The Bible series, but things really jumped the shark with the Book of Mormon.
The Bible did fuck me up as a kid.
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.
Matthew 5:28-5:29
Reading this as a super religious + horny 12 year old was terrifying. I felt extreme guilt for not maiming myself for a few years before I finally realized religion was bullshit.
My wife was raised Southern Baptist, she has a lot of sex hang ups, despite having been out of the church for about 30 years.
You are not alone in this.
“If a man is considered guilty for what goes on in his mind, then give me the electric chair for all my future crimes.”
-Prince 1989
Did you cut your d*ck ?
That one is crazy how the main character does shitty things like wiping out civilizations just out of spite, then he impregnates a teenage girl and the baby grows up and is all nice and loving but says he is actually his dad and he/his dad love everyone. So much gaslighting.
Indeed, among the religious books I have read, the Book of Mormon takes the top position on the loony pile. What kind of indoctrination and drugs do you need to believe that?
Grooming the youth, that’s the kind of indoctrination you need. As a missionary, the only non-indoctrinated adults who got into the BoM were, let’s say, simple.
I had full access to the internet growing up (the secret was to be awake when other sleep lol) and reading the bible made me feel like I was viewing age inappropriate content then anything else
American Psycho contained scenes so graphic that I’d have to pause and stare out the window briefly before I could go on.
I used to sell books and this elderly couple came up to the counter saying they were buying it as a Christmas present.
So I told them “Hey, it’s not my place to say what is or is not a good Christmas present, but before I sell it to you, could I get you to just flip the pages, randomly stick your finger in, and start reading?”
They thought I was kidding, but they did it…
“OH MY GOD!”
“Yeah…”
“OH MY GOD!”
Better they find out then than AFTER I sold it to them!
So did they buy it or what
They did not…
Jesus christ ! There’s just some things you don’t talk about in public.
That’s a pretty interesting encounter. Glad you helped them know what they were about to do.
It was more self preservation. I didn’t want them coming back after the fact. ;)
I entered this post to say exactly that.
There comes a point in the book when the constant one-upping the last scene just makes me need two or more sessions to get through the chapter. The last “Girls” chapters are specially gruelling.
It was the hamster that finally got me. Was sitting outside at my school’s union, between classes, and just couldn’t believe what I was reading.
Gore
For me it was the scene wher Pat like grabs the vocal cords of one of the women after drilling a hole through the mouth and then rips them out of the mouth.
At first I thought the book was really boring with all of the brands and clothes descriptions that took half of the chapters. After that the senseless killings and brutality got to me in the end.
I had the same experience, why all this stuff about brands and clothes? Then the juxtaposition totally disturbed me. Then I started working with people in the corporate world…
I thought it was like a coping mechanism to make him more adjusted. Sometimes when he doesn’t describe brands or simply there aren’t any designer products, he loses his mind very quickly.
It could also be about corporate behavior but I haven’t had the chance to meet anyone that entrenched.
It is absolutely a coping mechanism for those types in reality. Scary accurate.
Yeah first time I read a grueling book. Couldn’t believe how much worse literature gore affects me compared to onscreen blood.
Pausing is a regular thing with books for me, disturbing or no
The pause was forced was my point. I couldn’t go on otherwise because I was overwhelmed.
Aside from the occasional designed-to-offend ones, probably The Road. Only book I’ve ever read that haunted me
I got offended at the lack of punctuation or anything. Didn’t get far. Fuck you Oprah and fuck your book club.
Hm I wonder how the next scene will go. Gray ash huh? Well I guess I should have seen that coming.
I read it and then watched the movie and it was depressing. His other book Outer Dark involves brother sister incest, child murder, and cannibalism! Very cheery.
Anytjing that marquis de sade wrote. Dont read it. Its the work of someone who pretended to “pose interesting questions” while write the worst rape fanfiction with his dick in his hand.
Trigger warning: just straight up awful assault
!There is a scene in which a father is forced to raped his underaged daughter and then gets shot while cumming inside her. The daughter of course gets spared. Oh wait no. She gets raped a gun point, mutilated and then rape killed again. Repeat this fof roughly 400 pages. Oh wow, so challenging and insightful! I truly believe that de Sade was horrified by this! Fuck off. !<
it is horrific - but you’re missing some of the context.
De Sade partly wrote it as a fuck-you to the establishment in and of itself
Partly as a satire of the aristocracy - and you can’t understate exactly how much he hated them - which is why he casts them as rapist pedophiles that prefer young boys
And partly as an attempt to catalog horrors of abuse and mental illness and the suffering of the common man at the hands of those in power
If you’ve come across the short story Guts at some point, it’s apparently part of the book Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I haven’t read the whole book so not sure what the other stories are like but this story is really trying to be both gross and fucked up.
