uh, thats jacked up (disturbing books)

[parkaboy]

I'm sure to get a ton of "pahlinuk pahlinuk!!" in here, and to be honest, i havent read anything of his =( i keep meaning to, i've read some excerpts and i'm extremely interested i just havent gotten around to it. so what are some other messed up books that you enjoy because of or despite their "OMGWTF" factor?

i think my favorite three are Vurt and Pollen by Jeff Noon and The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe.

The Butcher Boy is written almost in stream of consciousness style and the grammar is atrocious because its written from the direct perspective of a crazy person remembering his childhood. it uses... arrrrgh, i cant think of the term for it... but its a style of writing where you write like you actually talk, with a specific dialect or accent. mark Twain used it a lot in dialogue. >_< hopefully you get what i mean.

Vurt and Pollen are sort of a part one and part two but do alright as stand-alones. They are sci-fi, set in a post-catasrophy earth and are pretty damn messed up, Pollen especially.

[lachatte]

I've read Vurt. That book was seriously strange. Haven't gotten around to Pollen yet, though I keep meaning to get it. I remember telling my mom that I was reading Vurt and I swear I could hear her shudder through the phone.

[parkaboy]

Pollen is sooo much better/worse. well, i thought so anyway, but now that think back to parts of vurt my brain is shuddering too.

[aion7]

If by messed up you mean disturbing and thought-provoking, I'd say 1984 by George Orwell fits perfectly.

[Geekthras]

Disturbing books C Books by H.P.Lovecraft


*The C is supposed to be a bit shorter and with the top and bottom extending farther to the right.

[Belial]

As stereotypical an answer as it is, House of Leaves was pretty fucked up.

[Kewangji]

The Butcher Boy is written almost in stream of consciousness style and the grammar is atrocious because its written from the direct perspective of a crazy person remembering his childhood. it uses... arrrrgh, i cant think of the term for it... but its a style of writing where you write like you actually talk, with a specific dialect or accent. mark Twain used it a lot in dialogue. >_< hopefully you get what i mean.

Vernacular, maybe?

[Aleril]

The Giver was pretty messed up for a book that is focused towards pre-teens.

[parkaboy]

i mean messed up as in...

the butcher boy was about a murdering teenager who had a "special relationship" with a catholic priest. he dressed up as a little girl for him. and then killed his best friend. among other things.

vurt and pollen are about mind altering substances in a post catastrophy world where male undead are considered zombies and dangerous whereas female undead are clairvoyent, cross species breeds have evolved to varying degrees (like dog people) and mix very freely with humans. Pollen takes it a step further and addresses what happens with one of the characters from the altered-mind state breaks into the real world and tries to make it his own through mass paranoia resulting in graphic and unorthodox (but well written) violence

i mean THAT kind of fucked up.

by the standards i've been getting Brave New World is the end all of mind fucks. I mean, its pretty O_o when you think about it, but its still not quite on the level i meant. i mean things that make you think "... that is just WRONG."

[Aleril]

by the standards i've been getting Brave New World is the end all of mind fucks. I mean, its pretty O_o when you think about it, but its still not quite on the level i meant. i mean things that make you think "... that is just WRONG."

Yea, when it got to the little kids having sex, I was like "Um... o....kay?" With a big DO NOT WANT face.

[rxninja]

The Giver was pretty messed up for a book that is focused towards pre-teens.

What the fuck are you smoking, man? Seriously, dude, The Giver is not messed up in any way, shape, or form. It's a work of literature and uses artful literary notions to convey basic human sensation in a creative, thought-provoking manner. Have you read any fucked up novels?


Palahniuk never really disturbed me until "Haunted." I don't remember which stories, but that book was..um...yeah. I know it's over the top and it feels almost forced, but whatever. All of his writing is based off of real world experiences and slightly warped versions thereof, so the level of forced disturbing-ness is acceptable.

