Disturbing Books

[dnt]

I stayed up till an ungodly hour last night reading Tess Gerritsen'sVanish. It will make you very, very afraid of the Patriot Act and Halliburton. You know, if you weren't already.

[Daisy Pusher]

I hated hated hated American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Generally, I guess I think of BEE as smug, pretentious, and wildly overrated.

I was somewhat sickly fascinated by the freak-show nature of de Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir, until they got to the part with whatshernames's mother near the end. if you've read the book, you know what I mean; if you haven't, don't read it. Ewww.

I remember being an impressionable 12-year old when I first read Helter-Skelter. I was convinced that summer that our house was going to be creepy-crawled, and then when my family visited L.A. later that year, I begged my stepfather to drive me past all the murder scenes and various points of interest relating to the Manson Family. He and my mother were a bit disturbed, to say the least.

[emersende]

I'm a big fan of George Orwell- not 1984 or Animal Farm, but his earlier books and essays- so this past week The Road to Wigan Pier finally arrived and I got to read about the miners and unemployed working-class in Depression-era northern England. I know that Orwell is dismal, but good grief, he made it sound like World War II was a good thing for England because it finally gave people something to do. That's pretty awful. I love his books for a lot of reasons, but sometimes they get very upsetting as well.

[Deleted]

Okay, you asked for it.

It was nonfiction, which made it worse. In The Bravest Battle: The 28 Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the author talks about the horrendous conditions in the ghetto, including the lack of food. The rampant malnutrition was especially hard on children and new mothers, who would lose their milk and thus couldn't feed their babies. He talked about one woman whose baby starved to death.

The mother was starving, too.

The family had no meat.

They couldn't have a burial for the body.

So....

[Deleted]

I'm currently rereading a disturbing book, Perfume by Patrick Suskind. It's just full of disgusting tidbits and the main character (can't call him a protagonist!) is a total sociopath/evil genius. He also has, of all things, the greatest sense of smell in the world. Fascinating details about eighteenth century France with all the grit and filth left in.
Stephen King seems unable to write a book without including at least one scene of animal torture, for which I will never, ever forgive him. It's a despicable, utterly gratuitous way to give readers a shock.

[biondetta]

I read Perfume a number of years ago and remember being fascinated and disturbed all at once. It's an interesting book, but not one I necessarily want to re-read.

[captain]

I thought that Perfume was a good book. Quite different from everything else that I've read, which I think was why I liked it.

Perhaps I've become desensitized to my reading material, or I just speed read through the sketchy parts so I don't have time to dwell upon/picture them.

One book that did cause me to lose sleep was Insomnia by Stephen King. The thought of little evil men running around with scissors killing people didn't sit well in my overactive imagination.

[hamhock]

"Zombie" by Joyce Carol Oates. A story about a serial killer who wants to capture and lobotomize someone to be his slave, told from the serial killer's point of view. Very creepy, like you are trapped in his head.

[Deleted]

I read a book by Joyce Carol Oates when I was around 8. About a family that gets murdered by the father, except for one kid (who escaped only because he stayed late after school and is the one who walks into the house to see the aftermath of all the carngage/dead bodies of his family) who is then adopted by a family with major obesity problems and at some point he is put in a mental institution or tries to commit suicide or something, marries happily but ruins it by having an affair, then to cap it all off, has a grown daughter who gets all messed up with drugs/free love in the 1960's.
I didn't have a clue about what was happening most of the time, but the fact I remember the plot so well that I'm now able to piece all the story parts together, shows how freaky I thought it was then. Ever since I came across a copy of the book as an adult, and realized who the author was, I have absolutely no desire to pick up anything by her, no matter how good the book reviews get.

[Deleted]

stargirl Joyce Carol Oates has some good books but I've read a really disturbing one by her too---She apparently can get a little freaky. The book I read involved a girl who's parents died so she went off into an orphanage or something and later joined some sort of satanic gang and it was her job to lure girls into this van where they were then taken away to some farm and raped repeatedly. She ended up warning two girls when she developed a conscience and then the gang threw her in the basement where they tortured her and starved her. It was way weird.