You know i had to. Also, of course, this
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Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes was probably the first book I read where the protagonist dies (and slowly at that), which was pretty upsetting for a five year old. Even as an adult, I find kids’ books in general can be pretty full on, because they’re pitched at an audience that doesn’t really have a developed notion of subtlety.
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I read the Carlos Castaneda books when I was 15 and although I didn’t believe all the stuff in those books I spent way to much time way to young with various psychedelics.
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House of Stairs is a really weird book, stranger than one realizes at the time if one reads it as a kid. It doesn’t really make any sense. The maze of staircases is neither physically plausible nor necessary to the plot. It’s just there to make the whole thing feel like a bad dream.
I guess there are other surrealistic horror stories out there whose authors basically just torment their own creations in arbitrary ways for their readers’ amusement, but they’re not usually marketed as educational materials for children.
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The short stories by Roald Dahl. When I was a kid, they definitely blurred my notion of good and bad protagonists and taught me that stories don’t have to have a happy end, and that people do things out of selfishness more often than for the greater good.
And of course The Prince by Machiavelli made me lose my faith in humanity.
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The Holy Barbarians, On The Road, and other books by and about ‘beatniks’ made me want be a dropout all my life. Not a good career move. Fucked with my head.
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I was looking for the end of 1984 here. It’s a brilliant book in the usual sci-fi 'two misfits take on the system" mould, and you expect the miraculous ending, but it never comes: they don’t win; that they never could; that Big Brother knew what they would do before they did themselves… …and it keeps on going down.
…brrhh.
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Yeah, I’ll go with American Psycho as well. I felt that I couldn’t read it in public, as if the words would jump out and assault the passersby. And totally saving this thread and the Redditt one for the purposes of adding to my reading list.
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I took this course in high school.
This book got a lot of pushback, but I’d like to believe it was educational. It didn’t come as a shock to me, because I had already read it.
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Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel.
A novelist, a taxidermist, and two taxidermy animals Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a monkey.
Life of Pi had a twist ending but finishes mostly positively. This really does not.
I had my mind blown by Dahl stories twice. Once when I found his stories like “The Swan”, which were in with the kids’ books and were still sort of aimed at that market. Then again, a few years later (as an older kid, but still a kid) when I found his adult short stories, full of seriously unexpected violence and sex and weirdness, but I loved them as well.
I read Catcher at exactly the right age – about 14 – and thought it was the most important and life-changing book I’d ever read.
Reading it again a few years later was very cringeworthy.
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I’m a big fan of Someone Like You.
Switch Bitch, on the other hand, is a little rapey. And by a little rapey I mean a lot rapey.
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Very much agreed. Someone Like You and Tales of the Unexpected were my introductions to his adult stories, and they’re funny, weird, dark, and very clever. Switch Bitch was just nasty and pretty gross. I did enjoy his Uncle Oswald novel, though, which isn’t so much rapey as just ridiculous.
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Animal Farm – “The whole thing spooked the shit out of my 13-year-old mind.”
I remember it really disturbing me, too. For some reason, the raising of the Hoof-and-Horn flag over the farm invaded my dreams.
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Night Shift, Stephen King’s short stories, some of which went on, most disappointingly, to feature as really bad full length movies.
There were a few sleepless nights as a kid reading those stories…
I suppose as a 12-year old I also didn’t fully appreciate what cocaine was doing to the creative processes of America at the time… 
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I read it at 8 and liked it as a story about animals; I’d read Fantastic Mr Fox, I knew animals did odd stuff in stories, so no problem. It wasn’t until I read it at school that I realised it was about something else.
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I took a course in college that included “Against the Grain”, Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger”, etc. It was a brutal term. I think my brain refused to fully take in how depressing and nihilistic it was.
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Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese.
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I came here to mention The Road as well. And “bleak” is the exact word I always use to describe it. It really got to me in a weird way. I just felt… off… for several days after finishing it.
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