Disturbing books.

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.

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Originally Posted by grapes of wrath

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

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Is there an english translation?

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.

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

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Originally Posted by ImaginaryFriend

The Handmaids tale

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

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

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Originally Posted by 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.:)

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Originally Posted by blp

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

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

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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Originally Posted by limajean

Is there an english translation?

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"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.

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.

william s burroughs, nuff said

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?

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

Pretty much anything by Cormac McCarthy

The short stories of Paul Bowles