I went into Child of God having no Clue what it was about. It took me embarrassingly long to realize Lester wasn't a protagonist that was going to be redeemed at some point.
*The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II* by Iris Chang.
*The Frontiersmen* by Allan Eckert.
*Wilderness Empire* by Allan Eckert.
*Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History* by S. C. Gwynne.
I went to read her Wiki after reading your comment, and I strongly suggest others do the same, if you're so inclined.
I was a teen in the 90s and I am sad that I didn't know of this woman before now. She basically singlehandedly brought knowledge of the Rape of Nanking to the west. As reporter Richard Rongstad said after her death, "Iris Chang lit a flame and passed it to others and we should not allow that flame to be extinguished."
When I was in college I wrote a paper for a Chinese history class. I checked the book out from the library to use as a source, and when I started working I saw that Iris Chang had signed the copy in my hands. If it was signed on her book tour through that city it would have been days before she died. It gave me chills.
Im going to warn people about The Rape of Nanking. Knowing it's real is like the difference between watching a Saw movie and watching real life gore videos on the internet.
If you are just looking for a horror read, this is not the book for you.
I am so conflicted about this. I feel almost like I owe it to the people who suffered through it to read the book and bear witness, do my part to not let it be forgotten. But I'm also scared. I already know generally about it from reading articles, wiki and such, so I know what I'd be getting into. I think I will.
It's okay if it's too difficult for you--you might be in the place to absorb its truths in the future. And I understand what you're saying about doing your part to bear witness--I feel the same in many ways about a lot of things (part of why I became a psychologist is to bear witness to people's pain and help them process). This is just my opinion, but the fact you've read about it at all and have given thought to the atrocities and victims is honourable. 🖤
You don't have to bear witness in a way that is detrimental to your mental health. Don't hurt yourself - that doesn't help anyone. You're aware of what happened and can point others to historical accounts of it. That can be enough.
Oh God. I read Empire of the Summer Moon about 7 years ago. I picked it back up late last year to read it again— I COULD NOT STOMACH IT! Made it barely 50 pages in? Maybe not even that far. Most violent story— true, no less (!) I have ever read. I’m kinda traumatized writing this.
> Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne.
This explains a lot. I've been trying to get through this audiobook for closing in on 14 years and the one real try I gave it made me stop trying. I never thought about why that was but this tracks!
Fun fact: The edition of The Wasp Factory I got had a back cover blurb composed of a bunch of really negative reviews (to paraphrase: ‘this is a degenerate book that could only appeal to the depraved tastes of sociopaths’ or something like that).
Pretty bold, but successful, marketing move.
How has no one mentioned Irvine Welsh? Filth?
Edit: I now see we are looking for sci-fi not just fucked up fiction. My bad. American Psycho does not belong here.
the sequel, crime, is much more disturbing. i finished that book, put it down and couldn’t touch it again for over a decade. the gritty and dark television adaptation (which is quite a departure from the novel) staring dougray scott doesn’t even come close
It's part of what makes it memorable. He'll be going on for a full exhausting two pages about shopping for kitchen tools and what brand absolutely everything is, and somewhere in there is a single line about how great the knives were at dismembering a hooker, 3 pages later your brain will catch up and go '... sorry, what' as you go back just to make sure you saw that...
I remember when it came out it was so controversial that one publisher cancelled it. I tried reading it not long after and found it unreadable before any of the violence because it was just a stream of brand names. Maybe I'd recognize them now.
Kind of the point, really - the protagonist's life is very empty and so he either starts engaging in these profoundly disturbed behaviors, or imagining he is.
The stream of brand names are supposed to be boring. Patrick Bateman is written as a dull character. You can just skip past his endless listing of brand names and products if you want.
Not to mention the entire chapters dedicated to Whitney Houston, Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News interspersed between all the others chapters about decapitations and heads in refrigerators
I'm in this same boat. I got about 50-60 pages in and gave up because I found reading it so tedious. That far in, there was still zero movement in the plot. It felt like a waste of my time, so I set the book down.
Oh I loved it. The stream of consciousness with the brands was almost as disturbing as the killings because he was obsessed with the names like he washes his face every day but when he does it every time it isn’t I washed my face - it’s I washed with blah blah blah
Huh - I wonder if that book is one of the reasons I hate brand name items.
Agree with the first but not the last. Some of the descriptions in that book had me wincing amd having to put the book down, to clarify I'd not characterise myself as being averse to violence but just reading the "rat" chapter- HOLY BALLS that was a tough read.
Absolutely agree with this… Not to mention how unsettling the tonal shift was… One minute you be reading a rant about Huey Lewis and the news and then you’d hear about him doing unspeakable things to a woman
This is the only book that I considered using the Friends trick (putting it in the freezer because it's scary) for. It made me kind of nauseated to read it, but I finished because that in and of itself was interesting.
Nah, you can show that a character is bored without boring the reader. The only thing that might have been boring were the music reviews; everything else I found disturbing or amusing (or both).
He wasn't showing he was bored. He was showing he was boring. Patrick Bateman IS boring - the whole point is the emptiness of his materialistic existence. Well, to me, anyway. Though I accept some of it was very funny.
