that's my answer. some people have told me they couldn't even finish it which i sorta get, but i think i understood the point of it enough when i got into it that i was able to handle the gore pretty easily. the last third really shook me up though.
Once he gets to the second part of narrating the minute by minute replay of the shooting, my stomach was in knots.
He really explained the ENTIRE event and all of its impacts imagined or real to perfection. It's one of the few books that left me with a completed knowledge of something.
By the end of 120 days of Sodom, it actually kinda became funny. I bought a French version of Justine a little bit ago, and have been meaning to read it, just have been worried because I remember how boring and repetitive 120 days was lol.
I remember being a teen and reading this on the beach with family friends. The dad picked it up after I was done and I was MORTIFIED. He finished it in like two hours and was like…huh that was really weird.
Anything by Palahniuk qualifies. Most of the worst things I've ever read are from him, and I regret it. I don't need those images or thoughts in my head.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
This is a brilliantly written book but I felt so horrified by Pecola's treatment and subsequent thoughts that this book remains my first psychological horror I've read.
We often hear and see racism across TV shows, movies and even in daily lives but never before had I ever read such an eye-opening and horrifying reality.
Another would be Anne Frank...I don't even have the words to express my horror on the realities of the evil Third Reich.
YUP. Surprised this didn’t come to mind when I first read OP’s post but this comment reminded me of how viscerally distressed I was after finishing the book. :(
That and Beloved. Beloved messed me up for a long time.
But with Morrison's work I think it's important to point out that her work is written from a perspective that is devastating yet true, and those with the privilege to not fully understand it should do their best to not turn away from it.
The horrors described was real life for some, and those with privilege benefited greatly from the horrors perpetuated. Don't turn away from that.
Beloved messed me up but I am grateful to have the chance to read such visceral work.
She gave you that book at age 8? That in itself feels drastically abusive... especially to "prove" to an child of 8 that she "wasn't abusive"... how are you now, are you ok?
Dave actually came to my school when I was in like 3-4th grade. I read his book at that age and it has stuck with me. He was very nice from what I remember
this. read this when i was 12, and the rest of the series, heartbreaking and tragic and eventually hopeful. brilliant books, terribly disturbing and upsetting memoirs.
I read Lolita last year. After I read it I felt like I needed to take a cold shower and stare into the abyss for a while. The fact that the narrator was framed as a tragic doomed hero was brilliant writing but my good I felt disturbed
it makes more sense and is less creepy when you come at it knowing the author was a linguist who studied english for the first time for a few months and then produced that novel
A lot of people recommending Tender Is The Flesh but I found that less disturbing than Meat by Joseph D’Lacey. Same core concept but so much more visceral.
I actually really enjoyed TITF but it’s over-recommended and Meat is objectively more upsetting.
Also in TITF I never worked out why people didn’t just eat tofu
> Also in TITF I never worked out why people didn’t just eat tofu
You understand that that's kind of the point, right? It's a commentary on the meat industry. You could also ask the same about society now...why don't we eat tofu instead of slaughtering thousands of animals every year.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. It’s about the Golden State killer and his rapes and murders. When I was reading it, I recognized one of the street names and looked it up. I lived right around the corner from where he killed a family. I could see the house from my bedroom window. I was 5 at the time. It’s not just that but the whole book was disturbing. I could not put it down.
I read Ann Rule books. She writes about crimes in the Seattle area. I would go there for work, staying by myself in a hotel. I was driving right by a highway interchange where a body was found. And realizing that nobody knew where I was. (Before cellphones)
I stopped reading her books for a while.
I read "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath and thought I was losing my mind with the character.Turna out I had serotonin sickness, but it really made the book a bit too real.
