbing, or otherwise outrageous, but only one book came to mind when I opened this thread…
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
I read it in the airport waiting to vacation with my then-boyfriend, a successful, intellegent man who laughed when I told him how much the book had disturbed me. I couldn’t sleep while he was in the hotel for the whole week. Just thinking about it now makes me feel all creepy and bad.
I’m sorry I read Elizabeth George’s With No One As Witness. Her books seem to be getting progressively disturbing.
I read a book of scary short stories when I was a kid, and it had one story that’s messed with my head ever since. Two kids are at their uncle’s, and find a book of black magic in his basement. They mess around with it and find out that the spells work. Then the sister does a spell that turns her into a large fly, and starts buzzing her brother’s head to mess with him. But the kids haven’t noticed that their uncle’s black cat is in the room with them, and it jumps up and bats at the sister-bug, squishing her. The brother freaks out and uses the book to reverse the spell, which it does… but it just reverses the transformation, not the squishing. There was an illustration of the brother running up the stairs out of the basement, covering his face with his hands as he looks off page at whatever is left of his sister.
Jesus, I’m getting shaky just writing about it now.
One of the biographies of William S. Burroughs goes into excuricating details about the tragic life of his son. He drinks himself almost to death, gets a liver transplant, starts drinking again (which is strictly verboten for liver transplants), and eventually dies. I got mid-way through the chapters on him, and had to skip through them because of how disturbing they were.
If you’re talking about Stephen King, although I am a huge fan, I have never been able to read Cujo a second time.
I have a son. 'Nuff said.
“The Jaunt”
I came in here to mention it. The single most disturbing thing I have ever read, death would be a blessing compared to that.
Guts
‘This story shall shock and disgust you.’
Meh. Bad science. Pointless attempts to gross me out. More bad science. More pointless attempts to gross me out. Worse science.
The Lottery
I remembed the first time I ever read this. I knew almost immediately how it would end. The whole thing was like a badly written EC Comics (Tales From The Crypt, Vault Of Horror, etc) story.
Roald Dahl.
William and Mary and * Royal Jelly* are both in the collection Kiss Kiss. Two of the stories are such quiet and subtle tales of murder, a friend had to read them twice before seeing what the stories are really about.
Re William And Mary
The loveless marriage and controlling husband are shown with little touches rather than slapped across the reader’s face. Her revenge on her now helpless husband is hinted at, but we don’t know how far she’ll go.
Re Royal Jelly
I was going to say that the baby was a larva rather than a slug. But, I don’t think that is made clear. Certainly, mom has begun to fear that her daughter will soon metamorphose into something inhuman. But whether she’s just terrified, or whether daughter will indeed soon enter a cocoon is unclear
I have Kiss Kiss on my shelves and highly recommend it.
Please tell me I’m not the only person here compiling a “morbid books I must buy” list?? 
But it was a great short story.
Now, the books I wish I had never read are The Sleeping Beauty Books that Anne Rice wrote under a pseudonym. Oh, the kingdom of S&M and B&D.
Especially involving
the butter…and the cat
I had to keep reading though, to find out what happened to Beauty.
Man, I remember when that thing came out. I was a trade book buyer and got a free galley proof, which hit the wall soon after I started it. I think it was the first book I can remember that thoroughly revolted me. Just passing its shelf at the bookstore pissed me off. Yeeeeesh.
My contribution is Crime and Punishment. I’m glad I read it, but the scene where the cart horse is beaten to death has haunted me ever since.
On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Not Great Literature or anything, but simply chilling…I cried nearly the whole way through and then had nightmares for months afterward.
And if we’re including short stories, many of Ray Bradbury’s fit the bill, particularly “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” and “The October Game.” Oh my God, “The October Game.”
::shudders delicately::
They’re not all that difficult to ferret out online, either, if you’d care to look (although I’m hesitant about linking).
I’m amazed that neither of the books I wanted to mention have been posted yet. First, a book I sincerely wish I had never read, is Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates. It’s from the point of view of a Dahmer-esque serial killer, and it does not have an uplifting ending, to say the least. I have always had a minor phobia of serial killers, so why I put myself through this is beyond me. Don’t read it if such things keep you up at night.
