Only Forward
by Michael Marshell Smith…
Not disturbing in terms of content, but what it did with my brain. I actually missed the whole point of the story the first couple of times that I read it, and when it did hit, it hit like a hammer…
Not sure if you would consider this to be a book, technically it is…but it’s not a novel.
I would have given anything to buy this book, but when I went back to the store, it was gone…why god why?
Anyways, to the point…
It was a book of car crashes.
It was about 100 pictures from police records I guess.
All from the late 40’s to early 50’s
And every picture was beyond detailed.
Blood, gore, missing limbs, the limbs found outside of the car in the field, and some more blood.
Nothing was blocked out, or covered.
There was one where it was a picture of train tracks with just a foot sitting ontop.
Or there was another one where this couple both got decapitated.
Then near the end of the book, it left the car crashes and went into murders and suicides. All pictures of when the police got the scene. I’m not exactly sure why I was so thrilled with this “collection” of photos in a book, but I was.
One picture actually made me laugh, which is sad.
It was a highway and there was a cop kneeling down beside a dead dog on the road and in the back ground theres about 2 cars rolled over in the ditch and you can barely recognize that they were cars to begin with.
The things we do for animals…
Stick Woman by Edward Lee is the most disturbing thing I’ve read.
I am more disturbed that someone could conceive such a story than by the idea that it might actually happen, if you know what I mean.
I thought Geek Love was kinda sweet. A friend asked if it was a manual. Funny.
Hadn’t thought about Painted Bird and that bottle scene for years. Dang. I should never have opened this thread.
[hijack]I didn’t read the book but I did work with a guy who lived through the riot. We became pretty good friends and one night after work he started telling me what he saw including the blowtorch stuff. It was so bad I almost got sick.[/hijack]
I’d add Damnation Game by Clive Barker.
Slee
Fungus and The Ugly American both still disturb me.
I’ll second Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT.
my additions-
the comic based on Philip Jose Farmer’s THE IMAGE OF THE BEAST (I do have the book but may never read it)
Georges Bataille’s THE TRIALS OF GILLES DE RAIS- if you know about Gilles, you know why- these are the actual court records
a novel, British I think, called DEAREST about a cab driver who kills his pregnant girlfriend when she announces she’s about to leave him and then mummifies her body AND his unborn infant! In EXCRUCIATING DETAIL!!!
DERANGED - Fred Schecter’s true crime account of Albert Fish
I’ll add to the chorus naming “Naked Lunch” and “American Psycho” as among the most disturbing. Also, I’d add parts of “Infinite Jest,” particularly where they gratuitously and slowly push a broom all the way through (mouth, throat, abdomen, etc.) a poor retarded man who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But I thought Katherine Dunne’s “Geek Love” was hilarious–so over the top that I didn’t mind the parents’ concocting new ways to initiate in utero deformities. Basically I read that as a literal rendering of what people with screwed up values do all the time to their kids figuratively. [off-topic] By the way, this is supposedly the only Knopf book ever published in which their trademark dog is depicted differently: he has three front legs. First printing is probably a collector’s item. [/off-topic]
And for those who haven’t tried to read “Naked Lunch” yet–please save yourself from the experience. DON’T do it. It really is the worst.
**Mirror Image egamI rorriM **, The Girl in the Box was by Ouida Sebestyen
Thanks. God, I hate that book with a passion.
The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon.
It was one of the most beautifully written yet completely distrubing books I’ve ever read in my life.
Dangerosa, that’s on my top ten. I thought I was the only person in the world who knew about that book, and then I saw it a couple of years ago in Seattle on an “Our Employees Recommend” rack.
I have a couple of Spanbauer’s other books but haven’t read them yet. If a writer I really like isn’t very prolific (or dead), I like to leave something of theirs unread.
An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution by Partha Dasgupta. A fairly technical book into the economics of third-world poverty that describes how the lack of effective markets for capital and risk forces the truly poor to treat their children as capital goods. If you care about the poor, you should read it.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. A psychiatrist’s account of the social forces involved in the Algerian revolt against the French. It ends with case studies on the victims and practitioners of torture & murder.
The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. A first-hand account of a French kid who is pressed into service for Germany in WWII and ends up fighting on the Eastern Front.
The Malleus Maleficarum. Haven’t read it, but Carl Sagan said that it may be the most awful book ever written.
The Bible, or any religious tract, IMO.
The only book I’ve ever put down due to disturbing material was Naked Lunch, but it was such a confused & crappy read that it wasn’t worth figting for.
Someday I’ll have to start a thread on why people liked and/or were disturbed by American Psycho. Seemed like pedestrian tripe to me…
In a similar vein, there’s Pat Buchanan’s book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
Along the lines of “The Forgotten Soldier” is the book which disturbs me the most, “All Quiet on the Western Front”, by Erich Maria Remarque.
It’s a first-person (fictional) account of a German soldier in WWI. It’s detailed, and the futility just drips from the pages. The mundane details make it all the more disturbing for me.
The entire book is not too horrific, but there is one truly disturbing scene in Raptor by Gary Jennings.
It’s been a while and I don’t remember the exact setup, but a man has disguised himself as a woman to escape an attack by the Huns. He is captured anyway and is about to be raped by his attacker. When the attacker finds out he is not a woman, he takes a knife and cuts an appropriate hole in his scrotum and rapes him anyway.
I’ll agree with Blood Meridian-------very dark and hellish.
The book that scared me the most in my youth was Amityville Horror.
The Crying of Lot 49, as mentioned, is a brilliant book which I didn’t find disturbing at all.
And Ann Rice or Stephen King? They’re just disturbing because of their bad writing.
House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski.
It’s the sort of creepy that makes you just look for all the hidden realities just beneath the surface.
From Amazon.com “…a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.)” Is he ripping off Terry Pratchett?
I think that’s actually The Devil’s Butcher Shop.
In the Belly of the Beast was (IIRC) Jack Henry Abbott’s book about his prison experience in NY.
The Stranger by Albert Camus has to be the most disturbing book I’ve ever read. This was back when I was in high school. After I finished the book I started crying in the middle of homeroom and had to go to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall to calm down. It’s one of the only books I’ve ever thrown away.
Subject matter or content usually doesn’t bother me, strangely. I can read about all sorts of gore, violence, insanity, etc. As long as it’s a work of fiction, I just sort of gloss over the disturbing-ness, since I know it isn’t real. But non-fiction can really sicken me, especially books like Night by Elie Wiesel. I was horrfied for weeks after I read that book. (I was in middle school at the time, and I had never really known anything about the Holocaust before reading it.) Other non-fiction that I can hardly stand to read includes the book about the homeless people living in abandoned subway tunnels beneath New York City called The Mole People. I was so horrified and sickened reading about what these people must go through every day of their lives, and about the indifference and even hostility towards them by the city workers. The Malleus Maleficarum is also very hard to get through, not so much for the torture descriptions as for the incredibly upsetting mindset of the people who wrote the book, and their absolute and blind faith in the things they believed. (And what they were willing to do to their fellow humans because of those beliefs.) Another awful non-fiction book (whose title and author mercifully escape me) was about the illegal trade in endangered species and the people who keep these animals as ‘pets’. Another grotesque book about the selfishness and cruelty of human beings.
What bothers me in fiction books is the attitudes of the characters and their thought processes, more than their actions. This is why The Stranger was so upsetting for me. Other really disturbing works of fiction were some of the stories in The Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace, The End of Alice by A.M. Holmes, and some strange book I read quite a long time ago called Come Before Christ and Murder Love. Horrible, horrible books.