That’s one of my favourite books. If you take it in the sort of gory comedy horror genre (thinking evil dead), it’s actually pretty great and has more depth to it than just horror stories.
Some of his later books get much worse, more gory, and far less interesting. He’s really just going for shock value in a lot of them. I stopped reading after the pink sock in Pygmy (couldn’t even finish the book).
I looked it up again when writing this comment and even though most reviews are negative they do make it sound pretty interesting. I’ve put it in a maaaybe list.
If you want to start with another less horrifying book by him (that isn’t fight club), I’d highly recommend Rant or invisible monsters
Rant was fantastic, and I also agree wholeheartedly with everything everyone says about Guts.
I read Guts for the first time in an issue of playboy when I was in my early teens… I still vividly remember reading the titular bit at the end. And also how it affects his family…
Goddamn.
Naked Lunch by Christopher Burroughs
The Trial by Franz Kafka. Anything by Kafka is pretty mental.
Now imagine being German and having to read several works by that loony in middle school.
William S. Burroughs, not Christopher! Unless that’s I joke I’m missing…
Oh sbit
Was just talking about this yesterday because of the “would you pick the man or the bear” question going around. The novel Bear by Marian Engel is quite literally about a woman who falls in love with and tries to have sex with a large bear. It won the Governor General’s award in Canada.
Also The Wasp Factory is seriously fucked up.
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That’s pretty terrible. Good luck to you.
I can’t remember the name of the book now, but in high school we read a ‘true’ story of child abuse. I’m sure it was edited to both tone down and turn up certain elements, but it was pretty much a brutal shock to people who are mostly from decent families that love them. Whether the kids were rich, poor, or middle class in my school, just about everyone there could at least return home to parents that didn’t commit those horrors.
I remember the diapers, the exposure to the elements, and the way the other children were pitted against the abused kid, and honestly? It was the emotional abuse that was the worst to read.
Like reading https://elan.school - just completely outside of what happy people can imagine.
I think the book you’re referring to is The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. That book make me sick to read, and yes, it is based on a true story. One of very few books I’ve ever finished with a sense of profound disgust and vowed never to return to - not because it’s a bad book, on the contrary Ketchum manages to capture the wrongness of it all in compelling detail - but the subject of its story was just completely unpalatable. I was too young for that story when I read it and that was my first real taste of the sort of horrible fucked up shit that humans can do to each other. And God, there was an awful lot of horrible fucked up shit in that story. Sylvia Likens (the real life poor dead girl the book is based on) deserves to have her story told to the world but part of me wishes I didn’t read it.
So honestly the train in IT was pretty fucked up and I probably shouldn’t have read it as young as I was. 100 years of solitude has its own fucked-up-ness and God of small things is also fucked up at the end, but all very different types of fucked up…
The Reckoning by Grisham.
Death in Her Hands by Moshfegh.
The Long Walk by King.
The Children of Hurin by Tolkien.
Angela’s Ashes by McCourt.
Already mentioned but The Road, definitely.
The Children of Hurin is one of my favourite books. It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember I loved it for the beautiful prose and just how sad (and messed up) the story is.
The Wasp Factory and We Need to Talk about Kevin (both have scenes of an older child abusing the trust of a younger sibling, which really bothered me at the time).
Kevin is a TOUGH read. Very well written though.
Probably not as fucked up as other entries, but I read Geek Love in grade school. The original meaning of geek, which was someone who bit the head off a chicken. Bunch of weird shit about a messed up carnie family. Not a terrible read I guess but holy shit was I not prepared.
Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy.
It’s kinda hard to describe. I recon it’s a parable about American colonization and the genocide of the native people. Like a map of how a project like that gets done and who benefits from it.
It’s like a melodrama in that it’s light on plot, and character motivation, but without the extreme circumstances unless you count the pervasive, persistent, and senseless violence. (that the characters themselves barely seem to notice) Not exactly a supernatural tale, but filled with dream logic, oh and the literal Christian Devil is one of the main characters.
This is the only book Ive ever read twice, back to back. I got to the end and was like WTF, turned to the first page and started again.
“Mangez le si vous voulez” (Eat him of you wish)
A book relating events that happened in 1870 in a French village. From a misunderstanding one guy is beaten, released, tortured and ultimately burned alive with people bridging toast to collect the fat that was dripping from the fire.
All the events happened in a single day that goes from mundane to horror.
