Comment what books have caused you to become distressed, traumatized, or unsettled in any way. Please elaborate as to why.
The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It wasn’t scary per say but I had an interesting experience where I had a manic episode reading it, barely slept, and got absolutely obsessed with the idea of it as I read it.
10/10 loved the immersion aspect.
Came here to say exactly this! That one puts the reader in the narrator’s situation if you’re not careful. Which is pretty genius, but also terrifying. Stroooooong mental health warning like nothing else I’ve ever read, but sooo good. It took me three or four tries to get through it, just because of the ahem. Atmosphere it manifested in my brain. But it’s one of my favorite books ever.
This book also didn’t scare me in a traditional way but is definitely one of the most unsettling things I’ve read.
oh gosh I read this one quite recently, the incredibly esoteric nature of it was utterly fascinating and somewhat terrifying…
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The main character has no name, no parents and his life is full of violence and death. It’s all he knows, so much as he knows anything.
It’s being adapted into a film now. I don’t know how they’re going to pull it off.
I feel like it would need to be a television show instead and even then… I don’t think it’s possible to give it credit.
I don’t know if I’d want to see it, it’d be hard to watch on two counts:
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They do it well, somehow, and I have to look away for a lot of the scenes.
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It’s been done horribly and the book is irreparably marred by it.
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I feel like there are multiple levels of terrifying to this book.
I can’t get The Judge out of my head, he has a supernatural quality to him but in a horrible, intelligent way that makes him horrifying.
But then the other terrifying thing is just the depiction of the normal characters and what they go through and the actions they commit.
And then finally another level is the depiction of everything else they face. That scene where the boy first witnesses an attack by the Comanche is blood curdling and yet mesmerising within one sentence. For anybody looking for context, search for ‘Blood Meridian Legion of horribles quote’ for the whole sentence.
This sounds a little like Justine my De Sade. A bleak tale about ever escalating horrible events.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy, it’s just so goddamn bleak. Nothing ever goes well and just about everybody is horrible, not a book I’ll likely read again even though I did enjoy it. Same with the movie, it’s just such a kick in the guts that I won’t be rewatching it even though it was great.
This is funny, I immediately thought of Blood Meridian when I read the post title, then came in and saw another Cormac McCarthy book!
Came here to add No Country For Old Men
Shit, McCarthy wrote that too? Goddamn.
A writer of cheerful books he ain’t
Wasn’t. Died two days ago. :’(
I’m not even sure why I think of Blood Meridian over The Road. Maybe now that I have child rereading the road would make it worse. But I feel that especially upon a few rereads Blood Meridian has some really dark things happening that aren’t immediately apparent.
And I suppose part of my choice might be because I find The Judge to be both the most fascinating and horrifying character in anything I’ve read or seen.
There’s plenty of relatively bleak stuff out there, so I thought I was fine with The Road. Until the basement. RIP Cormac.
Was going to say the same thing, upon a recent reread the Road is still pretty damned harrowing
A Scanner Darkly is an incredibly moving and haunting novel to anyone who’s ever struggled with drug addiction. For a nonfiction book probably “Kill Anything That Moves” which is about the horrifying and infuriatting reality of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston
That afterword in A Scanner Darkly! Intense.
“This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it….”
Loved The Hot Zone! Nonfiction that reads like a thriller.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted(a collection of short stories). It made me close my legs and squirm, and feel disgusted. The first story ‘‘Guts’’ made me put down the book and not touch it due to fear of what i am about to read next.
As Wikipedia describes it : It is a tale of violent accidents involving masturbation, in which the reader is instructed to hold their breath in the very first line.
Yeah, reader beware.
Same experience.
I like to think I’m pretty adventurous (like I love to watch horror movies, etc). But that book is just too much. What are other books gave you that effect?
@SeverianWolf@beehaw.org > Haunted
I came here to post this!
I am not much of a horror/disturbing stories fan, but Guts was simply astonishing, I read this more than 10 years ago and still remember the story vividly.
Lolita, it’s simply unsettling.
Also Starship Troopers as I used to be in the military for a bit.
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. I still can’t believe I actually read the whole damn nightmare.
American Psycho made me so claustrophobic reading it I had to give up really quickly. Which means it was terribly effective, but not something I can make myself read.
The House in the Dark by Tarjei Vesaas. It’s a surrealist account of life under the Nazi occupation. It was written in Norway during the occupation. After writing it, Vesaas immediately buried the manuscript in the forest until the war was over - being caught with it would have meant immediate death.
1962 cold-war drama Fail-Safe is also very disturbing.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
It was an assigned reading in 11th grade. When I finally finished it, I remember feeling like my skin was crawling, and my thoughts were a jumbled mess - I was questioning everything, how I viewed others and how they viewed me, was it right or wrong, how would I have behaved in those situations…
I remember l just staring out my bedroom window into the pitch black night for an hour just digesting it all. I also remember sleeping with the lights on because I was a little creeped out.
Being an impressionable teen probably helped, but that book left a profound impact on my way of thinking about how I interact with the world and the people in it.
It was also my gateway book to classic literature and how good it can actually be!
Bunny by Mona Awad. The content of it isn’t necessarily the most distressing I have read, but the way it was written and the way the story was woven made me feel like I was literally dissociating while reading it which added a lot to the unsettling factor.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica had me thinking about it for weeks after. Evidently I’m still thinking about it now, having read it a year ago.
The subject matter is horrific. The ending is devastating, yet inevitable. Afterwards I felt like I had gaslit myself into ignoring the real character traits I was observing, wanting to believe there was a redeemable aspect to the depicted broken society.
I’m reading this right now
In the Tall Grass by Steven King and Joe Hill.
So unsettling until the scary. And then the scary got worse!
I don’t know if disturbing is the word I’d use but Empire Falls left me feeling profoundly sad for a few weeks after finishing it. It was a beautiful book and I’d recommend it to anyone but it definitely stuck with me for a bit and was hard to shake
As long as it unsettles you in some way, it counts.
Medical Block, Buchenwald: The Personal Testimony of Inmate 996, Block 36 by Walter Poller.