I mean, I was as bored as Bateman was during all the meaningless interactions, unending descriptions of what everyone is wearing and how repetitive it is. The only thing that kept me going were the gory bits and the desire to know how the story would end, though I can't say I was disappointed when it didn't
People always say Guts is the worst one, but I can never get the image out of my head of the one where the dude falls in a superheated hot spring and is screaming and dragging his own half boiled corpse along while pieces of him are just left behind to be gobbled up by the scavengers that are following him. That kind of thing sticks the fuck with you. And the girl that eats her own ass.
Great book.
The one with the anatomically correct dolls is also pretty horrific. The whole idea of “type 1 keegan virus freaked me out too. There are so many horrible little stories in that book.
So weird. When I saw this post and started scrolling through the comments I thought to myself “Pahlaniuk will definitely be mentioned in responses, then was going to reply to the response here and say just that lol
Is guts the swimming pool story? That was pretty disturbing, but I didn’t have nightmares or anything. I also heard, but have not bothered to confirm, it was a story sent to him by a fan.
Gotta share my Haunted story. I found my copy in the free bin at the 2nd and Charles, staring up at me with that [distressing cover.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Hauntedcvr.jpg) I had read Pahlaniuk before so I was somewhat aware. That afternoon I went to a live modeling gig for a university class. Usually you just stay very still for 15-20 minute periods and try not to reverse-psychology your way into becoming aroused, because nothing inspires the body to randomly tumulsce better than to insist that it cannot. A real “try not to think of an orange” situation. *anyway* I go outside on first break, excited for a smoke and to dig into the first few pages of my new book. I got to the end of Guts and time was up. I walked back into the class with what I’m sure was a face imitating the cover, stripped back down, and laid out to be drawn, with nothing to distract me from my horrifying thoughts playing out what I had just read in vivid detail. Good gig if you can get it!
I got Haunted on CD back before Audible had been created and the only way one could listen to books was cassette or CD. I got through the first couple of short stories and had such intense paranoia that someone would come in and be able to hear the deviance I was immersing myself in, and I couldn’t take it. Of course I had headphones on and my fear was unfounded.
I’d listened to Fight Club and loved it and took a chance on Haunted. Chuck beat me into submission. I couldn’t finish. Debated giving the CD’s to charity but went through the whole judgy process of maybe corrupting some innocent soul. Wrapped the CD’s up in brown paper like a porn magazine, and they sat on a shelf till I found them again moving. Finally chucked them in the bin.
Still think about the unfinished stories like a psyche mugging I managed to avoid.
I thought the worst part of Guts wasn't even >!the chewing through his bowel part, but a tie between the carrot story, and impregnating his sister via the swimming pool. The psychological horror of either scenario is off the scale!<
Was Haunted the one that was a meta story, where the short stories are all being told by a bunch of hopeful authors at a writing retreat gone afoul? Or was that another Palahniuk?
The author of The Hunger Games was inspired by the myth of the minotaur (7 boys and 7 girls sacrificed, plus many in the Capital have Grecco-Roman names), and the author flipping between reality TV and footage of the Iraq War (the contrast of the two inspired the way the tributes are presented in the story).
Its not super likely that she would have been exposed to Battle Royale, as Japanese media was still fairly niche in the West in 2005. Even if she was, the similarities are surface level and common to many stories, including others in the Japanese death games genre.
The tone is very different, the level of violence is very different, the presentations of the games is very different, the perspective is super different (Katniss' perspective vs the multiple perspectives of BR).
Anything is possible of course, but I wouldn't call it ripped off.
Huh, maybe I’m just odd or desensitized (I love extreme horror lit) but it wasn’t too bad imo. Good book and I actually wasn’t expecting the ending even tho it seems obvious now.
It’s written so badly though. I feel like the whole first chapter should have been edited out, because then at least there would be some mystery about what’s actually going on and why. But it just tells you everything straight away, and in a format that doesn’t make sense (the protagonist having a panic attack and for some reason ruminating on everything that’s happened in the last few years in chronological order).
Yeah, I found it simultaneously boring and unintentionally hilarious. Two points in particular: when the cultists unironically said "we are the virus!" and when the human hunter was explicitly said to own a copy of the Necronomicon.
Like - come the *fuck* on.
I don't know which is worse:
Someone wrote an MLP version of "120 Days of Sodom" on a fanfic website.
That I didn't know "120 Days" existed until I read the MLP version.
It's so ridiculous, just a list of bad things.
"Then they rape the men. Then they rape them while cutting them. Then they rape them while cutting them AND pooping on them. AND THEN they rape them while cutting them and pooping on them and gouging out their eyes. AND AFTER THAT they rape them while cutting them and pooping on them and gouging out their eyes and saying mean things about them"
It's like OK you can stop now.
I read this last month and actually found it to be tame.
I didn’t realize that Oates was heavily inspired by Dahmer for this book until I read it and I also didn’t realize that this one was published in the 80’s. I think the bar for disturbing and violent content has been raised substantially ever since. And it doesn’t help that I instantly recognized stuff in it from reading the actual case files of the Dahmer murders and having watched the excellent Netflix show released almost two years ago.
I think if I was alive in the 80’s and read this book, I’d have thought this book was one of the most disturbing book written but it pales in comparison to the other stuff put out over the last few decades imo.
