[Mike M]

For mine, the slake moth is one of the most disturbing fictional species aside from the weeping angels in dr who.

They just don't do much for me, it seems like there are far worse ways to go.

Surviving an attack is pretty horrifying, though.

[Lindbergh]

Manga counts right?

The page after this page: ”くるり”

[TheListener]

Altered Carbon, the part where Kovacs is put into a young woman's body and tortured to death, then they put his now scarred mind back into his own perfectly healthy body and there is no evidence it ever happened.

[sn00zer]

'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"
http://www.polvoestelar.com.mx/babil...t%20Scream.pdf
and "1408"
are the two most horrifying things I have ever read

[AAequal]

Sweet. Thank you! Can anyone tell me if Cormac McCarthy books are worth the $12 price? Which should I start with?

Road and Blood Meridian are pretty much his best books so just start there. Blood Meridian is masterpiece that you should read eventually.

First three novels are ok but nothing special, they are rather brutal, especially Child of God, it's by far the most dark and twisted novel by Cormac. Suttree is good one but I really don't think it's the best place to start. Border trilogy is just plain bad, they have some highlights but Cormac goes soft in these books and there really isn't much going on. I guess The Crossing was pretty decent but it had some real problems.

As for No Country for Old Men you should just see the movie, Coen bros follow the book well but they removed some bits and changed others and they all work better then the book.

'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" http://www.polvoestelar.com.mx/babil...t%20Scream.pdf and "1408" are the two most horrifying things I have ever read

One more vote for I Have No Mouth. Really disturbing :/ I read it as kid and the imaginery has stuck with me all these years.

[Leckan]

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Lieutenant Mamiya's flashback. If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about.

Ah fuck! This. It was so detailed.

[plasticpassion]

Pretty much a majority of the scenes in this book were creepy, disgusting, terrifying.

It's a very sadistic book.

[Slayven]

The fact this was based on a real story made it worse.




I had to stop at the handjob while making human sausage scene.

[mantidor]

I'm catching up with Lovecraft and although I knew about some of his creatures and gods reading about them is something else, I'm enjoying it a lot. It's a different kind of disturbing stuff that is hard to find anywhere else.

[bengraven]

Reading that alone made my stomach drop.

It's so much worse when you actually read it.

Wait, what? Which story was that? I read that book and have absolutely no recollection of anything like that.

Towards the end of the book when there are maybe one or two short stories left. The people have sabotaged their food supplies, supposedly, and are basically obsessing over food. The pregnant lady passes out, I believe, and yeah...

Interestingly, that short story stuck with me too, but I've always recalled that line as "Longer than you think, Dad, longer than you think!" But I haven't read it in at least twenty years, and I wonder if I just invented a different line over the years, haha.

I just keep seeing my vision of the kid. Long hair sticking straight up, mouth in a maniacal grin, clawing at his face with his super long finger nails and those fucking insane old/young eyes and him saying that line, "it's forever in there" and the one you said, "Longer than you think, dad, longer than you think".

*shivers*

It was seriously the scariest thing King has ever written and stuck with me for a very long time. I couldn't sleep the night I read it.

Where can I read these Stephen King and Lovecraft short stories?

For King: get all his 80s and 90s short story collections and you'll be happy. It's King back when he not only wrote the finest of his career, but also was bugged out on coke and drinking half the time. I recommend Skeleton Crew, Different Seasons, Night Shift, and Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

All the stories I mentioned were in Skeleton Crew, I realized, except Boogeyman, which was in Night Shift. Night Shift also has the fucking horrible (in a good way) stories The Mangler, Jerusalem's Lot, Night Surf and Sometimes They Come Back. Oh and a story that never really got popular called Children of the Corn. heh. Yes, half the stories in Night Shift ended up being movies.

For Lovecraft:

If you have a Kindle or Nook you can basically get all the stories he wrote for free by getting the huge Omnibus editions.

But the best collection in paper is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Necronomicon-W...7625957&sr=1-2

An awesome value.


And don't disregard the "Lovecraft clones" as some less-informed readers call them. Around the time Lovecraft revolutionized horror, many of his friends, peers, and students ended up taking up his style and his entire mythos and helped create even more scary shit. Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) is the most famous and his stories share the same universe as Lovecraft, but also Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and more recently T. E. D. Klein.