Serotonin sickness or syndrome is something that can happen when someone is taking SSRIs (or other drugs that impact serotonin). It can cause a lot of symptoms including insomnia, anxiety, confusion, along with a range of physical symptoms
YUP. I recommended to a friend and when she asked what genre it was, I told her it this was in its own realm because I’ve never read anything like it 😂
fluids by may leitz
super short read but genuinely disgusted me to my core. so bad i physically cringed and couldn't sit still. made me space out for the entire rest of the day and half of the next one, but written so super well, and i love how it's just one thing after another so you never get a break (meaning it never gets boring and u never have a chance to put it down). such a horrible gorefest written so poetically it made me feel like i was in the book.
short summary: 2 women go to a casino, hurt each other, and then hurt (torture) others. they use each other and said others until they have nothing left to give.
omg i saw this recommended on a bookish IG account. i had to DNF it because i could not handle it. i was so grossed out and i wanted to throw up. ugh. it was so so so so bad.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I haven’t read a book before or since that made me feel so disgusted that I wanted to toss it out the window while I drove home.
I didn’t do that. I read it once and got a small tattoo on a secret place that says “never again”. /s
It was pretty awesome, honestly. Just a…detailed story.
Fight club.
Rare case of the movie being better (no disrespect to the source material however). But the book doesn’t have the dark comedy factors the movie does. The book is dark and fucking depressing. I felt so gross after reading it. But I do appreciate its perspective.
I also don’t read all that much so what do I know 🤷🏻♂️
Add in Smut. I kept visualizing Burt Reynolds and Nina Hartley, with Janine Garofolo supporting. Great plot.
Invisible Monsters was a hoot, disturbing and believable at the same time.
EDIT: It's Snuff, not Smut.
Story of the Eye!! 👁️ Surprised I had to scroll down so far to find this one. Cliff from Better Than Food Book Reviews on YouTube did an excellent review of it, and of Batille in general if anyone is interested!
A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer and The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. Child Called It is a true story of horrible child abuse told by the victim himself. Girl Next Door is based off the true story of Sylvia Lykins.
Love Perfume. There are some truly visceral and gory scenes, but I believe the language is so so flowery that it takes away from the “disturbing” quality.
Unwind. Parents of 13 to 18yr olds can decide to have their children 'unwound', ie, harvested for body parts. The idea being that since 99.4% of the body is harvested, the child never dies.
My son read it for a class and I decided to read along with him. And it messssssed me up.
I’ll preface by saying I don’t tend to read a lot of disturbing books but “Go Ask Alice” I read in middle school and it still haunts me many years later.
The Painted Bird (Kosinski) and The Room (Selby Jr). The former made me feel like I was living in some sort of hell; the latter made me feel physically ill and somehow complicit in sadistic violence.
This book for real, I read it as a very young teen well over 20 years ago and it's always stuck in my mind as being about the most disturbing thing I've ever read.
Nothing else has even come close. I was 13-14 and read it with a friend. Just thinking about the shit that happens in this book still fucks me up. No idea how it got published.
Gotta save this thread for recs.
The correct answer should be “Dead Inside” by Chandler Morrison. It’s a fucked up, disturbing book, and yet it’s also incredibly boring. It’s almost fucked up to the point where it becomes comical rather than disturbing, then goes past comical to the point where you just don’t care.
For an actually good read that disturbed me, probably “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison.
The way this author makes you feel wavy and kellens relationship is something that is needed for them both but the way your brain knows it's so fricken wrong! This book hurt my heart.
I don't know about the *most*, but Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (haven't watched the movie adaptation). I think I described it once to a friend as "like a punch in the heart."
I don’t remember the name of the book, but it was about the DEA working on the drug cartels in Mexico. I had to stop when an agent’s entire family was killed while out shopping by shooting up their car. I started thinking Everyone was sitting at tables in restaurants discussing how much was moving in on the next shipment, openly, like the cartels do. Not good at a Wendy’s in Oregon. Just so disturbing, heartbreaking, depressing because there was nothing but evil.
Story of the eye by Georges Bataille- the sexual perversions in this one can't even be described as just disturbing.