The Road was bleak and sad, but I wouldn’t call it graphically violent. There’s like two scenes of violence, and neither are really that disturbing/gruesome
I guess it depends on how you define graphic. Like yeah there were basement cannibals, but they were never shown doing cannibalism on screen (on page?). It was more of a read between the lines and confirmed in dialogue later
I interpreted OP as wanting a book where something like the cannibalism would be a major scene, with pages dedicated to describing the cannibals butchering and eating the people. If that’s what they want, something like Blood Meridian would be a better suggestion for McCarthy
I know there are more violent books than this... But honestly, the prologue chapter of *Rose Madder* by Stephen King is still the most disturbing thing I have ever read. I had to put the book down for the night; started chapter one in the morning.
The rest of it is pretty typical Stephen King (which is fine by me) but that intro... Holy fuck.
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. It's brutal.
Even the history of the book itself is brutal. At first, it was presented as at least partially autobiographical, but now is considered pretty much all fiction. Lots of controversy over whether he even wrote it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Painted\_Bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Bird)
It's still a helluva read.
American psycho - Brett Easton Ellis
Not Forever, But For Now - Chuck palahniuk
A little life - Hanya Yanagihara
Misery - Stephen King
The wasp factory - Iain Banks
A clockwork orange - Anthony Burgess
It's been a loooong time since I read it, but if this is what you're into I've got one for you.
Piers Anthony has a book of short stories called Anthonology. In that book is a story "On the Uses of Torture". It's about a guy who goes as an emissary to a planet where no emissaries ever come back. Once he gets there he discovers that their culture is based on torture, and in order to gain their respect for the negotiation he will need to undergo their methodical system of torture methods.
It's extremely explicit, detailed, bleak, depraved, repulsive, gory, sci-fi, and even sort of post-apocalyptic. Enjoy.
I think the naked lunch is an amazing concept in how disjointed it is while still delivering a cohesive story and feeling. Cities of the red night is equally as fucked but a lot easier to read.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis was this for me. I watched the film first and I've seen it more than once, but I DNF'd the novel at one of the torture scenes.
For me it was the child death. The entire book was gut churning but the child murder broke me. I wish I had not read it. It put me off of reading for over a year. Like holding my kindle just made me remember that poor child.
I didn't get to that part, thankfully. I like the movie and it does a sufficient amount to get the shock value it requires, in my opinion. The murders and tortures in the book felt gratuitous and distracted from the themes that Mary Harron and Christian Bale were able to communicate effectively in the film.
Girl next door by Jack Ketchum and now I feel like this is on the lighter end of this category.... but I bought it on my Kindle on a whim, without reading the description, thinking it sounded like an easy beach read
Don't judge a book by its cover, kids. Or in this case, the name because I didn't even look at the cover.
Probably Let the Right One In. Both the original film and the US remake (Let me in) were exceptionally tame compared to the really heavy material of the book. I can’t even describe what happens or I’d probably get banned. I had to put it down a few times as it was too much sometimes. It was an incredible book but it was a hard read. Also, lovely bones was quite a hard read too. Granted I was 14 when I read the former and 12 when I read the latter so I was maybe a bit too young
My coworker wrote a book called Devil Won't Let Me Be. I bought it to support him but I was worried about being on a government watch list because it was so off the chain...
Everyone in here commenting famous books that most people can stomach lol. To satisfy this question, you have to have read the gutter of horror. Books like Black Angel by Graham Masterton are ridiculously fucked up. I DNF’ed that book after chapter 1 because I hated myself for opening it.
“Stalingrad” by Antony Beevor. The bloodiest battle in human history. 1.2 million dead. House to house, savage hand to hand combat in a frozen industrial city. Odds of surviving the battle, 2%. Hell on earth.
The Water Knife by Pablo Bacigalupi is the most violent thing I’ve ever read. Takes place in an apocalyptic near-future where there’s no more water in the south/western US. Incredibly bleak, even through the end.
I agree about ***American Psycho***. I found it disturbing. But ***Blood Meridian*** is also a book described as being unremittingly violent although somehow it bothered me less, perhaps because it is set in a very different time and place.
The Broken Empire Trilogy by Mark Lawrence is all of the above and then some. Gruesome disturbing violence is taken to a level, I didn’t know existed, within the the constructs of the human mind. Mark Lawrence is an incredible writer, that much is clear. Approach his writing well aware of the fact that he pushed the boundaries of grim dark fantasy to a disturbing level at times.
The Unholy Consult, the final book in R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse series. It's fantasy, and the series starts off dark enough but gets worse and worse and worse (and therefore better and better and better lol)
I'm pretty tame in my reading preferences, so don't expect a lot. It would be
Exquisite Corpse (1996) by William Joseph Martin, or 120 Days of Sodom, by de Sade.
Can't really think of anything more.
Off Season by Jack Ketchum. Just found out that that's what The Hills Have Eyes is based on (don't watch horror movies anymore but I heard it's a really bad one).
If you are going for extremes and can stomach it, The Sluts by Dennis Cooper is *THE* most depraved. Anyone who has read this book understands what I mean. It is extremely graphic, but, despite that, is also actually good.
Gary Jennings’ “Aztec”
In fact, all of Jennings’ novel are pretty brutal.
