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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
Aside from the occasional designed-to-offend ones, probably The Road. Only book I’ve ever read that haunted me
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.
I got offended at the lack of punctuation or anything. Didn’t get far. Fuck you Oprah and fuck your book club.
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
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
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.
The Wasp Factory. I mean the whole book is disturbing but the ending…
