Disturbing books.

[Behemoth]

I tend to divide between "good weird" and "bad weird" when it comes to my books:

Good Weird: anything by Haruki Murakami, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y.

Bad Weird: anything by Joyce (!) sorry Joyce fans, and I also had real trouble with Toni Morrison's Beloved, just couldn't work it out at all...

[Wilde woman]

Very interesting topic.

Cosmicomiche by Italo Calvino. It was the first real piece of literature I read in Italian, which made it even weirder.

"The Hunger Artist" by Kafka. I read it for class and was left thinking, damn - that was WEIRD. To me, it was even more bizarre than Metamorphosis.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H.P. Lovecraft. Scared me witless.


Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel.

I loved this book! The magical realism was crafted really well, so I didn't find too ludicrous.

[amb]

At page 49 right now, another vote for Finnegans Wake.

Then The Troika by Stepan Chapman, and Erickson's Days Between Stations.

[bounty]

i say ditto on the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. also, the first couple of books in the cs lewis space trilogy (have not read the third), out of the silent planet, and perelandra, were sorta "out there."

[windowfriend]

Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

I felt like squirming the whole time I was reading it. Interesting...but weird.

[weltanschauung]

gravity rainbow:

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master,
but you can tickle his creatures.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, ****ing idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

\m/

[annatak]

I'd also say Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It was a fascinating read but I can't really explain why. It was fantastical and impossible and engaging.

[the selkie]

The Blood Of Angels by Stephen Gregory is the strangest book I have ever read. It starts off extremely slow. However, if you can get past the first 120 pages you will not want to stop reading it until the end.
I won't tell you what happens in it in case you decide to read it. But it just begins as the rather normal man's obsession with a woman. From there it gets weird, & then just more & more strange until the end of the book. By then you are thinking "What the [beep]???"

[thomas212]

I find it terrible when a gifted author put you in the shoes of a derange mind,like say Nabokov with Lolita or more recently read Andrei Makine The crime of Olga arbelina.You actualy understand and feel the processe going through,and it is not something agreable.
On another scale any of Hubert Selby jr book are very unsettling,and yes,weirds.The willow tre,the demon,are some reads!
Also Rainer Maria Rilke-the notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge was a very strange book and one that i could not grasp enterly.It clearly made me feel my limitation.I shall go back to it and maybe another read would help get more out of it.

[PoeticPassions]

I find it terrible when a gifted author put you in the shoes of a derange mind,like say Nabokov with Lolita or more recently read Andrei Makine The crime of Olga arbelina.You actualy understand and feel the processe going through,and it is not something agreable.


I agree. You find yourself identifying, or even empathizing with the deranged minds. After reading Lolita I thought it was such a powerful love story. Yet if I heard about some pedophile who was preying on a 12 year old girl, I would be prone to find it disgusting and unacceptable... usually such books cast me into a dejected mood, one in which I start absorbing or picking up certain emotions, characteristics, or moods of the main character...

[Iago]

Cohen's Beautiful Losers, considered the gem of Canadian Literature, was next to impossible to read. Postmodernism has its limits...:D

[Tallgren]

The Castle by Kafka is certainly up there... Strange, but also difficult and b-o-r-i-n-g. Nobody has mentioned Amerika, I wonder if that's because nobody has read it or because it's more accessible than other works by Kafka?

And Steppenwolf, loved the beginning but the rest is certainly 'out there'.

[Gustavo L.]

I think it was the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini. It’s a sort of illustrated survey on a fictitious surrealistic world, and it is written in an invented language which hasn’t been deciphered yet (maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, but who knows?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

[grotto]

Also Rainer Maria Rilke-the notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge was a very strange book and one that i could not grasp enterly.It clearly made me feel my limitation.I shall go back to it and maybe another read would help get more out of it.

I ordered this book; it arrived last week, now I’m looking forward to it a wee bit more. I will have to pay a bit more attention, thanks for the heads up.

For me, Kafka is weird. The Metamorphosis and The Trial, I just don’t seem to grasp him at all. I read him, and wonder, why? I don’t think of him as so much a genius as I do insane.

[thomas212]

I ordered this book; it arrived last week, now I’m looking forward to it a wee bit more. I will have to pay a bit more attention, thanks for the heads up.

Good luck.



