List love 5: The most disturbing novels I have read

When I was posting about my Halloween-themed reads, I mentioned that I was planning to make a list of disturbing books. Well, here it is. As you can see, there are no outright horror novels on the list - instead they are mostly thrillers and suspense novels, the kind that can play endlessly with one’s imagination because one always tends to imagine things as being worse than they really are. A good writer can scare the living daylights out of the reader merely by using suggestion.

We have always lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. A tale of mental disintegration and murder, it is disturbing on several levels, from the cheerfully manipulative unreliable narrator, to the evil cousin, to the townspeople who turn into a lynch mob in the flash of a moment. Most of all, the atmosphere just keeps getting more thickly oppressive and creepy with each new chapter.
The Wasp Factory by Iain M. Banks.The protagonist lives in a world of his own making, with strange but logical rules that seem perfectly normal to him, but scary and disturbing to the reader. Now that I think about it, I am pretty sure Banks was under the influence of We have always lived in the castle when he created this character, although the story is totally different.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Such a very bleak view of the future, one that seems ever more possible as it becomes more and more difficult to hide from the electronic media and a Big Brother of sorts is indeed monitoring people.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Were the ghosts real or were they imaginary? Freaky either way, because if they were, the nanny had every reason to react as she did, and if they weren’t, the kids were manipulative little monsters. Mostly the atmosphere is just thickly oppressive and creepy.
The Legend of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Bad ghosts or crazy person imagining things? Hard to tell, but deeply disturbing either way, and again the atmosphere plays a big part.
Perfume by Patrick Suskind. The protagonist is a sociopathic serial killer and yet you actually like him or at least root for him.
Animal Farm by George Orwell. Another dystopia novel that shows a disturbing look at human society acted out by animals.
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. The passage with the crucifix was enough to guarantee a place on this list, but again the atmosphere makes it disturbing.
Psycho by Robert Bloch. Today I would probably find it quite tame, but I was 12 when I read it and was afraid to sleep with the light off for weeks afterwards, out of a fear I would have a nightmare (I associated nightmares with darkness).

Furthermore, I suspect that if I were to read the Lord of the Flies I would probably add it to the list, at least if it is anything like as disturbing as the movie.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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