Lord of the Flies.
Not so much because it scarred me for life but rather because it taught me that teachers can be idiots, making kids read this horrible book seemingly just because it has kids in it. It was really not appropriate for 6th graders to my mind.
OMG, I’ve been trying to figure out the name of that book for almost 2 decades. Something just clicked in your comment and I knew what it was. Very unsettling.
I’m way too old and jaded to get fucked up by a book. But if I weren’t:
This is just a start. More fuckedupness sure to follow.
1984 for me. Read it as a young teen as most do. If I can bend the requirement slightly, the movie “Empire of the Sun” really fucked me up. Saw that even younger and it really painted a picture of how war affects normal people.
In Cold Blood. For some reason my Dad suggested it to me the summer I turned 13. That same summer while we were away for the weekend, some sick fucks ransacked our house and killed my pet guinea pigs, one of which was pregnant. That wasn’t a good year…
Agree with those who posted Flowers For Algernon; The Road; and The Shining.
In my early 30s I took a turn thru the French Decadents, eventually dropping down from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to – thought I’d be cool --the Marquis de Sade. 120 Days of Sodom, Justine and part of Juliette.
Even typing just the titles of that putrescence turns my stomach and starts metal brain saferoom doors to slamming.
JK Huysman’s Against the Grain also fucked me up spiritually for 20 years: “Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world’s wretchedness
would rend my heart.”
That shit messed me up a long time.
I always liked responses along the line of “considering all the religions in the world, we’re both atheists. I just believe in one less god than you do.”
That one definitely didn’t eff me up mentally, but it did get me seriously hooked on his other books. Bear thinks big. A wonder that film/tv industry hasn’t caught on. There was talk about doing his Darwin’s Radio series for TV, but Bear backed out when producers wanted to make the evolved children look like lizards.
Stepping back a bit from f*cked up, the latest book to significantly affect me was The Vorrh by B. Catling. Steampunk-ish/fantasy/alternative fiction… not my usual thing, but the strangely connected characters (one of who actually existed) and their stories, the unusual narrative style, the incredible imagination displayed, and prose (Catling is also a poet) had me reading the book again within a few months.
That’s moronic. They’re supposed to be homo sapiens 3.0
I also read Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children. I then read Eon, and tried very hard to read Eternity, but by about 1/3rd of the way through Eternity I lost steam.
I actually went to elementary and middle school with Greg Bear’s children. His daughter was the same grade as me and in a lot of the same classes.
Uhoh… I recommended Ian Banks to a neighbor I only know from seeing him walking his dog, and he’s reading The Wasp Factory now. I haven’t read any of his “mainstream” novels, only the science fiction ones. So I didn’t know I was throwing an existential crisis at the man.
I did tell him that I had read that his mainstream stuff was pretty dark, and that was balanced by the extraordinarily optimistic universe he had created in his Culture novels. I hope he doesn’t try Use of Weapons or Surface Detail as a kitten chaser to Wasp Factory.
I think some serious books that stuck with me (and have a much different brain-feel than the movies) were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Name of the Rose.
No movie, but I’d also recommend Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories, The Things They Carried. And don’t skip the foreword.
(At the risk of having this G. Bear thread split off) I’ve read and enjoyed everything by him except for The City at the End of Time. I managed to get ~1/4 of the way through that, but nothing clicked. Not the plot nor the characters. I ran out of steam there also. His War Dogs series pulled me out of that disappointment, though, and seemed to be intentionally written as something film/tv could pick up on.
This thread made me think of the Python sketch above, as well as this gem which I only just discovered. IMO UK comedian Greig Johnson’s YouTube channel is one hell of an under-subbed oeuvre. Highly recommended to the savvy Boingers out there.
Where the Red Fern Grows is the earliest book I can remember messing me up. I can’t remember how old I was (I might have been 9 or 10). In my defense, I don’t recall really reading too much fiction, and was naive and unsophisticated.
On the short story front, “Jefty is Five” kind of messed with my brain when I was 13 or so.
Second Johnny Got His Gun:
Add a few off the top of my head:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Illuminatus! Trillogy (and associated Robert Anton Wilson wormhole)
Pincher Martin
The Lathe of Heaven
The Baltimore Catechism.
Well, the annotated complete works of Shakespeare f*cked me up physically.
Humpin’ that thing in a backpack all over campus? Talk to me, English majors.
This, in that it revealed to me what one of my retirement hobbies will be…trolling future obsessives.
Zinn’s People’s History. He started out describing all the things Chris Columbus’ contemporaries did to the native peoples of the Americas and Caribbean. I had to stop, it had me reeling. I never did go back and finish that.