For me, Kafka is weird. The Metamorphosis and The Trial, I just don’t seem to grasp him at all. I read him, and wonder, why? I don’t think of him as so much a genius as I do insane.

This is not antinomic.
Lots of genius were a bit insane and some of the mads have touch of genius.

[Hurricane]

The Metamorphosis, Young Goodman Brown or Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. All of those were just...weird.

[Carrolb2]

Naked Lunch

[BienvenuJDC]

I'd have to say that Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland...

[Jordon]

Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus! Trilogy".

Those books make everything listed so far read as linear as "See Spot Run" ;)

[Apocrypha75]

Naked Lunch - William Burroughs; enough said.

[onioneater]

I agree about Kafka...just bizarre stuff.

[Mr Endon]

[The weird books you've been mentioning that I've read I love them all. What does that tell about me, I wonder? And though I've never read Finnegan's Wake I'm sure it's the weirdest ever]

Good weird: anything by Daniil Kharms / Kafka / Ernst Jandl
Bad weird: is there such thing?
Don't-know-what-to-make-of-it weird: anything by Gertrude Stein

[Reader90]

Years ago, I read this book called "How to Disapear Completely and Never Be Found" by Doug Richmond. It was really strange, but it still kept my attention. It was about this girl and her friend and a rat-man who writes comic books.

"Slaughterhouse-five" by Kurt Vonnegut was also really wierd, but also really good. I love the pictures drawn throughout.

[woof]

Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille
I read it a while ago so my memory is a little hazy, but essentially it is about these two teenagers who have very strange sex, involving eggs and milk and urine. Everyone is insane. After some girl kills herself they go to Spain. More weird sex (this time with a bull's testicles). They rape a priest and pluck out his eye. The end.

[dnceive]

(Has this not been mentioned yet?)

Naked Lunch - William Burroughs (actually - any of his cut-ups). Not particularly easy or conventional reading even for "hands-down bizarre", but I found it worthwile. It's both hilarious and repulsive.

Yeah , I'd go for the so-called Nova trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.
Burroughs had fully developed his cutting-up and folding-in techniques by then, to which Naked Lunch stands as a precursor. And on that note, Brion Gysin's The Process. Oh, and Der Prozess (The Trial) by Kafka. On a roll... ;)

[March Hare]

Someone mentioned Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman. His At Swim Two Birds is the strangest thing I've read. And it's hilarious. But it helps if you drink Guinness while you read. Borges is bizarre in a magical way. Pirandello's Six Characters... is in the same vein as At Swim To Birds. Crying of Lot 49 was nicely weird, also.

[Eryk]

The short stories of R. A. Lafferty. (http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/RAL/accolades.html)

[joao_oliveira]

The most bizarre book ever has to be "Naked Lunch". Then, Jose Saramago's Blindness and everything by Haruki Murakami are also quite bizarre/disturbing

[Tupelo]

The Bridge
Walking on Glass

both by Iain Banks.

Fabulous, but very trippy

[lupe]

Tupelo, I hope you have read The Wasp Factory by the same author. It's brilliant. I mentionned it on the same thread earlier this year.

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=664761#post664761

[Tupelo]

Tupelo, I hope you have read The Wasp Factory by the same author. It's brilliant. I mentionned it on the same thread earlier this year.

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=664761#post664761

Of course!

I loved The Wasp Factory. Also Dead Air and Espedair Street, although it's a good while since I've read any of them. I may give them another look.

[billl]

The title says it all, I want to be disturbed, affected and mezmerized by something mind-bendingly insane, evil, violent, bloody and twisted...something stylishly done and intelligently assembled.

Suggestions?

Well, it's a 'low-budgety' translation of a Japanese pulp novel that became a famous movie--so the prose is fine, but just basically functional (fast-moving and intelligently assembled plot, though). HOWEVER, on every other criteria, Battle Royale by Koushun Takami fits the bill perfectly.

[Xylophanous]

Probably the weirdest - and also the bleakest - fiction I have read is Jonathan Bowden's disorientating novel Kratos. The latter deals with insanity from a Nietzschean perspective.

http://www.jonathanbowden.co.uk/images/thumb_kts.jpg

And at the very high end of the scale, particularly with regard to literary skill, is Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. The novel reads like a completely misanthropic Hermann Meville, but what makes the it unusual is its very multilayered construction and the sheer baroqueness and density of the prose. Really extraordinary.

