So far, it’s Keep the River on Your Right. Actually, it’s a rather beautiful and sensitively rendered memoir, but … “disturbing” and “terrifying” really don’t describe what the book’s like. Any description I write just can’t do it justice. It’s about a man who disappears into one of the most remote parts of New Guinea in the 1950s and lives with a cannibal tribe for several months.
The kicker? It ain’t fiction.
It’s a quick read (took me maybe an hour and a half) but once I was done, I just kind of sat there and stared at the walls, and the only thing I could think was “Wow.”
I say “so far” because I got The Painted Bird for Christmas. Everyone who has ever mentioned the book to me has warned me about it, including the person who got it for me, as I was unwrapping it.
I’m really in for it, aren’t I?
(But I gave House of Leaves in return. HoL, though, isn’t so much terrifying or brutal as it is unbelievably creepy. And more people need to know about it.)
“Last Exit To Brooklyn” By Herbert Selby…it’s got much humanity, but Selby really thrives on the most base degradation of people, wether done by others or self-inflicted. All the characters in the novel are so hopelessly ignorant and self-destructive yet so real that it always puts me in a foul mood.
“American Psycho”, Bret Easton Ellis…not only for the graphic murder/mutilation/torture scenes, but for the sheer banality of the universe depicted. It’s a circular narrative with absolutely no catharsis for the reader.
“The 120 Days Of Sodom” by The Marquis De Sade…absolute must read for anyone interested in sheer literary perversion. It starts off just be plain offensive with livid and joyous descriptions of rape, child molestation, and urine fetishes, and then delves into utter depravity of the worst kind. By the time he writes about pulling all of a girl’s teeth out before forcing her to fellate him, or how one guy sodomizes a girl while the other breaks her fingers one at a time so her muscle contractions from the pain can be timed with his orgasm…it just becomes time to put the book down.
There is a respectable body of scholarship that indicates the migrant workers did pretty well in California, which experienced an agricultural come-back between 1934 and '37, and ended up with a labor shortage, not high unemployment. The wages of Okies (and everyone else) in California were higher than the national average, and public assistance in California was better, too.
My nominee would be “Let’s Go Play At The Adams’” a cult horror novel from the 70s that’s been in copyright hell for 30 years or so. It starts out kinda light and innocent, with a babysitter tied up by her charges. The thing that makes it disturbing is the way the situation progresses step by step toward something very, very dark, with the babysitter’s options slowly wilting away. The way the collective psychology of the relatively normal kids who’ve captured the babysitter is dominated by the psychopathic girl in the group is especially chilling.
I’m not alone in my evaluation of the story. Despite being out of print for almost 30 years, the novel has spawned websites on the Internet. He’re’s the best of them: <a href=“http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/mendal.htm”>Ray Girvan’s site</a>. One author has written a sequel to the novel (which is unmarketable since he doesn’t hold copyright) another has written a “bug patch” to fix the (in his view) too horrifying ending*, transforming the story into soft core porn, and Steve Vance’s novel “The Abyss” is a literary response to LGPATA.
I was happy to see Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love mentioned since that was the book that immediately came to mind upon reading the thread title. Also, Elie Weisel’s Night .
I’d have to also add Flowers for Algernon . I read it when I was a kid and afterward was eternally afraid I would lose my brainpower just like that. Plus, I thought it was cruel what they did to Charley and Algernon.
Nice to see All Quiet on the Western Front get honorable mention- I just read that last semester for a class and I’m glad I did. I wouldn’t have picked it up on my own, but it was such an experience - disturbing being only one aspect.
Hmmmmm- Sula , by Toni Morrison is pretty disturbing too. National Suicide Day? Yup.
by Timothy Findlay. Normally he’s not quite so strange - it’s the Noah and the Ark story, kind of. Noah is sleeping with one of his daughters-in-law, and one of his sons is permanently dyed blue after nearly being eaten by some cannibals…
Sounds like a good read. I’ll have to put it on my list.
I was just joking because Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels include some buildings, e.g. Death’s house & the U.U. library, where the interior dimensions don’t match the exterior ones. I should have been more clear that I wasn’t serious. Sorry about that.
I have great difficulty answering this questions because good literature should be disturbing, i.e., should make us think and feel what is unfamiliar.
Nobody has mentioned the fiction of Patricia Highsmith, which explores the ever receding boundaries between normal and pathological, virtue and sin, and suggests that in a godless world, these values exist in a paradoxical relationship that cannot be contained by conventional morality.
Her first (and maybe her best) is Strangers on a Train (which became the Hitchcock masterpiece), but there are many others.
What is disturbing is the CASUALNESS with which normal behavior edges into pathology and violence, along with the fact that the villian is never ever punished.
OK, I happened to like Pet Sematary, which might reveal a little more about my mysterious character. Mwahahaha.
However, I also read Christine, likewise by Stephen King, and that piece of…stuff… made me physically ill. Pure disturbance was in every page and I hugged the toilet like I had the world’s worst hangover. Not bad for a minor, huh?
Well, I am reading The Three Musketeers- no, that’s not the disturbing one. I also just finished Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell. A lot of other books I’ve read by her are really disturbing, and I expect that, but this one just got to me in the worst way.
I suppose it could be my state of mind screwing with me, and I know this author has written a lot about sociopaths, but this one in particular just felt so creepy. It’s basically about an illiterate housekeeper who ends up shooting the family she works for (not giving anything away- that’s all on the first page). It’s creepy not because of the murder, really, but all of the descriptions of the housekeeper- how she’s closed off to the printed word, how she has absolutely no emotion or regard for others. It felt positively slimy. Worse than anything horribly graphic or morbid. This indifference was a thousand times worse.