I really wish I could remember the name of it, but it’s about a lawyer who effectively puts the devil on trial, except it’s really messed up in parts. There’s this entire sequence involving a girl, a young child, who over time seduces the main character who describes in great detail the experience of screwing this child, only for it to be revealed that the girl was the devil/a demon of some sort whose sole purpose is to corrupt the main character. The majority of the book was great, but that particular sequence was well into distasteful and disturbing.
I think it was called Son of the Endless Night, but I’m not certain if that’s correct.
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.
“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
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.
Did you cut your d*ck ?
You are not alone in this.
That one is crazy how the main character does shitty things like wiping out civilizations just out of spite, then he impregnates a teenage girl and the baby grows up and is all nice and loving but says he is actually his dad and he/his dad love everyone. So much gaslighting.
I had full access to the internet growing up (the secret was to be awake when other sleep lol) and reading the bible made me feel like I was viewing age inappropriate content then anything else
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.
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.
Hm I wonder how the next scene will go. Gray ash huh? Well I guess I should have seen that coming.
Day of the Oprichnik. I only wanted to read it because it is banned in Russia.
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.
Three words: Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Sybil was a worthy contender too.
1984 is honestly the most terrifying book I’ve read. I read to it see if people were invoking it in good faith (they weren’t) and left with a very real fear that there will always be a more pressing issue to distract us from any real political change, even in cases where most Americans agree with each other.
American Psycho contained scenes so graphic that I’d have to pause and stare out the window briefly before I could go on.
Yeah first time I read a grueling book. Couldn’t believe how much worse literature gore affects me compared to onscreen blood.
I entered this post to say exactly that.
There comes a point in the book when the constant one-upping the last scene just makes me need two or more sessions to get through the chapter. The last “Girls” chapters are specially gruelling.
It was the hamster that finally got me. Was sitting outside at my school’s union, between classes, and just couldn’t believe what I was reading.
Gore
For me it was the scene wher Pat like grabs the vocal cords of one of the women after drilling a hole through the mouth and then rips them out of the mouth.
At first I thought the book was really boring with all of the brands and clothes descriptions that took half of the chapters. After that the senseless killings and brutality got to me in the end.
I had the same experience, why all this stuff about brands and clothes? Then the juxtaposition totally disturbed me. Then I started working with people in the corporate world…
I thought it was like a coping mechanism to make him more adjusted. Sometimes when he doesn’t describe brands or simply there aren’t any designer products, he loses his mind very quickly.
It could also be about corporate behavior but I haven’t had the chance to meet anyone that entrenched.
It is absolutely a coping mechanism for those types in reality. Scary accurate.
Pausing is a regular thing with books for me, disturbing or no
The pause was forced was my point. I couldn’t go on otherwise because I was overwhelmed.
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!
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. ;)
So did they buy it or what
They did not…
Jesus christ ! There’s just some things you don’t talk about in public.
I recently read The Parable of the Sower and it really affected me, both because I felt empathy for the characters and because I saw some uncomfortable parallels in the recent history of our world. I also was disturbed by The Sparrow. Though frankly I wouldn’t recommend it for a lot of reasons. Battle Royale is intensely violent, in a really personal way. For graphic novels, From Hell is a really rough read honestly, but also really interesting
I read Hunter S Thompson’s book about the Hells Angels when i was in high school and i regret it, i also really fucking hate bikers. Just rolling packs of rapists.
I’ve heard of Bikers Against Child Abuse that plays upon the stereotype to guard kids against their abusers and provide a protective presence as the kids testify in court 🤔
Good for them. But i’ve also heard of public relations so i don’t trust these things. Im sure priests also offer support services for victims of child abuse.
Well, there are bikers and then there are bikers.
Also sexual predators are often victims themselves. It is not far fetched that some would try to help people is a similar situation. But it is also not far fetched to think that some become perpetrators of similar actions.
Wish by Peter Goldsworthy. J.J. has always been more at home in Sign language than in spoken English. Recently divorced, he returns to school to teach Sign. His pupils include the foster parents of a beautiful and highly intelligent ape named Eliza.
As a fan of transgressive fiction, I’ve read quite a lot of fucked up books. Here’s what I came up with off the top of my head - sorry, it’s quite a long list!
