Best fucked up books

[BrunoMattei]

Double post, fuck da police, Artaud deserves a post all to his own.

Thinking of what AnOminous has said I was struggling to think of French surrealists that are worth a damn that haven't been mentioned and I just remembered Antonin Artaud's epic historical fiction on the Roman emperor Heliogabalus: Or, the Crowned Anarchist.

Artaud (one of my absolute biggest influences of my life) was a poet, artist, playwright, actor, philosopher (of a sorts) and a mad man. Some have referred to him as the Holy Madman. He suffered from schizophrenia and was a big time drug addict. Early proponent of art therapy.

To get a taste of Artaud I would recommend my thread: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/to-have-done-with-the-judgement-of-god.62355/

The compilation Artaud Anthology comes highly recommended even if you're not a poetry person. Give it a shot. Artaud was very un-pretentious as well. He hated the art-circles of his time calling them a tribe of rubbish-mongers. His favorite curse was "Crab-lice." He despised wannabe and fake people like Andre Breton.

Back to Heliogabalus:

Antonin Artaud - Heliogabalus: Or, the Crowned Anarchist : Antonin Artaud : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Arauds most accessible and...

archive.org

Artaud recounts the life and times of the corrupt emperor and his mother as he only he can. Filled with magick, ritualism, orgies, new and dying gods, and ultra-violence. Do not feel bad about downloading it. The publisher is a scum fuck and more about Creation Books here: http://www.creationbooksfraud.com/

Creation had an amazing catalog at its peak and published shit like Cows and a lot of Counter Culture shit. I was surprised to find out that they never paid anyone who published with them.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Survivor Type by Stephen King: A short story rather than a novel, it follows a disgraced surgeon who is caught in a shipwreck while smuggling heroin and winds up on a tiny deserted island. He slowly loses his mind due to starvation, isolation, and drug use. In his desperation he begins amputating his own limbs to eat, using the heroin as a crude anesthetic. The story ends with him being batshit insane, having amputated and eaten everything below his waist, and drools uncontrollably as he ponders which body part to eat next. I read this for the first time in 8th grade it it fucked me up for a couple of days. It still gets under my skin.

 

[Cosmos]

I've got some more suggestions:

The Collector by John Fowles: A psychotic bureaucrat kidnaps a young art student and holds her captive in the basement of his country house. Divided in two sections, the novel contains both the perspective of the captor, Frederick, as well as that of Miranda, the captive. It's so creepy to be inside the head of an obsessive, psychopathic kidnapper, and the feeling of wrongness is doubled when we get to Miranda's perspective and we see how captivity is affecting her. There's actually nothing very graphic in this novel; Frederick considers himself to be a "gentleman" and refuses to force himself on Miranda, instead showering her with gifts and attention in the hopes that she'll fall in love with him and stay with him willingly. Of course, it's still incredibly creepy and wrong, which Miranda's section is sure to let us know. The ending stuck with me for a while.

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury (read): A short story by sci-fi extraordinaire Ray Bradbury. The story examines the fallout of a cataclysmic nuclear war from the perspective of a smart house that vainly keeps trying to look after its long-dead owners. The title comes from a 1918 poem of the same name that was one of the first works examine the concept of human extinction. The poem describes how nature would move on without humanity and life would continue to flourish. In Bradbury's story, however, nuclear fallout has rendered the environment toxic and barren, and life itself is slowly dying out (exemplified when the former residents' dog comes home to die of radiation poisoning). This story is a haunting portrayal of what horrors lie in the aftermath of nuclear war.

