I think another Doper sent me this book, obfusciatrist, maybe? Anyway, it was called “H: A Novel” by Elizabeth Shepherd.
The book is about a little boy who’se been sent away to summer camp. The first half of the book relates correspondence between parents and psychiatrists and camp staffers about his behavior. The picture you get it that he’s a weird, nerdy kid with a few issues. The second half is the story from the kid’s point of view, inside his mind, mostly via letters he’s writing to his friend, the stuffed letter “H” he’s attached to. At which point you learn he’s not a weird nerdy kid with a few issues, there’s a lot more going on.
It made me feel terrible.
For a long time I could not let go of Jaqueline Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean.” You get to a point where you know there can be no happy ending for everyone.
Two others that were well-done but were so depressing I regret picking them up: “The House of Sand and Fog” and “A Simple Plan.” Like watching a trainwreck in slow motion–you know nothing good is going to happen, but the characters keep marching on. Agonizing.
I liked A Simple Plan, because it showed how a normal sort of person could wind up completely in the toilet just by taking small, steady steps in the wrong direction. At each point, I could say to myself, “Yeah, I might have done that same thing if I were in his shoes.” And at every point, the hope that things might still turn out well…
For me there were two, one as a child and one fairly recently.
The childhood one was 83 Hours Till Dawn, a nonfiction account of an heiress who was kidnapped and buried alive in a box with a life-support system while the kidnapper tried to get her family to pay the ransom. It was from her point of view, and scared the bejeebers out of me. And I was a kid who happily read and enjoyed things like Helter Skelter and The Amityville Horror.
The recent one was Graham Masterton’s A Terrible Beauty. I normally love Masterton’s stuff (the gorier the better) but this one was horrible. It was about a deaf woman who was very adept at reading lips and who worked for a police department. The ending left me cold:
She was lured by a man she thought cared about her (and who kidnapped her young daughter to do it) into a gang-rape situation. After she was extricated from this situation by another character, the story seemed to be over, but then on the last page she receives a visitor at her door and when she opens the door, the visitor (a man she’d had trouble with earlier in the book) simply pulls out a gun and blows her away. The End.
I’d never felt so cheated by a book before as I did by this one.
Recently I read Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog for my book group. It was a hard read, in that it was disturbing and made me wish I wasn’t part of humanity.
It’s about two brothers who live on a ranch in the 1920’s .
The older one was secretly gay and, to some degree in “love” with his brother…The younger brother marries a woman and the older brother does everything he can to undermine their relationship…Meanwhile the older brother is trying to seduce the woman’s son…The son is onto him and gets revenge…which I will not go into…in case someone wants to read it.
As it happens, we never got to discuss it…I was kind of mad because I felt like I really had to work at reading it.
I don’t think anybody mentioned the Newbery winner,The Giver . That book was pretty disturbing for a children’s book.
Thank you for admitting this. I had the same reaction, although my hub was just sort of bemused that I’d be upset by the book. I had weird dreams for days after I finished it.
Double Jeopardy by Bob Hill. A true-crime story of Mel Ignatow, a man who kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed his girlfriend, Brenda Sue Shaeffer. And got away with it. It happened in my town.
And Death of Innocence: The Killing of Shanda Sharer. Shanda was a 12-year old girl who was kidnapped, beaten, sodomized with a tire iron, and then - while still alive - set on fire. A friend of mine knew Shanda and Melissa Lovelace, who was the “mastermind” behind the whole thing. And one of the girls on the periphery, Kari Pope, was a girl that, at one time, wanted to go out with me.
Maybe they bother me because they happened where I live.
That’s because they have many redeeming qualities that far outweigh the gross-outs. I’d be surprised if there were scenes so vile a person would regret reading all the rest of it, which usually is at least decent and often amazing.
Peter Straub has that *Blue Rose * series of novels and numerous related short stories that have some highly disturbing, gut-wrenchingly tragic moments and many details of it that linger in the memory in an unpleasant way that hasn’t left me yet. So you will realize what high praise it is that I say it’s worth the suffering because they are so well-done that it all makes sense in the end and your intense reaction gives the novel an emotional weight. It changed they way I thought about some things.
There are a lot more movies out there that leave me with this feeling than books. Books usually have some redeemingo r uplifting endings somewhere in them.
Moderator’s note: The question of spoilers for classics, or even for older works that have been around a long time, is a fuzzy one. I could easily take either side of that argument. On the one hand, it’s been around a long time and spoilers are everywhere, it’s classic enough to take it for granted that everyone knows, etc. On the other hand, there are always new readers/viewers who, in fact, don’t know.
I’m never sure where to draw the line. “Rosebud” is probably the canonical example. But in this case, I think it’s context: Hitchhikers’ Guide isn’t really “classic” … and this thread is about books that are upsetting, so I think we should be more attentive to spoilers. This thread may attract people to a book, and therefor we should be thoughtful.
I read a Book Section in Reader’s Digest once about the abuse of small boy. The Murder of Robbie Wayne, Age 6 was pretty graphic, and even more horrid was that the other children in the house were not abused in any way.
The scene where he’s standing on a chair, washing the dishes, trying to hold his pants up because he’s lost so much weight through starvation just hurts my heart. His finally dies when his stepfather knocks him down for drinking Coke from the baby’s bottle.
Okay, I found it. I read it. I have a question. (Do not click on the spoiler box unless you want to know the big surprise ending. You have been warned.)
How the hell did Mich have time to kill Marion and cut her up before he went downstairs? From what I could tell he went down last, then started the story about the witch.
Now, that’s not what I thought. I thought he wanted to hurt his wife in the most horrible way possible, to draw out the pain, and what worse way to do that than to kill her daughter, her precious daughter that looks nothing like her husband? Mich admitted he didn’t love his daughter, that he’d wanted a son. I do see your point, “Some idiot turned on the light” perhaps ruins the sadistic game he’s playing, but I took that to mean he wanted to make the panic last longer. The lights are turned on, his wife’s fears are confirmed, game over.
I haven’t read much Bradbury lately, my attempt at his style is off. The above is a rough draft, cuz I don’t feel like spending a few hours going over his stories and adjusting the vocabulary, structure and imagery just so.
She chose for her sister a book on herbs, for the baby a book of old local Indian lore, and for herself–only the index volume of an encyclopedia. Perhaps I should have mentioned that in the earlier part of the book she began reading the entire encyclopedia from A to Z, figuring all that general knowledge might help her out at Harvard.
The plot was very loosely based on the true story of Drs. Stewart and Cyril Marcus, identical twin gynecologists who were found dead in their NYC apartment in the 1970s.
OK, then. And what good would an index do her without the books? never mind, I don’t want to know!
Friar Ted --I actually don’t remember how the book started out.
Looking back over the years (it’s been at least 4 since I read it)–so much that he said was so horribly evil (involving animals) --now I think, eh, not so much.
But I could be wrong and I am not about to reread it to see if I am right.
Other books that disturbed me: Sybil --and I saw the movie, too and it still is with me at times. I don’t like horror or violence, so I am a wuss when it comes to this kind of stuff…
Bastard Out of Carolina was disgusting and rather foul. No more for me by that author.
When you say “bad science,” are you referring to the fact that
the pool’s pump sucks his large intestine out of his anus instead of his small intestine? I had always thought that if something like that happened it would be your large intestine that would be pulled out, but thanks to this old Cecil column and a few other sources I’ve read since, I’ve learned that it’s the small intestine that comes out when things start getting sucked out of your heiny.
It was quite startling to hear Chuck make such an error when I was listening to the audiobook version of Haunted the other day.
