Disturbing books.

Yeah, The Long Walk can stick with you the first time you read it.

I recently read 'The Descent' by Jeff Long. It's about humanity's war with a subterranean race - what people have thought of as demons. There are enough explicit examples of pain and torture to keep just about any freak happy.

The Descent NEEDS to be a film.

In the Stephen King vein, I am disturbed by Rage, cause I identified with the main character a little too much. The Long Walk was disturbing but I finished it. I have a hard time not finishing things no matter how bad, sick, or disturbing. Witness my watching "8mm" in its entirety.

Lord of the Flies
Song of Kali

Coldheart Canyon and American Psycho are pretty fucking disturbing.

Song of Kali

1984. When I finished that book I felt like an empty shell of a person. I know it was fiction, but it seems so real that it's hard not to feel a certain sense of dread that what's in there is entirely possible.

Definitely Song of Kali, also A Good Man is Hard to Find and select other Flannery O'Connor collections. Severed, about the black dahlia, by John Gilmore. To get all old skool, Washington Square by Henry James is pretty disturbing.

If you really want a mind fuck read The Story Of The Eye by Georges Bataille.

Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. is pretty harrowing as well.

As far as King is concerned, there is short story contained in Skeleton Crew called Survivor Type that is pretty disgusting. Basically it's about a drug dealer who gets stranded on a small island with nothing but his stash of drugs. After breaking his leg, he dopes himself up, amputates it and eats it. This progresses to the point where he is basically a stump with one arm because he has eaten the rest of his body parts.

Agreed, that story rocks in all the worst ways. The most disturbing King for me is probably still Pet Sematary. Also, the interlude in IT when all the 11 year olds get to know each other in the most intimate of places. IT remains my favorite book of his but I really, really wish he would have left that part out.

I also like "The lawnmower man swerved and ate the mole."

You wanna read something disturbing? Try Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse. It's got explicit pages after explicit pages of serial killers doing what they do best, cannibalism, and graphic descriptions of gay sex in just about every orifice. Once a critics and publishing industry darling, this book killed Poppy's push as a mainstream horror writer in league with King and Rice. She's having to work in the small press now and hasn't had a novel published since.

i read american psycho 2 years ago...i had to stop for about a week to take a breather,some of the images i read in that book have made a permanent place in my brain (the hamster tunnel/rat part,stabbing of the little boy/eating the jellyfish,walking around with a head on his dick)

and yes the long walk was an excellent book,but it really didnt stick with me as such a disturbing book,in some way,but not enough for me to remmeber it as one...

misery stuck with me,when she ran over the cop with the lawnmower...

intensity by koontz had me creeped out...

mr murder was pretty freaky too

Misery is damn disturbing. You can really feel Paul's agony throughout.

Lord Of The Flies is also disturbing. Golding has written it so well that the sticky heat of the jungle becomes almost unbearable.

I have actually gotten a bit spooked reading Thomas Harris' first Hannibal Lecter book (and my personal favorite) "Red Dragon". The scene where Francis Dollarhyde has glued the guy to an old-fashioned, high-backed wheelchair and then sets the poor bastard on fire, rolling him down a hilll, is pretty messed up. There's a lot more in the book that was just creepy to me, but I don't want to spoil anything else for those of you who haven't read it.

The Far Cry by Fredric Brown. It's out of print but if you are into stuff like Jim Thompson it is well worth tracking down. That book left me shaking as I finished it.

Del Toro would be a pretty good guy to direct 'The Descent'. So would Friedkin.

They could establish a great opening sequence with the hikers discovering the body of a tortured slave, a missing WWII RAF pilot, in a cave in the upper Himalayas in 1988...Cut to the UN force in Bosnia wondering why the hell something is eating the corpses in a mass grave from BELOW...Then the fun begins!

Pierce Brosnan or Viggo Mortensen as Ike.

I think Del Toro'd have more luck with 'The Descent' than he would with 'The Mountains of Madness', actually.

STEPS by Jerzy Kosinsky. It isn't a horror book, but is frequently chilling none the less.

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy. I read this one back to back with American Psycho, and both left me with mental images I've yet to forget. For this one, it was the band of savages roaming the lands on horse back. For American Psycho...gee, so many. The rat following the cheese scent. The cornea popping. So many. Yet I feel the movie was a wispy shadow of the book without this images. Really the movie was just a completely different and much more average story. Too bad.

WILL THERE REALLY BE A MORNING by Francis Farmer. Tragic life. But I learned sometime after reading this book that it may not be as factual as the word "autobiography" might suggest. I hear Farmer's care takers leading up to her death might have had a go at revising her manuscript before turning it over to the publisher. Just allegations. Either way, by itself, it's a really good read.

Stephen King. Two scenes stand out to me. One in NEEDFUL THINGS where two women went insane and fought one another to the death. Can't remember the names. Only one of their bellies were sliced and intestines went splat. The other is the lawnmower scene in MISERY, which I guess didn't make the film. If you've read these books, you'll probably know what I'm talking about.

Personal Skin-Crawlers:

Slob by Rex Miller.
Relentless homicidal maniac-type story.

Perfume by Patrick Susskind.
Deformed man with the greatest sense of smell ever tries to replicate the most perfect perfume in the world (suffice to say, the key ingredient involves virgin girls.).

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
Still the best scary book I ever read.

P-p-peace.