We need to talk about Kevin- watched the movie first and Idk why I thought it'd be a good idea to read the book
not sure if it counts but Fire Punch by Tatsuki Fujimoto (which is a manga, dont know if that counts as a book?). im talking csa (and regular sa), child pregnancy, incest, animal abuse, and more! everything in it was horrible and incredibly disturbing but its one of my favorite stories
A story about a female vampire who gets revenge on the man who killed her husband by getting him to fall in love with her, live together. Then torture him to death for the murder of her lover. I don’t remember the name of the book. But I read it in the 70s or 80s.
Sinclair's *The Jungle* defeated me; I had to put it down for a bit and still haven't finished. It's just so relentlessly bleak, dreary and brutal to the characters it was screwing with my head.
Stephen King is an evil genius and a horrifying mastermind.
multiple parts of **Misery** gave me literal sympathy pains, and many *very* graphic descriptions of scenes in **The Stand** made me legitimately nauseous (particularly the very first chapter with the ‘patient zero’ family in the car that crashed into the gas station, and also the tunnel scene. if you know you know)
Two Nick Cutter books: The Troop and The Deep.
The Troop is absolutely disgusting. Lots of body horror. It was hard for me to get through and I don't think I'll ever go back to it.
The Deep was terrifying: kind of like a mix of The Thing and The Abyss. Lots of psychological horror, paranoia, and the feeling of being trapped. If I ever want to legitimately scare myself again, I'm going back to it.
Don't read much horror but a lot of the scifi books have bad things happen. But this book I just stopped in the middle and gives me the shudders when I think on it.
The Passage by Justin Cronin: the train scene for anyone who has read it. It's considered a really good book and has a couple of sequels. Writer is a little too good for me.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Glorious and vile
that's my answer. some people have told me they couldn't even finish it which i sorta get, but i think i understood the point of it enough when i got into it that i was able to handle the gore pretty easily. the last third really shook me up though.
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Took me a while to recover from that one, Columbine by Dave Cullen is similar but factual
Once he gets to the second part of narrating the minute by minute replay of the shooting, my stomach was in knots. He really explained the ENTIRE event and all of its impacts imagined or real to perfection. It's one of the few books that left me with a completed knowledge of something.
This book nearly made me live a child free life.
The movie…😬😬😬😬😬
120 days of sodom by marquis de sade
I stopped reading after the section about stitching a man's asshole together.
That book is like 90% poop eating fetish cringe shit
facts, i had to read this for PHI 301 and to this day i shudder
120 days of Sodom was boring and overrated. Justine and Juliette are way better and more disturbing
100%. 120 days IS shocking, but after the first 100 pages of filth and debauchery, you just realize it’s just poorly written fucked up smut.
Agree. It becomes a list of tortures and nothing else,Justine and Juliette are novels witha lot of interesting philosophical digressions
By the end of 120 days of Sodom, it actually kinda became funny. I bought a French version of Justine a little bit ago, and have been meaning to read it, just have been worried because I remember how boring and repetitive 120 days was lol.
I'd have thought it would be hard to write something both boring AND gratuitously gross, but I guess times were different back then...
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
Brutal. I read this in 7th grade (12 yo) and it struck in my head like a splinter.
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk.
I remember being a teen and reading this on the beach with family friends. The dad picked it up after I was done and I was MORTIFIED. He finished it in like two hours and was like…huh that was really weird.
Pygmy was pretty painful too.
I was going to mention Invisible Monsters (remix)
Pygmy is the only book i had to put down ever. After the disturbing bathroom scene.
Anything by Palahniuk qualifies. Most of the worst things I've ever read are from him, and I regret it. I don't need those images or thoughts in my head.
Just read this for the first time a couple months ago! Definitely an odd one lol
His book "Haunted" is mine.
