Best fucked up books

I'm not as well read as a lot of you people here, you all have some really good picks, many that I've never heard of. The only thing I've read that I can think of right now that was pretty f'd up was "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. It's a pretty common, well known book but if you've never heard of it, it's about an immigrant that gets a job in the meat packing industry in Chicago around the turn of the century.

It starts with the main character full of optimism, willing to show up at the meat packing plants every morning until he gets hired on. Once he gets hired, it's basically all down hill from there. He gets hurt, loses his job, finds out the "new" house that a realtor sold him wasn't new at all and that he was conned into purchasing it at a greatly inflated rate and this was all part of a larger scam the realtor was running where they charge outrageous interest on a property until something inevitably happens where the buyer can no longer make payments. The house is then seized, put back on the market with a fresh coat of paint, and the con begins all over again.

His wife eventually turns to prostitution to make ends meet, and the main character ends up leaving his family and getting involved in petty but profitable crimes like strong armed robberies. Things start to look up for the main character now that he's free from the responsibilities of a family and he has some minor connections in organized crime, but he finds out that in Chicago it doesn't matter how well connected you are, someone will always be higher up in the food chain. It does a pretty good job of conveying the greed and hopelessness of cutthroat capitalism (this was the point IIRC as Upton Sinclair was a socialist).

All these horrible things that happen with the main character are pretty f'd up and that doesn't even get into the disgusting detail of how the meat packing plants were managed in those days.
 
Extremely tame compared to the likes of 1984 and Salo, but Unwind has a pretty disturbing premise. No one can get abortions anymore, so as a compromise when you're 13-17 if your parents decide they don't want you anymore they can send you to a "harvest camp" as a form of retroactive abortion, where you're chopped into pieces while fully conscious to have your limbs, organs, skin, and brain grafted onto other people. And when chunks of your brain get grafted into another person, usually the last conscious memory it has is lying on an operating table being dissected. Or worse. It doesn't.
 
Blood Electric by Kenji Siratori, it's an interesting literature experiment(?), basically it's a system code of the machine that makes androids from corpses.
Would you say you had to learn how to read it since it is machine code?
 
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Pet Sematary spooked me a great deal when I first read it. Mostly because of how much death is discussed and how unnatural it all feels. Not to give obvious spoilers but a main character dies prematurely somewhere in the book and another character goes on a long emotional dirge where they hallucinate the dead character's entire life had they not died. It's pretty fucked up.

While we're on King, Carrie of course is no exception for disturbing. For his first novel, he did a good job getting into the sociopathic psychology of teenagers and how there's really no reason behind them acting the way they do. Book!Carrie isn't as sweet as Spacek!Carrie but you still do want to see her make it at the end. Too bad everything turns into a fucking mess.
 
My main social group circulate book after book to each other, and the only book I've had any of them complain about was The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, mostly the complaints were that it was too dark or unsettling to finish reading. I think the author is actually trying to disturb and alienate his readers.

"The Conspiracy against the Human Race is renowned horror writer Thomas Ligotti's first work of nonfiction. Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination. The worst and most plentiful horrors are instead to be found in reality. Mr. Ligotti's calm, but often bloodcurdling turns of phrase, evoke the dreadfulness of the human condition. Those who cannot bear the truth will pretend this is another work of fiction, but in doing so they perpetuate the conspiracy of the book's title."

--David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence; Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates reads like the diary of a budding serial killer, a young man who wants to create a zombie sex slave out of a victim and essentially goes through a process of trial an error in his quest. It definitely made me feel nauseated a few times. I don't know if I would say it's one of the best fucked up books but it's worth a read.
 
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Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates reads like the diary of a budding serial killer, a young man who wants to create a zombie sex slave out of a victim and essentially goes through a process of trial an error in his quest. It definitely made me feel nauseated a few times. I don't know if I would say it's one of the best fucked up books but it's worth a read.

So basically it was loosely based on Dahmer?
 
No mention of the room yet?
We have a thread on it and it's horror.
https://www.amazon.com/Room-Jr-Hube...ocphy=9007386&hvtargid=pla-473619279999&psc=1

It will fuck you up. I shared it with a friend after a member suggested it here, and she wound up texting me a week or so later how we probably shouldn't be friends, and was barely joking.

A quick search on the site can hint how bad this is, and it's a case of not being tehe it's bad. It's harsh to read or swallow. It's also fucking good because a book that makes your stomach turn means it's quailty written and it's not a edgy scrotty mcboogerballs act.

120 of sodom was breaking for it's time but aged poorly I think. It's really a deep story if you think about some of it's deeper meaning instead of so I peed on the poop of the 4 year old. I won't ramble on 120DOS tho as it's still important historically but today it's a gross out book at best.
 
Blood Meridian which is sorta based on a real gang of scalpers in the south west. The prose is really fun too.

Finding out that Judge Holden was a real person was legitimately disturbing.

I mean, we know almost nothing about the real Judge Holden, so obviously he wasn't the terrifying, Satanic figure that he was in the book, but still, it's a pretty surreal thing to find out when you knew nothing about the Glanton Gang before reading Blood Meridian.
 
I love how @BrunoMattei starts with Sade in the OP and half of the responses are so tame in comparison, and then he keeps going.

I've been out of the edge game for a while so I don't have any hyperviolence or corpse fucking, but since we're on the subject of the morally dubious, I would recommend Serpentine by Thomas Thompson. It is a highly researched and interviewed following of Charles Sobhraj, a French Vietnamese-Indian man who led a life of con artistry and became a serial killer later on.
 
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