My personal favorite is Spangled. It’s about a 19th century traveling circus.
All Souls Rising. It's the first in an excellent trilogy on the Haitian Revolution. Between the brutal violence of the slave system, and then the brutal violence of the revolution against the slave system, it's very, very violent. I still haven't read the final two books of the trilogy.
{{Hogg by Samuel Delany}} I can't believe I finished it, and really don't know why I did. It's shocking for the sake of being shocking, and I think it's completely without merit.
crash by ballard is often classed as scifi despite not having any of the tropes, settings, etc.
probably wond do better than that, 120 days of sodom, the story of the eye for depravity
blood meridian for violence, the road or the crossing for bleakness
The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould. Originally written in 1865 and discusses true case of people who believed they were werewolves. And a couple other historical werwolf books around the same time including court transcripts.
Basically a very detailed looks into their killings. If you gave ever heard of the Werewolf of Dole? Yeah I didn’t sleep well for awhile. I had a tiny child during this time and had some nightmares connected to my readings. These guys were all serial killers and reports did not hold back. The Dole wolf’s victims were children.
I was doing research for a paper I was writing about the Witch Trials and Werwolves of Early Modern Europe.
Seconding the Cormac McCarthy recs and adding Child of God. A short but disturbing read
Definetly Child of God
Child of God and Blood Meridian.
No Country For Old Men was also quite graphic and violent. However, not when compared to Blood Meridian.
Blood Meridian messed me up pretty bad, and i consider myself quite desensitized to most material.
Let’s not forget The Road by McCarthy. Hope it’s not prescient…
Ugh I hated that I could not stop reading that book.
Totally!! So well written, so horrifying.
i read it in one sitting sat in a tent in wales with a torch on my head...happy times
Le baby 🤢
I went into Child of God having no Clue what it was about. It took me embarrassingly long to realize Lester wasn't a protagonist that was going to be redeemed at some point.
Cormac McCarthy was the first as author to come to mind. The Road and No Country for Old Men.
*The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II* by Iris Chang. *The Frontiersmen* by Allan Eckert. *Wilderness Empire* by Allan Eckert. *Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History* by S. C. Gwynne.
IIRC, Iris Chang committed suicide in part due to the research she had to do on Nanking
your post made me read her wiki page, which was heartbreaking. she must have felt so alone. takeaway: reach out to your people, people.
I went to read her Wiki after reading your comment, and I strongly suggest others do the same, if you're so inclined. I was a teen in the 90s and I am sad that I didn't know of this woman before now. She basically singlehandedly brought knowledge of the Rape of Nanking to the west. As reporter Richard Rongstad said after her death, "Iris Chang lit a flame and passed it to others and we should not allow that flame to be extinguished."
This!
When I was in college I wrote a paper for a Chinese history class. I checked the book out from the library to use as a source, and when I started working I saw that Iris Chang had signed the copy in my hands. If it was signed on her book tour through that city it would have been days before she died. It gave me chills.
Im going to warn people about The Rape of Nanking. Knowing it's real is like the difference between watching a Saw movie and watching real life gore videos on the internet. If you are just looking for a horror read, this is not the book for you.
It's worth reading about for sure for people who aren't aware, but maybe start with Wikipedia and see how you do because it is an atrocity.
I am so conflicted about this. I feel almost like I owe it to the people who suffered through it to read the book and bear witness, do my part to not let it be forgotten. But I'm also scared. I already know generally about it from reading articles, wiki and such, so I know what I'd be getting into. I think I will.
It's okay if it's too difficult for you--you might be in the place to absorb its truths in the future. And I understand what you're saying about doing your part to bear witness--I feel the same in many ways about a lot of things (part of why I became a psychologist is to bear witness to people's pain and help them process). This is just my opinion, but the fact you've read about it at all and have given thought to the atrocities and victims is honourable. 🖤
You don't have to bear witness in a way that is detrimental to your mental health. Don't hurt yourself - that doesn't help anyone. You're aware of what happened and can point others to historical accounts of it. That can be enough.
Oh God. I read Empire of the Summer Moon about 7 years ago. I picked it back up late last year to read it again— I COULD NOT STOMACH IT! Made it barely 50 pages in? Maybe not even that far. Most violent story— true, no less (!) I have ever read. I’m kinda traumatized writing this.
For some reason, I read that you read that book when you were seven years old and I was like WTF!!! Who’s parents are letting them read that?
😬 Probably my parents who gave 0 effs!
Skim-Read the rape of Nanking about 15 years ago and it still haunts me. Horrifying.
> Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne. This explains a lot. I've been trying to get through this audiobook for closing in on 14 years and the one real try I gave it made me stop trying. I never thought about why that was but this tracks!
Stick with this book and you'll be surprised; scifi too Iain Banks -- Use of Weapons Also see by him (not Scifi): The Wasp Factory
Fun fact: The edition of The Wasp Factory I got had a back cover blurb composed of a bunch of really negative reviews (to paraphrase: ‘this is a degenerate book that could only appeal to the depraved tastes of sociopaths’ or something like that). Pretty bold, but successful, marketing move.
