LOL! “The first one just seems so angry, and the second one is a little campy, but well-meaning. It’s like they were written by different authors.”
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Ooh, now that you mention Greg Bear, that reminded me of the “Human as a National Park” thing that happened in Blood Music. The sapient cells couldn’t convert a woman down to sludge like the rest of North America. She had some problems with her cell biology, so the sapient cells decided to make her something like a museum for them. Abd she got to live the rest of her life isolated in Manhattan.
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The Painted Bird, J. Kosinsky. A suggestion from my freshman (college) English teacher–grrr. In a time when I needed to integrate my life with society it seriously didn’t help.
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That is goddamn amazing
I will have to check that out. Did you ever read Blood Music by Greg Bear? That one stuck with me as well and was borderline body horror. Oops @LDoBe already mentioned it 
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We didn’t get that many viewpoints of the same story again until Tarantino.
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The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. Read it when I was 14. Messed me up for years. I was convinced I heard scratches coming from the ceiling every night.
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Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus Trilogy.
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The Illuminatus! Trilogy completely fucked my sense of reality for a good couple of weeks.
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The Dice Man.
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Nonfiction Entry! Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. I had to put that book down for weeks at a time after finishing some chapters, because suddenly I had no idea how to make decisions any more.
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That was hysterical!
Ugh, horrific depictions of human depravity. I earned a “C” from an Expository Writing professor for suggesting that the incidents were fabrications. Turned out they are.
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As a kid i read The Shining and the book was truly terrifying. I think its one of the few books that i’ve read that actually scared me. I’ve tried re-reading it since but knowing the story takes out a lot of that fear.
Lord of the Flies i wouldn’t say it “fucked me up” but the story is very harrowing. Seems like a lot of people that read it for school just flat out hate it, it wasnt required reading for me so i read that on my own time and really liked it despite the dark theme.
Relato de un Naufrago (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is also a hell of a read and its a true story though embellished by Marquez. The sailor goes through a lot of suffering and while i immensely loved reading it the story has always stuck with me.
Mind fuck-wise i would say John Dies At The End does it for me, reading it feels like taking acid.
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I read “House of Stairs” as a kid, not sure it f*cked me up, though. I don’t think any books I read as a kid really messed me up in any way, but maybe because I’m comparing the fantasy of books to the reality of how adults and other kids seriously messed me up.
As a young adult reading “The Gulag Archipelago” was kind of traumatizing, I’m not sure I ever finished it (the last 3rd of the book is tedious, painstaking details of how bogus so many Soviet trials were.)
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy was relentless in its bleakness. McCarthy has a way of writing that doesn’t just describe events, but cuts through so that you almost live them. Brutal.
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Too many! Certainly Labyrinths, the first Jorge Luis Borges collection in English.
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Strangely, its effects can be cured simply by reading it.
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Flowers for Algernon is a real tear-jerker and a fantastic example of how language tells a story.
I finished it on a sunny summer morning over coffee in the park and just - sat there for a while…
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Level 7 was adapted by J. B. Priestley for a 1966 episode of the BBC2 television science-fiction drama programme Out of the Unknown.
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