Comment what books have caused you to become distressed, traumatized, or unsettled in any way. Please elaborate as to why.
The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It wasn’t scary per say but I had an interesting experience where I had a manic episode reading it, barely slept, and got absolutely obsessed with the idea of it as I read it.
10/10 loved the immersion aspect.
Came here to say exactly this! That one puts the reader in the narrator’s situation if you’re not careful. Which is pretty genius, but also terrifying. Stroooooong mental health warning like nothing else I’ve ever read, but sooo good. It took me three or four tries to get through it, just because of the ahem. Atmosphere it manifested in my brain. But it’s one of my favorite books ever.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The main character has no name, no parents and his life is full of violence and death. It’s all he knows, so much as he knows anything.
It’s being adapted into a film now. I don’t know how they’re going to pull it off.
I feel like there are multiple levels of terrifying to this book.
I can’t get The Judge out of my head, he has a supernatural quality to him but in a horrible, intelligent way that makes him horrifying.
But then the other terrifying thing is just the depiction of the normal characters and what they go through and the actions they commit.
And then finally another level is the depiction of everything else they face. That scene where the boy first witnesses an attack by the Comanche is blood curdling and yet mesmerising within one sentence. For anybody looking for context, search for ‘Blood Meridian Legion of horribles quote’ for the whole sentence.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy, it’s just so goddamn bleak. Nothing ever goes well and just about everybody is horrible, not a book I’ll likely read again even though I did enjoy it. Same with the movie, it’s just such a kick in the guts that I won’t be rewatching it even though it was great.
This is funny, I immediately thought of Blood Meridian when I read the post title, then came in and saw another Cormac McCarthy book!
I’m not even sure why I think of Blood Meridian over The Road. Maybe now that I have child rereading the road would make it worse. But I feel that especially upon a few rereads Blood Meridian has some really dark things happening that aren’t immediately apparent.
And I suppose part of my choice might be because I find The Judge to be both the most fascinating and horrifying character in anything I’ve read or seen.
A Scanner Darkly is an incredibly moving and haunting novel to anyone who’s ever struggled with drug addiction. For a nonfiction book probably “Kill Anything That Moves” which is about the horrifying and infuriatting reality of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston
That afterword in A Scanner Darkly! Intense.
“This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it….”
Lolita, it’s simply unsettling.
Also Starship Troopers as I used to be in the military for a bit.