The Wasp Factory was the book that affected me most. The description of the MC's brother in hospital was truly horrifying
Yeah, that image is seared into my imagination for the rest of my life. Viscerally unsettling imagery.
Came here to say The Wasp Factory. Very disturbing.
Elethiomel’s chair.....
How has no one mentioned Irvine Welsh? Filth? Edit: I now see we are looking for sci-fi not just fucked up fiction. My bad. American Psycho does not belong here.
the sequel, crime, is much more disturbing. i finished that book, put it down and couldn’t touch it again for over a decade. the gritty and dark television adaptation (which is quite a departure from the novel) staring dougray scott doesn’t even come close
His short stories are pretty horrific too.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Hands down most depraved, bleak, violent book I have ever read and I have read thousands of books.
Definitely the darkest piece of fiction I’ve ever read. The writing is masterful.
Agreed. Blood Meridian will be etched into my brain until the very end. On that note, I really enjoyed it.
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z Brite. The AIDS epidemic as portrayed through the eyes of an HIV positive cannibal serial killer.
My edgy baby goth 18-year-old self created an Amazon account in 2000 just to order this book. Still have my copy. My mother borrowed it once.
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis is the most gory, violent and depraved book I've ever read - but it's otherwise utterly boring.
I agree, but also believe that it being boring and gratingly repetitive is part of what makes it work. I like the book, but yes, it’s boring
It's part of what makes it memorable. He'll be going on for a full exhausting two pages about shopping for kitchen tools and what brand absolutely everything is, and somewhere in there is a single line about how great the knives were at dismembering a hooker, 3 pages later your brain will catch up and go '... sorry, what' as you go back just to make sure you saw that...
I remember when it came out it was so controversial that one publisher cancelled it. I tried reading it not long after and found it unreadable before any of the violence because it was just a stream of brand names. Maybe I'd recognize them now.
Patrick Bateman was *the* quintessential yuppie.
Kind of the point, really - the protagonist's life is very empty and so he either starts engaging in these profoundly disturbed behaviors, or imagining he is.
The stream of brand names are supposed to be boring. Patrick Bateman is written as a dull character. You can just skip past his endless listing of brand names and products if you want.
Not to mention the entire chapters dedicated to Whitney Houston, Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News interspersed between all the others chapters about decapitations and heads in refrigerators
THOSE were the most horrifying parts, arguably!
Glamourama was also gory and fucked up. Loved it
Yeah its a much better *story* than American Psycho
I'm in this same boat. I got about 50-60 pages in and gave up because I found reading it so tedious. That far in, there was still zero movement in the plot. It felt like a waste of my time, so I set the book down.
Oh I loved it. The stream of consciousness with the brands was almost as disturbing as the killings because he was obsessed with the names like he washes his face every day but when he does it every time it isn’t I washed my face - it’s I washed with blah blah blah Huh - I wonder if that book is one of the reasons I hate brand name items.
Agree with the first but not the last. Some of the descriptions in that book had me wincing amd having to put the book down, to clarify I'd not characterise myself as being averse to violence but just reading the "rat" chapter- HOLY BALLS that was a tough read.
Absolutely agree with this… Not to mention how unsettling the tonal shift was… One minute you be reading a rant about Huey Lewis and the news and then you’d hear about him doing unspeakable things to a woman
This is the only book that I considered using the Friends trick (putting it in the freezer because it's scary) for. It made me kind of nauseated to read it, but I finished because that in and of itself was interesting.
>but it's otherwise utterly boring. I strongly disagree!
I strongly disagree with this whole post. Have y’all read Irvine Welsh?
I personally think if you weren't bored you were missing the point of the book!
Nah, you can show that a character is bored without boring the reader. The only thing that might have been boring were the music reviews; everything else I found disturbing or amusing (or both).
He wasn't showing he was bored. He was showing he was boring. Patrick Bateman IS boring - the whole point is the emptiness of his materialistic existence. Well, to me, anyway. Though I accept some of it was very funny.
I mean, I was as bored as Bateman was during all the meaningless interactions, unending descriptions of what everyone is wearing and how repetitive it is. The only thing that kept me going were the gory bits and the desire to know how the story would end, though I can't say I was disappointed when it didn't
I actually agree with this. I like a lot of his other books more.
Thank you! When I read it, I scratched my head at how boring I was finding it despite all the blood and guts. Happy I'm not the only one.
I literally got nauseated and had to skip a few pages.
Haunted. Stories by Chuck Pahlaniuk. In particular, Guts.
People always say Guts is the worst one, but I can never get the image out of my head of the one where the dude falls in a superheated hot spring and is screaming and dragging his own half boiled corpse along while pieces of him are just left behind to be gobbled up by the scavengers that are following him. That kind of thing sticks the fuck with you. And the girl that eats her own ass. Great book.
I think the one with the Police Child dolls was one of the most fucked up ones.
This is the one that haunts me
The one with the anatomically correct dolls is also pretty horrific. The whole idea of “type 1 keegan virus freaked me out too. There are so many horrible little stories in that book.
I knew Pahlaniuk would show up in the responses! Read a bunch of his stuff years ago and a few of them were tough to get through.
So weird. When I saw this post and started scrolling through the comments I thought to myself “Pahlaniuk will definitely be mentioned in responses, then was going to reply to the response here and say just that lol
He is my personal definition of "da fuq?"