[Jibbajabbawockky]

oh my god yes Blood Meridian is my favorite book of all time. It will stay with you years after reading. It's so powerful.

Yup. The descriptions of violence in that book are crazy. That one scene where they come across the one horse thats been bitten by the snake stuck with me just in how graphic the descriptions are. Its totally disgusting:

"eyes bulged out of the shapeless head in a horror of agony and it tottered moaning toward the clustered horses of the company with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bride of its nose and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough.

Its just nasty and yet totally brilliant.

[U n i o n 0015]

Guts by Chuck Palahnuke The bit when he has a DIY prolapse in the swimming pool. I didn't get the vapours, but still.

Only thing I've ever read that made my stomach churn. UGH UGH UGH.

[Mike M]

Just remembered a short story called Mr. Club and Mr. Cuff that was got under my skin as a teenager and lurks there to this day. About a businessman who discovers his wife is cheating on him and hires a pair of goons to torture and murder them, but pays a price.

I have huge fears about grevious bodily harm and being maimed and disfigured, and while it wasn't super graphic as I recall, my imagination filled in enough gaps for many sleepless night.

[MrOogieBoogie]

Yup. The descriptions of violence in that book are crazy. That one scene where they come across the one horse thats been bitten by the snake stuck with me just in how graphic the descriptions are. Its totally disgusting: "eyes bulged out of the shapeless head in a horror of agony and it tottered moaning toward the clustered horses of the company with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bride of its nose and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough. Its just nasty and yet totally brilliant.

Oh, absolutely. I always cite that scene when talking about McCarthy's ability to create images. Here's the rest of the passage in case anyone wants to sample the writing style (not really a spoiler tbh):

They had but two animals and one of these had been snakebit in the desert and this thing now stood in the compound with its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine ideation out of an Attic tragedy. It had been bitten on the nose and its eyes bulged out of the shapeless head in a horror of agony and it tottered moaning toward the clustered horses of the company with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bridge of its nose and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough. The American horses began to mill and separate along the wall at its approach and it swung after them blindly. There was a flurry of thumps and kicks and the horses began to circle the compound. A small mottled stallion belonging to one of the Delawares came out of the remuda and struck at the thing twice and then turned and buried its teeth in its neck. Out of the mad horse's throat came a sound that brought the men to the door.

[SmithnCo]

Some of the shit in "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis is disturbing. I almost felt physically sick at points.

Yeah... the uh... "rat" part was pretty sick. Those gross scenes went a long way for the satire though.

The first mini-story of Palahnuik's Haunted was pretty gross too. Not really that disturbing though. Also the part where his sister gets pregnant from his pool-cum was more ridiculous than anything.

[Koroviev]

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Lieutenant Mamiya's flashback. If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about.

Yep :(

[Biggest-Geek-Ever]

OP absolutely nails it. Blood Meridian is probably the most apocalyptic novel I've ever read; some of the nihilistic imagery in it would make the antagonists of The Stand, Swan Song, The Road, etc cower in a fetal position and weep like a baby.

[SpartanForce]

Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Pyramids

The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the nauseous aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite ponderous, even as seen from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first. Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture. Once in a while the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared in fascination, wishing it would emerge further from the cavernous lair beneath me.
Then it did emerge . . . it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up the higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to the world of dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have been dream, or the dawn would never have found me breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.
The Great Sphinx! God!—that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . .
But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.

[SmithnCo]

Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Pyramids The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the nauseous aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite ponderous, even as seen from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first. Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture. Once in a while the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared in fascination, wishing it would emerge further from the cavernous lair beneath me. Then it did emerge . . . it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up the higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to the world of dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have been dream, or the dawn would never have found me breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx. The Great Sphinx! God!—that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . . But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.

Lovecraft has a good amount of chilling stuff. It taps into a fear of the unknown. One of my favorites is The Music of Erich Zann, for that reason.

[Tim the Wiz]

McCarthy, Lovecraft, King, Mieville; beaten to it and happily so.

[Stat Flow]

Oh my fucking GOD!

