Comment what books have caused you to become distressed, traumatized, or unsettled in any way. Please elaborate as to why.
Lolita, it’s simply unsettling.
Also Starship Troopers as I used to be in the military for a bit.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy, it’s just so goddamn bleak. Nothing ever goes well and just about everybody is horrible, not a book I’ll likely read again even though I did enjoy it. Same with the movie, it’s just such a kick in the guts that I won’t be rewatching it even though it was great.
There’s plenty of relatively bleak stuff out there, so I thought I was fine with The Road. Until the basement. RIP Cormac.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
It was an assigned reading in 11th grade. When I finally finished it, I remember feeling like my skin was crawling, and my thoughts were a jumbled mess - I was questioning everything, how I viewed others and how they viewed me, was it right or wrong, how would I have behaved in those situations…
I remember l just staring out my bedroom window into the pitch black night for an hour just digesting it all. I also remember sleeping with the lights on because I was a little creeped out.
Being an impressionable teen probably helped, but that book left a profound impact on my way of thinking about how I interact with the world and the people in it.
It was also my gateway book to classic literature and how good it can actually be!
Medical Block, Buchenwald: The Personal Testimony of Inmate 996, Block 36 by Walter Poller.
The House in the Dark by Tarjei Vesaas. It’s a surrealist account of life under the Nazi occupation. It was written in Norway during the occupation. After writing it, Vesaas immediately buried the manuscript in the forest until the war was over - being caught with it would have meant immediate death.
1962 cold-war drama Fail-Safe is also very disturbing.
Tough question, but I found The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch to be very disturbing. It really freaked me out in places.
Gotta be a tie between Pet Semetary and Blindsight, although for different reasons.
For me, pet semetary was very disturbing as an examination of a parent’s grief. But kinda underwhelming as a supernatural afterlife story. Dont get me wrong, still loved it, but yeah the build up is way more harrowing than the pay-off
A Scanner Darkly is an incredibly moving and haunting novel to anyone who’s ever struggled with drug addiction. For a nonfiction book probably “Kill Anything That Moves” which is about the horrifying and infuriatting reality of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston
Loved The Hot Zone! Nonfiction that reads like a thriller.