The Jaunt by Stephen King: Another short story. The story takes place early in the 24th century, when the technology for teleportation, referred to as "Jaunting", is commonplace, allowing for instantaneous transportation across enormous distances, even to other planets in the Solar System. The story follows a family as they prepare to "jaunt" to Mars. The father entertains his children with the story of how the jaunt was invented, omitting the disturbing parts (including how people who jaunt while conscious either die instantly or go insane, necessitating that people who jaunt are knocked unconscious). It's eventually revealed that physically jaunting occurs instantaneously, to a conscious mind it lasts for an eternity. One is simply left alone with their thoughts in an endless field of white for what is suggested to be possibly anywhere from hundreds to billions of years. The implications of that are incredibly disturbing to me.

 

[AnOminous]

Baudelaire was genius but I wouldn't call Flowers Of Evil "fucked up."

It has a poem where he stabs someone and fucks them in the stab wound. It's described rather beautifully but that's pretty fucked up. It's especially fucked up considering it is about a woman he actually knew.

 

[BrunoMattei]

It has a poem where he stabs someone and fucks them in the stab wound. It's described rather beautifully but that's pretty fucked up. It's especially fucked up considering it is about a woman he actually knew.

I must have missed that one poem.

Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal

Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), and in particular to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). The definitive online edition of this masterwork of French literature, Fleursdumal.org contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, together...

fleursdumal.org

 

[AnOminous]

I must have missed that one poem.

Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal

Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), and in particular to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). The definitive online edition of this masterwork of French literature, Fleursdumal.org contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, together...

fleursdumal.org

A celle qui est trop gaie.

 

[BrunoMattei]

A celle qui est trop gaie.

À celle qui est trop gaie (To She Who Is Too Gay) by Charles Baudelaire

fleursdumal.org

It sounds like one of the poems that's suppressed from some publications. I've read it twice and I know an early paperback I had was missing some of the shocking poems (for the time) like the one in tribute to lesbianism.

 

[AnOminous]

À celle qui est trop gaie (To She Who Is Too Gay) by Charles Baudelaire

fleursdumal.org

It sounds like one of the poems that's suppressed from some publications. I've read it twice and I know an early paperback I had was missing some of the shocking poems (for the time) like the one in tribute to lesbianism.

Yes, it was one of the poems that was prohibited for "obscenity."

 

[Rafal Gan Ganowicz]

Anything by Poppy Z Brite

 

[Constellationzero]

I can't recommend these two books enough: Cold Storage by Wendell Rawls Jr. and The Shoe Leather Treatment by S.L. Stebel.

Find them on Amazon--both are out of print--get them together and read them BOTH. These are an amazing and very fucked-up expose on the old Farview institution in Waymart Pennsylvania. These days Farview (well, a part of the original building) still stands and is known as FCI(?) Waymart. It mainly houses sex offenders...I thought Nick Bate was actually housed here for a bit?

Anyway, I won't tell you what all is in both books. Just a lot of fucked up ghey sex, drugs, human cockfights, deaths, and spinal taps. These are two of my most frequently read books.

 

[Genderfluid Pirate]

Invisible Monsters by Chuck P.

Spoiler

It's about a model who shoots herself in the face because she is tired of feeling like she has to use her looks to get attention from her parents, so she makes sure she can never go back to that. Similarly, her brother transitions even though he isn't trans because he feels his masculinity to be a burden. A particularly fucked up part is when the family gets together for lunch without the brother (they think he has been dead for years at this point) and the parents go on to graphically talk about AIDs and gay sexual activities (they thought the brother was gay and died of AIDs. The reality was that he had been raped as a teen and got gonorrhea from that). It made me nauseous. It was a brilliant way to convey how the protagonist feels sick with the way her parents obsess about her brother.

 

[teat]

I'm reading The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown for school.
It's about the Donner Party and has goes into depth and also provides background information to the events causing the tragedy.
Also provides some basic explanations about what the emigrants physically experienced.
Knowing that this is shit that actually happened makes it super disturbing.

One of the surviving adults casually hangs the corpse of an infant on a wall hook like meat and a child eats the flesh of her own mother

 

[biledriver]

Oh man, I am so pleased with how this thread is picking up. @BrunoMattei - big ups for making this thread, it is fantastic. (forgive my gushing, I am not-often around people who read books, or who read the sort that I like).
I had my corona cherry popped, stuck in bed for weeks, and books have kept me from going bat shit.

