Best fucked up books

Cows by Matthew Stokoe

It follows the journey of a man named Steve as he works in a meat packing facility. He lives with a crippled dog, and his menstrual soaked mother who crippled said dog. Above his apartment lives a woman who searches her innards with an anal probe, while at work he labors alongside with a lover of death and a Zoophile.

An excerpt:
...But she was pulling her plate toward her, pressing her fork into the softness of the stool, lifting a piece to her mouth. Her eyes in their mean folds of fat held his, and for a second the stink of shit absorbed time. Between them space emptied of all the mists that usually swirled there and Steven saw how well she understood him. Then she moved and the stink was just stink again and Steven had to carry on, whatever she knew. He saw thin fibers and lumps of still recognizable food poking from the broken end of the shit and prayed that her destruction would be swift.

The Hagbeast waited for him to eat first. He put a section of the shit into his mouth. It rubbed his lips and the chocolate-smear drag of its entry made him shudder. He could not immediately bring his teeth together and the turd lay acridly in the hollow of his tongue, forcing its thick, boggy smell up behind his nose and into his head, cinching his stomach in a rapid serial spasm that threatened to send bile squirting from his nostrils.

He forced himself to bite down and chew quickly, but speed didn’t reduce the appalling foulness of the taste. The shit was gritty against the roof of his mouth and made crunching sounds with his teeth. It worked itself into a clogging paste that built up under his tongue and inside his cheeks, so stiff he had to use his finger to hook it out. He felt he was drowning in the anus of some dysentery-struck mammal, vistas of the world made shit opened before him. Then, at last, a small amount of vomit punched through his locked throat and mercifully allowed him to swallow...
 
Cow wasn't mentioned in this thread before, right? I know Hogg and Filth was.
 
Cows by Matthew Stokoe

It follows the journey of a man named Steve as he works in a meat packing facility. He lives with a crippled dog, and his menstrual soaked mother who crippled said dog. Above his apartment lives a woman who searches her innards with an anal probe, while at work he labors alongside with a lover of death and a Zoophile.

An excerpt:
...But she was pulling her plate toward her, pressing her fork into the softness of the stool, lifting a piece to her mouth. Her eyes in their mean folds of fat held his, and for a second the stink of shit absorbed time. Between them space emptied of all the mists that usually swirled there and Steven saw how well she understood him. Then she moved and the stink was just stink again and Steven had to carry on, whatever she knew. He saw thin fibers and lumps of still recognizable food poking from the broken end of the shit and prayed that her destruction would be swift.

The Hagbeast waited for him to eat first. He put a section of the shit into his mouth. It rubbed his lips and the chocolate-smear drag of its entry made him shudder. He could not immediately bring his teeth together and the turd lay acridly in the hollow of his tongue, forcing its thick, boggy smell up behind his nose and into his head, cinching his stomach in a rapid serial spasm that threatened to send bile squirting from his nostrils.

He forced himself to bite down and chew quickly, but speed didn’t reduce the appalling foulness of the taste. The shit was gritty against the roof of his mouth and made crunching sounds with his teeth. It worked itself into a clogging paste that built up under his tongue and inside his cheeks, so stiff he had to use his finger to hook it out. He felt he was drowning in the anus of some dysentery-struck mammal, vistas of the world made shit opened before him. Then, at last, a small amount of vomit punched through his locked throat and mercifully allowed him to swallow...

All that flowery prose and then still use the term "shit" describing a fecal stool? That's the most disgusting part right there.
 
Just received House of Leaves. I have no idea what to expect other than "good fucked up". It's the "Remastered Full-color Edition", whatever that means.

Edit: still getting through it but what the fuck.

Edit 2: what the fuck. It's definitely a mindfuck.
 
