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Hyzenth1ay posted:Setting aside nonfiction… Yup, that's my answer too. For anyone unaware, it's about a family of circus freaks. But the husband actually doses his wife with cocktails of drugs with known effects on the fetus trying to create more freaks. And it gets more hosed up from there.
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Apr 3, 2023 03:56
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Another extremely hosed up book I've read was Veins by Drew of "Toothpaste for Dinner" and a bunch of other stuff fame. If you're an older poster you might remember him as user M R CRACKER/I LIKE FROSTYS, and the entire book is his forums posting gimmick expanded out to a full fledged memoir. It's M.R. "Dude" Cracker himself explaining why the Wendy's that burned down wasn't his fault by giving the complete story of his entire life, and though it's labeled as a comedy, I found it soulcrushingly sad. The thing is, I have personally known people like this, as friends: people too disabled, too abused, and too just plain unwell to even understand how unwell they are, surviving in the most horrific of situations to be anything but completely blithe. One of the most memorable scenes is a part of M.R.'s quest to find a girlfriend, which he does by asking every single woman that shows up at his Goodwill job, the job he got because he just got out of prison, to be his girlfriend. When his manager finds out, she fires him, and he responds by immediately asking her out too now that she's not a coworker. It's a great short read and I really liked it, but I don't think I'm going to read it again any time soon. Easily the saddest book I have read in my life, sadder than The Road, because these people exist in real life all around us.
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Apr 3, 2023 04:10
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Youremother posted:Another extremely hosed up book I've read was Veins by Drew of "Toothpaste for Dinner" and a bunch of other stuff fame. If you're an older poster you might remember him as user M R CRACKER/I LIKE FROSTYS, and the entire book is his forums posting gimmick expanded out to a full fledged memoir. It's M.R. "Dude" Cracker himself explaining why the Wendy's that burned down wasn't his fault by giving the complete story of his entire life, and though it's labeled as a comedy, I found it soulcrushingly sad. The thing is, I have personally known people like this, as friends: people too disabled, too abused, and too just plain unwell to even understand how unwell they are, surviving in the most horrific of situations to be anything but completely blithe. One of the most memorable scenes is a part of M.R.'s quest to find a girlfriend, which he does by asking every single woman that shows up at his Goodwill job, the job he got because he just got out of prison, to be his girlfriend. When his manager finds out, she fires him, and he responds by immediately asking her out too now that she's not a coworker. that sounds insanely "good". I think we've all met this guy at some point in life.
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Apr 3, 2023 04:20
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Had a friend recommend the sword of truth books by everyone's favorite yeard aficionado, Terry Goodkind. Finished the first book because at that stage in my life I read everything all the way through, and got one paragraph into the second book before saying "gently caress this trash." The first book has some really disturbing torture in it that my friend forgot was in there. Read another friend suggested book called Quantum Connection, by Travis Taylor. A man and a woman are abducted and use an alien wish granting room to make themselves both super sexy and super smart and they beat the aliens. It was extremely terrible on a visceral level. Ended with some weird eugenics poo poo as the characters of course fell in love and started having super babies. I pretty much stopped taking recommendations from those friends after these two books. A punishment I put on myself was King Rat by China Mieville, the twist was pretty hosed up quite frankly. Turns out the protagonist, who was framed for the murder if his father, is the son of the magical rat king, who raped his mother, posed as his uncle, and killed the man who raised him, all so the rat king could teach him how to be a weird magical rat.
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Apr 3, 2023 05:52
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Upgrade posted:definitely some non-fiction, ordinary men is up there, also 'the price of glory: verdun 1916' by alistair horne because of the descriptions of just how upsettingly awful the actual battle was. Poilou for the same reason, the idea that real people spent so much time in such godawful conditions is hard to wrap your mind around.
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Apr 3, 2023 07:09
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Orson Scott Card's Treasure Box. The twist is Card is a pedophile
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Apr 3, 2023 09:43
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Some stuff I read as a teenager, particularly a Graham Masterson book about cannibalism, and some off the rails horror novel by an author whose name escapes me, jammed full of horny dick worms and vagina dentata gently caress monsters.