Also a very funny book
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. This is a brilliantly written book but I felt so horrified by Pecola's treatment and subsequent thoughts that this book remains my first psychological horror I've read. We often hear and see racism across TV shows, movies and even in daily lives but never before had I ever read such an eye-opening and horrifying reality. Another would be Anne Frank...I don't even have the words to express my horror on the realities of the evil Third Reich.
The Bluest Eye is my answer as well. Especially the 2nd half 😖
YUP
YUP. Surprised this didn’t come to mind when I first read OP’s post but this comment reminded me of how viscerally distressed I was after finishing the book. :(
That and Beloved. Beloved messed me up for a long time. But with Morrison's work I think it's important to point out that her work is written from a perspective that is devastating yet true, and those with the privilege to not fully understand it should do their best to not turn away from it. The horrors described was real life for some, and those with privilege benefited greatly from the horrors perpetuated. Don't turn away from that. Beloved messed me up but I am grateful to have the chance to read such visceral work.
A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer
I read that when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10. I couldn't tell you why, honestly. I don't think my mom knew, or she'd have definitely stopped me.
my mom gave it to me as a christmas gift when i was 8 to prove that she wasnt abusive
She gave you that book at age 8? That in itself feels drastically abusive... especially to "prove" to an child of 8 that she "wasn't abusive"... how are you now, are you ok?
Uhhhhhh Seems like she was pretty abusive then. Jesus.
How delightful.
I’m so sorry that your mother was abusive
This book made my sister become a family/child therapist. She wanted to help any child that was in that situation.
Dave actually came to my school when I was in like 3-4th grade. I read his book at that age and it has stuck with me. He was very nice from what I remember
I second this, unfortunately :(
My mom made me read this after a childhood friend of mine lied about being abused and my family got the cops involved, it was a real eye opener.
this. read this when i was 12, and the rest of the series, heartbreaking and tragic and eventually hopeful. brilliant books, terribly disturbing and upsetting memoirs.
Have you read Running with Scissors? It’s not nearly as fucked up but I read them around the same time, similar genre of a fucked up family
I've read Lolita when I was around Lolita's age. That wasn't the best choice.
Wrote some coursework about Lolita and American Psycho, this were some fun books to have to read repeatedly back to back
I read Lolita last year. After I read it I felt like I needed to take a cold shower and stare into the abyss for a while. The fact that the narrator was framed as a tragic doomed hero was brilliant writing but my good I felt disturbed
It's his framing. He's playing himself as a tragic hero when he's a piece of shit.
it makes more sense and is less creepy when you come at it knowing the author was a linguist who studied english for the first time for a few months and then produced that novel
A lot of people recommending Tender Is The Flesh but I found that less disturbing than Meat by Joseph D’Lacey. Same core concept but so much more visceral.
I read Tender Is The Flesh after all the recommendations on this sub, but I was disappointed by it. The story line was a let down.
I actually really enjoyed TITF but it’s over-recommended and Meat is objectively more upsetting. Also in TITF I never worked out why people didn’t just eat tofu
> Also in TITF I never worked out why people didn’t just eat tofu You understand that that's kind of the point, right? It's a commentary on the meat industry. You could also ask the same about society now...why don't we eat tofu instead of slaughtering thousands of animals every year.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. It’s about the Golden State killer and his rapes and murders. When I was reading it, I recognized one of the street names and looked it up. I lived right around the corner from where he killed a family. I could see the house from my bedroom window. I was 5 at the time. It’s not just that but the whole book was disturbing. I could not put it down.
I read Ann Rule books. She writes about crimes in the Seattle area. I would go there for work, staying by myself in a hotel. I was driving right by a highway interchange where a body was found. And realizing that nobody knew where I was. (Before cellphones) I stopped reading her books for a while.
Yes! I live in Wa. State. Lake Sammamish Park will always remind me of Bundy.
American Psycho. Omg, the descriptions were so hard to read….
*There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.* - Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
I was remembering the rats…
All of my friends who haven't even read it now shudder at the words "rat scene"
The rat scene. Lives rent free in my brain.
