Have you ever found a book to be good, but too disturbing to continue?

[Rhonlynn]

Yes: American Psycho, I made it to the last 5 pages, and couldn't continue. The bath scene....I'll never forget it.

And, Pet Cemetery, saw the movie, I've read about everything Steven King wrote, but couldn't finish that book.

[tponzo]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Here's a potentially disturbing sentence:

Written words are the exact correlates of actions.

What if that were true? What if every cruelty and atrocity ever imagined on the page became real simply because a person had written about it?

"Shudder" Now that's a truly distrubing thought. We'd be in really deep doo doo.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Here's a potentially disturbing sentence:

Written words are the exact correlates of actions.

What if that were true? What if every cruelty and atrocity ever imagined on the page became real simply because a person had written about it?

Wasn't that a plotline in a Heinlein book?

[jhempel24]

Originally Posted by 357mag

I almost stopped reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" because of it's anti-religion, anti-God leanings. I state this not to start a discussion on religion or spirituality, it is just how I feel. I am a Christian and I found his anti-God comments disturbing to me. It was a good book otherwise.

I didn't get that feeling at all from this book. It wasn't anti-God learnings it was about how an autistic kid viewed the world around him based on facts and numbers, and you CAN'T state religion in facts and numbers.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by kjk

Wasn't that a plotline in a Heinlein book?

1. Probably in the sense that Heinlein was a 50s SF writer and played with what-if scenarios, but probably not, because his imagination wasn't creepy enough to have conceived of that idea in that way.

2. In another sense, I wouldn't know because I've only ever made it through one Heinlein book. Writer friends and I used to read parts of Time Enough for Love aloud to each other because we couldn't believe how hilariously bad it was.

3. The idea comes from the most terrifying dream I've ever had, and which I had recurrently when I was a little boy. Nothing gruesome happened in it, unlike my other nightmares, but the sense of being alone with the utterly violent repercussions of unfiltered thought manifesting as action left me so terrified that I couldn't scream as I forced myself awake. All I could do was make a hissing sound.

4. The worst thing you can do to anyone who's creative is compare an idea they share to something that already exists -- especially before they've had the chance to develop it. You have no idea what they'd have done with it on their own, but they now have some horrible precedent to learn to avoid.

As a studio musician, I learned never to do that to other musicians -- especially not while recording an album. If you tell the guitarist who's developing their part as they track it that it sounds exactly like [fill in the song or artist's name], then you've killed their performance. For the next hour, all they're going to do is try desperately to avoid sounding like someone else. Whereas if you say nothing, simply encourage them or ask them to try a suggestion of yours, then they'll do what all studio vets are paid to do, which is be both receptive and original: quick to learn and adapt without losing their own ideas and sound.

[Nawpkin]

It's hard for something to be disturbing to me. You can take some of the most disturbing things and they won't faze me. Rape, incest, both combined, abuse, really none of that would stop me or deter me regardless of how vividly it was described. The only thing that stops me from reading a book is if the author gets too preachy about religion or something like that. I can't stand views or different opinions being pushed in my face.

[Aladyleyna]

My most recent encounter was with Stephen King's Under The Dome. It was an amazing book, and what I really liked about the book was that the characters were pretty much like you or me; they were ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary situation. Unfortunately though, they were too believable, and I started rooting for them, and then the situation got so bad that I really didn't want to continue reading because I was afraid that something bad would happen to them. And that some of the deaths I encountered were so saddening...

I have yet to finish reading the book. Maybe someday... I guess...

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by Aladyleyna

My most recent encounter was with Stephen King's Under The Dome. It was an amazing book, and what I really liked about the book was that the characters were pretty much like you or me; they were ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary situation. Unfortunately though, they were too believable, and I started rooting for them, and then the situation got so bad that I really didn't want to continue reading because I was afraid that something bad would happen to them. And that some of the deaths I encountered were so saddening...

I have yet to finish reading the book. Maybe someday... I guess...

Yeah, King does that, doesn't he? I still haven't cracked Under the Dome but I may have to do that. I'm still working my way through the Dark Tower series on audiobook (I have a long commute) and trying to work my way through my to-reads on my Kobo.

[Aladyleyna]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Yeah, King does that, doesn't he? I still haven't cracked Under the Dome but I may have to do that. I'm still working my way through the Dark Tower series on audiobook (I have a long commute) and trying to work my way through my to-reads on my Kobo.

*hides* Actually... That is the only Stephen King book I've read, but if that's his writing style throughout his books, I might end up too intimidated to read any of his books. Which reminds me... I really ought to try reading the Dark Tower series.

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by Aladyleyna

*hides* Actually... That is the only Stephen King book I've read, but if that's his writing style throughout his books, I might end up too intimidated to read any of his books. Which reminds me... I really ought to try reading the Dark Tower series.

he makes his characters VERY real. he throws in many things about personal foibles that make you go; "gee! I'm not the only one!?" it is part of what makes his suspense and fear so believable

welcome to the forums!

