White Noise by Don DeLillo, a Postmodern, blacker-than-black humor novel about consumerism, fear, and death. Completely blew my mind when it was given to me by my AP Humanities teacher in high school.
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For me, it was Philip K. Dick short stories, specifically Autofac and Adam without Eve, IIRC.
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I wonder if that’s my deal, too. I’ve been trying to think if anything really messed me up, but books were such a refuge that even the freaky ones are remembered fondly. For context, I believe I read about 70% of what Stephen King had written at the time by the time I was 13. “It” probably freaked me out the most, but even that had a strong friend group of kids who banded together.
Disclaimer: I saw “The Shining” mentioned here, and that’s one of the few I still haven’t read, so maybe I dodged a bullet. 
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So happy to see House of Stairs listed! Pretty much every William Sleator book messed me up in its own special way, and I loved them all.
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Rama II. I read Rendezvous with Rama as a preteen, and then moved onto the sequels, which featured incest, pedophilia, and gerontophilia. I don’t recall if it had all three at once.
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Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit. This is not humblebrag BS. I had to read a lot of difficult stuff, and I’m drawn to stuff that’s hard for me to understand; I always have something to prove. But I was reading this for a class, and I felt something in my brain go sproing. It didn’t give me nightmares–no book ever has (the movie Predator fucked my shit up good)–but it spooked me. I honestly think it broke something in my brain. I’ve never gone back to that sort of stuff, stuff I used to enjoy, like Merleau-Ponty, because I dread this experience again. I’m not sure if my “metaphysics if bullshit” attitude derives from an honest position or from fear of reliving the sort of vertigo I experienced reading Hegel’s repetitive, crazy, weird-ass book. I would never write this under anything but a pseudonym.
House of Leaves is really good. If you haven’t read it, it’s really worth a go.
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I guess I didn’t mention that one because I saw the movie first. Although, even being prepared for how rough it was going to be, the book was still devastating.
Same here. I think maybe “Salem’s Lot” creeped me out a bit, but maybe we need a definition of “f*cked you up mentally” here.
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For me the book that f***ked me up the most was “Disney’s illustrated Old Yeller”. I was six, and read it at my Aunt’s place. I get to the part where he is having nightmares about his dog getting rabies and trying to kill/bite him. That’s the point when my aunt’s St Bernard jumped on me and the resulting dog phobia lasted until my 20’s
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Celestial Navigation In A Nutshell by Hewiit Schlereth.
Combining trigonometry, astronomy and use of sextant measuring instrument was a challenge. Read each chapter (paragraphs/sentences) several times. Finished reading the book, read it again, things started to make sense / clearer comprehension. Still working at it.
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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
–Richard Dawkins
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Um, what?
I have been hospitalized for depression. The Bell Jar rang very true with me, and made me feel less alone.
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Any of Ray Bradbury’s paperbacks: The Martian Chronicles, Something WIcked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, “Fucked up” is a little strong; perhaps more “transformative.” And, for some reason, this particular cover art was particularly effective. Perhaps because it was realistic and not hokey. It was like Bradbury was writing it for me: “Here you go, kid.”
Bonus '50s dystopic pulp science fiction: There Will Come Soft Rains
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Our 6th grade teacher read House of Stairs to us, and it may have been one of the first really dark stories without a happy ending that many of the class had ever experienced (aside from Goosebumps books, anyway). He also read another one, I think just titled Singularity, about a time-distorting field in a kids’ clubhouse that a boy used to become older than his older brother or something, which I think was similarly bleak and eerie.
I’d say the only books that have really disturbed me are some horror ones that really got to me- Stephen King’s It and a couple stories from Skeleton Crew, and H.P. Lovecraft… not any specific story, but the cumulative effect of them all.
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Damn, the title alone on that one…
Mine was “Into the Mouth of the Cat”
It’s supposed to be a story celebrating heroism, but I came out repulsed and pitying him. It was a long time before I read another non fiction war book (my normal genre in my teens) and when I did, I read it with completely different eyes.
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I picked up a book from the Dell Abyss line (which ranged from pretty good to amazing) just because they had published it. The thing was called Toplin and it was by Michael McDowell. Never read anything like it. I threw it across the room, twice. This has some interesting stuff about the book:
Toplin
It has, uh, pictures too, and they are prtty unsettling also.[It has been reissued! However, this version may not have the illustrations in it. This is a good thing as an original version, even the paperback one would be WAY expensive.]
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The Eye of Argon
…and no, I did not finish reading it.
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fuckin animorphs, that ka applegate sure loves body horror
also based on her reddit posts i wouldn’t be surprised if she posts here 
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Yes to The Shining: I read it in junior high and scared the shit out of myself. Contains all the horror of the movie and more.
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Myra Breckenridge
I didn’t really read it, just skimmed it at age 6. I didn’t understand it because I didn’t get satire, or pretty much anything about it, including one chapter that consists solely of “Where are my breasts? Where are my breasts?”
Since I was too young to be affected by it didn’t really fuck me up, but it sure fucked me down.
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Every Junji Ito book I’ve read was creepy as hell, but the scene that really chilled me was in Volume 3 of Uzumaki. The main characters live in a town “cursed by spirals.” Many weird and horrific things are happening, all connected by spirals-- a woman’s hair curling and choking people, bodies deforming and twisting together, and people slowly turning into giant snails. A minor character isn’t worried about going without food. One of the people in his party is becoming a snail, and this character loves escargot… I had to put the book down for a while after that chapter. As an avid reader, I don’t get that reaction often.
I second third the Illuminatus! Trilogy as a real mindscrew. And I dearly love John Dies at the End. The sequels aren’t quite as good, although reading the third book while feverish with the flu was an interesting experience.
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