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Apr 3, 2023 09:47
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"American psycho" ... I though I was kinda prepared for reading through the graphic torture scenes but the long scene near the end really got to me. Then there were some fantasy books I read as a kid/teen that I only afterwards realized were some kind of beastility/furry porn thing.
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Apr 3, 2023 11:43
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Not sure about Most hosed up but the "Gap" series of sci-fi books by Stephen R. Donaldson gets pretty dark and gnarly
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Apr 3, 2023 11:55
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Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:Oh yah that's another good one. I liked Cold Kill too, another portrait of pointless sociopathy and a real window in the nasty gritty 80s. yeah, one of the things i genuinly love about jack olsens books is it just shows how loving empty and vapid and gross theses sacks of shits lives are and also just all these various other low key lovely people in general were of that time period. like the one i remember is the family from misbigotten son, where the poor family son gets horribly murdered and worse and the police don't give a gently caress because they are white trash and the dad was this super active vet on leave and then he got shitfaced behind the wheel and gets his arm torn off and he becomes this bitter drunk and the mom starts loving this other guy and the kid who is murdered is the other guys son. all the weird family drama poo poo. its also nuts how people like Kevin can get away with some much bullshiting, like obviously its before the net and the time of "bullshit everything to get ahead" but like the dude is the most pathetic channer type dweeb ever and like half of his dumb poo poo is about his lovely awful political satire book or him dicking around with that realestate job. Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 12:42
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has anyone posted Urs Allemann's magnum opus of 1992 yet
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Apr 3, 2023 12:44
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Trieste by Daša Drndić hosed me up pretty good, it combines nürnberg testimonies, archives, photograps, articles, and interviews with the fictional story of a girl who falls in love with an SS officer and has her kid being adopted by the Lebensborn program, and it punches you in the face where suddenly the complete list of every single person deported to concentration camps from italy and italian-controlled territories during the holocaust interrupts the story
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Apr 3, 2023 12:52
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I do not recommend reading If this is a man and Trieste back to back, btw, it'll leave you depressed for a week or so
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Apr 3, 2023 12:54
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Not so much r ally hosed up and more "a product of it's time" but a few years ago I got it in my head to read the James Bond novels. Casino Royale went ok, Live and Let Die was going swimmingly... ... Then I got to a chapter named - ahem - "[N-word] Alley" and then I just kinda put the book away and that was that for that particular endeavor.
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Apr 3, 2023 13:08
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:The Rama sequels written by Gentry Lee & (allegedly) Arthur C. Clarke are possibly the most hosed-up books I've ever read: Lmao. This made me check out the wiki synopsis for the original because it's been like 2 decades since I read it and lol it has Italy getting smashed by an asteroid on 9/11/2077
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Apr 3, 2023 13:13
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Cthulu Carl posted:One of Stephen Baxter's Manifold series has a homo habilus or homo erectus getting a handy from his mom for no goddamn reason. That probably explains the bit in The Long War, cowritten with Pratchett, where there's a race of sentient dog people on one earth, and they've bought Alsatians for their queen to use as sex slaves. Always thought that was a bit odd. Not a majorly hosed up book, but it definitely upset me: the plotline in C J Sansome's Dominion, set in a UK that surrendered after Dunkirk, where an autistic man is in a psychiatric institution and is extremely aware that the next step in his treatment is electroshock therapy. Can't even blame that on the Nazis, that's just what happened IRL.
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Apr 3, 2023 13:27
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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Pure, utter, relentless shite. Misery porn and the most loving awful garbage I have ever given up on. We bought it because everyone was raving about it when it came out, but no. It is total arsewipe. Still pisses me off that I ever even heard of the loving thing.
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Apr 3, 2023 21:27
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Surface Detail by Ian banks
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Apr 4, 2023 01:00
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The Kite Runner is absolute dogshit that only was praised because of when it came out and world events at the time. It’s a bland misery porn book that tries to check enough boxes to be good “modern literature.” Nothing about the character or story are interesting. The critical mass of English professors trying to be progressive or cultured or whatever by praising the book is just sad. A Thousand Splendid sons wasn’t much better but it was more coherent by far.