[garrybuck]

> none of that would stop me or deter me regardless of how vividly it was described<

If I take a detached clinical view I can do the same thing, but when I read for pleasure I like to get totally immersed in the story. The moment it becomes personal, I bring my own 'stuff' to the story. I like that it 'feels real', but there are definite limits on what I like to feel.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Aladyleyna

[W]hat I really liked about the book was that the characters were pretty much like you or me. . . . Unfortunately, they were too believable, and I started rooting for them, and then the situation got so bad that I really didn't want to continue reading because I was afraid that something bad would happen to them.

You've just summed up one of the three basic reasons King is so successful.

The first is his characterization. He really did absorb from Dickens the idea that characters should be likable. He also grew up in the days of rock and roll and perhaps matured in the days of punk, which meant he had to reject the stock types from Dickens -- "flat characters," as Forster called them -- and draw from people he observed and knew, as well as resonant performances in films. (He often takes details not from the screenplay but from the actors -- their gestures and idiosyncrasies, the little things they do, which Poe taught us all to notice.)

The second reason is his technique of making cultural, even generation-specific details sinister, and common childhood memories terrifying.

To be one of the first modern horror writers to do that, he had to look into himself and find the things that terrified him personally -- all of the toys that affected him in the wrong way during childhood. The scratchy records in gra'ma's living room, the creepy shade of green paint used for the too-new house next door occupied by strangers. The black and white pictures in the 60s gym teacher's office as he threatened humiliation to the student who didn't seem to try. The disturbing shoes the principal always wore, that made a squishy sound as he turned to notice some culprit.

The last reason is his specifically American sense of catharsis, which I trace to Melville's Moby Dick, in which the repressed unconscious desire and anger of the main character breaks the surface of the water like an immense Freudian phallus. The whale's a metaphor for Melville's homosexuality as well, but it's is also symbol of the way we repress our desires and anger only to have them rupture the surface of our decorous façades.

We Americans tend to bury our grim histories and keep a pleasant expression until the moment that ancient anger or desire rips through to take us over. It's the consequence, perhaps, of the decisions of the first British Americans, some of whom were Calvinists, to erase the supposed corruption of their European cultural past: To cleanse the memory and start all over again.

Yet we can never erase the provenance of the present.

King's way of showing that catharsis, which has as much to do with Rebel without a Cause as it does with Edgar Allen Poe, influenced everything after him, including films by David Lynch.

The funny thing is that I find his characters a little too likable (I feel King trying to make me like them) and have never cared for his plots or his style (which for me lacks a certain precision and music). But I'd be a jerk if I didn't admit that the things he deems most important, he does very well.

================

Certain horror novels are easy for people to read despite the carnage because the characters seem expendable: They're too thinly drawn. But King wants the fates of his characters to worry and upset you, the reader. He wants anxiety to hook you until you've finished the book.

70s hack writers had that down to a sexist formula, you know: Make the wife or girlfriend lovable, then show her being abducted by the end of the second chapter. It's right up there with the other chestnut of potboilers: Always reference a corpse, a murder, crime or sex in the first paragraph if not the first sentence.

The difference is that King wants you to feel that the experience of reading the book was meaningful, hence the warmth of his use of ordinary characters. Hence, too, his use of ordinary prophets: spiritual characters, who are usually poor and sometimes illiterate, to conjure universal resonances and depths.

[tponzo]

The last reason is his specifically American sense of catharsis, which I trace to Melville's Moby Dick, in which the repressed unconscious desire and anger of the main character breaks the surface of the water like an immense Freudian phallus. The whale's a metaphor for Melville's homosexuality as well, but it's is also symbol of the way we repress our desires and anger only to have them rupture the surface of our decorous façades.

Wow! And I thought Moby Dick was just about a big fish


Great analysis of King and why he is so successful at what he does. .

[taosaur]

There was one science fiction series I stuck with into the third fat paperback, at which point there was a scene so brutally sadistic and leeringly misogynistic that, not only did I drop the series flat, but I was at a loss as to how to dispose of the books, as I could not in good conscience allow them to pass from my hands into anyone else's. I have no idea what I ended up doing with them: probably just sent them to the landfill.

The books were only mediocre science fiction in the first place, so definitely not worth the cost of having that scene placed in my head, largely without warning. At the risk of directing someone toward the series, but in the interest of warning others away, it was The Middle Kingdom series, about a future overpopulated Earth ruled by authoritarian Chinese traditionalists.

[carld]

Originally Posted by taosaur

The books were only mediocre science fiction in the first place, so definitely not worth the cost of having that scene placed in my head, largely without warning. At the risk of directing someone toward the series, but in the interest of warning others away, it was The Middle Kingdom series, about a future overpopulated Earth ruled by authoritarian Chinese traditionalists.

Looking at the reviews, it seems that the people for don't like it REALLY DON"T LIKE IT! The people that like it seem to give it a lot of leeway. Yes, it's violent, but... seem pretty typical.

I think I'd be well and deep into the hater camp.