The other is When Rabbit Howls, which is sorta like Sybil on crack. It’s supposedly a true story about a woman who was so traumatically sexually abused by her stepfather from the ages of 2-16. Consequently, her personality shattered into 116 pieces. Some of the descriptions of abuse were horrifying and still haunt me.
I recently read “Guts,” and had to put the book down for about 2 weeks. It was worth finishing, though, so I wouldn’t call it something I wish I’d never read. I think he put that story first in the book so that the reader would have to ratchet up his threshhold for horror. Once I did that, I got through it fine. In a way, the book reminded me of a collection of urban myths and fantasies. I like Chuck, though, that’s just me.
Ditto for Base Instinct by Dr. Jonathan Pincus, a neurologist who studied violent criminals, which is about how people become serial killers. It was fascinating and contained some good psychological insight, but the descriptions of the abuse some of these people suffered that contributed to their eventual criminality were beyond what I personally can read and remain unmoved.
You’re more right than you know. James Ellroy’s mother was brutally murdered when he was a little kid, in a manner very similar to the real-life Black Dahlia murder. He saw the body and everything, and the murder was never solved. As he got older, he fell in with bad crowds, went through a brief phase as a neo-Nazi in his teens, turned to petty crime, and broke into women’s houses to sniff and steal their panties. It was much later when he started exorcising his personal demons as a writer, including a true-crime book about his mother’s murder and how it affected him, My Dark Places and an early serial killer novel inspired by Charles Manson, Killer On the Road. The novels that follow The Black Dahlia in his “L.A. Quartet” are all very good, but all feature some terribly disturbing and grisly moments: The Big Nowhere, *L.A. Confidential * (the basis for one of the greatest movies of the last 10 years), and White Jazz all build on the same continuity.
Yikes. I hadn’t thought of “The October Game” in years. That is one of the most disturbing things I ever read as a child. Bradbury sure knew how to shake you up just by suggesting dreadful things.
Bury my Heart at wounded Knee.
I wish I had never read it because it totally pissed me off.
I don’t recall the title of the book, but when I was a child I took out a true crime story about two sisters whose mother left them with some people in a major city to take care of them while she couldn’t. One sibling was treated reasonably well, IIRC, but what stuck with me was the treatment of the other. She wound up starving to death in a basement with the family dog(s), after neighbors heard her for days running a shovel along the window bars of the basement she was left locked in trying to get someone’s attention. The girl’s body was discovered by authorities a few hours too late to save her. To this day the image haunts me, and it’s one of those things I really wish I had never read it.
If anyone does happen to recognize the book or the case and can point me in the right direction so I might exorcise this particular demon, I’d be eternally grateful.
The bookA Simple Plan disturbed me and depressed me so badly I didn’t finish it, which rarely happens.
Like RubystreakWhen Rabbit Howls gave me a bad case of the shivers.
I read another book about twin crazy OB-Gyns (male) who had incestuous relations. I no longer remember the title of that one but it sure was weird. I vaguely remember thinking it was based on a real story.
I read Justine and Juliette ( together in one book) in college. It didn’t disgust me then, I was more puzzled by it than anything, but some of the images have stayed with me more than I’m happy with.
Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge changed my life forever, and not in a good way.
It’s a sci-fi murder mystery that takes place over something like 50,000 years, and the story is basically about these people looking for the victim, who’s a contemporary of theirs, but who was marooned outside of a stasis bubble, so all of the clues are like digging through anthropological remains. So the book is really about page after page of reading about how this woman died, lonely and surrounded by rabid dogs, and how she tried to figure out some way of leaving clues that would survive the elements for the thousands of years she knew it would take for her friends to solve her murder. And we’re reading about it like it’s ancient history. The image of her utter desolation made me get very depressed about aging and eternity and all that existential crap, and I’ve never recovered. Do not read this book.
I know I read this when I was younger (I read everything Stephen King wrote when I was 12-ish, but haven’t read anything since then - about 1991), but I have no recollection of this story at all. Would anyone mind summarizing it for me (in a spoiler box if it makes you feel more comfortable)?
I’m surprised that no one mentioned any of the Clive Barker books.