Ask Lemmy

As a fan of transgressive fiction, I've read quite a lot of fucked up books. Here's what I came up with off the top of my head - sorry, it's quite a long list!

Some different types of fucked up here (horrible fucked up and fun fucked up):

Cows by Matthew Stoke (not very well written, but very fucked up, a sick classic)

Anything by Carlton Mellick III, but especially Aspeshit, which is like Evil Dead on acid (semi literally). But he's definitely 'fun fucked up' not grotesquely nasty without humour. All Bizarro is fucked up and worth checking out.

Apocalypse Culture I and II are both intentionally fucked up compendiums of short pieces and art that will make you sick and angry, but also make you think about a lot of different things. Feral House have plenty of fucked up books that are worth reading.

Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard - experimental writing unlike most other Ballard books, but significantly more fucked up in parts. All Ballard is great and fucked up at some point; High Rise has one of the best opening paragraphs of any book, ever. Crash is probably second to Atrocity Exhibition in fucked-up-ness.

Marquis de Sade - Justine, 100 Days of Sodom. Juliette: (mentioned elsewhere) horrible imagination-run-wild in the worst way, but aimed at antagonising people against the aristocracy and satirising the extreme cruelty and nastiness of those in power, probably including himself.

UK publisher Creation books (and imprint Attack!) did "anti-books" as they called them - some fucked up stuff of all kinds there: from fun stupidity like Raiders of the Low Forehead to some really horrible stuff by Peter Sotos that was unreadable (even to me).

The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love tells you all you need to know about human beings and a lot you never needed to know (eyeball licking fetishism is a thing, apparently).

Nick Cave's 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' is a wonderful pieces of fucked-up-ness and the reason for my username: a mute hillbilly recounts his sordid, psychotic life while drowning in quicksand, with biblical imagery and references, poetic 'Deep South' language, and lots of unpleasantness, especially from his parents. Kind of an ugly sibling to 'The Wasp Factory's.

Clive Barker's works can be pretty fucked up - Books of Blood is still his best work, in my opinion.

Supervert's 'Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish' was disappointing, badly written, and fucked up in boring but nasty ways. I'd avoid it, but it's a long time since I read it, so maybe I forgot a lot about it. I remember being bored and irritated, and little else.

Most Will Self books are pretty to very fucked up, particularly his early stuff.

Harry Crews was a wonderful writer, with some pretty fucked up stuff in Feast of Snakes and A Childhood - The Biography of a Place.

Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and William Burroughs all have lots of great fucked up work.

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is fucked up in terms of layout and typesetting as well as storyline. Some really effective parts, some get a little bogged down in their own cleverness. But very much worth reading. Not fucked up in terms of gore or sex, as far as I remember!

Patrick Suskind's Perfume is brilliant and fucked up, and possibly the only book that can change your sense of smell.

James Joyce - Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are fucked up in terms of experimental style and language, and are wonderful pieces of writing, despite being notoriously 'difficult'.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's biographical books are wonderful and fucked up. 'The Spiritual Journey' is one of the best still.

That's enough for now - I'm sure I'm missing a lot!

Wish by Peter Goldsworthy. J.J. has always been more at home in Sign language than in spoken English. Recently divorced, he returns to school to teach Sign. His pupils include the foster parents of a beautiful and highly intelligent ape named Eliza.

Go Ask Alice

Very good book but it goes through a young women's journey through SA, and hard addiction.

The Wasp Factory. I mean the whole book is disturbing but the ending....

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.

I recently read The Parable of the Sower and it really affected me, both because I felt empathy for the characters and because I saw some uncomfortable parallels in the recent history of our world. I also was disturbed by The Sparrow. Though frankly I wouldn't recommend it for a lot of reasons. Battle Royale is intensely violent, in a really personal way. For graphic novels, From Hell is a really rough read honestly, but also really interesting

Day of the Oprichnik. I only wanted to read it because it is banned in Russia.

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 read the A Child Called It series which is an autobiography about the abuse David Pelzer suffered at the hands of his mother and his experience with foster care.

Some pretty fucked up shit happened to this man. The fact that he grew up to be a functioning human being let alone put it all behind him is incredible.

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.

"La catedral del mar" and "Los herederos de la tierra" by Ildefonso Falcones, and one more vote for "The road".

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.

I really wish I could remember the name of it, but it's about a lawyer who effectively puts the devil on trial, except it's really messed up in parts. There's this entire sequence involving a girl, a young child, who over time seduces the main character who describes in great detail the experience of screwing this child, only for it to be revealed that the girl was the devil/a demon of some sort whose sole purpose is to corrupt the main character. The majority of the book was great, but that particular sequence was well into distasteful and disturbing.

I think it was called Son of the Endless Night, but I'm not certain if that's correct.

If anyone's looking for something not-quite-so-fucked-up as the suggestions here -

Creepers by David Morell

He wrote the Rambo stories too . Creepers is a great story with good twists, worth a read

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

It's so creepy because you read the repeated sexual abuse of a minor through the eyes of the perpetrator who continuously justifies his acts and misrepresents Lolita's reactions. He's a very unreliable narrator. First he even becomes her stepdad to have better access to her. Then her mother dies, through a car accident just before she can call the police on him. Again this is recounted through Humberts eyes, so I'm thinking it was actually murder.

I haven't finished the book yet, it's kind of hard to read. It's been a few years, and I should be somewhere in the middle IIRC.

I'm currently rereading A Clockwork Orange and yep, it's pretty fucked up.

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.

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.

Firefly by Piers Anthony (the writer of the Xanth fantasy series).

There's way too much talk of erections around dead bodies, but by far the worst part is the long section with a woman describing in way too much detail how much she enjoyed being raped as a five year old, acting it out and everything. Anthony is a messed up dude.

Reading Spectrum 7th grade math workbook was the first time I considered ending it all

"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.