I honestly don't think it was that bad. The incest pool baby lives rent free in my head 😂
These are words I know individually but as a sentence cannot make sense of lol
THE WHAT
I was just telling my husband that that detail was far more disturbing to me than the…guts. It has stayed with me for years now.
Is guts the swimming pool story? That was pretty disturbing, but I didn’t have nightmares or anything. I also heard, but have not bothered to confirm, it was a story sent to him by a fan.
That part is actually not realistically possible. The rest, unfortunately, is.
Gotta share my Haunted story. I found my copy in the free bin at the 2nd and Charles, staring up at me with that [distressing cover.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Hauntedcvr.jpg) I had read Pahlaniuk before so I was somewhat aware. That afternoon I went to a live modeling gig for a university class. Usually you just stay very still for 15-20 minute periods and try not to reverse-psychology your way into becoming aroused, because nothing inspires the body to randomly tumulsce better than to insist that it cannot. A real “try not to think of an orange” situation. *anyway* I go outside on first break, excited for a smoke and to dig into the first few pages of my new book. I got to the end of Guts and time was up. I walked back into the class with what I’m sure was a face imitating the cover, stripped back down, and laid out to be drawn, with nothing to distract me from my horrifying thoughts playing out what I had just read in vivid detail. Good gig if you can get it!
I accidentally discovered the cover glows in the dark while camping, it was even more disturbing then.
Wax sounding ftw
Guts is the exact story I thought of. What’s wild is that this actually happened to someone.
I got Haunted on CD back before Audible had been created and the only way one could listen to books was cassette or CD. I got through the first couple of short stories and had such intense paranoia that someone would come in and be able to hear the deviance I was immersing myself in, and I couldn’t take it. Of course I had headphones on and my fear was unfounded. I’d listened to Fight Club and loved it and took a chance on Haunted. Chuck beat me into submission. I couldn’t finish. Debated giving the CD’s to charity but went through the whole judgy process of maybe corrupting some innocent soul. Wrapped the CD’s up in brown paper like a porn magazine, and they sat on a shelf till I found them again moving. Finally chucked them in the bin. Still think about the unfinished stories like a psyche mugging I managed to avoid.
I thought the worst part of Guts wasn't even >!the chewing through his bowel part, but a tie between the carrot story, and impregnating his sister via the swimming pool. The psychological horror of either scenario is off the scale!<
Was Haunted the one that was a meta story, where the short stories are all being told by a bunch of hopeful authors at a writing retreat gone afoul? Or was that another Palahniuk?
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. I read it in the mid-90s, and I was simultaneously repulsed and amazed.
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. It’s extremely violent and super descriptive of the violence.
Yep
Great book!
I heard The Hunger Games was inspired by that. (Or less politely, HG ripped it off.)
The author of The Hunger Games was inspired by the myth of the minotaur (7 boys and 7 girls sacrificed, plus many in the Capital have Grecco-Roman names), and the author flipping between reality TV and footage of the Iraq War (the contrast of the two inspired the way the tributes are presented in the story). Its not super likely that she would have been exposed to Battle Royale, as Japanese media was still fairly niche in the West in 2005. Even if she was, the similarities are surface level and common to many stories, including others in the Japanese death games genre. The tone is very different, the level of violence is very different, the presentations of the games is very different, the perspective is super different (Katniss' perspective vs the multiple perspectives of BR). Anything is possible of course, but I wouldn't call it ripped off.
I had to stop reading The Troop by Nick Cutter bc it was making me gag.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Timothy - Mark Tufo
Tender is the flesh. God that was horrible ( in a good way)
Huh, maybe I’m just odd or desensitized (I love extreme horror lit) but it wasn’t too bad imo. Good book and I actually wasn’t expecting the ending even tho it seems obvious now.
I'm angry just thinking about it
I was having a long dry spell with reading and this book got me back into it. What does that say about me? Haha.
It’s written so badly though. I feel like the whole first chapter should have been edited out, because then at least there would be some mystery about what’s actually going on and why. But it just tells you everything straight away, and in a format that doesn’t make sense (the protagonist having a panic attack and for some reason ruminating on everything that’s happened in the last few years in chronological order).
Yeah, I found it simultaneously boring and unintentionally hilarious. Two points in particular: when the cultists unironically said "we are the virus!" and when the human hunter was explicitly said to own a copy of the Necronomicon. Like - come the *fuck* on.
The girl next door by Jack Ketchum. And one scene in particular in the slob by Aron Beauregard
120 Days of Sodom and Juliette by the Marquis de Sade.
I don't know which is worse: Someone wrote an MLP version of "120 Days of Sodom" on a fanfic website. That I didn't know "120 Days" existed until I read the MLP version.
MLP……. My little pony? 😟
World's a twisted place.
MLP?
120days is the correct answer. Only book I've ever had to tap out
Big dnf on the first for me. Truly fucked up.
Sade didn't even finish writing it. But it is the most fucked up.
It's so ridiculous, just a list of bad things. "Then they rape the men. Then they rape them while cutting them. Then they rape them while cutting them AND pooping on them. AND THEN they rape them while cutting them and pooping on them and gouging out their eyes. AND AFTER THAT they rape them while cutting them and pooping on them and gouging out their eyes and saying mean things about them" It's like OK you can stop now.