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172583713m/193408.jpg

[JuniperWoolf]

I'm reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest next. I've read the first chapter. Insane asylum in the early days when "professionals" got it all wrong. Seems pretty disturbing so far, they over-shocked this one guy and now he's a vegetable.

I've read Kafka's Metamorphasis. It was obviously notoriously pretty bizzare. VERY open to interpretation.

[lupe]

Probably the weirdest - and also the bleakest - fiction I have read is Jonathan Bowden's disorientating novel Kratos. The latter deals with insanity from a Nietzschean perspective.

http://www.jonathanbowden.co.uk/images/thumb_kts.jpg

And at the very high end of the scale, particularly with regard to literary skill, is Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. The novel reads like a completely misanthropic Hermann Meville, but what makes the it unusual is its very multilayered construction and the sheer baroqueness and density of the prose. Really extraordinary.

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172583713m/193408.jpg

Sounds very interesting. I added these two on my list. Thanks Xylophanous!:thumbs_up

[Zee.]

Odd request but i'm looking for some "disturbing" novels. Set in a time no earlier than the 20th century.

Throwing a few titles out there to give you an idea of what i'm interested in:
In Cold Blood, A Clockwork Orange, American Psycho etc

[Scheherazade]

This has been discussed here at length - if you would like to have a look:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18742&highlight=wasp

[Zee.]

Oh, perfect. Thanks. :)

[The Comedian]

If you're willing to give comics/graphic novels a shot, try Preacher by Ennis/Dillion. It's certainly literary -- compelling characters, plot development, thematic. It's also highly disturbing and visual.

I recommend trying the trade paperbacks vols 1-3 to give the series a fair go. But I'll wager that if you like Clockwork Orange, you'll enjoy this comics masterpiece.

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

I would say the famous As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner or Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

[Phangirl7]

I would say The Giver by Lois Lowry. We had to read it in class when I was in 7th grade and something about it was very disturbing to me, (although I can't remember what it was.) I'll have to read it again and see if my attitude toward it has changed any.
Also the "Child called It" books scared me, too, and I was past 7th grade when I read those.
P.G.7.

[blp]

A Personal Matter and The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe. The latter has a scene in it that literally nearly made me vomit on the train to work one morning. I was standing up at the time; my legs buckled and I broke into a cold sweat. But the former is, by a few whiskers, the better book and also pretty strong medicine.

[stlukesguild]

Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum
Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf
Mikhail Bulgakov- The Master and Margarita
Franz Kafaka- The Trial, The Castle
Bataille- The Story of the Eye
Andre Breton- Nadja
Georges Perec- A Void
Alain Robbe-Grillet- The Erasers
Julio Cortazar- Hopscotch
Mario Vargas Llosa- In Praise of the Stepmother
Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian, Suttree, Child of God
Camus- The Stranger
John Fowles- The Collector
Nabokov- Lolita
Robert Coover- Spanking the Maid
Celine- Death on the Installment Plan

Just a few suggestions.:)

[blp]

Hmmm... Master and Margarita, stlukesguild? It's unusual, but disturbing? I second Story of the Eye, though. In fact, it should be number one with a bullet in any disturbing books list.

And how could I have missed another chance to plug Blood and Guts in Highschool and Great Expectations by Kathy Acker?

[DisPater]

Under the Skin by Michael Faber
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

[grapes of wrath]

never read a more disturbing book than Jonathan Littel "Le benevole", "The kindly ones"

[IJustMadeThatUp]

I second The Collector by John Fowles

[My name is red]

Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet
The Anonymous Ogres by Pascal Bruckner

[Zee.]

I googled Story of the Eye ( WOW - sounds so incredibly sick )
and The Collector. The Collector seems to be the kind of book I was hoping to read. As sex, gore etc - i don't find disturbing, just blegh, gross.

[Zee.]

never read a more disturbing book than Jonathan Littel "Le benevole", "The kindly ones"


Is there an english translation?

[King Mob]

I second Naked Lunch.
God I still can't take out of my mind some of its sickest images.

And as for 120 Days of Sodomy I haven't read it but i'd like to. Thing is I still can't gather enough strength to see Pasolini's film version (i've had it for months), I don't know when I will gather the willpower to read it.