Requiem for a Dream is a little crazy because of the language. There's really no punctuation, so thoughts, dialogue, and description blend together in one insane, drugged-out trip. I never made it too far, actually, because of the language useage. By a similar note, A Clockwork Orange.

Blindness, by Jose Saramago, is pretty messed up. It's about an epidemic outbreak of blindness, as though it were a communicable disease, and it follows the first hundred or so victims as they're quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum. Amidst the crowd is one woman who doesn't go blind (essentially the narrator so that the reader has some images to work with). The book gets its level of insanity from the fact that it never uses character names (for instance, there's an eye doctor, but he's always referred to as the eye doctor, the optometrist, etc.) and the type of moral/social breakdown in the prison is just..so..out there. It's a great book, but reading it will probably leave you horribly depressed.

[Jack Saladin]

... Someone posted a link to Guts on these forums once, I implore them to do it again.

Seriously. You cannot fuck with Guts when it comes to disturbing. I cannot emphasise this enough to anyone who hasn't read it.

[bananarchy]

... Someone posted a link to Guts on these forums once, I implore them to do it again.

Seriously. You cannot fuck with Guts when it comes to disturbing. I cannot emphasise this enough to anyone who hasn't read it.

I've heard this before from a couple of sources, but I haven't read it and don't really intend to. Never really gone for the shock value thing.

[Jack Saladin]

It is easily the most disturbing thing I have ever experienced. No image could match it.

[Narsil]

Yeah, that's easily the most disturbing thing I've ever read, but a lot of Haunted is like that. It's not a book I will ever read, touch, or recommend to anyone ever. But I keep it on my shelf, because I would still call it a good book. It's just so painful to read.

However, easily the most disturbing, painful, completely fucked up book I have ever read was Night, by Elie Weisel. What makes it most sickening is the fact that it's true. I think the last line was the most affecting line I've ever read in a book, something to the effect of "I looked in the mirror and there was a look of a corpse in my eyes. It hasn't left me.".

I read this book in one sitting, and that was a very bad day. The feeling after finishing it wasn't a feeling of wanting to cry, or anger, or rage, or hatred, all those could by considered emotional shades of gray, whereas this was pure, empty black.

[Malice]

American Psycho is pretty fucked up, and holds my personal award for the craziest act of sex-violence.

Spoiler:

At one point in the novel Bateman takes a woman's severed head, puts his erect cock in her mouth, and walks around with it hanging like that.

But then, most of Ellis is like that (that is, fucked up).

Palahniuk's good. Blindness is good. James Ellroy gets pretty fucked up (in "LA Confidential", one of the characters ends up finding out that the Walt Disney stand-in is some kind of horrific necrophiliac child-killer).

Even Stephen King has had some crazy stories. Gerald's Game comes to mind, as does the short story in which the guy stuck on a desert island succumbs to autocannibalism, coke addiction, and insanity all at the same time ("lady fingers they taste like lady fingers").

Clive Barker gets really, really weird sometimes. There was the one where a pig at a boy's reformatory was possessed by the ghost of a dead boy and ended up being worshipped by the other boys, who fed the pig kids from time to time. Or the one where a town full of people stood on each other to create two giant people-shaped masses of people, which then fought, killing hundreds of them.

This is pretty fun.

[cephalopod9]

The Giver was pretty messed up for a book that is focused towards pre-teens.

What the fuck are you smoking, man? Seriously, dude, The Giver is not messed up in any way, shape, or form. It's a work of literature and uses artful literary notions to convey basic human sensation in a creative, thought-provoking manner. Have you read any fucked up novels?

Because conditioning people into conformity to the point where they can't see color or feel aroused, and euthanizing the elderly, twins, and such isn't at all unsettling? It isn't grusome or outrageous, but I personally can't say I'm much at ease with a future where in all forms of choice have been eliminated.