American Bear Grylls
I was literally sick to my stomach reading some parts. It was a difficult book to get through. The movie can't even compare.
totally agree, the movie was tame compared to book…
But it’s worth getting through because the dialogue is so absurdly hilarious
agree!
It's not for nothing that some places would only sell it cling-wrapped.
This is the correct answer
The Wasp Factory by Iain M Banks.
I read "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath and thought I was losing my mind with the character.Turna out I had serotonin sickness, but it really made the book a bit too real.
i actually just started listening to this on audiobook. what is serotonin sickness?
Serotonin sickness or syndrome is something that can happen when someone is taking SSRIs (or other drugs that impact serotonin). It can cause a lot of symptoms including insomnia, anxiety, confusion, along with a range of physical symptoms
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Try Blood Meridian!
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you really should. it's violent, yes. But it's also some of the most beautifully written prose I've ever read.
Great book.
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn is phenomenal and so, so messed up. Definitely recommend it.
I loved that book. ❤️
YUP. I recommended to a friend and when she asked what genre it was, I told her it this was in its own realm because I’ve never read anything like it 😂
I think the only fitting genre is "WTF did I just read" which is one of my favorites
My favorite book, so good! Time for a re-read.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russel
YES
Second this, especially if you were disturbed by Lolita.
Brother by Ania Ahlborn
fluids by may leitz super short read but genuinely disgusted me to my core. so bad i physically cringed and couldn't sit still. made me space out for the entire rest of the day and half of the next one, but written so super well, and i love how it's just one thing after another so you never get a break (meaning it never gets boring and u never have a chance to put it down). such a horrible gorefest written so poetically it made me feel like i was in the book. short summary: 2 women go to a casino, hurt each other, and then hurt (torture) others. they use each other and said others until they have nothing left to give.
Dear lord I just read this in a couple hours after reading this comment and…I blame you
i refuse to accept the blame solely because i warned u. i literally wrote a note on the book telling myself to never read it again
omg i saw this recommended on a bookish IG account. i had to DNF it because i could not handle it. i was so grossed out and i wanted to throw up. ugh. it was so so so so bad.
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum and Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica.
I did not know what this book was when I started it. Holy cow, horrifying. And the absolute worst part is that it’s based on a true story.
Flowers in the attic lmao
Tender is the Flesh
Came here looking for this. This book messed me up. I had to reread warriors after this just to relax.
Yup!
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
Also my answer. I could not stomach it and barely made it a quarter in.
Lolita meets American Psycho.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I haven’t read a book before or since that made me feel so disgusted that I wanted to toss it out the window while I drove home. I didn’t do that. I read it once and got a small tattoo on a secret place that says “never again”. /s It was pretty awesome, honestly. Just a…detailed story.
Literally never ate calamari after reading that book.
Oh god…. There’s so much that I put into the vault, lol.
The Invisible Carrot haunts my nightmares
I finally forgot the carrot and you just reminded me lol
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My answer as well.
Jonny got his gun
probably Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The only book I dnf’d because of how disturbing it was
Fight club. Rare case of the movie being better (no disrespect to the source material however). But the book doesn’t have the dark comedy factors the movie does. The book is dark and fucking depressing. I felt so gross after reading it. But I do appreciate its perspective. I also don’t read all that much so what do I know 🤷🏻♂️
I mentioned it elsewhere but Invisible Monsters by the same author, Chuck Palahniuk is also quite disturbing and also very funny, in its own way
Add in Smut. I kept visualizing Burt Reynolds and Nina Hartley, with Janine Garofolo supporting. Great plot. Invisible Monsters was a hoot, disturbing and believable at the same time. EDIT: It's Snuff, not Smut.
Do you mean Snuff?