I cannot believe that this thread is this recent. I literally just finished reading Blood Meridian, JUST finished writing a short paper on it for my final in my literature course, JUST finished looking up some analysis of the ending, and was wondering what else I could view on it. I was just now thinking about the ending.

And then I see this thread, didn't even search for it.

This is so trippy man.

[daviyoung]

Another vote for American Psycho. I shouldn't have read that book when I was 14.

[MrOogieBoogie]

Oh my fucking GOD! I cannot believe that this thread is this recent. I literally just finished reading Blood Meridian, JUST finished writing a short paper on it for my final in my literature course, JUST finished looking up some analysis of the ending, and was wondering what else I could view on it. I was just now thinking about the ending. And then I see this thread, didn't even search for it. This is so trippy man.

Awesome. You should watch this lecture by Professor Hungerford of Yale University on the book. It's very entertaining.

[Rivyn]

The description of the soldiers wandering around in the forest outside of town, scalded and blinded with their melted eyes streaming down their faces, will forever haunt my memory.

Melting eyes? Fuck..

[Wickwire]

The scariest thing I've ever read was Poe's A Descent into the Maelstrom, but then again i am terrified of open water and the thought of drowning.

[Casual Gamera]

It's been a long time since I read it but the incident that sent Eric "mad" in The Wasp Factory.

[Ermac]

I just finished 1984 and the scene where Winston sees himself in the mirror for the first time after he's captured creeped me out. I imagined him looking like a Regenerator from RE4

[Red UFO]

Wow, I was just going to post Dracula when Johnathon notices that he has no reflection, which creeped the shit out of me.

I see you all have the bases covered though!

[G.O.O.]

Some of the shit in "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis is disturbing. I almost felt physically sick at points.

For some reason, American Psycho made me feel bad but I could still carry on. Some scenes from Glamorama by the same author made me close the book and wait for a while.

[Dresden]

Wait, what? Which story was that? I read that book and have absolutely no recollection of anything like that. Kind of surprised at the Slake Moth and Weaver from Perdido Street Station getting such props, as I found the whole "remaking" and Torque aspects of the New Crobuzon mythos to be far far faaaaaar more unsettling. Iron Council wasn't as good as Perdido Street or The Scar (Not sure I even actually *liked* it, honestly), but the elementalist attack, the depictions of the effects of the Torque... So much worse than anything the other books threw at you outside the more grotesque and cruel remakings.

Torque stuff always creeped me out. So did the mosquito women in the Scar. :/

Creepiest is probably the mention of roach trees, though.

[Dmax3901]

American Psycho for sure, I didn't realise it at the time, but after finishing that book I was in a weird headspace for a number of weeks. Fucked up stuff.

Also Les Chants de Maldoror. Basically American Psycho but French and 19th Century:

One should let one's fingernails grow for fifteen days. O, how sweet it
is to snatch some child brutally from his bed, a child who has nothing
as yet upon his upper lip, and, wide-eyed, to make a pretence of passing
your hand smoothly over his brow, brushing back his beautiful hair!
Then, suddenly, when he is least expecting it, to plunge your long nails
deep into his soft breast in such a manner as not to destroy life; for
should he die you could not later enjoy his sufferings. Then you drink
the blood, passing your tongue over the wounds; and during this time,
which should last as long as eternity lasts, the child weeps. There is
nothing so delicious as his blood, extracted in the manner I have
described, and still warm, unless it be his tears, bitter as salt.

[Mike M]

Torque stuff always creeped me out. So did the mosquito women in the Scar. :/ Creepiest is probably the mention of roach trees, though.

The descriptions of the mosquito men was more disturbing to me, the women seemed to have a bit more in common in appearance with humans, as I recall (At the very least they had jawed mouths instead of sucker mouths or whatever.)

Most everything about Torque was the shit of nightmares, I couldn't get the fate of the three poor saps in the train car in Iron Council out of my head for weeks. Much of the world of Bas-Lag reminds me of nothing so much as Fringe in fantasy setting, it seems like reality is coming apart at the seams in some places.

[Dega]

The most creepy book for me is one about my county called "Ghost along the Brazos" I was maybe 11 or so when I read it and knew a lot of the places in the book so it just creeped me out a bit.

It's probably not all that scary to my grownup self now but at the time it was. lol