Guts was icky, but I can't say it really bothered me that much. I've also been wondering

Spoiler:

Is it actually possible to get impregnated from pool water? I would think the chlorine and the quantity of water would put the odds at pretty slim. I'm not a doctor tho'.

.
I don't see how being literature prevents something from being messed up or disturbing.
Brave New World is literature and pretty edgy. Also kind of similar to The Giver, although more extreme. One the things I find interesting about it is that it's described as satire.

[Elenion]

Abo Rasul (real name: Mathias Faldbakken) - "The Cocka Hola Company", and "Mach und Rebel". Dunno if these two are translated to any other languages than Norwegian but I found them cool but a tad disturbing.. The first wasn't so bad but the latter one included some nasty stuff like sex with youngsters (12 years old), rape, nazism, drugs, porn-making etc.

Oh, and American Psyko.

[tiny]

'Yin' by Akif Pirincci. It's a post apocalyptic novel of epic page count. Pirincci delights in describing how all male humans die because they shit and barf their guts out. After that some pretty deranged women fight for the power over a sperm bank.
Every one of the five women in the center of the story are described very closely, their whole lifes before the crisis, and none of them is really likeable, exept, perhaps, the whore (forgot her name). And the one you could have had some pity with (abducted, chained in a cellar, raped, abused, disfigured until Piggy pukes his life out), is so utterly fucked up that you want to shoot her in the head while going 'Ewwwwwww!'.
It was depressing and disgusting, but entertaining at the same time, and for being a man, Pirincci got close to the female mind.

[Gunfingers]

Can i nominate the Old Testament?

24 All the men who went out of the city gate agreed with Hamor and his son Shechem, and every male in the city was circumcised.

25 Three days later, while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob's sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. 26 They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem's house and left. 27

An israelite girl is raped, and the rapist wants to marry her, and to have all the israelites intermarry with his people. So Levi and Simeon lie and tell him that they're okay with this if all their people are circumsised. Then, Levi and Simeon go in to the town while all the men are sore from their circumsision and kill them.

Or

24 When Saul's servants told him what David had said, 25 Saul replied, "Say to David, 'The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.' " Saul's plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.

26 When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king's son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, 27 David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented the full number to the king so that he might become the king's son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.

A 100 foreskin dowry? WTF? And he goes above and beyond.

[Narsil]

Abo Rasul (real name: Mathias Faldbakken) - "The Cocka Hola Company", and "Mach und Rebel". Dunno if these two are translated to any other languages than Norwegian but I found them cool but a tad disturbing.. The first wasn't so bad but the latter one included some nasty stuff like sex with youngsters (12 years old), rape, nazism, drugs, porn-making etc.

Gravity's Rainbow has got that beat. The bits of it I understood were really fucked up. There are parts where:
-A man swims through a toilet to reclaim his mouth harp, while recognizing several different varieties of fecal matter
-A different man rapes several young girls because they are impostors of his daughter. He does it to get back at people he doesn't know can can't really prove are screwing with him.
-A man in a pig suit is captured and has his testicles removed due to a case of mistaken identity.
-A 12 year old girl being spanked forcibly in the dining room of a cruise liner makes the entire huge group of people simultaneously begin one massive orgy.
-The same 12 year old girl was conceived on a set for hardcore BDSM porn.

[stockpot]

I read Psychoshop as an eleven or twelve year old and it confused me, horrified me, and turned me off science fiction for a good long while. I'm sure it's a fine, normal-ish book for any internet-using adult, but as a little kid, I was all .

[Angelene]

Yeah, that's easily the most disturbing thing I've ever read, but a lot of Haunted is like that. It's not a book I will ever read, touch, or recommend to anyone ever. But I keep it on my shelf, because I would still call it a good book. It's just so painful to read.

However, easily the most disturbing, painful, completely fucked up book I have ever read was Night, by Elie Weisel. What makes it most sickening is the fact that it's true. I think the last line was the most affecting line I've ever read in a book, something to the effect of "I looked in the mirror and there was a look of a corpse in my eyes. It hasn't left me.".