Did someone link a pdf to the Klaus Kinski autobiography? If so, I'd like to thank them because I randomly found it the other day on my laptop. It was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read, and it's quite a story so far. I do like this type of autobiography, the 'unreliable narrator' in some ways is the most realistic. Because we tell our stories from our perspective, our version of 'what happened' could be perceived in so many ways.

The book "Nothing" by Janne Telle is a childrens book technically but it messed me up pretty bad when I read it as a kid and even today it really disturbing when you look into it. Like if Lord of the flies was actually good. And it's a classic that I'm sure others have mentioned, but "Lolita" is one messed up book too.

Can you link this? I looked it up but I found a very sweet-looking kids book about a lost cat/forgotten stuffed toy, and nothing that looked weird at all. Idk how others would feel on it, but I think it'd be ok to include "fucked up picture books" (provided yknow, its not "go the fuck to sleep" and obvious things like that)

The original publication was in 2007 on the internet, possibly even before that. Seeing how the website itself appears, it could easily be a 90's era website.

New Order of Barbarians

The 2013 print is from when it was formatted into a book for official publication.

Was Gaëtan Dugas one of those pedos or was he not the first? It's too bad that they got the AIDS thing wrong though since that causes a discrepancy that hurts the whole thing.

Supposedly Dugas was recently found to not be the "patient zero" of legend. There was, in fact, documentation of a Congolese woman with an illness exactly like what was later called AIDS, and it was written in 1954. That story looks interesting to me though, I think it's a cool suggestion. Def will check it out, I enjoy conspiracy-doom type junk. I can suspend my disbelief if it's paced and framed well even through my skepticism.


@Cosmos --- Love your suggestions. I wasn't aware that "When the Wind Blows" was an illustrated book. It's one of the most depressing animated films ever made. It's looking like this thread doesn't mind text walls if they contain good stuff. Kind of hard not to be wordy when talking of books

Surprised À Rebours hasn't got a mention. Maybe it's just too basic bitch. Huysmans himself has a mention earlier in the thread.

Also in terms of general French faggotry, there's obviously everything Francois Villon wrote that we know of, Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud, Jean Genet, and the absolute god Baudelaire. All of them wrote some pretty fucked up stuff.

I almost wanted to list A Rebours, as I do really like that book--- to me it's in the "fun" side of fucked up, and it's written in such an engaging, silly way. I suppose to some it would come across as pompous or even boring, but like basically everyone we've mentioned here, he's an acquired taste. Baudelaire is a master at forcing you to visualize such detailed, bizarre things... I'm already so inclined, but some writers just can't do the type of image-insertion he does. He's one author I've always wished to make illustrations from his stories, or wished that he had been himself an illustrator.

I'm not as familiar with Villon as I probably should be (I am one of those with a seemingly endless list of "books to read")... any recommendation to start? It was just in the Kinski book that he mentions having some intense experiences drowning himself in Villon's works after some chick he fucked gave him a book to read on the train...

I'm reading The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown for school.

