Just remembered a few more: Dr. Rat by William Kotzwinkle. It’s about the horrors of being a laboratory test animal, told from the perspective of a aged rat. If you read it, you will never support animal testing again. The rats (and other animals) have horrible and yet completely plausible things done to them, and they repeat the phrase “Death is the only freedom” as their mantra. It got so incredibly horrible after a while that I started crying uncontrollably.
Watership Down and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH are actually children’s books, but I found them extremely disturbing as a child, and I refuse to read them ever again.
On Haloween night the History Channel had a documentary on about witch burning. They put it in a context I’ve never heard before. They described Europe as in the grip of the Black Death. But they had no understanding for it; they could only turn to the main explanation: religion. (Think about it–stuck in a world of Aristotlean phyiscs where physical events are associated with animistic causes, a literal belief in the bible and an orthodox Catholic interpretation, no viable theory of disease, and what disease theory they had was most likely rooted in religious faith and magic.) Anyway, they saw the terror of the plague and the only explanation their world view had to offer was that it was punishment from god. Certainly much punishment had been meted out in the Old Testament. So they undertook reform in the rather nasty approach of going after witches with real Old Testament vengence.
I’m not trying to excuse what they did. But it does put it in a very, very different light. I think that’s why a little part of me always roots for the bad guys: sometimes the good guys aren’t right.
I had to read it for an English class, and as all our books have been dull and somber, I expected this one to be so, too. I can not describe the creepiness of it. It was good though, go read it!
I agree about The Girl in the Box and Pet Sematary. There’s also a kids’ book that I think is called Children of the Dust about the aftermath of nuclear war that scared the bejesus out of me when I read it.
<b>When Rabbit Howls</b> an autobiography by Truddi Chase.
She supposedly suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder & recounts severe abuse while a foster child & how her personalities were formed.
Good godlessness. Did you have to remind me? I’m going to have to block that out of my brain in order to sleep tonight. Thanks!
Seriously though, “Raptor” is a great book, but that scene definitely ranks up there in the hallowed halls of the horrifying. It’s the whole package that got me – that unfortunate man, the pregnant woman, the little eunuch and what happens to them. Ugh.
“1984” made me want to go smash my head against a wall. It drove me insane for about a week. All those questions about what truth is, whether history matters, the appeal of power…
Okay, another vote here for Santa Steps Out. shudder I read a few pages of that in the bookstore and it just . . . ugh.
House of Leaves was recommended to me by a friend and it scared the hell out of me. It starts out sort of oddly, but it just spins out of control and the fact that the book is formatted in such a way that it completely disorients the reader is really frightening.
“The Girl in the Box” freaked me out too. In fact, it was the first book I thought of when I saw the thread title. The premise didn’t really make much sense (she was kidnapped with a typewriter?) but I was so creeped out that I used to imagine rescuing the girl just so I could get to sleep.
On The Beach by Nevil Shute is really good and disturbing. It’s probably not as bad now that the Cold War seems to have faded, but it should make you think nonetheless. It’s about the Australian populace waiting for the post WWIII radiation cloud to drift down to swallow their continent.
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart is another great book about a super-plague that pretty much wipes out civilization. The main character is a graduate student in geology who is forced to fight to save humanity’s greatest acheivements, i.e. literacy & knowledge. Very, very good book.
Don’t know if short stories count. Both of these were in Tales by Moonlight II ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson (Tor 0-812-55371-3, Jul ’89 [Jun ’89].
Mr. Templeton’s Toyshop
Hard to describe. A series of paragraph-long vignettes about a diabolical toyshop owner who casually murders all the children in his town.
The Eldritch Horror of Oz
I know we said no Lovecraft, but this story REALLY bothered me. It’s only really effective if you’ve actually read L. Frank Baum’s first several books in the Oz series, as opposed to just seeing the film. In short, a regular old mainstream Oz citizen is reading an Oz history book in a library at the Emerald City. Some of the pages are stuck together, and reasoning that some sticky-fingered kid was responsible, the hero takes out a pocket knife and is able to pry apart the pages in question. He then reads about the former inhabitants of Oz, grotesque arachnoid beings who worshipped Cthlulu and did the usual unspeakable Lovecraft drills. The good wicth Glenda catches him reading the book, and explains to him how she and certain other Oz characters have been battling the eldritch 8-legged beasts for ages, and are barely keeping them at bay in the great deserts. She also tells him that they have planted spies in Oz, and that he must tell nobody what he knows.
The final scene has him pondering that the Woggle-Bug’s origin story (being magnified by a curious farmer, IIRC) seems kind of bogus. The hero then notices that the Woggle-Bug seems to have scars on his body where two extra legs have been removed at some point, meaning he once had eight legs…ick.
I opened this thread with HoL in mind – I just finished it last night. While some of the literary devices get kinda old (okay, enough with spreading out one word over four pages), the book itself is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read. Not because of any booga-booga monsters jumping out at you, but because it posits one of the most frightening questions I can think of: What if you couldn’t trust that the most basic things around you – space and time – were a constant? What would you do if you couldn’t trust that the physical universe you live in could change the rules from moment to moment? <shudder>
I’ll also put in a vote for American Psycho. Mainly because Bateman is able to describe some of the most horrific scenes with utter clarity and dispassion.
I’ve mentioned this book before and nobody has been able to identify it for me, but I keep hoping somebody else has read it.
This may not be a novel, perhaps it is a short story, though I am pretty sure it was the entire book - see, I read this when I was about 7 or 8, and I can’t remember exactly, but I remember many details.
NOTE: This book was NOT Dr. Rat, though there are similarities.
The book was told from the point of view of a rat. He is the ‘pet’ of a demented teenage boy who is always performing cruel ‘experiments’ on animals. About the only one I can remember, though, is where the boy tapes the paws of several kittens to a cookie sheet and bakes them in an oven. The rat is the only animal that the boy hasn’t tortured and/or killed, and it has possibly been corrupted by the boy’s influence, he mentions at some point that every now and then the boy puts a female rat in the cage with him, but every time the rat kills and eats her.
Dear LORD, my seventh grade English teacher gave me that when I told her I’d read everything on the book list. Much as it disturbed me at the time, I now have a strange urge to revisit it…
Red Dragon freaked me the hell out as I was reading it, but I can’t even imagine why in retrospect.
THE DUALISTS (or THE DUELLISTS) OR THE DEATH-DOOM OF THE DOUBLE-BORN
Two young boys, best friends, delight in taaking identical objects & smashing them against each other to see whose object will break first. They go from sticks & their toys to stolen objects, their homes furniture, then small animals.
Thennnnnnnn- twins are born in the neighborhood!
Utterly repulsive! You know old Bram was howling with laughter when he labored to make each sentence of the climactic scene more horrid than the prior sentence.
It would be an EXCELLENT Tales from the Crypt episode1 EXCEPT the “moral” is actually an ANTI-moral which would have outraged William Gaines.