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Books that may have damaged your psyche

Started by Dex Sawash, February 06, 2018, 07:19:11 PM

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Dex Sawash

Kids book, The Story About Ping



About enslaved ducks and possibly little boys too. The last duck to return to the slave duck fishing boat gets a whack from the overseer. Highlighted the randomness and banality of cruel adults. I really feel uncomfortable if I  am late or last to arrive.

This image of bondage and male nudity made young me have real odd feelings too.




What's your hing damaging book?

QDRPHNC

The Road shitted me up. I will never watch the film.


Sin Agog

This happens to me, but only on a temporary basis, and on a pretty small scale.

When I was thirteen and read Crime & Punishment, I immediately went out and stole a trolley.

ASFTSN

Just reading excerpts from Samuel R Delany's Hogg has done this a little bit, I reckon.

Hobo With A Shit Pun

I wasn't clinically depressed until I did a doctorate on Alasdair Gray.

That'll do it.


Brundle-Fly

Killing For Company by Brian Masters. Spending all that time in Dennis Nilson's brain made me feel very odd. Nilson's reasoning behind the murders makes the reader almost feel complicit.

nedthemumbler

Quote from: QDRPHNC on February 06, 2018, 07:52:13 PM
The Road shitted me up. I will never watch the film.

Came here just to post Z is for Zachariah, so obviously a post apocalyptic theme here.  However Z is a lot less bleak and barbaric than The Road, and in a way it's portrayal of building a new life without any precedent ( or authorities) appealed to my teen brain as much as it haunted me.

Is the film worth a watch, anyone? Edit (Z is for Zachariah I mean, I enjoyed The Road film a lot, but then McCarthy's prose is very taut in a very filmic way to begin with)






bushwick

Quote from: ASFTSN on February 07, 2018, 12:15:25 PM
Just reading excerpts from Samuel R Delany's Hogg has done this a little bit, I reckon.

hahaha ditto, I discovered that book on one of my "sickest book EVER!" google search jaunts. Have read a lot about it but don't know if I ever want to own the bloody thing. Have read little excerpts of Peter Sotos' work which deal with similar vibes. It's all a bit much, frankly!

Read that famous Palahniuk short story in I think The Guardian when I was ~12.

ASFTSN

Quote from: nedthemumbler on February 08, 2018, 11:27:06 PM
Is the film worth a watch, anyone? Edit (Z is for Zachariah I mean, I enjoyed The Road film a lot, but then McCarthy's prose is very taut in a very filmic way to begin with)

If you are a thirteen year old boy looking to see some side-boob in English class, then absolutely.

I remember it just being ok.  The fact the valley in which it's set has its own little micro-climtate means it doesn't feel very post-apocalyptic to be honest. 

garbed_attic

Trying to read 120 Days of Sodom as a teenager, I reckon.

Small Man Big Horse

I remember a horror short story where two lorry drivers crashed in to each other, and then started fucking in the road despite being horrendously injured, and my twelve year old self was definitely quite scarred by it. I think it was by Clive Barker, but I'm not 100% sure.

Zeitoun, though not because of the book, but because of what's happened since.

thraxx

When I was a kid Salem's Lot scared the shit out of me so I couldn't sleep for about 2 weeks.  Nights spent expecting to see red eyes at the window.

As an adult and father Pet Semetry devastated me a few years ago.

bgmnts

Quote from: thraxx on February 10, 2018, 10:02:33 PM
As an adult and father Pet Semetry devastated me a few years ago.

Isnt Pet Sematary the only novel that actually scared King?

I read somewhere that he wrote Pet Sematary to be the scariest thing ever.

It's possibly his bleakest work outside of his Richard Bachmann darkness.

Icehaven

I've often wondered about the effects of so many children's books (and TV shows and films for that matter) relying so heavily on anthropomorphism. Not that it might damage your psyche negatively as such, just affect it. Dunno if there's been any studies done on the long term effects, maybe on general empathy levels, or even attitudes to animal welfare etc. but they could be interesting.

There's also a massively disproportionate number of children's books which feature dead or missing arents, orphaned main characters etc., but that's a whole other session.

Andy147

Quote from: nedthemumbler on February 08, 2018, 11:27:06 PM
Came here just to post Z is for Zachariah, so obviously a post apocalyptic theme here.  However Z is a lot less bleak and barbaric than The Road, and in a way it's portrayal of building a new life without any precedent ( or authorities) appealed to my teen brain as much as it haunted me.

Is the film worth a watch, anyone? Edit (Z is for Zachariah I mean, I enjoyed The Road film a lot, but then McCarthy's prose is very taut in a very filmic way to begin with)

The BBC "Play for Today" version is (as far as I remember about 30 years after watching it) a decent adaptation and pretty close to the book.
No idea about the 2015 version (although since it's got a third character in it it's obviously less close to the book).

nedthemumbler

Quote from: Andy147 on February 14, 2018, 12:02:53 AM
The BBC "Play for Today" version is (as far as I remember about 30 years after watching it) a decent adaptation and pretty close to the book.
No idea about the 2015 version (although since it's got a third character in it it's obviously less close to the book).

Thanks, Play for Today's are usually good quality.  'Goes down YouTube burrow'

tookish

Reading Lolita as a pre-teen (nine or ten?) definitely did me a lot of damage. I recognise that the fact that I was already not a virgin and experiencing longterm sexual abuse may have been a factor. Still, I was too young to pick up on the fact that Humbert Humbert wasn't supposed to be sympathetic, and for years I thought I was a 'nymphet' who ruined lives with my overdeveloped sexuality, as opposed to, y'know, the victim of a gross paedo.