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Apr 4, 2023 01:41
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Venomous posted:Naked Lunch, but I was 17 at the time so I might not find it as hosed up nowadays, idk Same, think I was around the same age or maybe a bit younger. I had no context for the time it came from, the beat movement or the author, so it was a very WTF experience. Could probably also nominate some sci-fi/fantasy series like Sword of Truth, Wheel of Time, the Eddings books, Ender's Game and so on but I was churning through paperbacks every two days so none of them really made an impact. Oh also if you pick stacks of novels at random from library shelves, there's a half decent chance you'll get some weird sex poo poo. From around the age of 12, I got a pretty good primer in sex, gay sex, sex orgies, alien sex, gigantism, tentacle rape and more thanks to our public library 
Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 10:01
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Fruits of the sea posted:Same, think I was around the same age or maybe a bit younger. I had no context for the time it came from, the beat movement or the author, so it was a very WTF experience. I learnt the other day that Eddings and his wife went to jail for child abuse. Before he became a widely published author!
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Apr 4, 2023 10:12
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distortion park posted:I learnt the other day that Eddings and his wife went to jail for child abuse. Before he became a widely published author! Yeah, I learned that later in life  Honestly don't remember much about their books except that they were all really repetitive with the protagonist getting godlike superpowers at the end. Don't really want to go back and see if there was more to it now.
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Apr 4, 2023 10:14
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Even as a kid I recognised that they were bad pretty quickly. Didn't stop me reading them though
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Apr 4, 2023 10:20
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WaffleZombie posted:Yup, that's my answer too. For those who haven't read it: yes, this is the basic premise of the novel, established within the first few pages or so. Things... go from there. Geek Love is one of my favorite books of all time -- it's told as the memoir of one of the younger children of the family, as a reflection on her bizarre youth and her family's eventual fate and legacy, and the prose and character work are great -- but it starts brutal and goes harder. If we're talking about hosed up books with no redeeming value, I think my top pick is still Piers Anthony's Firefly, an "erotic horror" novel whose ostensible plot is about an ooze monster that secretes pheromones to make people uncontrollably horny so they'll sit there and jack off as it consumes their fluids, but is mostly known for being a really long-form defense of pedophilia -- the main character is a woman who entered into a sexual relationship with an adult man as an 8-year-old and still hates the world for putting her "boyfriend" in prison, because he really loved her! And Anthony clearly agrees with her and has a whole afterword about the cruelty of society towards pedophiles! Just making his usual subtext text! (Also I think the former-abused-child lady gets eaten by the sex ooze later, but in an empowering way?) Also, there's an entire chapter where Piers Anthony speculates about the life of "Eve," the first hominid to exhibit permanent breast swelling outside of estrus, and the presumed evolution of boobs from there. I don't remember what, if anything, that had to do with the pedophilia or the sex ooze. It was just kind of... there.
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Apr 4, 2023 11:39
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Plebian Parasite posted:Chuck Palanuik's Haunted. It's a short story anthology with a narrative weaving them all together, but the common thread is basically 'what's the most hosed up poo poo I, chuck palanuik, can imagine'. It's a hosed up book both in content but also in the concept that it's a pretty shameless and indulgent book for an already shameless and indulgent writer. I'm reading Palanuik's Make Something Up which is a newer short story anthology. I love it. Haunted's next then.
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Apr 4, 2023 11:50
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Antivehicular posted:For those who haven't read it: yes, this is the basic premise of the novel, established within the first few pages or so. Things... go from there. Geek Love is one of my favorite books of all time -- it's told as the memoir of one of the younger children of the family, as a reflection on her bizarre youth and her family's eventual fate and legacy, and the prose and character work are great -- but it starts brutal and goes harder.