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Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk. Basically all of Palahniuks books are fucked up but Snuff is probably the worst in terms of fucked upedness.
Shit I forgot to mention The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. Not fucked up in a gore or sexual way but it's got a world that is so depressing and scary that I'd say it's fucked up. If you like Lovecraft Hodgson is basically Lovecraft if he was a better writer. Premise of the book is a man has been flung into a vision of the future, where the sun has seemingly gone out and all of humanity lives in a giant pyramid shaped structure. Outside of the structure are monsters of various sorts, the structure is the only source of light and is being perpetually watched by giant monsters just waiting for the light to eventually go out.
 
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Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk. Basically all of Palahniuks books are fucked up but Snuff is probably the worst in terms of fucked upedness.
Shit I forgot to mention The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. Not fucked up in a gore or sexual way but it's got a world that is so depressing and scary that I'd say it's fucked up. If you like Lovecraft Hodgson is basically Lovecraft if he was a better writer. Premise of the book is a man has been flung into a vision of the future, where the sun has seemingly gone out and all of humanity lives in a giant pyramid shaped structure. Outside of the structure are monsters of various sorts, the structure is the only source of light and is being perpetually watched by giant monsters just waiting for the light to eventually go out.
Love Night land but its original anachronism prose could get on my nerves. I know there's a version that tidies everything up.
 
Erskine's Box by Kin Lloyd It's about a eunuch who fixates on his own mother and then on a girl half his age. It's not as hardcore as a lot of what's here but it makes you want a bath regardless, because his obsessions and compulsions are on full display and they are so unbearably slimy.

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan The mother of four kids dies. They don't want to be split up by social services, so they encase her body in cement in her basement. The kids themselves aren't good at boundaries. Incest follows.

The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson It's a book of bizarre short stories about body parts and secretions. Sperm are cow-sized and are farmed for milk. Nerves are grown in fields like wheat. Humans produce phlegm as social signals and communication. etc
 
The House of Holes, supposed to be erotica but comes off as really demented.

It follows the titular house, which is more like a small country. How one gets there is by looking at holes and thinking about pleasure. Among this variation is a man looking down his penis hole and a woman who shoved her arm up a wooden stature's giant asshole.

There's a woman who removes other woman's clits and a scene where a lady lays a silver egg, and I quote, contains: “No, there’s a tiny silver man and a tiny silver woman inside. You can watch them make love if you like that sort of thing."
 
An absolutely horrifying book is Rose West: The Making of a Monster, by Jane Carter Woodrow, but that may not count in this thread since it's nonfiction. The horror of Rose West goes back much further before she met Fred West, before she was even born. What happened to her as a child is stomach churning. It's brutal reading.
 
Class: a guide through American Status System by Paul Fussell

not fucked up as in demented but more in finding out where you stand in social society. Real eye opener , found myself cursing out loud and had to put it down at times when it began describing my childhood home and people I know almost exactly.
The book came out in the early 90s or late 80s so some of the references to media or tech is a little dated but Still a damn good book.
and no... it's not some commie propaganda book
My favorite part is describing what the different classes buy from mail order catalogs. Describing how people of lower middle-proles buy garbage called "collectable" like john wayne plates, "limited edition" things like wine glasses or betty boop mugs in hopes they'll increase in value but in reality things marketed as "collectable" tend to just be junk you accumulate. "Collect"-sure- but dosnt really increase much if at all in value over the years. Hell it'll probably be worth less with inflation the way our money printers go brrrrrrr.
Or how people will wear clothes with brand names or with names of products that do well so that they themselves are associated with a sucessfull product by their piers.


edit. forgot to mention The American Way of Death. I forgot who wrote it but it was 1st published in the 60s and I think helped reform the funerial business. The woman describes how it really takes advantage of grieving people in a real crisis moment like used cars salesmen selling you a clunker with a free undercoat of paint. I couldnt get through all of it but it really shows how ghoulish some people are- anything to make a buck, right?


Also anything by David Grossman. He's an army psychologist who's books are standard reading at West Point.
Really fucked up some of the stuff in those books. Very interesting stuff, but his one book "on combat"(about the psychology of people in combat) at times felt like a self help book for police waging war against people in the US.
I know at times police get into some horrid shit and they gotta do fucked up things to get out alive but if they're trained like infantrymen...they'll probably act like infantrymen..towards citizens...