I read this book in one sitting, and that was a very bad day. The feeling after finishing it wasn't a feeling of wanting to cry, or anger, or rage, or hatred, all those could by considered emotional shades of gray, whereas this was pure, empty black.

Oh it was utterly heartbreaking...and the ending you're looking for is
"I wanted to see myself in the mirror ... I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me"

[Matthias]

Dude, Vurt has a sequel? Righteous; thanks for the info! I read that book several years ago, and found it rather delicious. Strange, mind you, very strange, but delicious.

For informing me about Pollen, you get 1 Robot Point.

[aion7]

In 1984 the main character, Winston Smith, describes his original feelings to his love. He says something along the lines of "I wanted to rape you and smash your head in with a brick". That is fairly disturbing. The ending was also extremely disturbing. There was quite a bit of torture, of the mind and body, described.

[Savoy_Truffle]

Hmm... I had issues with "The Bell Jar" -- we read it in our Honors English class, and I couldn't help but shudder at the thought that I've reached my peak early and am destined to horrible depression and possible suicide.

[My Uncivilized God]

Guts

Warning: Graphic depictions of everything. I wouldn't advise reading it if you're under the age of twenty-one or have a weak stomach.

Spoiler:

His sister gets pregnent

[Eccentricist]

Exquisite Skin by Poppy Z. Brite. It's partially an AIDs and heroin story, partially a romance between two necrophiliacs. It features graphic descriptions of:

Spoiler:

• Various fluids, some of which used to be solids
• Cooking and eating human flesh and organs
• Corpses at various levels of decomposition and deconstruction
• Many many variations on sex with corpses
• Unorthodox and painful spots to have injections

All in all, pretty disturbing.

[nonorganon]

CTRL+F find:william s. burroughs Phrase not found
CTRL+F find:anthony burgess Phrase not found
CTRL+F find:jg ballard Phrase not found
CTRL+F find:henry miller Phrase not found
CTRL+F find:harlan ellison Phrase not found
CTRL+F find:robert anton wilson Phrase not found

It's like you guys aren't even trying, at least someone mentioned Pynchon.

[parkaboy]

Exquisite Skin by Poppy Z. Brite. It's partially an AIDs and heroin story, partially a romance between two necrophiliacs. It features graphic descriptions of:

Spoiler:

• Various fluids, some of which used to be solids
• Cooking and eating human flesh and organs
• Corpses at various levels of decomposition and deconstruction
• Many many variations on sex with corpses
• Unorthodox and painful spots to have injections

All in all, pretty disturbing.

D=

...no wait...

=D


*scurries off to amazon*

[Istrom]

I read Haunted earlier this year, I had just read Fight Club and thought that Palahniuk was a pretty good author.

I read Guts on the way to school on the bus. My friends had no idea why I was sad all day.

[livelyness]

The Rape on Nanking
also The Jungle
turns out truth is grosser than fiction.

[Mother Superior]

Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen

It's a book about "Grampa" and.. ermm... (okay how the fuck do I translate that one?) Grampa and his "kid" who live in the north of sweden and spend their days raping, killing, having sex with each other, beating people up and other such activities (the kid early on shaved grampa's balls in the bath).
There's a particular passage where Grampa and the "kid" are raping a pregnant woman who begs for them to spare her baby. Grampa responds by promising that he'll kill her, gut her, and eat her unborn baby when he's finished just because she asked him. Another where they hide in a bell tower and execute a vacationing family one by one with sniper rifles and later on skin them and save them for dinner. The whole thing is written in a northern dialect and from the kid's perspective and Grampa is described as a sort of mythological hero with a profound hate of women and a love for all things that cause suffering ("Go on, hit me in the head with the ice-pick so I can enjoy myself"). The introduction states the whole book was discovered as scribbled notes found in the pockets of a young child the man writing the introduction brought home, raped, killed, decapitated and distributed fairly among the various grocery stores in the county.

