If there's a thread similar to this, then I apologise.

But yeah; the most disturbing, sickening, horrifying book you've ever read. Gimme!

 

The Uzumaki manga

 

I couldn't really think of one, but Cheddar's post sparked my memory a bit. I guess "It" qualifies the most for me. Though it was more that I found the eponymous creature and the things it did to be disturbing, sickening and horrifying, not so much that I found the book itself to be those things. I was actually very satisfied with it.

 

I second The Shinning. I read it when I probably too young but I couldn't read the last few bits at night. Just too much.

 

Kay, my turn.

Although not too disturbing, Naked Lunch was fucked up.

The Girl Nextdoor by Jack Ketchum was awesomely - excuse the adverb - chilling, too.

I mean, I'm a horror junky, chasing dat feeling, so it might be pretty sick to those who don't usually pay a good ol' visit to horror much...

Currently reading Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison which is a hit, too.

 

To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter by Vladimir Bukovsky about his experiences as Soviet dissident (wikipedia: "Bukovsky was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the Soviet Union. He spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and in psikhushkas, forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals used by the government as special prisons."). Especially as I was reading it over twenty years ago, now it would be probably far less shocking.

At least for me fiction is rarely really disturbing.

 

The most disturbing thing I've read was the novelette Sandkings by George R.R. Martin. To this day I get seriously creeped out as I get close to the end.

Idk if the fact that it was a translation played any part. I still haven't read the original.

 

I rarely find books truly disturbing; whether that says more about me or the books I read is open to debate.

However, my first instinct on finishing American Psycho was to go and rinse myself off in the shower. Not disturbing, in that it didn't really play on my mind, but horrible to read. Similarly, there are a few sequences in Steven Erikson's Dust of Dreams which made me put the book down while I recovered, specifically those sequences dealing with 'hobbling' - a thoroughly repellent custom of one of the 'primitive' races of the Malazan-verse which involves cutting off a woman's feet and then raping her until she's basically a vegetable.

The only book I can think of that's disturbed me though is House of Leaves, which is the greatest mind-fuck I've ever read. It's scary, it gets into your head, and you can't skim through it because then it makes even less sense than it already does (if you haven't read it, do so; it's fantastic).

 

Goosebumps.

 

I fell down into a Junji Ito hole over the course of a few days, reading just about everything of his I could find. It was good times, and Uzumaki was an absolute joy to read. Shame nothing else quite matched up to it.

Also there was some seriously fucked up shit in there.

 

Let the right one in. There's a lot of disturbing and scary shit in it.

 

Hmmm... there are parts of the Horus Heresy series that have disturbing imagery, but the series that leaps to mind as having the most disturbing content has got to be Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. Forget the multiple rapes and sexual assault and all manner of sick twisted shit that happens throughout that series, the worst elements are the lingering details that Goodkind dwells upon in grotesque detail for chapter after chapter.

And that's not even touching the underlying philosophy of those books, which starts okay and then goes off the rails in a BIG way.

 

The John Cleaver Books by Dan Wells, which I quite like. The books are written very much as young adult novels in tone, style, and level of maturity. The caveat is that the teenage protagonist is a sociopath. While he is written as a hero despite his disorder, the actual nature of said disorder is treated with surprising and sometimes disturbing candor. Oftentimes his psychopathy is treated almost as a a superpower, allowing him to understand the killers he must contend with, but then..

Spoiler

he becomes unduly fascinated by the idea that the damage to a corpse he encounters was caused by fecal matter being forced into a stab wound. Or fantasizes about killing his mother. Or sets a cat on fire. Or dreams about torturing a girl he likes in his basement.

The thing is, these really are very juvenile books, they don't read like they were written for adults, right down to the way sex is never mentioned, despite everything else that goes uncensored. I can imagine reading this as a thirteen year old, which would probably be pretty disturbing.

 

Stephen King wise The Stand was fairy nasty in parts I thought, 'Salem's Lot too though in a different way.
Most of Dean Koontz's stuff was really off putting especially The Husband. Aspects of the Blue series by Ken Catran were a bit off in parts, mind you that probably comes with the territory writing about serial killers.
There was another one I read years ago about Tamerlane that went into pretty gory detail about just how many people he was killing. can't remember the author though.

 

Gantz and I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

 

Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt" was particularly disturbing. The idea of being stuck in an endless plane of white nothingness for an eternity with no mental/physical stimulation of any kind is horrible.