Not saying fuck the cops or doomer posting , just saying it's a little disturbing at times they way he refers to dealing with the public like their in a warzone.
 
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edit. forgot to mention The American Way of Death. I forgot who wrote it but it was 1st published in the 60s and I think helped reform the funerial business. The woman describes how it really takes advantage of grieving people in a real crisis moment like used cars salesmen selling you a clunker with a free undercoat of paint. I couldnt get through all of it but it really shows how ghoulish some people are- anything to make a buck, right?
The author was Jessica Mitford.
 
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison.

The book follows a young girl from ages six to twelve and her family growing up in rural South Carolina in the 1950s. The main character is an illegitimate child (hence the title), and her mother marries and has a second daughter. She marries a second time after the first husband dies, and the new stepfather physically and sexually abuses the main character throughout the course of the book, and it's implied he abuses the other daughter as well.

Later on in the book, an aunt of the main character discovers severe wounds left on her because of her stepfather abusing her, and her uncles proceed to beat seven shades of red out of her stepfather. He is hospitalized, and when he gets out of the hospital, he talks to the main character (who is twelve by this point) when she is home alone and says they will be a family (the mother repeatedly sides with the stepfather throughout the book and chooses him over her abused child even though she knows the abuse is going on). The main character demands he leave, and he responds by violently raping her in the house before the mother walks in and breaks a bottle over his head. The main character is taken to live with her aunt and uncle, and her mother speaks to her one last time and gives her a copy of her birth certificate before leaving to live with the stepfather and her second daughter.

The book ends on a note that can best be described as "everything is awful", and I thought the whole thing was pretty well-written, and it also had a made-for-TV film adaptation that aired in 1996 that I watched after reading the book, and I thought was very faithful to the source material. I may come back with more book suggestions in the future.
 
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I mentioned this a while ago but there was Creation Books. They were a British (we all thought it was British) publisher that was active in the 90's all the way until the mid 00's. They had an amazing catalog of subversive, transgressive, and fucked up shit. But, they (well, just the one guy who owns it) ripped off pretty much everyone who signed up with the company.


This is a great read and shows just how many people were ripped off.

Anywho, the guy who ran the company is still at it. He grabbed whatever was Public Domain or of dubious legality and re-released the books with new covers as E-books. I would highly recommend piracy for obvious reasons.

But, good news, you can read all of the re-branded material for free (with a time limit) on Scribd if you have an account.

 
I mentioned this a while ago but there was Creation Books. They were a British (we all thought it was British) publisher that was active in the 90's all the way until the mid 00's. They had an amazing catalog of subversive, transgressive, and fucked up shit. But, they (well, just the one guy who owns it) ripped off pretty much everyone who signed up with the company.


This is a great read and shows just how many people were ripped off.

Anywho, the guy who ran the company is still at it. He grabbed whatever was Public Domain or of dubious legality and re-released the books with new covers as E-books. I would highly recommend piracy for obvious reasons.

But, good news, you can read all of the re-branded material for free (with a time limit) on Scribd if you have an account.

So is this illegal for him to do?
 
This is a great read and shows just how many people were ripped off.
This sounds like the notoriously disastrous Gnome Press of science fiction fame, which similarly published a lot of great books and then exploded in a catastrophe of borderline fraud and failure. Since this always comes up when Gnome Press is mentioned, Martin Greenberg, the crook who founded Gnome Press, should never be confused with Martin H. Greenberg, the prolific anthologist.

Come to think of it, and more relevant to the fucked-up books topic, there was also Olympia Press, the first publisher of both Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Nabokov's Lolita, which similarly went belly-up after a series of sordid dealings and questionable treatment of authors. Maurice Girodias was probably one of the more notable villains of the publishing of fucked-up books scene.
 
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