Room 13 by Robert Swindells really distressed me and formed the basis for my first major OCD incident.

'It' is also never far from my mind; the opening sequence with the gay couple and It biting into Adrian's armpit was very, very vivid and still floats up into my head most days.


bgmnts

Quote from: tookish on February 16, 2018, 02:45:22 AM
Reading Lolita as a pre-teen (nine or ten?) definitely did me a lot of damage. I recognise that the fact that I was already not a virgin and experiencing longterm sexual abuse may have been a factor. Still, I was too young to pick up on the fact that Humbert Humbert wasn't supposed to be sympathetic, and for years I thought I was a 'nymphet' who ruined lives with my overdeveloped sexuality, as opposed to, y'know, the victim of a gross paedo.

Room 13 by Robert Swindells really distressed me and formed the basis for my first major OCD incident.

'It' is also never far from my mind; the opening sequence with the gay couple and It biting into Adrian's armpit was very, very vivid and still floats up into my head most days.

Very good.

mothman

Had to stop reading Christopher Hitchens' autobiography because he was starting to provide a voice-over narration for my dreams.

RedRevolver

Every Roald Dahl book. I mean, they're great, and I love Roald, but he was a very stable man pretending to be a complete psychopath.

RedRevolver

Also, Jacqueline Wilson books, in particular the Girls series. Pretty sure she convinced me bulimia was OK because she's actually a pretty poor storyteller.

I haven't read a horrible book as an adult, nor have I read that many books since becoming an adult if I'm honest. Anything that seems more exciting than my life as a dullard is completely unpalatable to me. I prefer online articles that I can post shitty comments on instead.

H-O-W-L

War of the Worlds because I bought into the Artilleryman's protofascist bollocks at a young age, spurred on by physical and sexual abuse I was undergoing at the time that made me develop a superiority-over-inferiority attitude in response to my own perceived failures. The attitude flipped back and forth between "ah, let's just kill everyone else" and "i suck, so i should kill everyone that sucks more than me to prove that i don't suck". Idiot. If I could meet fifteen-year-old me I'd give her a kick in the fucking ribs. Deserved it.

In modern times it's probably been the 1955 Manual of Civil Defence that has shitted me right up because it's made me aware just how fucking little a shit the ruling classes have given the average working man for ages. Not because of its contents, but when you contrast it with something like Protect and Survive (produced thirty years later), the later publications are woefully under-detailled. I've heard the excuse that this was because PaS was designed for a lower reading level, but that's bollocks. Everyone could understand the MoCD unless they were legitimately developmentally disabled, in which case they'd probably (and unfortunately) not be able to action the advice in the book anyway. Some of the shit in the CD manual is so useful (such as dealing with voids in collapsed buildings & retrieving the wounded from such situations, using your surroundings to make rubble zones safe, that kinda thing) that I'm actually mortified the government didn't give a toss.

Protect and Survive is, in itself, a useless piece of shite because it wasn't intended to be distributed until escalations had begun-- by which point total dissemination would've been fucking impossible. It was also pretty steeply-priced back in the day from what I've heard, especially compared to the (woefully under-packed even by PaS standards) local council's versions. I've got the Leeds and the Bomb pamphlet, and while being respectably anti-bomb it has a lot of shit that's like "yeah just refer to Protect and Survive or the air raid warden, lols!!!". Helpful.


Dannyhood91

Quote from: RedRevolver on February 20, 2018, 03:01:10 PM
Every Roald Dahl book. I mean, they're great, and I love Roald, but he was a very stable man pretending to be a complete psychopath.

There's an ending to a certain Dahl book where the two main antagonists end up shrinking so small that they don't exist anymore and it bothered me so much that everytime I woke up in bed I'd stretch extra hard to counteract any shrinking I may have gone through during the night.

Famous Mortimer

Whether you'd call an instant conversion to vegetarianism a damage to the psyche?

"John Dies At The End", by David Wong. The main guys have a weird tablet thing that increases their power of perception to god-like levels.One of them looks at a chicken sandwich, and is able to tell what the chicken was thinking before it died. Pretty simple little bit, and I'm the only person I know who had this reaction, but after reading it I just couldn't eat meat again. It just shook my brain up, good and proper.

Ferris

The Road had a surprisingly profound effect on me. Haven't read it for years but I still remember little grim bits of it here and there. All quiet on the western front is another one.

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on March 07, 2018, 12:02:08 PM
Whether you'd call an instant conversion to vegetarianism a damage to the psyche?

"John Dies At The End", by David Wong. The main guys have a weird tablet thing that increases their power of perception to god-like levels.One of them looks at a chicken sandwich, and is able to tell what the chicken was thinking before it died. Pretty simple little bit, and I'm the only person I know who had this reaction, but after reading it I just couldn't eat meat again. It just shook my brain up, good and proper.

There's a comic book called Chew by John Layman which has a similar theme. The protagonist has a 'gift' that after eating something he sees the life and experience of whatever it was. He survives mainly on beetroots, since experiencing life in dark warmth is vastly preferable.

newbridge

Better not read the Roald Dahl story about the guy who invents a machine that allows him to hear plants talking and screaming as they are cut down, you'll starve to death.