One of the most disturbing things I read is Grant Morrison's short story The Braille Encyclopoedia. Yeah, I know, Morrison's comics Invisibles and The Filth are quite disturbing, but nothing comes close in his work to that little prose story.

[ImaginaryFriend]

1984
A Clockwork Orange
Lolita
The Handmaids tale
Parts of "Let the right one in" (but i still loved it)
All of these disturbed me a little

[eyemaker]

The Handmaids tale


Quite intriguing...I'll be reading this next moth!:)

[Janine]

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy to me was very disturbing, especially one very key scene.

[Barbarous]

Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum
Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf
Mikhail Bulgakov- The Master and Margarita
Franz Kafaka- The Trial, The Castle
Bataille- The Story of the Eye
Andre Breton- Nadja
Georges Perec- A Void
Alain Robbe-Grillet- The Erasers
Julio Cortazar- Hopscotch
Mario Vargas Llosa- In Praise of the Stepmother
Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian, Suttree, Child of God
Camus- The Stranger
John Fowles- The Collector
Nabokov- Lolita
Robert Coover- Spanking the Maid
Celine- Death on the Installment Plan

Just a few suggestions.:)


Hmmm... Master and Margarita, stlukesguild? It's unusual, but disturbing?

I don't see it either....But The Tin Drum is an excellent choice.

[higley]

Hmmm... Master and Margarita, stlukesguild? It's unusual, but disturbing? I second Story of the Eye, though. In fact, it should be number one with a bullet in any disturbing books list.

The Master and Margarita is one of my favorite books. I never found it creepy, but rather surreal, like a Dali painting.

[grapes of wrath]

Is there an english translation?

"The Kindly" ones i believe is the title in English, The author, Jonathan Littel, writes both in French and English. it is the story od the Holocaust seen from the point of view of a gay nazi.

[PoeknowsProse]

Not sure if it has been mentioned, but Child of God by Cormac McCarthy was very disturbing.

Set in mountainous Sevier County, Tennessee, Child of God tells the story of Lester Ballard, a dispossessed, violent man whom the narrator describes as "a child of God much like yourself perhaps." Ballard's life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order. Successively deprived of parents and homes and with few other ties, Ballard descends literally and figuratively to the level of a cave dweller as he falls deeper into crime and degradation.

[libernaut]

william s burroughs, nuff said

[King Mob]

Ballard's Crash, God i forgot CRASH!!!

excellent novel

And Heinrich Hoffmann's Shockheaded Peter. Those poems were meant for kids, can you believe that?

[Silas Thorne]

R. Scott Bakker's 'Prince of Nothing' series

[iamnobody]

Pretty much anything by Cormac McCarthy

[ladderandbucket]

The short stories of Paul Bowles

[Patrick_Bateman]

American Psycho

[zoolane]

'Apt Pupil' Stephen King Short Story I have readed it twice so far I quite actual enjoy reading. I found fascinating now King does it with such believable way and language is great.

[Patrick_Bateman]

Anyone seen the 1975 film based on The 120 days of Sodom?

......yeah.

Add Torture Garden and The Cannibal Within to the list.

[OrphanPip]

Anyone seen the 1975 film based on The 120 days of Sodom?

......yeah.


Ya, not that good.

[B. Laumness]

The most disturbing, violent, pornographic book I have ever read (not entirely, I couldn't) is probably not The 120 Days of Sodom, nor The Story of the Eye, nor American Psycho, but Hogg by Samuel Delany.

[hazelk]

My latest disturbing book is "Down by the River" by Edna O'Brien, it deals with incest and abortion.

[Rores28]

Ya, not that good.

The eating of the food with nail disturbed me more than anything..

[Mr.lucifer]

For some reason, people praise that movie as great art.

[OrphanPip]

The same director made an X-rated adaptation of some of the Canterbury Tales, but I haven't been able to get a hold of it.

It's certainly part of the porno-chic movement of the 70s, but it's not the best out of that period. I think the French film, Le Bete/The Beast, is a bit better, playing on themes of incest, bestiality, and human animalistic sexuality, without all of the sadism.

Edit: http://www.dvdtown.com/review/beast-the/dvd/2656

[Mr.lucifer]

None of the works mentioned here are nowhere as disturbing as the things I've read. Even the story of the eye pales to the things I've seen.

[Patrick_Bateman]

None of the works mentioned here are nowhere as disturbing as the things I've read. Even the story of the eye pales to the things I've seen.