Dude, fuck. That book is... probably one of the darkest non-fiction accounts I've ever read. It ranks up there with like, books women wrote on their experiences in the Bosnian War (though they differ as the Donners were up against the brutality of nature, vs the brutality that is man/politics within war).
One thing that this thread has shown is that "fucked up books" span so many genres, from the aforementioned faux-nonfic like Sybil or A Child Called It or JT Leroy (where the story is fake, but the reality behind it is equally fucked), the modern sovereign citizen culture and it's own lit, and then of course... sometimes the darkest books of all are the ones about true stories, of course the obvious being medical history and wars.
But American is history has the uniqueness of being such a young country, so the treacherous, dangerous and risky steps to shape a nation are full of horror stories. Though the Donner Party is legendary in its abject bleakness. I read this book a while back and was stoked to hear an excellent episode about it on Last Podcast.
The everyday life that some people have (or had) now or throughout history, sometimes is enough to be a true horror story that probably couldn't be replicated in a film properly. That book, no doubt, shows how deep the well of human suffering can be--- it's also a story of strength, in its own way. People had to be so tough back in those times, just... practically walking across an unknown country with an incredibly diverse, vast landscape. It was a harsh life that I think few Americans can really imagine.
There's an early part of the trip where one of the women wrote in a diary entry that so far, things are going well, and although it's been tough, if this is bad as it gets, she's happy. She had no idea how dark things would go. Those people were so brave and resilient even in the face of one of the most brutal (and beautiful) forces, which is simply nature. Excellent mention for this thread.


.... recently I've become curious to the works of Georg Büchner. It had taken me a long time to get a copy of Woyzeck (the Herzog/Kinski film, 1979) and I am interested in reading the play. Anyone familiar with him? Or the Woyzeck story in general (there are many variations of film and productions)? It made me feel a lot of ways that I don't understand. Some kind of mashup of extreme discomfort but a comforting sense of relatability that you wish you didn't have? On surface, a simple story, but I am going to explore the productions, films and unfinished book. It's fucked up, but for deeper reasons than I can understand yet.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Oh man, I am so pleased with how this thread is picking up. @BrunoMattei - big ups for making this thread, it is fantastic. (forgive my gushing, I am not-often around people who read books, or who read the sort that I like).
I had my corona cherry popped, stuck in bed for weeks, and books have kept me from going bat shit.

Did someone link a pdf to the Klaus Kinski autobiography? If so, I'd like to thank them because I randomly found it the other day on my laptop. It was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read, and it's quite a story so far. I do like this type of autobiography, the 'unreliable narrator' in some ways is the most realistic. Because we tell our stories from our perspective, our version of 'what happened' could be perceived in so many ways.

I'm not as familiar with Villon as I probably should be (I am one of those with a seemingly endless list of "books to read")... any recommendation to start? It was just in the Kinski book that he mentions having some intense experiences drowning himself in Villon's works after some chick he fucked gave him a book to read on the train...

.... recently I've become curious to the works of Georg Büchner. It had taken me a long time to get a copy of Woyzeck (the Herzog/Kinski film, 1979) and I am interested in reading the play. Anyone familiar with him? Or the Woyzeck story in general (there are many variations of film and productions)? It made me feel a lot of ways that I don't understand. Some kind of mashup of extreme discomfort but a comforting sense of relatability that you wish you didn't have? On surface, a simple story, but I am going to explore the productions, films and unfinished book. It's fucked up, but for deeper reasons than I can understand yet.

I linked the Kinski Uncut PDF. I sent that to a friend of mine as an Xmas gift once. He likened it to Sartre's Nausea. I'm pretty sure Klaus heavily re-wrote Villon's poetry to suit him. He reads some it here:

No doubt he re-wrote other poetry to suit his interests. Probably for the better. The documentary, like all Herzog documentaries, needs to be watched.

 

[Lackadaisy]

American Psycho is the only book I've read that made me physically ill and uncomfortable. I had to actually put it down for a bit... and then kept reading right after.

 

[BrunoMattei]

We've discussed American Psycho and The Road adnauseam.

 

[Cosmos]

I love reading right-wing 'patriot' books, they're usually violent masturbatory Walter Mitty fantasies about the author's Mary Sue self-insert fighting the evil government/UN/Trump's Chosen People/NWO.

A couple of my favorites:

Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse by James Wesley, Rawles (he puts a comma in his name like that because he's both a sovereign citizen and a Christian Identity follower): The UN rigs the US economy to collapse, invades the US with foreign (mostly African) troops, militias rise up and drive them out (committing hundreds of war crimes, including using VX gas to wipe out whole cities full of 'Godless liberals'), in the end America becomes a Christian theocratic police state that burns Trump's Chosen People, atheists, liberals, and 'heretics' (Catholics and Mormons) at the stake. That's seen as a good ending.