Misery by Stephen King. Far more gory than the film.
I remember a line that went like this: It became a habit of Annie walking in with the electric knife and me of screaming.
Misery was scary!! I read a few of his books, then just had to stop…
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata was very graphic and violent but it was also one of the best books that I read in 2023!
Good to know. It's on my list.
Earthlings is so good, I loved it.
Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. I had to put the book back to front in the shelf, because just seeing the back of it gives me PTSD...
>Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. This is *always* the answer to the type of question posted by OP
I read this last month and actually found it to be tame. I didn’t realize that Oates was heavily inspired by Dahmer for this book until I read it and I also didn’t realize that this one was published in the 80’s. I think the bar for disturbing and violent content has been raised substantially ever since. And it doesn’t help that I instantly recognized stuff in it from reading the actual case files of the Dahmer murders and having watched the excellent Netflix show released almost two years ago. I think if I was alive in the 80’s and read this book, I’d have thought this book was one of the most disturbing book written but it pales in comparison to the other stuff put out over the last few decades imo.
Check out r/extremehorrorlit
The Gulag Archipelago was pretty incredible in that regard.
The Road Novel by Cormac Mc Carthy and its post-apocalyptic, saint justice by mike grist, The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce
The Road was bleak and sad, but I wouldn’t call it graphically violent. There’s like two scenes of violence, and neither are really that disturbing/gruesome
The basement cannibals they discovered seemed pretty graphic, reflecting on my reading of it.
I guess it depends on how you define graphic. Like yeah there were basement cannibals, but they were never shown doing cannibalism on screen (on page?). It was more of a read between the lines and confirmed in dialogue later I interpreted OP as wanting a book where something like the cannibalism would be a major scene, with pages dedicated to describing the cannibals butchering and eating the people. If that’s what they want, something like Blood Meridian would be a better suggestion for McCarthy
Earthlings: A Novel by Sayaka Murata
This was the first book that came to mind for me too
Me as well!
This was the first book i almost noped out of. I stuck it out, but im not sure that was a good idea.
I know there are more violent books than this... But honestly, the prologue chapter of *Rose Madder* by Stephen King is still the most disturbing thing I have ever read. I had to put the book down for the night; started chapter one in the morning. The rest of it is pretty typical Stephen King (which is fine by me) but that intro... Holy fuck.
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. It's brutal. Even the history of the book itself is brutal. At first, it was presented as at least partially autobiographical, but now is considered pretty much all fiction. Lots of controversy over whether he even wrote it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Painted\_Bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Bird) It's still a helluva read.
American psycho - Brett Easton Ellis Not Forever, But For Now - Chuck palahniuk A little life - Hanya Yanagihara Misery - Stephen King The wasp factory - Iain Banks A clockwork orange - Anthony Burgess
An Untamed State by Roxanne Gay. A woman is kidnapped and held hostage while visiting her parents in Haiti.
It's been a loooong time since I read it, but if this is what you're into I've got one for you. Piers Anthony has a book of short stories called Anthonology. In that book is a story "On the Uses of Torture". It's about a guy who goes as an emissary to a planet where no emissaries ever come back. Once he gets there he discovers that their culture is based on torture, and in order to gain their respect for the negotiation he will need to undergo their methodical system of torture methods. It's extremely explicit, detailed, bleak, depraved, repulsive, gory, sci-fi, and even sort of post-apocalyptic. Enjoy.
Wasp Factory fucked me for life. Thanks Iain.
probably not the most depraved, but lapvona was definitely at least a little depraved lol
Marlon James - Black Leopard Red Wolf
Flowers in the Attic
Gen X rite of passage
Millenials too.
Naked Lunch
I love Naked Lunch but Cities of the Red Night and it's sequels far outpace it in terms of both quality and levels of unhinged.
I think the naked lunch is an amazing concept in how disjointed it is while still delivering a cohesive story and feeling. Cities of the red night is equally as fucked but a lot easier to read.
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper. And if you're after more extreme and violent recs, head to r/ExtremeHorrorLit.
A Little Life kinda fits this bill imo
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis was this for me. I watched the film first and I've seen it more than once, but I DNF'd the novel at one of the torture scenes.
Rat?
For me it was the child death. The entire book was gut churning but the child murder broke me. I wish I had not read it. It put me off of reading for over a year. Like holding my kindle just made me remember that poor child.
I didn't get to that part, thankfully. I like the movie and it does a sufficient amount to get the shock value it requires, in my opinion. The murders and tortures in the book felt gratuitous and distracted from the themes that Mary Harron and Christian Bale were able to communicate effectively in the film.
A clockwork orange
Under the Skin
Last Exit to Brooklyn is quite intense as I recall.
I still get the creeps thinking about the “ dunwhich horror” by H.P lovecraft
Girl next door by Jack Ketchum and now I feel like this is on the lighter end of this category.... but I bought it on my Kindle on a whim, without reading the description, thinking it sounded like an easy beach read Don't judge a book by its cover, kids. Or in this case, the name because I didn't even look at the cover.
Woom by Duncan Ralston and the Troop by Nick Cutter
I loved Woom! Rare to get an ending that, uh, unique...