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Apr 4, 2023 12:54
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Yeah, Naked Lunch was a loving trip. It's this jumbled stream-of-consciousness mass of text with lots of grotesque details, and only as you go along do you start to realize that there's actually a narrative hidden in the chaos. I'm glad I read it, but I don't think I'll ever go back and read it again. Speaking of Ordinary Men, I read Rudolf Höss' autobiography Commandant in Auschwitz that he wrote while in prison after the war. It's got a lot of the classic excuses - I didn't know what the job was! I was just an administrator! If I refused they'd go after my family! I was just doing my job! I tried treating the prisoners as humanely as possible, so when you think about it it was good that I ran the camp and not someone else. etc etc - and then you get to the part where he describes being present for sending women and children into the gas chamber and the children are crying and the parents are trying to put on a brave face for them and Höss goes on and on about how awful it was, but at the same time he seems to be really proud that he endured and did his duty despite that duty being absolutely horrendous. Like he expects the reader to go Oh, he's so strong and brave and manly! for sending children to their deaths. I had to put the book down and go for a walk.
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Apr 4, 2023 13:45
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"That part" in Stephen King's IT. How the hell did it get the go ahead from the editor or publisher?
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Apr 4, 2023 14:18
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The editor read the first 1000(?) pages and was like "yeah sure fine" when they should have kept reading another couple of hundred pages.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:20
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Government Handjob posted:"That part" in Stephen King's IT. How the hell did it get the go ahead from the editor or publisher? it was the 1980s Mr. Sunshine posted:The editor read the first 1000(?) pages and was like "yeah sure fine" when they should have kept reading another couple of hundred pages. also this
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Apr 4, 2023 14:31
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I remember reading IT years ago, thinking the whole time "No way is 'That Part' real. C'mon... People are just exaggerating. That's absurd." Then I realized I was at That Part and just started slipping pages until I was on a new chapter. I think it was the chapter after That Part, but it might not have been, and I don't care to ever check again.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:50
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Stephen King farts out some weird poo poo sometimes. Anybody remember the butt weasels from Dreamcatcher?
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Apr 4, 2023 14:56
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Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe. It's about a group of reformatory school boys who are taken up into the mountains of Japan in WWII and are basically just left in the care of some horrifying rural peasants who immediately abandon them when a plague outbreak is suspected, so they're left to fend for themselves and the villagers try to shoot them if they leave
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Apr 4, 2023 15:04
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Not really hosed up per se, but A Scanner Darkly bummed me out. I thought it would be all fun and offbeat like the movie, but man it was depressing as hell especially the afterward where Phillip K Dick dedicated the book to all his friends that he lost to drug abuse.
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Apr 4, 2023 15:15
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someone in the book barn suggested The Throne of Bones was like vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen so i bought it turns out it's a bit unpleasant to read about people loving in the goo of a not-very-freshly filled and still occupied sarcophagus, especially before lunch
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Apr 4, 2023 16:14
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Philip K Dick is a pretty hosed up author. Ubik read like a psychotic dream logic stream of thoughts which given his fondness for meth was probably accurate. highly recommend, but it put me in a weird mood for days.
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Apr 4, 2023 16:48
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Famethrowa posted:Philip K Dick is a pretty hosed up author. Ubik read like a psychotic dream logic stream of thoughts which given his fondness for meth was probably accurate. I remember reading Ubik when I took a course on sci-fi on college. I don't remember Ubik, just reading it. I don't know what that means.
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Apr 4, 2023 16:53
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Cthulu Carl posted:I remember reading Ubik when I took a course on sci-fi on college. there isn't a lot to latch on to plotwise, honestly. it's more of a feeling or sensation that stuck with me. highly recommend if you like weird scifi. I think it's sub 300 pages.
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Apr 4, 2023 17:01
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Saltpowered posted:The Kite Runner is absolute dogshit that only was praised because of when it came out and world events at the time. It’s a bland misery porn book that tries to check enough boxes to be good “modern literature.” Nothing about the character or story are interesting. Oh christ, I had to read The Kite Runner back in high school and I loving hated it. Even in my teenage years I felt like a book that crammed with child rape was a bit too much for our class. A disgusting book, crammed to its brim with glurge and torture
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Apr 4, 2023 19:19
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Did anyone ever read a Child Called It? I read that in school for some loving reason and after all of it my teacher was "and it all might be a lie!" And I was like what the gently caress
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Apr 4, 2023 19:23
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