The Bridge
Walking on Glass
both by Iain Banks.
Fabulous, but very trippy
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The Bridge
Walking on Glass
both by Iain Banks.
Fabulous, but very trippy
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/for...761#post664761
Of course!Quote:
Originally Posted by lupe
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrysanthus
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
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.
Sounds very interesting. I added these two on my list. Thanks Xylophanous!:thumbs_upQuote:
Originally Posted by Xylophanous
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
This has been discussed here at length - if you would like to have a look:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...highlight=wasp
Oh, perfect. Thanks. :)
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.
I would say the famous As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner or Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
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.
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.
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 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?
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
never read a more disturbing book than Jonathan Littel "Le benevole", "The kindly ones"
I second The Collector by John Fowles
Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet
The Anonymous Ogres by Pascal Bruckner
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by grapes of wrath
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
Quite intriguing...I'll be reading this next moth!:)Quote:
Originally Posted by ImaginaryFriend
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy to me was very disturbing, especially one very key scene.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I don't see it either....But The Tin Drum is an excellent choice.Quote:
Originally Posted by blp
The Master and Margarita is one of my favorite books. I never found it creepy, but rather surreal, like a Dali painting.Quote:
Originally Posted by blp
"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.Quote:
Originally Posted by limajean
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
American Psycho
'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.
Anyone seen the 1975 film based on The 120 days of Sodom?
......yeah.
Add Torture Garden and The Cannibal Within to the list.
Ya, not that good.Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick_Bateman
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.