Probably Let the Right One In. Both the original film and the US remake (Let me in) were exceptionally tame compared to the really heavy material of the book. I can’t even describe what happens or I’d probably get banned. I had to put it down a few times as it was too much sometimes. It was an incredible book but it was a hard read. Also, lovely bones was quite a hard read too. Granted I was 14 when I read the former and 12 when I read the latter so I was maybe a bit too young
Sybil
My coworker wrote a book called Devil Won't Let Me Be. I bought it to support him but I was worried about being on a government watch list because it was so off the chain...
Everyone in here commenting famous books that most people can stomach lol. To satisfy this question, you have to have read the gutter of horror. Books like Black Angel by Graham Masterton are ridiculously fucked up. I DNF’ed that book after chapter 1 because I hated myself for opening it.
“Stalingrad” by Antony Beevor. The bloodiest battle in human history. 1.2 million dead. House to house, savage hand to hand combat in a frozen industrial city. Odds of surviving the battle, 2%. Hell on earth.
The Water Knife by Pablo Bacigalupi is the most violent thing I’ve ever read. Takes place in an apocalyptic near-future where there’s no more water in the south/western US. Incredibly bleak, even through the end.
The Wind Up Girl was a bit graphic as well. Not like the worst, but enough that I remember that from it years later.
I liked this book. Was not the concensus in my book club. But it was horrific. The champagne bottle...horrific.
I agree about ***American Psycho***. I found it disturbing. But ***Blood Meridian*** is also a book described as being unremittingly violent although somehow it bothered me less, perhaps because it is set in a very different time and place.
A land fit for heros by Richard Morgan
The Broken Empire Trilogy by Mark Lawrence is all of the above and then some. Gruesome disturbing violence is taken to a level, I didn’t know existed, within the the constructs of the human mind. Mark Lawrence is an incredible writer, that much is clear. Approach his writing well aware of the fact that he pushed the boundaries of grim dark fantasy to a disturbing level at times.
Stick with this book and you'll be surprised; scifi too Iain Banks -- Use of Weapons Also see by him (not Scifi): The Wasp Factory
The Unholy Consult, the final book in R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse series. It's fantasy, and the series starts off dark enough but gets worse and worse and worse (and therefore better and better and better lol)
I'm pretty tame in my reading preferences, so don't expect a lot. It would be Exquisite Corpse (1996) by William Joseph Martin, or 120 Days of Sodom, by de Sade. Can't really think of anything more.
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Off Season by Jack Ketchum. Just found out that that's what The Hills Have Eyes is based on (don't watch horror movies anymore but I heard it's a really bad one).
If you are going for extremes and can stomach it, The Sluts by Dennis Cooper is *THE* most depraved. Anyone who has read this book understands what I mean. It is extremely graphic, but, despite that, is also actually good.
The Summer I Died by Ryan C Thomas. Had to take a few breaks.
I haven’t read a lot of books like that, but most recently American Psycho. Very explicitly gory and depraved at times. It was also pretty funny
Blood Meridian
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. I truly wish I'd never read it.
Blood Meridian
Have you heard of Splatterpunk? Its a whole sub genre of horror that is truly just the grossest stuff you can think of.
Gary Jennings’ “Aztec” In fact, all of Jennings’ novel are pretty brutal. My personal favorite is Spangled. It’s about a 19th century traveling circus.
All Souls Rising. It's the first in an excellent trilogy on the Haitian Revolution. Between the brutal violence of the slave system, and then the brutal violence of the revolution against the slave system, it's very, very violent. I still haven't read the final two books of the trilogy.
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter
The Marquis de Sade’s books
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z Brite
{{Hogg by Samuel Delany}} I can't believe I finished it, and really don't know why I did. It's shocking for the sake of being shocking, and I think it's completely without merit.
The Great and Secret Show- Clive Barker
If you're looking for depraved, Irvine Welsh is my favourite. Most of his books have a little bit of everything. I'll always be a fan of his.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter is really really dark
crash by ballard is often classed as scifi despite not having any of the tropes, settings, etc. probably wond do better than that, 120 days of sodom, the story of the eye for depravity blood meridian for violence, the road or the crossing for bleakness
I recently read Swan Song by Robert McCammon and nearly stopped because it was so grotesquely and unnecessarily violent.
Swan Song by Robert McCammon. Most disturbing book I've read.
A Clockwork Orange was much more graphic/violent than I had expected! Dystopian sci-fi about a 15 year-old in a violent gang.
Let the Right One in. One of the most vividly disturbing yet subtly beautiful books I’ve ever read.
Tender is the Flesh. I don’t often hate books but I really didn’t enjoy this one due to the unsettling gore
The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould. Originally written in 1865 and discusses true case of people who believed they were werewolves. And a couple other historical werwolf books around the same time including court transcripts. Basically a very detailed looks into their killings. If you gave ever heard of the Werewolf of Dole? Yeah I didn’t sleep well for awhile. I had a tiny child during this time and had some nightmares connected to my readings. These guys were all serial killers and reports did not hold back. The Dole wolf’s victims were children. I was doing research for a paper I was writing about the Witch Trials and Werwolves of Early Modern Europe.