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Johhny Got His Gun- Dalton Trumbo

The horror of war. It had a great effect on me and I am very pacifistic about conflict now.

I agree with Flowers in the Attic. I read it when I was 13 or so and I was quite horrified and saddened by it. Besides the disturbing relationships, one of the things that really bothered me was

Spoiler

the whole poison on the doughnuts thing. To realize the grandmother was almost as sad and trapped as the kids, and trying to help them out in her little way from their horrible murderous mother. Man! And also the idea of twins wherein one of them dies, that always upsets me. It must be like having part of yourself die.

Other books that quite disturbed me:

Books of Blood 1-3 by Clive Barker. My father saw me reading an Archie comic when I was 12 and confiscated it for being "stupid". He then said this was the sort of thing I should be reading, and gave me this book. Well, I read it all the way through and had nightmares for the next year, at least! Especially the story "Rawhead Rex" upset me... as I recall there was some sort of monster that especially loved to rip apart children and eat their internal organs.

Hindsight by Ronald Kelly. I was big into writers like King and Koontz when I was in my early teens, and I picked up this book because it seemed kind of along a similar vein. However I found it really spooky and sad, and I found for a long time afterward I would think about it and just become... unsettled. It's basically about a girl whose brother disappears, and then as an adult she starts to find out what happened to him through visions.

I also found Wives and Concubines by Su Tong pretty upsetting, though in part because I'd seen the movie based on it previously (Raise the Red Lanterns). It's a very harsh and unsentimental story of a young concubine who goes slowly crazy. One of the interesting things about it is she isn't a very likable or interesting main character, but the story is immensely compelling anyhow. I was surprised by how much this book disturbed me, and the other two in the book I read it in were similarly unsettling.

it's called.. i have no mouth & i must scream

I feel confident in this one. The most disturbing book I've read was Perfume, by the German, Patrick Suskind. Here's a brief description from Amazon:

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and frest-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brillance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

I saw the movie based on the novel and it was a bit viscerally disturbing. I bet the book is all the more so.

American Psycho. Without a doubt.

Blood Meridian

Olivia22 wrote:For me it would probably be the "Flowers in the Attic" series by V.C. Andrew. That whole series was extremely disturbing.

I also really hate what I call "what may come..." books. You know like "1984" by George Orwell,
"Brave New World" by Aulous Huxley, and even to a certain extent "The Hunger Games" Trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

What a coincidence - Flowers in the Attic really disturbed me after reading it.