Give us some titles then slick.

[Mr.lucifer]

Give us some titles then slick.
Shinji's Nightmare Cataclysm
Boys will be boys
Chibi usa's 7th birthday
The works of a chap by the name of comicsnix
If I was your nazi
Kanashii no Imi(te story is actually written in english)
Rectified Anonymity

You can find all those on the internet for free. They're all written on the internet in fact. Just look them up. All of them are disturbing and horribly written. Some of them involve child rape descrobed on horrible written graphic detail, nearly of them are written rape fetishists(I'm serious, most of them are meant to be erotic), and nearly of them contain disturbing sexual acts meant to erouse but come off as severly depraved. The works by comicsnix are the only ones on that list that were not the author's sexual fantasies and were meant to shock the reader.

[Patrick_Bateman]

If they're horribly written and the authors' are just putting their disgusting thoughts down in words then what is the purpose of reading them?

[Gizlam]

I personally found The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I found the cannibalistic scenes in the novel terrifying especially with the juxtapostioning of the kind humanity which also permeates the piece.

I find novels which dont just go with purely violence but show flickers of humanity or goodness far far far more disturbing as it brings you out of the disgusting level to make it even worse when you get back to it.

[Mr.lucifer]

If they're horribly written and the authors' are just putting their disgusting thoughts down in words then what is the purpose of reading them?

Bile facisination.

[Ghuyuran]

Aliss by Patrick Sénécal is a modern retelling of the story of Alice in Wonderland with Montreal as the setting. A lot of disturbing scenes in there, all either sexual or violent. The girl wants to go on live on her own and she rapidly learns life isn't that pretty.

I do not know if the translation from French is available yet or will.

[MrsWentworth]

Don't know if someone has already mentioned this one, but 'Purfume' is a pretty strange read.

[Transmodernism]

Although it's probably not quite as disturbing as A Clockwork Orange (yikes!) or American Psycho (:eek6:), just for sheer volume of gore Catch 22 by Joseph Heller is, IMVHO, pretty disturbing. Makes Saving Private Ryan seem like Star Wars.

[ponty]

some Irvine Welsh is pretty dark. 'Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs' is a rework on Dorian Gray and 'Maribou Stork Nightmares' and 'the Acid House' contain filth. But the supreme award has to go to Palahniuk's 'Haunted' (cool mash-up of Chaucer and the Lake District druggies), with a nod of best player to Saint Guts Free.

[dfloyd]

a black comedy, but a comedy none the less. Not disturbing to me at all.

[TheChilly]

120 days of sodomy is definatly a messed up book, and yet it's fairly well written (ah, Sade, you crazy Marquis). It gets a bit wordy at times - until you et to the list.

I tried to breeze though "The 120 Days of Sodom" once...

Felt the same way I felt about "Hogg" (by Samuel R. Delany)... severe discomfort and nightmares for days before I could even get to the story. Especially Hogg.

[Aurora]

Irvine Welsh - studied him as part of short Scottish Fiction - VERY weird and disturbing for my taste

'The Acid House' in particular

[missmeadowsweet]

Okay, this book is a children's book, but it's still one of the creepiest books I've ever read (in a good way). It's called The Trouble With Jacob and is about a little boy whose grave was disturbed. His bones were moved and now he appears to these kids saying, "I want my bed, where's my bed?" All he wants is for his bones to be put back in his rightful grave. Seriously, this book made me scared of the dark while I was reading it.

And also, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is frightening in a completely different way, because it's disturbing to think of the possibility of our world becoming like the world Huxley imagined in the book.

[Anaïs]

100% agree with OP re: palahniuk

The road- cormac mccarthy

[Anaïs]

After dark - murakami is also weird as ****

A clockwork orange, although it has been mentioned.

I found 1984 quite disturbing, but mostly because I read it while I was in China last year and well...

[bookowskee]

just for sheer volume of gore Catch 22 by Joseph Heller is, IMVHO, pretty disturbing.

Really? I thought Catch-22 was one of the funniest book I've ever read.

topic:

The Purpose Driven Life by I-don't-give-a-fvck-who-wrote-it. lol, I'm kidding.

Seriously:

The Room by Hubert Selby Jr.

Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh

Disturbing but nevertheless good reads, the both of them.