They also play fantasy football and name the entire defensive line after german war criminals.

[parkaboy]

I think MS just won the thread, and i didnt even know it could be won.

[My Uncivilized God]

I read Haunted earlier this year, I had just read Fight Club and thought that Palahniuk was a pretty good author.

I read Guts on the way to school on the bus. My friends had no idea why I was sad all day.

Sad. Your reaction was sadness. Interesting, mine was more of a "I will never go near another fucking

Spoiler:

swimming pool

for the rest of my life.

[SteamPunk]

Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen

It's a book about "Grampa" and.. ermm... (okay how the fuck do I translate that one?) Grampa and his "kid" who live in the north of sweden and spend their days raping, killing, having sex with each other, beating people up and other such activities (the kid early on shaved grampa's balls in the bath).
There's a particular passage where Grampa and the "kid" are raping a pregnant woman who begs for them to spare her baby. Grampa responds by promising that he'll kill her, gut her, and eat her unborn baby when he's finished just because she asked him. Another where they hide in a bell tower and execute a vacationing family one by one with sniper rifles and later on skin them and save them for dinner. The whole thing is written in a northern dialect and from the kid's perspective and Grampa is described as a sort of mythological hero with a profound hate of women and a love for all things that cause suffering ("Go on, hit me in the head with the ice-pick so I can enjoy myself"). The introduction states the whole book was discovered as scribbled notes found in the pockets of a young child the man writing the introduction brought home, raped, killed, decapitated and distributed fairly among the various grocery stores in the county.

They also play fantasy football and name the entire defensive line after german war criminals.

Um... Forgive me for being naive, and for possibly having no appreciation of art or free speech or whatever the fuck, but... why would someone write that? A whole book of that? Really? When they could have better spent their time on a jigsaw puzzle, or possibly knitting? I just don't understand some works.

[Mother Superior]

Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen

It's a book about "Grampa" and.. ermm... (okay how the fuck do I translate that one?) Grampa and his "kid" who live in the north of sweden and spend their days raping, killing, having sex with each other, beating people up and other such activities (the kid early on shaved grampa's balls in the bath).
There's a particular passage where Grampa and the "kid" are raping a pregnant woman who begs for them to spare her baby. Grampa responds by promising that he'll kill her, gut her, and eat her unborn baby when he's finished just because she asked him. Another where they hide in a bell tower and execute a vacationing family one by one with sniper rifles and later on skin them and save them for dinner. The whole thing is written in a northern dialect and from the kid's perspective and Grampa is described as a sort of mythological hero with a profound hate of women and a love for all things that cause suffering ("Go on, hit me in the head with the ice-pick so I can enjoy myself"). The introduction states the whole book was discovered as scribbled notes found in the pockets of a young child the man writing the introduction brought home, raped, killed, decapitated and distributed fairly among the various grocery stores in the county.

They also play fantasy football and name the entire defensive line after german war criminals.

Um... Forgive me for being naive, and for possibly having no appreciation of art or free speech or whatever the fuck, but... why would someone write that? A whole book of that? Really? When they could have better spent their time on a jigsaw puzzle, or possibly knitting? I just don't understand some works.

Why? It's awesome! I mean, aside all the bizarre, crazy and evil shit inside it it's actually very well written (it's all written in a very, very thick swedish northern accent)

[Upsilon]

I read Guts... And *wasn't* sick or traumatized. Does that make me fucked up?

[pieaholicx]

I read Guts... And *wasn't* sick or traumatized. Does that make me fucked up?

Very much so.

I'm the kind of guy that laughs at the gore in all those gorefest films, and I was disturbed by it. When I did get the book I skipped over it. Once is more than enough for me.

Yeah, I have to toss in another vote for Haunted. The book (to the point I've gotten to) is quite messed up.

[Narsil]

Which part is that?