The Bible series, but things really jumped the shark with the Book of Mormon.
The Bible did fuck me up as a kid.
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.
Matthew 5:28-5:29
Reading this as a super religious + horny 12 year old was terrifying. I felt extreme guilt for not maiming myself for a few years before I finally realized religion was bullshit.
“If a man is considered guilty for what goes on in his mind, then give me the electric chair for all my future crimes.”
-Prince 1989
You are not alone in this.
My wife was raised Southern Baptist, she has a lot of sex hang ups, despite having been out of the church for about 30 years.
Did you cut your d*ck ?
Indeed, among the religious books I have read, the Book of Mormon takes the top position on the loony pile. What kind of indoctrination and drugs do you need to believe that?
Grooming the youth, that’s the kind of indoctrination you need. As a missionary, the only non-indoctrinated adults who got into the BoM were, let’s say, simple.
I had full access to the internet growing up (the secret was to be awake when other sleep lol) and reading the bible made me feel like I was viewing age inappropriate content then anything else
That one is crazy how the main character does shitty things like wiping out civilizations just out of spite, then he impregnates a teenage girl and the baby grows up and is all nice and loving but says he is actually his dad and he/his dad love everyone. So much gaslighting.
Aside from the occasional designed-to-offend ones, probably The Road. Only book I’ve ever read that haunted me
I got offended at the lack of punctuation or anything. Didn’t get far. Fuck you Oprah and fuck your book club.
I read it and then watched the movie and it was depressing. His other book Outer Dark involves brother sister incest, child murder, and cannibalism! Very cheery.
Naked Lunch by Christopher Burroughs
The Trial by Franz Kafka. Anything by Kafka is pretty mental.
Now imagine being German and having to read several works by that loony in middle school.
William S. Burroughs, not Christopher! Unless that’s I joke I’m missing…
Oh sbit
I can’t remember the name of the book now, but in high school we read a ‘true’ story of child abuse. I’m sure it was edited to both tone down and turn up certain elements, but it was pretty much a brutal shock to people who are mostly from decent families that love them. Whether the kids were rich, poor, or middle class in my school, just about everyone there could at least return home to parents that didn’t commit those horrors.
I remember the diapers, the exposure to the elements, and the way the other children were pitted against the abused kid, and honestly? It was the emotional abuse that was the worst to read.
I think the book you’re referring to is The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. That book make me sick to read, and yes, it is based on a true story. One of very few books I’ve ever finished with a sense of profound disgust and vowed never to return to - not because it’s a bad book, on the contrary Ketchum manages to capture the wrongness of it all in compelling detail - but the subject of its story was just completely unpalatable. I was too young for that story when I read it and that was my first real taste of the sort of horrible fucked up shit that humans can do to each other. And God, there was an awful lot of horrible fucked up shit in that story. Sylvia Likens (the real life poor dead girl the book is based on) deserves to have her story told to the world but part of me wishes I didn’t read it.
Like reading https://elan.school - just completely outside of what happy people can imagine.
Was just talking about this yesterday because of the “would you pick the man or the bear” question going around. The novel Bear by Marian Engel is quite literally about a woman who falls in love with and tries to have sex with a large bear. It won the Governor General’s award in Canada.
Also The Wasp Factory is seriously fucked up.
I think it was called “Welcome to Night Vale”. After painfully reading page after page of absurd drivel that was probably “written” by a drunk AI, I finally gave up. It really reads like the output of a low-quality Markov chain. My daughter insists it isn’t, but then they managed to simulate that very, very well (I have worked with Markov chains before, so I have a bit of experience how that looks like).
It is very rare that I give up on a book, maybe one in several thousands. But this one was a perfect waste of paper and ink, worse than some books we had to read in school, which is probably the harshest criticism I can offer.
On the Beach by Nevil Schute. Read it as a kid and didn’t realize what I was getting into. Kept waiting for the ending to have some kind of silver lining. Something. Then the last of humanity fucking dies and the last character commits suicide.
Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy.
It’s kinda hard to describe. I recon it’s a parable about American colonization and the genocide of the native people. Like a map of how a project like that gets done and who benefits from it.
It’s like a melodrama in that it’s light on plot, and character motivation, but without the extreme circumstances unless you count the pervasive, persistent, and senseless violence. (that the characters themselves barely seem to notice) Not exactly a supernatural tale, but filled with dream logic, oh and the literal Christian Devil is one of the main characters.
This is the only book Ive ever read twice, back to back. I got to the end and was like WTF, turned to the first page and started again.
Go Ask Alice
Very good book but it goes through a young women’s journey through SA, and hard addiction.
Not really quite as bad as the others here, but I read the first two books of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind as a young teen before getting squicked out by it. The female lead almost gets sexually assaulted four times (one of them being when she rides into the middle of a battlefield completely naked for incredibly contrived reasons). The entire first half of the second book is the author’s BDSM fantasy forced into plot relevancy. But perhaps the worst I read was some evil ritual that involved the villain cutting off and eating the genitals of a young boy.
So yeah, I stopped reading it.
I came here to talk about this exact series.
I think I read up to about book 8 and every one had some fucked up rape/bdsm shit.
I’m currently rereading A Clockwork Orange and yep, it’s pretty fucked up.
The Wasp Factory. I mean the whole book is disturbing but the ending…
“Mangez le si vous voulez” (Eat him of you wish)
A book relating events that happened in 1870 in a French village. From a misunderstanding one guy is beaten, released, tortured and ultimately burned alive with people bridging toast to collect the fat that was dripping from the fire.
All the events happened in a single day that goes from mundane to horror.
I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was eleven. Some of the nonsense rhyme still comes back to me when I’m tired - she’s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts em inna pens / wire, briar, limber lock, three geese inna flock.
I also read She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb when I was in high school. Both are extremely fucked when it comes to talking about mental health and hospitalizations.
Day of the Oprichnik. I only wanted to read it because it is banned in Russia.