Enemies Foreign and Domestic by Matt Bracken: The ATF stages a false flag sniper attack on the Super Bowl to get all guns banned, militias rise up against the government, the government declares martial law and establishes the North American Union. That's just in the first book, there's like six of them.

Unintended Consequences by John Ross: The usual. Government gun ban, militias rise up, ambush UN convoys, etc. Gave birth to the minor meme 'time to feed the hogs', referring to a guy who kills government employees and feeds their bodies to his pigs. You occasionally see someone quote it on Fudd gun boards like The High Road and The Firing Line.

There's some pretty fucked up stuff in Patriots too. The main group of 'heroes' is a militant survivalist organization that operates like a cult, ruled over by Rawles' self-insert character. They have a militia compound in northern Idaho with literally tens of millions of dollars worth of guns, food, army surplus vehicles, even an ultra-light plane rigged with machine guns. They all practice a fanatical version of hyper-Calvinism, to the point where women are ordered never to speak unless spoken to first. They defend their compound from attacks by horribly stereotypical black and Mexican gangbangers, led by Trump's Chosen communist commissars(!). There's a token agnostic who gets mortally wounded and repents on his deathbed, the UN shows up to be bumbling cannon fodder in blue helmets, and all the minorities in America die off without ZOG paying their welfare, leaving a 100% white, Christian nation.

At least the version I have is an early one that's a little bit saner, Rawles later released an updated addition that adds on even more sovereign citizen stuff, chapters heaping praise on Nazi cop killers like Gordon Kahl and Chevie Kehoe, and Holocaust denial and even claims that Pearl Harbor was a Trump's Chosen false flag.

This is a late post but I fucking love this. Please summarize more terrible far-right books. Your descriptions alone made me laugh out loud.

 

[Unpaid Emotional Labourer]

So much actual literature in this thread, allow me to draw your attention to some delights from Romancelandia.

Everyone has some sort of idea of the fuckedupness you can find in romance novels, but possibly not of this particular nature! All available on Kindle Unlimited!

The R. Lee Smith oeuvre includes:

Cottonwood: If you watched District 9 and thought hey, you know what would be great, if this literal insect man fucked an earth girl, with a great deal of thought given to that great big throbbing spermatogus emerging from between those belly plates mmm hmm? This is the book for you.

The Last Hour of Gann: Fat chick departs an overcrowded future earth but d’oh, the ship crashes on an unknown planet. Hero is a giant lizard man, with a great deal of thought given to what’s hiding up in that cloaca mmm hmm

The Land of the Beautiful Dead: hero is zombie Jesus, rotting and falling apart and everything. Lol.

Heat: Sadistic alien rapist abducts earth girl, my least fave. I‘m fine with fucking bugs, lizards, and zombie Jesus but I draw the line at the heroine being forced to eat some slag’s pussy. I’m too heterosexual for bi shit in my reading material, but not my actual porn-porn of course, that’s different. Had to skip that whole section.

Now let me explain this: none of you are surprised to learn that somebody published this stuff, I know you aren’t. But! You will never read higher quality, more thoughtful, introspective, humane, and more genuinely touching books about fucking bugs, lizards, alien sadists, zombie Jesus, or fat chicks than these, and the world-building is always stellar. I enthusiastically recommend.

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

This is a late post but I fucking love this. Please summarize more terrible far-right books. Your descriptions alone made me laugh out loud.

