Discordia Concors: Disturbing Books

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I love books that are vaguely or drastically unsettling. Dystopian. Twisted.

Tell me I am not alone here. What are your favorite strange and haunting works of fiction?

A random sampling of "disturbing" books I've enjoyed:

In the Country of Last Things --- Paul Auster
The Horned Man --- James Lasdun
The Fifth Child --- Doris Lessing
Oryx and Crake --- Margaret Atwood

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The most disturbing book I have read recently was False Memory by Dean Koontz. What made it disturbing was the fact that it didn't stray too far from reality as most of his books do. It also will give you a new insight to the haiku chain game.

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The most disturbing book I ever read was Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird."

I read it nearly forty years ago, and it still gives me a cold feeling of hopelessness to remember it.

I don't care about any of the controversy about whether Kosinski attempted to say this book was autobiographical. It is a novel, but it is a very unsettling novel.

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Agreed Golden...and welcome

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In 1975 I was living on a little farm in Manassas Virginia and somebody left a copy of Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. Maybe it was the bucolic setting but that book scared the bejeezus out of me.

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I'll have to look at those sometime Shocked

From a review of In the Country of Last Things:

In a book-length letter home, Anna Blume reports that her search for a long-lost brother has brought her to a vast, unnamed city that is undergoing a catastrophic economic decline. Buildings collapse daily, driving huge numbers of citizens into the streets, where they starve or die of exposureif they aren't murdered by other vagrants first. Government forces haul away the bodies, and licensed scavengers collect trash and precious human waste. Weird cults form around the most popular methods of suicide. Anna tries to help, but the charity group she joins quickly runs out of supplies and has to close its doors. A number of post-apocalyptic novels have been published recently; Auster's, one of the best, is distinguished by an uncanny grasp of the day-to-day realities of homelessness. This is a scary but highly relevant book.

The book has an eerily haunting feel. I admire Paul Auster's style of writing.

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The most disturbing book I have ever read, without question, was "Johnny Got His Gun", by Dalton Trumbo.

Powerful, powerful stuff, and more important than ever now that Dubya is behind the wheel.

Here's a synopsis

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panzade wrote:

In 1975 I was living on a little farm in Manassas Virginia and somebody left a copy of Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. Maybe it was the bucolic setting but that book scared the bejeezus out of me.

Yes, indeed. That is one scary book, Pan. So is Tryon's other work of subtle horror, The Other.

Gustav, Trumbo's Johnny Got his Gun has become a classic of sorts. Contrary to popular legend, it was never banned (except locally in certain places) and has never been out of print. I have a Bantam paperback edition. [edit: strike that "of sorts" in the first sentence.]

Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon is pretty dystopian, too.

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Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden is commonly considered a disturbing book. I wasn't impressed. The themes of orphans, dead body, and incest (as crafted by McEwan) just didn't have that effect on me. Am I jaded?

Clive Barker's Weaveworld is probably more in the horror genre (is "disturbing" a subgenre?), but isn't horror intrinsically disturbing? Either way, it's subtly and elegantly unsettling.

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I thought this topic would have generated more interest.

Patience is a virtue, right?

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A couple of month ago I read a disturbing, scary book
from Kay Hooper "Sense of Evil" I got so frightened, I only
read a couple of pages per day and nothing at night.

Henning Mankell (a swedish writer) has the most bizarre
and twisted books "The Fifth Woman" was my first book
of his, and then I was hooked. He makes your toe nails
crawl.

Anything by Patricia Highsmith is also quite twisted.

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Disturbing books tend to give me nightmares, particularly if I've been reading them in the evening. Evening is my time to read, so I tend to avoid nightmare fodder.

Years ago I read Crime and Punishment because I though I should. That book made me feel unclean--as does the much muted memory of the book fifty years later.

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Henning Mankell isn't always twisted, CJ. He's also written some quite manistream crime stories. A bit bloody, sometimes, true, but no more so than most policiers. I have his The Dogs of Riga sitting within reach right now.

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Could be Andrew, I haven't read all of his books,
but the one I did read, were quite scary and twisted, mostly
with political underlaying.

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Just about anything by H.P. Lovecraft gives me the willies.
Then again , I'm afraid of Faulkner.

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"Rule of the Bone" by Russell Banks is disturbing, haunting and unforgettable. The story of a neglected, mistreated, messed-up, "lost" boy and the way he plays the cards that are dealt him. It was so believable and well-written I forgot I was reading fiction.

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I had a taste for Robertson Davies for a while... not sure what I'd think of it now.

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Robertson Davies is one of my favorites--in part because his shadows are technicolored shadows and not necessarily uniformly dark.

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I love Robertson Davies too. I had the good luck to hear him read once and that was a real treat.

Chuck Palanuick certainly offers up an unusual cast of misfits in his books. More odd than creepy or scary, "Lullabye" and "Diary" are two of my favorites.

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I don't know who Robertson Davies is.

Zane, you thought Rule of the Bone was disturbing? The protagonist's life is disturbing, but the book is something else...or maybe I'm being semantic. Regardless, the narrative voice is unique, the story indelible. I love the descriptions of Jamaica.

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Discordia Concors: Disturbing Books

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