Some different types of fucked up here (horrible fucked up and fun fucked up):
Cows by Matthew Stoke (not very well written, but very fucked up, a sick classic)
Anything by Carlton Mellick III, but especially Aspeshit, which is like Evil Dead on acid (semi literally). But he’s definitely ‘fun fucked up’ not grotesquely nasty without humour. All Bizarro is fucked up and worth checking out.
Apocalypse Culture I and II are both intentionally fucked up compendiums of short pieces and art that will make you sick and angry, but also make you think about a lot of different things. Feral House have plenty of fucked up books that are worth reading.
Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard - experimental writing unlike most other Ballard books, but significantly more fucked up in parts. All Ballard is great and fucked up at some point; High Rise has one of the best opening paragraphs of any book, ever. Crash is probably second to Atrocity Exhibition in fucked-up-ness.
Marquis de Sade - Justine, 100 Days of Sodom. Juliette: (mentioned elsewhere) horrible imagination-run-wild in the worst way, but aimed at antagonising people against the aristocracy and satirising the extreme cruelty and nastiness of those in power, probably including himself.
UK publisher Creation books (and imprint Attack!) did “anti-books” as they called them - some fucked up stuff of all kinds there: from fun stupidity like Raiders of the Low Forehead to some really horrible stuff by Peter Sotos that was unreadable (even to me).
The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love tells you all you need to know about human beings and a lot you never needed to know (eyeball licking fetishism is a thing, apparently).
Nick Cave’s ‘And The Ass Saw The Angel’ is a wonderful pieces of fucked-up-ness and the reason for my username: a mute hillbilly recounts his sordid, psychotic life while drowning in quicksand, with biblical imagery and references, poetic ‘Deep South’ language, and lots of unpleasantness, especially from his parents. Kind of an ugly sibling to 'The Wasp Factory’s.
Clive Barker’s works can be pretty fucked up - Books of Blood is still his best work, in my opinion.
Supervert’s ‘Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish’ was disappointing, badly written, and fucked up in boring but nasty ways. I’d avoid it, but it’s a long time since I read it, so maybe I forgot a lot about it. I remember being bored and irritated, and little else.
Most Will Self books are pretty to very fucked up, particularly his early stuff.
Harry Crews was a wonderful writer, with some pretty fucked up stuff in Feast of Snakes and A Childhood - The Biography of a Place.
Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and William Burroughs all have lots of great fucked up work.
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is fucked up in terms of layout and typesetting as well as storyline. Some really effective parts, some get a little bogged down in their own cleverness. But very much worth reading. Not fucked up in terms of gore or sex, as far as I remember!
Patrick Suskind’s Perfume is brilliant and fucked up, and possibly the only book that can change your sense of smell.
James Joyce - Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are fucked up in terms of experimental style and language, and are wonderful pieces of writing, despite being notoriously ‘difficult’.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s biographical books are wonderful and fucked up. ‘The Spiritual Journey’ is one of the best still.
That’s enough for now - I’m sure I’m missing a lot!
Firefly by Piers Anthony (the writer of the Xanth fantasy series).
There’s way too much talk of erections around dead bodies, but by far the worst part is the long section with a woman describing in way too much detail how much she enjoyed being raped as a five year old, acting it out and everything. Anthony is a messed up dude.
Was just about to post this. I read it in the 90s, expecting something more along the lines of a scifi Xanth style story. Got a traumatising, f’d up sexual fever dream. To this day some of the shit from that story pops in my head sometimes.
It’s incredibly messed up. I don’t recommend it.
Didn’t read it all but only the opening when I was personally too young. Anyway the book lucky by the author of the lovely bones. I’ve read books with serious content in it like the first broken earth book and deeds of paksenaeian both which have rape/dubious consent but I was more than mature enough to handle that.
Not really quite as bad as the others here, but I read the first two books of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind as a young teen before getting squicked out by it. The female lead almost gets sexually assaulted four times (one of them being when she rides into the middle of a battlefield completely naked for incredibly contrived reasons). The entire first half of the second book is the author’s BDSM fantasy forced into plot relevancy. But perhaps the worst I read was some evil ritual that involved the villain cutting off and eating the genitals of a young boy.
So yeah, I stopped reading it.
I came here to talk about this exact series.
I think I read up to about book 8 and every one had some fucked up rape/bdsm shit.
I read the A Child Called It series which is an autobiography about the abuse David Pelzer suffered at the hands of his mother and his experience with foster care.
Some pretty fucked up shit happened to this man. The fact that he grew up to be a functioning human being let alone put it all behind him is incredible.
