Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite. My best friend was really into Brite in high school, and insisted I read this for some reason.
I will never read anything by this author again.
For the most part, I am OK with Clive Barker but the scene in Damnation Game where
The guard dog had been killed and then reanimated and started to eat itself.
was too much.
The complete short story is online. You can find it exactly as you’d imagine…entering the author and story name into google. In the sample text google shows beneath each link, you’ll see the first line of the story.
I didn’t find it unpleasant so much as frightening, on many levels. The ending devastated me the first time I read it. I was the same age as Miranda was supposed to be at the time.
The two books I regret picking up and reading are Laird Koenig’s The Little Girl who Lives down the Lane, which was made into a film starring Jodie Foster. I was about 12 when I read it, and it is far too disturbing for any 12 year-olds to read IMHO.
Also a biography and analysis of the West family, as in Fred and Rosemary West. It started with an account of FW’s parents’ horrific marriage, and went downhill from there. I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t even want it in the house. Reading Martin Amis’ autobiography Experience, which includes a section where he explains that he never visits the dentist because being pinioned into that chair in a helpless position makes him think of his cousin, who was one of the Wests’ victims, just reinforces that feeling of utter revulsion for those evil people.
I’m with Miller on “The Handmaid’s Tale”, I found it extraordinarily disturbing, and years later the thought of it still creeps me out, particularly given the rise of fundamentalism around the world.
I re-read “The Ghost Stories of M R James” every few years and I’m always sorry because I can’t sleep without a light on for weeks. I love them, but there are scenes in the stories I’m sorry I remember, and on the whole, having an over-active imagination, I’d have been better off not reading them I think. I can still creep myself out just thinking about “Whistle and I’ll Come to you My Lad”.
Two books which I am sorry I read are Mo Hayter’s first two, “Birdman” and “The Treatment”. I love crime fiction and I read a lot of the darker stuff … John Connolly is one of my favourite writers, but those books just gave me the shudders. I really started to wonder about my liking for crime fiction. They are very disturbing, and although I’m given to a lot of re-reading they are two books I won’t read again.
“The Basement” by Kate Millet, which is a narrative regarding the crime relayed in “The Indiana Torture Slaying - Sylvia Likens’ Ordeal and Death”.
VCNJ~
:eek: That’s the book that scarred me when I was a kid! Thanks for posting this information. Now maybe I can re-read it and find out it wasn’t as horrible as I remember. Or not. Either way, it’s good to know the title of the demon.
There were a couple of horror collections in a school library that had stories that freaked me out. I had a really advanced reading level for my age (something insane like high school senior level when I was 7), and so I kept reading books geared at an older audience. All I remember of the one is something about a dead/dying/tortured/whatever puppy in a basement, and since I grew up with dogs I was really softhearted for them. That’s all I can remember of the story, but I do remember at the time I was so freaked out about it that I tried praying to ask God to get that horrible memory out of my brain.
The other stuck in my mind more firmly - a couple were on vacation somewhere tropical, and were terrorized by a huge (like over-foot-long) deadly poisonous centipede that kept appearing to surprise and scare them. I think it was the last scene where they were going through the closet in their room - maybe to leave, though now that I think of it, the guy had a machete so I think they were trying to find it and kill it - and the centipede dropped out of the closet onto the woman…
and into the neckline of her dress. The author described how the centipede’s antennae and feet practically caressed the curve of her breasts, then the centipede headed down, and was seemingly going to go check out her vulva/vagina, when it let go. I think it then immediately ran up inside the guy’s pantleg and settled right next to his genitals, and the guy panicked and swung the machete. IIRC, the story stops right there but you’re left with the impression that it wasn’t the centipede he hit.
And that’s why I’m totally phobic of centipedes, and why I had a rough time staying with friends who had a (much smaller) centipede problem in their bathroom! Gah… My husband doesn’t like centipedes either, but I won’t describe the reason for him other than telling him that I read a “scary” story about it as a kid.