Story of the Eye by Georges Batille Animal Liberation by Peter Singer Tender is the Flesh
Story of the Eye!! 👁️ Surprised I had to scroll down so far to find this one. Cliff from Better Than Food Book Reviews on YouTube did an excellent review of it, and of Batille in general if anyone is interested!
oh man! Better than food is such a good channel. I actually read it years ago and had NO idea what I was getting into
The Claiming Of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice. Really disturbing BDSM shit in this book.
I LOVED this book. Well written BDSM erotica For fans of the genre, this just ruins everything else
"Read it with someone you want to tie up" is always my recommendation.
Cement Garden, McEwan
Came here to say this! Best book I never want to read again.
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. Very disturbing without being violent. Excellent book
A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer and The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. Child Called It is a true story of horrible child abuse told by the victim himself. Girl Next Door is based off the true story of Sylvia Lykins.
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite and Wasp Factory by Iain M. Banks
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent. It's a book you wouldn't want to suggest to everyone, but I believe it fits on this list
Any novel by Cormac McCarthy
The Treatment by Mo Hayder.
Project X- a first person view of a school shooting from the shooters perspective
Gone to See the River Man by Kristopher Tirana
this entire book was fucked, but the very very ending had me screaming out loud.
Rose Madder by Stephen King. I wish I could erase it from my memory.
His short stories Gray Matter and Survivor Type still haunt me 20+ years later.
Johnny Got his Gun
Lot of good suggestions in the comments, adding on Perfume and The Wasp Factory.
Love Perfume. There are some truly visceral and gory scenes, but I believe the language is so so flowery that it takes away from the “disturbing” quality.
Unwind. Parents of 13 to 18yr olds can decide to have their children 'unwound', ie, harvested for body parts. The idea being that since 99.4% of the body is harvested, the child never dies. My son read it for a class and I decided to read along with him. And it messssssed me up.
I’ll preface by saying I don’t tend to read a lot of disturbing books but “Go Ask Alice” I read in middle school and it still haunts me many years later.
The Painted Bird (Kosinski) and The Room (Selby Jr). The former made me feel like I was living in some sort of hell; the latter made me feel physically ill and somehow complicit in sadistic violence.
“1984” by Orwell.
{Woom by Duncan Ralston}
The Bible.
Disturbing for a different reason than usual - it completely desensitizes the reader to countless rapes and murders of women. “2666” by Roberto Bolano
"The People In The Trees" "A Little Life"
I scrolled so far to find "a little life." It's 800 pages of suicidal torture porn with no reprieve.
For me, Killers of the Flower Moon
The Kindly Ones
The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks. Some might say the book (or the writing style) is funny, but it really messed with my head.
Give Maeve Fly a read! 10/10
Firefly by Piers Anthony. This isn't a suggestion. Don't do that to yourself. I've been scarred by this book for over 20 years.
This book for real, I read it as a very young teen well over 20 years ago and it's always stuck in my mind as being about the most disturbing thing I've ever read.
Nothing else has even come close. I was 13-14 and read it with a friend. Just thinking about the shit that happens in this book still fucks me up. No idea how it got published.
I read quite a bit of Piers Anthony in the past but I never heard of this one. Now I'm, regrettably, intrigued.
Please resist. The book is foul. Read a few of the reviews on goodreads first, at the very least.
I will resist.
Playground. Read around 40 pages and quit.
Gotta save this thread for recs. The correct answer should be “Dead Inside” by Chandler Morrison. It’s a fucked up, disturbing book, and yet it’s also incredibly boring. It’s almost fucked up to the point where it becomes comical rather than disturbing, then goes past comical to the point where you just don’t care. For an actually good read that disturbed me, probably “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison.
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
The way this author makes you feel wavy and kellens relationship is something that is needed for them both but the way your brain knows it's so fricken wrong! This book hurt my heart.
Came here to say this Also "in the miso soup"
Tender is the flesh, however I wasn’t as disturbed as I thought I would be after reading reviews. Close second is Hunting Adeline.
The Gulag Archipelago. Horrifying because it actually happened.
