![]() “The scene where Crake casually slits Oryx’s throat and is then, in turn, shot by Snowman happens so suddenly, with no warning, it’s shocking and leaves you numb I had to stop for a moment to recover. ![]() In fact, it terrifies me so that I can’t bring myself to start the second novel in the trilogy, The Year of the Flood.” - mlrb ![]() “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake still invades my dreams from time to time. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003) This is a dark, dark story, both in terms of theme, and its graphic depiction of murder (among other things).” - Matt BrownĪ still from the film Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg. “Certain passages throughout the book are incredibly disturbing. The truth is always more disturbing than fiction.” - FunkBrother69 The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (1984) It was so unpleasant that I couldn’t even bring myself to give it to a charity shop and ended up putting it in the bin.” - deltajones What Is the What by Dave Eggers (2006) “There’s a Karin Slaughter book about paedophilia that I mistakenly picked up as a light criminal/cop-type read some years ago. “I found Blood Meridian to be violence pornography – one, long waterfall of blood cascading down the page.” - conedison Kisscut by Karin Slaughter (2011) “Blood Meridian is pretty disturbing, even for McCarthy.” - woodstok I’m sure it’s not unusual to say that I find the death of children in novels to be particularly powerful and devastating.” - Oranje14 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985) This is described in excruciating and gory detail which I won’t go into here, and stayed with me for weeks. “Not the whole book, but there is a passage where one character kills his child to get back at his girlfriend. Tip: Don't read if you've just started online dating Leah Holroyd ApCity of God by Paulo Lins (1997) Glad it's not just me haunted by American Psycho. To this day, I find it difficult to think of that novel without getting the chills.” - Marta Bausells The shock factor makes even worse the impact of a painfully slow and thorough account of the murder of a Japanese soldier in Mongolia during the second Sino-Japanese war, told in one of the flashbacks that abound in the book. “It is not what one expects when reading a Murakami novel – especially one where you find yourself in a world of cats, pasta, music, domestic problems and dreams – to be abruptly faced by a horrifically detailed torture scene. I wasn’t expecting that the narrator of Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal to be quite as malign as she is, and the hatred lurking inside what she thinks is love for her beautiful young teacher colleague left me rattled for days.” - Lindesay Irvine The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1994) “Novels that invite you inside the minds of dangerous obsessives, unaware of their own toxic natures, always leave me very unsettled when done well. “No, no,” screams the teenager.” - Books editor Claire Armitstead “In the 1966 trial that cleared the book of obscenity, Gore Vidal argued: “Just as Hieronymus Bosch set down the most diabolical and blood-curdling details with a delicacy of line and a Puckish humor which left one with a sense of the mansions of horror attendant upon Hell, so, too, does Burroughs leave you with an intimate, detailed vision of what Hell might be like, a Hell which may be waiting as the culmination, the final product, of the scientific revolution.” Yes, yes, the adult me assents. I still remember the waves of nausea provoked by the the molestation of boys in Hassan’s Rumpus Room: “‘No, no!’ screams the boy. “I can’t remember how I came into possession of a copy of Naked Lunch in my teens but it so horrified me that it’s the only book I have actually, physically destroyed.
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