Disturbing Literature

[Dark Muse]

The Beetle sounds intersting. I want to read The Magician. I am a fan of Maugham.

[prendrelemick]

It may be that I've led a sheltered life, but I find books like Tess of the D'urbervilles and Crime and Punishment disturbing. Fictional depravity, goryness or horror doesn't bother me much, but show me unfairness or injustice or grinding, hopeless poverty and it really gets to me. However the characters affected must be well drawn and believable.

[Emil Miller]

The Beetle sounds intersting. I want to read The Magician. I am a fan of Maugham.

I have read it twice even though the supernatural wasn't Maugham's forte. It's based on the life of Aleister Crowley and is a pot boiler way beyond Maugham's normal output. The short stories 'The Taipan' and 'Lord Mountdrago' deal with the unfathomable and are more disturbing to my mind.

[Emil Miller]

I forgot to mention my own novel The Fateful Circle that is currently undergoing a rewrite. Here's a brief description of the story line:

When a hen-pecked civil servant is driven to murder his wife, the normally mild-mannered Michael Butler thinks he has committed the perfect crime but is unable to foresee the astonishing effect the killing will have. Subjected to terrifying dreams and haunted by an unknown woman, he flees abroad, where his re-marriage and the people it brings him into contact with draw him into a series of events that threaten his sanity.
Trapped in a world where time seems to have lost continuity, he can do nothing but play his predestined part in a scenario that will end in his destruction as the story unfolds to its strange but logical conclusion.

[biblophile]

the Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, and there are some very disturbing passages in Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum. The Horla by Guy De Maussupant is a story worthy of Poe.

[Red Terror]

The Prince by Machiavelli is the most disturbing book I have ever read; and I read it 3 or 4 times.

[Red Terror]

Demons has a vicious obscurantism running through it, don't you think???

As a teeager I read Dostoyevsky's The Devils (aka The Possessed or more recently Demons) and I was deeply disturbed by this passage:

“What she means is that, for instance, we know that the superstition about God arose from thunder and lightning,” said the girl student… “It’s well known fact that primitive man, terrified by thunder and lightning, deified the invisible enemy, being aware of his own weakness before iit. But how did the superstition about the family arise?? How did the family itself arise?”

The Devils Part 2 Chapter 7 tr. David Magarshack 1953


At that moment, beyond my window in the seaside resort which was my home town stretched an infinite meaningless space of such immensity there could be no possible value in my life. Any mundane life was irretrievably trivial.

I've just re-read the book and found it curiously profoundly consoling. There is more to life and I can only express that adequately in terms of God and God's gift to us.

"God is necessary to me if only because he is the only being one can love eternally" as the hopeless pseud Verkovensky says on his deathbed.