The only redeeming quality of Bartleby the Scrivener is that it is the price one must pay to respond, ironically, “I’d prefer not to.”
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Clive Barker’s stories had the same effect on me…as an adult. In particular, “The Body Politic” bothered me for a long time. 
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What a great novel, but to me not very disturbing.
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Sharna pax and get the poal
When the Ardship of Cambry come out of the hoal
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Deepest sympathy to you. I don’t know timeframe or circumstances or your relationship with your brother. But i know loss and im sorry.
Bukowski and a few of the other books in this list pose the chicken/egg question. Was i bound to be fucked up whether or not i read _____? Not for every person or every book. mostly i think intense books and other media can be incubators and hatchers for the right bad/ hidden eggs
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Surprised you haven’t mentioned Alfred Bester, given your handle.
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Assuming that “blew my mind” != “fucked me up mentally”…
There have been many books that blew my mind – Naked Lunch, Masks of the Illuminati *, Right Where You Are Sitting Now, and Illuminatus! trilogy, for example. Also Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, How Real Is Real?, and both books (so far) by Rafi Zabor.
*On first read, anyway. It really fell apart for me during the subsequent reading.
Other than the aforementioned Imperial 109, I can’t think of a book that “fucked me up mentally,” though. There are some books, such as People’s History of the United States, King Leopold’s Ghost and The Dream of the Celt, that I am glad I read during adulthood and not late adolescence (of course, the latter two are much newer than that – I mean that I didn’t feel “mentally strong” (or, as strong as I was going to get, anyway) until I was 24 or 25).
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I’d like to put in a word for Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s “Vita Nostra” - an immensely fucked up anti-wizard-school book whose title suggests that maybe it’s all just a very elaborate metaphor for how fucked up all our lives are.
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Level 7 really hit me back then; now it’s tame. Now the 1961 Estes Catalog–that really messed up my life.
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Apologies for the edits, I kinda lost track of what forum I was on 
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No worries on my part. Thanks to Discourse, we can see the editing history.
Unlike books that messed me up, I would say the one book that opened my mind and made me the happy mutant that I am now was The Medium Is the Massage, which I read as a really young kid. Found it in my dad’s study, amongst other old college books, and it made a permanent, indelible mark on my mental state. I couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9 at the time. It was when Ford was president, that much I still recall.
My dad had a lot of books that I would borrow from his college collection, and impressed me at a young age. The Medium Is the Massage was the first, but I also recall devouring:
- Listen, Little Man!
- Short Stories by Kafka (a collection with English on the left page, original German on the right)
- Bullfinch’s Mythology
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Books should fuck you up. I think that’s entirely the point of books.
Spoiler alert: this is also the point of children. 
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Atlas Shrugged, but I grew out of it. 
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What’s the difference between juvenile literature and young adult literature?
The Hunger Games is young adult. Atlas Shrugged is juvenile.
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Going in a totally different direction and/or different definition of f****d up: the things I read in college by John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and Peter Singer. I internalized the idea that any time I valued my own life and well being more than that of any arbitrary human, it made me a bad person. An unachievable ideal, and unhealthy mentally. Still not fully over it 12 years later.
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