Most Disturbing Books I

This is a list of the most disturbing books I have read. And by this I mean works of fiction (short stories, novellas, short novels, novels) that kept me awake at night and left images I remember long after. I am just starting to compile the list, so it will be updated regularly. And of course I am open for recommendations! 

Nathan Ballingrud - The Visible Filth
 

A deeply unsettling read, almost from the get go. The novella does what good horror fiction (at least in my opinion) should do: Make you feel safe while at the same time slowly pulling the rug away from under you, fiber by fiber, increasingly blurring the line between real and surreal - until you finally see that gaping hole underneath your feet that you are gonna fall into now. Like his  marvelous - and recommendable - short story collection 'North American Lake Monsters', 'The Visible Filth' shows that Nathan Ballingrud is a unique voice in modern horror literature. 

Kealan Patrick Burke - Blanky

What starts as a tragic story of loss, told from the perspective of a grieving father whose daughter has died just months after her birth (no spoiler here, you learn this on the first two pages), soon develops into pure and relentless horror with a deeply psychological and symbolic subtext. Kealan Patrick Burke doesn't say a word too much, and still manages to make his first person narrator almost painfully believable in his sadness, his hope, and ultimately his sheer terror. (Shout-out to Edward Lorn for his recommendation.)

Splitter VI

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.” 

(Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens)

Splitter V

“Give man a choice between reality and loneliness or fantasy and community, he'll pick having friends every time.” 

(Joe Hill - Rain; in: Strange Weather)

Splitter IV

“Our Society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It's an inevitability tourists can't help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?” 

(Neil Strauss - Emergency)

Splitter III

"The truth was, she hadn't felt much like a cop in a long time. That was a place she never thought she'd get to. Be just like the rest of them after ten years. Angry and drunk. Numb to pretty much everything. That wasn't supposed to be her. But she now knew what they all knew: that the very thing you need to stay strong and keep your head, that daily and deliberate apathy you practice like meditation, is the very thing that, in the end, robs you of your desire to get in the car and catch bad guys. Nobody tells you that, once you put on the armor, you can never take it off." 

(Scott Frank - Shaker)

Splitter II

"[Federal prisons] are dreadful institutions whose procedures are designed to dehumanize the people they contain. And when you look at our rates of incarceration - roughly seven times higher than those of our peer nations, higher even then the Soviet Union under Stalin - you can't help but feel there is something wrong with a society that feels the need to lock so many of its citizens in cages." 

(Brad Parks - Say Nothing)

Splitter I

"Security was a myth, a grand lie we told ourselves to mask the jarring reality of the human condition: that the social contract was written in sand, not stone, and it could be blown away at any time, by anyone with sufficient breath his lungs." 

(Brad Parks - Say Nothing)