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 Suspicions of Mr Whicher' - if you want an unnerving, real-life murder story with some history about the police/justice systems. Fascinating book and a bit creepy.

Also, agree with pp about Alice Seabold and 'The Lovely Bones' - very well written but I wish I'd never read it.

Let the right one in by John Lindqvist. I had to shut the book at a certain point and wait for daylight before I could continue.

Er I also recommended it to SIL when she mentioned she liked vampire stories. She meant Twilight. While there are vampires in both these books they are not sparkly in this one!

It has also been made into two movies Swedish version and English. I've seen the Swedish one and liked it.

Brave New World- Aldous Huxley
Never let me go -Kazuo Ishiguro
The Andromeda Strain and Prey both by Michael Crichton

The Wasp Factory. It was so disturbing I couldn’t finish it.

jente I know Pauline Cutting well.... she's a friend of my dh...wonderful human being and so humble

The Story of the Eye is disgusting and I felt sick, but weirdly compelled to finish it.

The Wasp Factory is very good, disturbing but not in the disgusting league.

@Stopyourhavering64 Oh that's lovely. I have so much respect for her and her work. It had a huge effect on me growing up. Please let her know her work hasn't been forgotten.

Once Were Warriors. And then the movie afterwards. My heart still breaks every time I think of it.

Ron Labrecque
Special Effects: Disaster at Twilight Zone : The Tragedy and the Trial

Carole Peters
Harold Shipman: Mind Set on Murder

Once I realised ^American Psycho^ was meant to be funny, I sort of got it. I still think Easton Ellis wants it both ways, i.e. the killings are imaginary, and mostly of women but you still read it, they are described in the detail he does not accord to the other killings. A feeling of complicity.

^Let the Right One In^ is superb, not least because it shows being a paedophile as a horrible life, and not in an aww, they have it tough too you know. Just, who'd ever want to be like that?

^The Ideal, Genuine Man^ by Don Robertson. Probably out of print now, but genuinely perturbing. I see from my copy that I read it thirty years ago and wonder if I'd be as appalled now.

Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet. The film The skin I live in is based on the book.

Lovely bones
Child called it
Flowers in the attic

Irvine Welsh Marabou Stork Nightmares - another vote for this.

We have to talk about Kevin and the Lovely Bones I thought were, not great. I'd sussed the Kevin one early on and the Lovely bones - who/what finds an elbow?

When the wind blows is totally depressing, it reminded me of how my grandparents would have reacted.

As a teenager I read Z for Zachariah, not sure if you would find it chilling now, the 1980s was a great time for scaring yourself with post nuclear war apocalypse.

Slightly off to left field, Fluke by James Herbert.

Kevin Brooke's The Bunker Diary. YA novel that won the Carnegie Medal a few years ago amidst controversy. It's not a nice story by any stretch of the imagination but it is powerful, well-told and I recommend it to everyone.

Minette Walters The Shape Of Snakes
Robert Harris Fatherland and Pompeii
L Shriver We Need ToTalk About Kevin
Michelle Paver Dark Matter
Hugh Howey Wool Trilogy
Oh and from my late teens -so forty years ago but I can still picture parts of it vividly-James Herbert's Rats

American Psycho.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. I love her books and she’s a talented, prolific and much feted writer. She writes about women and girls well. I’m not easily disturbed by fiction but this one was too much. And she’s such a tiny, well put together “proper” looking woman - how does this stuff come out of her head?

My Absolute Darling

https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Absolute-Darling-Sunday-bestseller-ebook/dp/B01MV0WM7Q/ref=sr11_1?crid=1FO7DJFIB1NS4&keywords=my+absolute+darling&qid=1580025377&sprefix=My+absol%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1

I haven't read it for years so I'm not sure how it will have aged but Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi is a good read, if you can find a copy anywhere.

King Rat by James Clavell has always stayed with me. Set in a Japanese POW camp.

@JasonVoorhees Cormac MaCarthy's Blood Meridian was so disturbing I had to stop reading.
No Country for Old Men is an excellent and disturbing novel as well though. As is, The Road, of course.

And on that subject Empire of the Sun is also fantastic.

Station 11
Lovely Bones
A child called IT
Lolita

I'm glad I wasn't the only person freaked out by We need to talk about Kevin! The poor mother.

'Perfume' is the most disturbing book I've read ever. I can't even describe it. Then 'Children of the Dust', which is 1980s young adult fiction about the aftermath of a nuclear war. It was in my school library. We all read it in series and freaked ourselves out permanently. Wtf, school librarian?!

Can't wait to get stuck into these!

I have a suggestion for my fellow weirdo readers - The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński.

Thank you all, hugely appreciate your responses