I guess I'll do a review of William Forstchen's One Second After, but it actually subverted my expectations and is actually a pretty good deconstruction of the 'Rawlesian Fantasy' genre. I'm coining the trope after James Wesley Rawles, the writer of Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse and constant failed predictor of societal collapse since Reagan's first term. Both myself and @GethN7 have done snarky reviews of his works. A Rawlesian fantasy is a usually post-apocalyptic book where a lantern-jawed Marty Stu survivalist/militia hero fights back against the evil liberal gub'mint, using various cool guns, armored vehicles, etc., the more ludicrous, the better (Unintended Consequences had a 25mm anti-tank rifle used to blow up a gub'mint helicopter, Patriots had an ultralight plane mounted with eight AR-15s with homemade full-auto sears hooked up to an electric trigger mechanism and 100 round drum magazines used to strafe UN stormtroopers.). People who try stuff like that in One Second After wind up dying horribly, as they would in real life. Usually the hero in a Rawlesian Fantasy winds up saving the day singlehandedly. The main character in One Second After nearly starves to death and buries most of his family and friends.

To be continued...

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

I guess I'll do a review of William Forstchen's One Second After, but it actually subverted my expectations and is actually a pretty good deconstruction of the 'Rawlesian Fantasy' genre. I'm coining the trope after James Wesley Rawles, the writer of Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse and constant failed predictor of societal collapse since Reagan's first term. Both myself and @GethN7 have done snarky reviews of his works. A Rawlesian fantasy is a usually post-apocalyptic book where a lantern-jawed Marty Stu survivalist/militia hero fights back against the evil liberal gub'mint, using various cool guns, armored vehicles, etc., the more ludicrous, the better (Unintended Consequences had a 25mm anti-tank rifle used to blow up a gub'mint helicopter, Patriots had an ultralight plane mounted with eight AR-15s with homemade full-auto sears hooked up to an electric trigger mechanism and 100 round drum magazines used to strafe UN stormtroopers.). People who try stuff like that in One Second After wind up dying horribly, as they would in real life. Usually the hero in a Rawlesian Fantasy winds up saving the day singlehandedly. The main character in One Second After nearly starves to death and buries most of his family and friends.

To be continued...

Part 1:

The main character is John Matherson, a retired US Army colonel turned history professor at a small Christian college in Black Mountain, North Carolina outside of Ashville. He's a recent widower who takes care of his two daughters. On the younger one's 12th birthday, a nuclear EMP device is detonated over the east coast of the United States, disabling all electronics. No electricity, no communications, no vehicles, no refigeration for food or Matherson's youngest daughter's insulin. Civilization breaks down and things quickly go to hell in a handbasket. People loot all the stores and even the local VA hospital and nursing home for drugs, and Matherson gets roped into leading a militia made up of the school's ROTC students that hunts down the looters and publicly executes them.

Now, in most Rawlesian fantasies, Matherson would revel in his new role as the town's warlord. In this book, however, he's sickened and terrified by the amount of carnage going on around him (people are starting to die of things like cholera and pneumonia without antibiotics and sterile water, and houses are burning down because people are lighting their powerless houses with candles), worried about his daughters, and generally just wants everything to go back to normal. He's also not some invincible snake eating commando a la Mack Bolan or the Marty Stu militia heroes of Patriots or Unintended Consequences, he's a peacetime officer who never saw active combat and doesn't have a endless arsenal of cool guns and billions of rounds of ammo, just a couple of hunting rifles and a replica Colt Walker black power revolver.

A few months into the crisis, things are starting to improve a bit. The telephone line between Black Mountain and Ashville is repaired, a few vintage cars have been restored to working order, including Matherson's mother-in-law's old 1959 Edsel. Then one of Matherson's neighbors who was out of town during the EMP and was given up for dead flies into town in his vintage WWII artillery observation plane, so primitive that the EMP didn't disable it. The towns of Greenville and Spartanburg, South Carolina have just been destroyed by an army of cannibal raiders comprised mostly of Atlanta gangbangers, and they're about to make their way north into the Appalachians. Black Mountain and Ashville are next on their agenda.

To be continued.