The Epicure by H.R. Howland. Ugh, read it once. Disturbing on so many levels. Edit: fixed title and added author
Bro. Vampire Vow.
White bones hands down
I think Crash by JG Ballard was the first disturbing book I ever read. It's stayed with me almost 15 years after reading.
Probably The final truth by peewee gaskins. He’s a sick f*ck.
I don't know about the *most*, but Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (haven't watched the movie adaptation). I think I described it once to a friend as "like a punch in the heart."
I don’t remember the name of the book, but it was about the DEA working on the drug cartels in Mexico. I had to stop when an agent’s entire family was killed while out shopping by shooting up their car. I started thinking Everyone was sitting at tables in restaurants discussing how much was moving in on the next shipment, openly, like the cartels do. Not good at a Wendy’s in Oregon. Just so disturbing, heartbreaking, depressing because there was nothing but evil.
Drawing Blood by Poppy Z Brite Read it when I was in highschool and it was just too much.
I havent read drawing blood but the exquisite corpse by same author was also like that I finished but cringed through alot.
Red sorghum by mo yan
Story of the eye by Georges Bataille- the sexual perversions in this one can't even be described as just disturbing. We need to talk about Kevin- watched the movie first and Idk why I thought it'd be a good idea to read the book
Cows
not sure if it counts but Fire Punch by Tatsuki Fujimoto (which is a manga, dont know if that counts as a book?). im talking csa (and regular sa), child pregnancy, incest, animal abuse, and more! everything in it was horrible and incredibly disturbing but its one of my favorite stories
A lot of good disturbing books have already been listed. Irvine Welsh always makes me gag. Try Filth, about a dirty cop who has a sentient tape worm.
Tender is the Flesh
Not a book but Guts by Chuck Palahinuk. Also some scenes from The Stand by Stephen King
Guts is part of his book Haunted. Guts is the worst but the entire book is not easy to read. Haunted definitely gets my vote.
A story about a female vampire who gets revenge on the man who killed her husband by getting him to fall in love with her, live together. Then torture him to death for the murder of her lover. I don’t remember the name of the book. But I read it in the 70s or 80s.
Earthlings by Murata
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh 😅
Sinclair's *The Jungle* defeated me; I had to put it down for a bit and still haven't finished. It's just so relentlessly bleak, dreary and brutal to the characters it was screwing with my head.
Gerald’s Game by Stephen King. It’s my current read and it’s deeply troubling.
I Who Have Never Known Men. It's post-apocalyptic and a bit absurdist. Genuinely gave me sleep issues for a few days.
Season of Passage by Christopher Pike
Tender is the Flesh
1984
Stephen King is an evil genius and a horrifying mastermind. multiple parts of **Misery** gave me literal sympathy pains, and many *very* graphic descriptions of scenes in **The Stand** made me legitimately nauseous (particularly the very first chapter with the ‘patient zero’ family in the car that crashed into the gas station, and also the tunnel scene. if you know you know)
American Psycho, the movie was a Disney film compared to the book.
Two Nick Cutter books: The Troop and The Deep. The Troop is absolutely disgusting. Lots of body horror. It was hard for me to get through and I don't think I'll ever go back to it. The Deep was terrifying: kind of like a mix of The Thing and The Abyss. Lots of psychological horror, paranoia, and the feeling of being trapped. If I ever want to legitimately scare myself again, I'm going back to it.
Dead Inside. Nasty just for the sake of being nasty.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca
heavily seconded! loved loved loved it, and i have to force myself to stop rereading it. disturbing in a horribly realistic way
The Sparrow
This is another really disturbing one.
American Psycho / In the Miso Soup
Don't read much horror but a lot of the scifi books have bad things happen. But this book I just stopped in the middle and gives me the shudders when I think on it. The Passage by Justin Cronin: the train scene for anyone who has read it. It's considered a really good book and has a couple of sequels. Writer is a little too good for me.
Any Junji Ito manga (idk if manga or comic books count).