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
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?
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.
Yeah first time I read a grueling book. Couldn't believe how much worse literature gore affects me compared to onscreen blood.
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.
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).
Naked Lunch by Christopher Burroughs
The Trial by Franz Kafka. Anything by Kafka is pretty mental.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
"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.
Reading Spectrum 7th grade math workbook was the first time I considered ending it all
The Area X series (Southern Reach Trilogy) is fucked up!
Ok let me give you a couple reasons if you haven't read it
There's this place, and it seems to be growing that has a weird effect on reality and the longer you stay there the stronger the effect. It centers around a lighthouse in a rural area. The government runs experiments but it's hush hush and nobody knows anything about it. BTW it's getting bigger.
People that leave the area x, might be doppelganger or so changed, it's the same to outside observation.
It's seriously a really good stuff and absolutely fucked up
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.
The Silence Of The Lambs, arguably more disturbing than the film as you know more of what the characters are thinking.
Red Dragon too for the same reason. The way he writes really gets you into the characters mind. I still get chills thinking about the part with the reporter in wheelchair. He describes the victim thought process as he's dropped off outside his office building. Even after all the killer did to him, he starts thinking he'll be set free, and you start to think that too, spoiler
just moments before he is set on fire and rolled down the hill.
Another one that really distributed me was when he describes the killer just watching a family in their house. They are completely unaware that he has been watching them and that they'll be his next victims.
I read that book 25 years ago and I still remember vivid details of it.
On the Beach by Nevil Schute. Read it as a kid and didn't realize what I was getting into. Kept waiting for the ending to have some kind of silver lining. Something. Then the last of humanity fucking dies and the last character commits suicide.
I'm currently rereading A Clockwork Orange and yep, it's pretty fucked up.
Firefly by Piers Anthony (the writer of the Xanth fantasy series).
There's way too much talk of erections around dead bodies, but by far the worst part is the long section with a woman describing in way too much detail how much she enjoyed being raped as a five year old, acting it out and everything. Anthony is a messed up dude.
I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was eleven. Some of the nonsense rhyme still comes back to me when I'm tired - she's a good fisherman, catches hens, puts em inna pens / wire, briar, limber lock, three geese inna flock.
I also read She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb when I was in high school. Both are extremely fucked when it comes to talking about mental health and hospitalizations.
I think it was called "Welcome to Night Vale". After painfully reading page after page of absurd drivel that was probably "written" by a drunk AI, I finally gave up. It really reads like the output of a low-quality Markov chain. My daughter insists it isn't, but then they managed to simulate that very, very well (I have worked with Markov chains before, so I have a bit of experience how that looks like).
It is very rare that I give up on a book, maybe one in several thousands. But this one was a perfect waste of paper and ink, worse than some books we had to read in school, which is probably the harshest criticism I can offer.
I really wish I could remember the name of it, but it's about a lawyer who effectively puts the devil on trial, except it's really messed up in parts. There's this entire sequence involving a girl, a young child, who over time seduces the main character who describes in great detail the experience of screwing this child, only for it to be revealed that the girl was the devil/a demon of some sort whose sole purpose is to corrupt the main character. The majority of the book was great, but that particular sequence was well into distasteful and disturbing.
I think it was called Son of the Endless Night, but I'm not certain if that's correct.
My Advanced English class in High School made me read the stort story Bloodchild.
That was pretty WTF for me at the time.
Don't know if a VN counts as a book, but Song of Saya
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
