Skeleton Crew was one of his short story collections that I really enjoyed as a kid, and it has two stories that did terrify me. The one with the murderous wind-up cymbal monkey and The Mist (which is one of my favorite things he’s written but damn it’s scary).
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oh someone shelved silence of the lambs on the children’s floor at one point that was interesting
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Thank you, thank you, for saying this.
As a kid growing up in a very sparsely populated (semi) desert, where the only Native American artifacts are from the Clovis era, The Martian Chronicles definitely seemed like a revelation, almost non-fiction to me. All other ‘children’s books’ are about fairies prancing around in dense forests and living in giant manor houses/castles.
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Reminds me of a book store that kept filing “The Pop-up Kama Sutra” in the children’s section.
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It might not have done so, but it came right at the end of high school and threw gas on an already burning existential (and identity) crisis. I still love it.
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Heart of Darkness by Conrad. While it is very poetic reading, this book opened my eyes to a sense of inevitable horror - a feeling that there was an evil force in the world, one of inevitable decay and horror, and nothing could stop it.
Oh, and House of Stairs. And ‘I have no mouth, but I must scream’.
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I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned:
Mind control horror show in space.
My 16-yr old brain was bent.
Scares any 12 yr old straight.
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i didn’t know that jeffrey epstein owned a bookstore.
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I found this one even more disturbing.
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1984 by George Orwell. Truly surprised to see I may be the first to post this. Really quite disturbing to a fifteen year old me.
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. As mentioned above.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. An amazing book. One of the all time great dystopian novels. Highly recommended.
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“When next I saw Don Juan, he told me “this time you will get more wasted than ever before!” and I ended up talking to a giant moth.”
-Book 4 or 5 or whatever
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Also recommended (if you want a book that blew my little mind as a kid): The Mouse and His Child.
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I always got the impression that the makers of “Cube” had to have read House of Stairs at some point.
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“Where the Red Fern Grows” was probably the first one I remember ripping my guts out.
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I assumed the point (fucked you up) sought pained negative responses, not merely strong reactions. I’ve been astounded and influenced by much lit’ry stuff – Chip Delaney, Mary Austin, Ed Sanders, Whole Earth Catalog, biblical texts – but it was beatnik accounts that sent me wrong.
How many of you read something that made your life worse?
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Yeah when I was a kid my big sisters were hippies & feminists & I used to read their books. That running story about D.R. in the Whole Earth Catalog; Revolution for the Hell of It; Be Not Content; Goodbye to All That; Sisterhood Is Powerful. I couldn’t wait to grow up, drop acid, levitate the Pentagon, & burn my bra
But the book that really messed me up as a pre-teen was Rosemary’s Baby.
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Ack, having issues with spoiler text here btw… Do not want this post going out without it…
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I kept trying to think of a book that fucked me up, however I’ve read so many books but none of them have really been for that purpose, and then I remember that one.
Hiroshima by Hersey is horific with detail of nuclear fallout suffering, skin falling off. That shit really happened. I saw the museum in Hiroshima when I first lived in Japan- diorama of mother and child screaming as their skin falls off bleeding to death will be etched into my fucking soul forever
I haven’t read it yet- but knowing the details, The Radium Girls book, with similar horrors, of jawbones rotting off in a still live face are true nightmare fuel.
The only, only media item that has permanently scarred me in ways I can’t speak of was a movie, called A Serbian Film.
Please, for fucks sake- don’t even google that shit. I felt like I was actually in hell when I watched that. I feel like I will never be clean again in this world after that, it permanently led me to believe humans can have no depth to their evil
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