Speaking of disturbing children’s books, anyone read Neil Gaiman’s Coraline? This book gave me major heebie jeebies when I read it at age 26. The recommended reading age for it is eight and up. I would think twice before letting an eight year old read this book.
I ran across the short story “Lukundoo” (which is available online, if you wanna Google for it) in a horror anthology when I was a kid—maybe in my elementary school library :eek: , I don’t remember for sure.
F’in’ creepiest thing ever. I don’t want to try to describe it. But definitely don’t read it if parsites creep you out.
She thought it could be the framework for new knowledge.
I regret ever reading anything by John Saul (the horror author, not the philosopher). Gruesome, dirty, little redeeming value. Probably no the best reads for an 11-year-old, either.
For the person who read Sebold’s The Lovely Bones but is avoiding Lucky, read it. She really manages to make her experience readable and even funny at times (but you will probably break down during the actual rape scene, and later during the court scenes).
As for the October Game
I don’t really understand how the girl, Marion, could be alive. I thought the whole point was that the father was passing around her body parts. He chooses to kill the daughter instead of shooting his wife because he knows it will hurt her more.
Chorpler Rereading the column, I was wrong on one fact but
American Psycho gave me nightmares for quite a few days after, mainly involving nail-guns. I still don’t know exactly why I finished the book…
Another book that upset me was A child called It. It didn’t upset me so much with its graphic descriptions of the horrible abuse that the author suffered, but it seemed to me that Pelzer was almost revelling in telling about it. It left me in a very weird head-space, thinking that he was somehow delighting in profitting from his horrible history. It’s hard for me to explain the feeling that this book left me with … Maybe someone else has read it and can explain better.
I’ve just read through three pages of replies and am I the first to mention Geek Love by Katherine Dunn?
That’s the one story from that collection that I never did read. I don’t think I will now.
I just read this based on your words, and not only wasn’t it scary, it wasn’t even very good. Honestly, did you really think this story was so frightening that you wish you’d never read it? I’ve certainly read stories that kept me up all night (Stephen King’s “The Boogeyman” from *Night Shift * made me sleep with the light on for weeks, though I was 11 at the time), but this ain’t one of them. I was disappointed… maybe I’m jaded, but this barely even qualifies as a horror story by today’s standards. Stuff has to be really traumatizing for me to regret reading it.
October Game again
Cat Fight, we go back to my earlier question:
How did he have enough time to kill her and cut up her body?
:smack: Ah yes…it was a bit of a downer, wasn’t it? I felt kind of grimy afterwards.
Why would you find sexually explicit material objectionable? I just don’t get that. I hope no one was actually asking you to DO any of the sex acts. It was more of a descriptive thing…right? I haven’t read the book, so enlighten me if you will please.
I’m obviously pretty thick-skinned too, as I can’t imagine being put off a book because I didn’t like something that happened within it. Bad prose, or poor character-mapping I can see, but not description or plot.
Having said that, some scenes stand out. I was about 15 when I read Misery, and a certain scene in that [not sure how to do spoilers either] involving a sledgehammer stayed in my mind awhile.
Also, American Psycho does have sickening scenes. However, it’s so clever in its satire, and the writing is so hypnotic that this doesn’t put me off at all. In fact, when I reread it, I was kind of disappointed not to get the same extreme reaction I had the first time.
Ishmael… I mean, it’s an amazing book and after reading it, you don’t look at life the same way again. In that sense, I loved it. The bad thing is now I look around, and based on what it says in the book… we should let cancer victims die, let sick people die, not destroy the earth to keep ourselves up, which although makes sense on paper, as a human being with a conscience, I couldn’t live up to doing it or making it feel right… Dunno, maybe I got the wrong ideas.
Two young adults books that I read when I really just a kid, because I thought I could easily handle the language. I could, but the subject matter was just too scary.
They are:
Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells
and
After the First Death by Robert Cormier.
In adult life Blindness by Jose Saramago is just, but only just, on right side of too upsetting.
Just realized this weekend that I gave the wrong title for this book. It’s actually Unspeakable.
My apologies.
Ugh, Misery. I read the book and refuse to watch the movie because of it. What got me wasn’t the sledgehammer so much as the
bit when he was crawling through the house trying to get back to his room when he’s sneaking around the house while Annie’s gone.
Someone earlier mentioned Kathy Acker. I’ll never read one of her books again. Not for the gross-out factor, although that played a huge part of it, but because the chick couldn’t write. She is one of the few people I hope is in Bad Writer Hell right now.
I have a copy of “Let’s Go Play” - it’s apparently the only novel the guy wrote - and then he later drank himself to death. It was pretty pricey too on biblio.com - but it does make a good companion piece to “The Basement”. For years, John Waters kept a portrait he had commissioned of Gertrude Baniszewski (the woman who instigated the torture of Sylvia Likens) in his house. He took it down, I think, because people kept asking him if it was his grandmother 
VCNJ~
This story, along with others like “The New Mother” by Lucy Cliford made me admit to the futility of asking people for recommendations about scary stories - none of the things rec’d ever are, and they often make me wonder if people sleep with nightlights on.
The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas has been mentioned a few times, and I found it just this side of too disturbing. It’s just a bit too fascinating to regret reading.
There is only one book I truly found so disturbing that I wish I’d never read it, and I can’t find it anywhere. It was called “Evil Seed” by I don’t know who, and it was a trashy, vile horror novel I read in my early teens. (so published no later than 1991). Whoever wrote it wasn’t Joanne Harris or C. G. McGovern-Bowen.
[spoiler]
The cover shows an evil little kid leering up at you from a coffin, holding a rose, I think a dead one.
As for the story, it begins with a woman having a one night stand with the devil, and being unable to abort the resultant baby. He grows up soulless and kills everyone in his family in horrifically gruesome manners- like pushing his grandmother into a TV after getting it to show her husband engaging in orgies in hell, and ripping his brother’s head off- not even sparing the half sister who loves him despite being an evil little bastard. [/spoiler]
After I read it I “accidentally” left it out in the rain, and wasn’t sad to see the book destroyed.