Controversial/unnerving books. Recommendations?

[JasonVoorhees]

Hi all

Been browsing the good old World Wide Web this chilly Saturday evening while my LO is with her dad, and came across an article regarding the most "traumatizing books people have ever read". Basically books that stick with you forever, due to their disturbing content.

I'm an avid reader and pretty bored of mainstream novels. Read a few weird books in my time and recently bought Lolita (a literary classic, so I've heard). WIBU to ask your experiences and/or recommendations?

Looking forward to your replies, hopefully some of you Mumsnetters are as weird as me.

The Wasp Factory is fantastic, as many have mentioned.

Glamorama is a less well known one from Bret Easton Ellis but imo it was FAR more disturbing than American Psycho. That was an utterly horrendous and hard going read. Graphic violence, body horror, strange and confusing structures and extremely detailed descriptions of terrorist attacks.

I couldn't finish The Dice Man. I just found it so utterly grotesque and pointless. I might have missed the point of it because I saw nothing clever but it's extremely cult.

The Mall by S.L Grey. It’s so weird and freaky

Have to say I read The dinner , well most of it and it didn’t effect me at all.
Got quite bored so never finished it .

The Mall

Dreadful read, I couldn't get past the first page.

Oh, hang on, The Mall ! I thought you said "Mail"

(I'll get my coat ...)

No Margaret Atwood yet. ‘The Heart Stops Last’ has some very disturbing visions of 21st C America - eg organ harvesting.

Also you must read Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles - a dystopian novel set in the recent future predicated on the complete collapse of the US dollar. That doesn’t do it justice - it is a brilliant, page turning read.

I love unnerving reads but I wouldn't willingly read about child abuse/child cruelty. Mentally sorting these into two columns! Great thread though.

A Head Full Of Ghosts. No abuse or anything. A slow building psychological mind fuck that had me open mouthed by the last 3 pages

Lullaby by Leila Slimani was pretty harrowing.

I find real history much more chilling than fiction - eg Wild Swans.

If you want to read something you really won't forget, try Svetlana Alexievitch's oral histories of Russia - Second-Hand Time, which is about the fall of the USSR, or The Unwomanly Face of War, about Russian women during WWII.

American Psycho is the most disturbing thing I have read. I have had to hide the book at the back of my bookcase.
I found Truman Capotes In Cold Blood a difficult read.
J.G Ballard - Crash
William S Burroughs, who I do like but the amount of descriptive drug-taking makes me feel nauseous after a while.

Agota Kristof, The Notebook
Nabokov, Camera Obscura

I'll second those suggesting the Wasp Factory - thoroughly engrossing but unsettling.

When my book group read read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life at least two of us loathed it and one begged off so she didn't have to discuss it. The sexual abuse scenes (which start when the character is a child) are like torture porn. It may be the only book I've deleted off my kindle without finishing, I just didn't want it near me.

Nobody has mentioned Lesley Glaister, here are my recommendations:

Digging to Australia: introverted teenager brought up by her naturist grandfather suddenly discovers the truth about her mother.

The Private Parts of Women: a woman who has run away from her very loving husband and children meets an elderly woman who has multiple personalities, because of very cruel childhood treatment by her father (who was "gender-disappointed").

Now You See Me: a young homeless woman secretly lives in the cellar of an elderly man for whom she cleans, and befriends a criminal.

The most disturbing book of non-fiction I’ve read recently is Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder - documenting the murder of 12 million civilians - Jewish and non-Jewish - by Germany and the ussr, mainly in Poland and Ukraine from the early 30s to the end of the war. Snyder is relentless - a superb historian.

On the back of his experience researching and writing books like this and his concerns for the current political direction, he has also recently written a short simple monograph - ‘On Tyranny - 20 lessons for the 21st century’ - which should be required reading for sixth formers and undergraduates everywhere.

Someone mentioned Primo Levi and The Drowned and the Saved is (as it should be) absolutely disturbing. I read it 20 years ago and can’t bear to bring details to mind.

If you want to read something you really won't forget, try Svetlana Alexievitch's oral histories of Russia - Second-Hand Time, which is about the fall of the USSR, or The Unwomanly Face of War, about Russian women during WWII.

I agree @Wilding, her interviews of women in her books are illuminating and sometimes upsetting. When I read The Unwomanly Face Of War I must have had to put it down 100 times to gasp in horror and just stare at a wall. Doing this in a busy pub is not good...

It's a book I'm glad I read, but I will never lend it to anybody. I read it so they don't have to.

Another recommendation for We Need To Talk About Kevin. Also Misery by Stephen King and The Secret History by Donna Tartt are very dark.

Someone else who's read The Unwomanly Face of War! I found it in my local gym (they have a book exchange). It's great, if horrifying. Both about how the women were treated after the war and the things they went through.

I still find The Shining really unnerving, especially the audio book.

Flowers in the Attic was my first foray into horror and I was hooked.

Beloved by Toni Morrison has stuck with me for years. I saw her read a passage from it, sitting mere meters from her, and it was chilling. I still can't believe how lucky I was.

I love several that have been mentioned and some that haven't: Blood Meridian (which I once saw described as "one long waterfall of blood cascading down the page" and it stuck with me as the perfect description), NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, The Heart Goes Last, Oryx & Crake, and The Handmaid's Tale (major Atwood fan), Let The Right One In, The Stand, Kelly + Victor (unsettling rather than scary), Blindness by José Saramago, Dark Matter by Michelle Paver (creepy af), Frankenstein, The Woman in Black, Turn of the Screw, The Monk, Dracula, Requiem for a Dream, Carrie ... I could go on and on!

American Psycho is a difficult read, made all the harder by a real weirdo I knew at the time of reading who was practically salivating while describing his favourite sections. Both book and weirdo were ditched.

I'm currently reading The Parable of the Sower and Station 11 - no light reading respite for me!

American Psycho
Another day in the death of America

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

“The Hairy Toe”. It really used to freak the kids out when I read that to them.

Sweetpea C.J. Skuse - written in the first person by a female serial killer. Darkly funny

Song of Stone by Iain Banks - deeply depressing and disturbing.

Another vote for Margaret Atwood - Oryx & Crake It's like you think these things wouldn't be allowed e.g. hybrids, too extreme...except it probably is happening.

Never Let Me Go - one of my favourite books. The frustration but the inevitability of it is what gets me.

Day of the Triffids - I finished it today. I can't believe I never read any Wyndham growing up. Recently finished the Chrysalids. Enjoyed both. The thing with the Triffids is it's not the Triffids that are the main point, rather how human civilisation collapses, how people react, how it could try to pick itself up.

Mandibles mentioned above - a long book, but well worth it and disturbing to think what would happen if the western world economy all collapsed.

Children of the Dust! OMG I remember reading this and shitting myself. I was obsessed by nuclear weapons as a teen, convinced the 3 minute warning would go off any minute. This didn't help!

Anything by Philip K Dick - I find it pretty hard to sleep after.