Lightweight. I read it as a pre-teen. (I've been told that this explains a lot...)

Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, particularly the scene near the ending

Spoiler

when they've kidnapped a prepubescent girl, tied her to the bed, doped her up, and are taking turns raping her. Most disturbing to me was how the shit was so fucked up and desensitizing by that point in the narrative that you don't toss the book aside.

For a lot of reasons, I found this story more disturbing than American Psycho by the same author, a story that also probably belongs on the list.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Spoiler

don't fucking go into the cellar.

Pretty much everything by him is disturbing on multiple levels.

Most everything by Margaret Atwood for dystopic fuckery. Oryx and Crake stands out among the most disturbing. She's probably responsible for most of my stories (even the happy ones) ending up dystopic hells-on-earth.

I'll second Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Insane AI tortures the five remaining humans on Earth beyond anything resembling a moral event horizon.

Spoiler

Holy fuck, Ted's fate.

I'm sure I'll think up more, but these stand out.

Edit:

I was with you until "starts okay." I don't think there's anything in any of those books that's philosophically redeeming.

 

Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat and the Tell-Tale Heart.

I haven't quite mustered up the courage to read the rest of his works (beside Sherlock Holmes) after reading those two stories.

 

I'll add my vote to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Some seriously fucked up shit.

Never mind that I'm playing the game based on it in October on stream. I'm a glutton for punishment.

 

The Dice Man by George Cockroft/Luke Rhinehart. The premise is that a psychiatrist one day decides to give up his ego and let the roll of a die decide what he is going to do.

Spoiler

It tells him to rape his colleague/neighbour's wife. He does.

It kinda snowballs from there and gets pretty disturbing in places.

 

He didn't write Holmes

That's actually sorta distressing that you think he did, he wrote Dupin, who predates Holmes by a bit.

Those stories weren't that scary to me even at 11, that's like saying you're disturbed by Wilde's Canterville Ghost

OT: while ASoIaF isn't that disturbing on a whole, there's a certain nauseating impropriety to

Spoiler

Jaime and Cersei fucking in Baelor's Sept, wasn't Tywin's body there?

spoiler for show/people who aren't past SoS

 

Um what?

Conan Doyle, my friend.

Edit: Ninja attack while I watched Taure's "What would you do?" stuff.

 

:3

NEVER SAY THAT WORD AGAIN

OT: does Malazan seriously have that sort of rapey shit? is it ... prevalent or just present in that one aspect of one culture?

 

House of Leaves is pretty disturbing, both for its format and because of the actual content. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is disturbing for the way in which its written.

 

American psycho deals a lot with being rich and having the money to buy shit you don't need.

"I want to play with your blood, you cunt," seems to be the extent of disturbed.

I'm starting to think some asshole thought it was amusing to water down my copy.

That said, Dean Koontz Night Chills was pretty disturbing for me at the age of twelve.

Basically, these men are given a mission to pump chemicals into the town's reservoir and they implement a code phrase to control people.

The part that nailed me?

He raped this woman in front of her kids and instructed the husband and kids to encourage him.

Hmm...

I have to say that there isn't much in the way of disturbing out there, but the few books that are are a treat.

 

Harry Potter. He marries that redhead fangirl.

 

The first law was great for it. It took me along time to notice things were being subverted and becoming fucked up.

 

Made more disturbing by the fact that there was no trio sandwich?

 

Somewhat. It varies depending on the book - it certainly seemed more common later on in the series and in the prequel. Certainly for the most part, it doesn't really feel gratuitious though; there are really only two instances that I can think of that go into any sort of detail.

Spoiler

The 'hobbling' that I mentioned is treated in-universe as the barbaric horror that it is, and is a major contributing factor in that race's decline, in some ways.

So you didn't get the scene where

Spoiler

he nails a woman to the floor, covers her vagina in cheese, pushes a live rat up there and watches it wriggle around for a while before he chainsaws her in half

then?

 

Yeah, sorry about that. I thought he wrote Holmes, because I remember reading Dupin story as well.

Those stories may not be scary to you, but they were pretty damn scary to me...primarily because of my overactive imagination.

That, and I know way too many people with these kind of psychological afflictions to be comfortable.

Note to self: move out of the ghetto.

 

Mhm not really my genre so I have to go back to the classics.. Marquis de Sade and his Juliette/Justine books. They really ruined my sex for a few weeks with their whole sex/power philosophy.

 

Have you read 120 days of Sodom by the same author?

If you haven't, read it!

Read 'I have no mouth and I must scream lastnight. Was good for a good kick-in-the-balls thrill, tbh. I just love those shorts that club you over the head and drag you into-

Speaking of shorts, Chuck Palahniuk's book Haunted is pretty freaky. It's a bunch of loosely connected short stories about these fucked up writers...

People usually have a problem with Chuck Palahniuk - hell, I do, too - but give this a shot...

 

Yeahhh, achluophobia, claustrophobia and agoraphobia.

I didn't realize how much said fears affected me until I read this book.
Got 3/4 the way through and am yet to finish it.

 

I have read it but I found it not that good/extreme compared to the others I mentioned. Everything escalated to fast and with so many PoV it also failed to make me care/identify with the characters (Of course, them not being hot French chicks could also influenced this a bit ).

 

Archipelago Gulag by A.Solzhenitsyn is the most disturbing. Especially when you understand that this is not fiction.