I came close to that view after reading her LOST SOULS.
Gay vampires- meh. Incestuous vampires- meh. Gay father-son incestuous vampires- :eek: :eek: :eek:
I just saw nothing unsettling at all about that story- much like when I read “The Iron Mother” after a CS thread advertized that as a really disturbing children’s story.
Actually, the best is BeauSeigneur’s THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY. It’s not always pleasant reading (the Rapture is more akin to the opening of King’s THE STAND) but it’s not disturbing like WE ALL FALL DOWN is intended to be. I gather that WE ALL is supposed to be from the perspective of a man who knows what’s going on, refuses either to turn to God or take the Mark of the Beast, and progressively becomes more & more damned.
I believe that’s The Conqueror Worm by Stephen R. Donaldson, from his short story collection Daughter Of Regals.
That guy has an exceedingly unpleasant imagination. I’m surprised he doesn’t write more horror.
When I was about 8 or 9, I read some book that was a collection of vignettes about cats, and one of the stories was about this woman’s cat who had bladder stones or something like that, so she took him to the vet, who put the cat under anesthesia and started putting in the catheter, but then something went wrong and the cat’s bladder burst, which made him wake up and start screaming, and the woman made the vet put the cat to sleep because he was in so much pain. The way it was written, though, made it seem like the woman didn’t love her cat very much, and she just put him to sleep because it would be easier than having the vet actually fix him. It made me cry for hours.
That reminds me of this story in Lillian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Had 14 Tales. It was about a mother cat who got revenge on her owner’s neighbor after he pushed her kitten off of a high apartment balcony. It made me cry, and it didn’t help when I learned that LJB had a cat who fell off of a balcony (accidentally) and based the story on him. 
The Magus by John Fowles. Not because it frightened or disgusted me.
It was labyrinthine beyond logic. It was beautifully written, pulling me along, into the greater darkness.
Innocent, I was sure, the end would make everything clear. Only a sadist would blindfold me, turn me around and around, lead me into the tunnels, dragging me deeper and deeper, only to twitch away the blindfold with the last parragraph, to find myself, not at the exit, not even at the center, but lost and alone in a tunnel with 3 choices. Ack!
Two of Stephen King’s I very well could have done without were * Gerald’s Game* and The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon. It was that helpless, out of control feeling. Hate it.
I’ve never been bothered by horror/blood sport genre. My work showed me much worse, devastated lives and familes . No novel could contain that much of blood guts and gore.
I guess all three books made me feel helpless. I hate that.
Interesting. There’s speculation that “Let’s Go Play At The Adams’” the book I cited, was inspired by the Likens murder. And it was reportedly the basis of Jack Ketchum’s 1989 horror novel, The Girl Next Door. That murder must have scared the shit out of a LOT of people.
I usually don’t get disturbed by anything. I’m too insensitive. I was trying to think of books that disturbed me, but I couldn’t think of anything, until I got halway through this thread.
I couldn’t have been more than 5 when at school they read to the class, I Knew an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. The ending freaked me out. It was that last line, “I knew an old lady who swallowed a horse. She died, of course.”
To have someone so calloused towards death, to just say something of that magnitude in such a matter-of-fact way freaked me out to no end. I could never read that book. I couldn’t even have it in my presence.
I have never been comfortable with the thought of death. Even moreso when I was little. That book did not help me.
Juliette by De Sade. I’m not so easily disturbed, but this one definitely bothered be.
One other that bothered me was The Celestine Prophecy by John Redfield
It was a lovely little fantasy, until the last page where the author suggests the reader send him money to further his “cause,” which appears to be the start of an L. Ron Hubbard-like cult.
Scared me bad. :eek:
I wouldn’t say particularly upsetting, but more information overload…I read “The Murder of Bob Crane” in like two days, and then for an entire week after that, every damned waking moment had the whole sordid affair running through my head…Facts, evidence, etc, ad nauseum…Now the wife wonders why I read several books at once…Keeps the overload from building up so badly…