Dark books, anyone?

I love dark books, but I know a lot of readers don't. So I'm curious. If a book is disturbing or sad, will you close the cover and walk away from it? And if not, what are your absolutely favorite weep worthy reads?

Caroline Leavitt

what do you mean by dark? I read Ellen Hopkins books and have been reading some other books that are definitley disturbing, but I like that appeal. Its different.

I may set something down and read it later, but usually I will come back to it when I'm in a more suitable mood. Is there a particular kind you're looking for? Just books without happy endings, or books with damaged characters, or disturbing content (either realistic or more of a dark fantasy/horror thing), or...?

I don't seem to be put off by "dark" books. Even gruesome/disturbing nonfiction I can really enjoy. I read Stiff by Mary Roach and Death's Acre by William Bass at the end of last year and loved them both.

In the interests of streamlining I probably should mention this group - http://www.librarything.com/groups/mostdisturbingbooks - which covers the subject pretty comprehensively. I do love a good 'dark' read. I find that if I overdo it they lose their impact but something really bleak every month or two makes me feel soooooo much better. Some of my favourites are:

The Collector - has to come at no 1 in any good list - beautifully creepy)
Monster Love - a bit too close to truth to not be scary
Alma Cogan - ditto
Do They Hear You When You Cry? - non-fiction but definitely disturbing
Misogynies - also n/f but possibly the most scary book I've ever read about the sex war.
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty Four
We Need to Talk About Kevin - magnificent!
The Art of Murder
As If I Am Not There aka S. A Novel About the Balkans
The Beach - a brilliant book for lovers of 'dark' and everyone else.
The Fifth Child
The American Way of Death - a n/f classic
Boy A
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
The Wasp Factory
Cries Unheard - more n/f
Deadkidsongs
Devotion
Don't Look Now
Eleni by Nicholas Gage (no touchstone) - n/f
The Other Hand aka Little Bee
Incendiary
A Kind of Intimacy
The Kite Runner
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
The Lord of the Flies
The Long Walk
Love Remains by Glen Duncan
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
Mister Pip
My Sister, My Love
On the Beach
The Outsider aka L'Etranger
The Republic of Trees
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Whew - sorry it's such a long list! And I've left off quite a few! Thank you, though, for giving me the excuse to go through my library and pick these out. Im now going to tag them all (and some others) 'disturbing' so anyone who wants to is welcome to have a browse around.

Oh, I love this long list! There are some books I don't know, and I loved They Shoot Horses, don't They (great film, too.) By dark, I mean books that make you cry or make you feel unsettled or disturbed. I love them, crave them. A lot of times people ask me why. "You're such a happy person, why would you be drawn to something dark?" My son, who is 13, is the same way. Give him a book where someone dies, and he adores it! (And he's also the happiest person on the planet.) Maybe we just like to feel all the big emotion? I'm that way in the books I write, too. (Again, my son's theater teacher asked me why such a happy person would write a book that made her cry?"

Why indeed!

Wuthering Heights, Burmese Days, Crime and Punishment, The Stranger, et multi al.

I really think it's we lucky ones who don't have much darkness in our lives who love these. Maybe if the kind of thing that happens in them actually happened to me I wouldn't be nearly so keen but, as it is, if I finish a book and then, three days later, it creeps back into my mind and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, I consider that a goodie.

Caroline - I found quite a few of these by going on here - http://www.whichbook.net/textonly/moodsearch/ and entering 'disturbing'. I still have a few I haven't read yet so there could be more surprises to come.

ETA - the search criterion that worked best for me was 'very disturbing' or 'definitely disturbing'; 'extremely disturbing' seems to bring up an awful lot of sexual abuse, which is a step too dark for me.

The Glass Castle by, Jeannette Walls
A Child Called It by, Dave Pelzer

I generally don't care for sad books... but disturbing or creepy (which sometimes also equates to disturbing)... yeah, I'll go for those. Rather than individual books, I'll go with a list of authors because that's shorter, and a favorite story from each... but knowing that there's more where these came from.

The Mist, by Stephen King, which has been made into a movie, is featured in his collection entitled Skeleton Crew
Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, a classic detective story but also quite disturbing; and
Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison, which is actually a collection of short pieces disturbing enough to heed the author's advice not to enjoy them all in one setting.

There's not much rhyme or reason to which books make me cry, except that I love those books, but the ones I remember at the moment just going by that are The Brief History of the Dead and Watchmen. I'm sure there were others but I can't remember... I should start a "cried" tag or something.

By dark, I mean books that make you cry or make you feel unsettled or disturbed.

Well, in that case, it's mainly non-fiction that does that for me. E.g., Love and War in Afghanistan, a collection of personal narratives from 15 people in Kunduz and Takhar provinces of Afghanistan. I cried buckets while reading that. Or The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust. (Or for that matter, pretty much any personal accounts of the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, or similar events.)

I'm a huge fan of "dark" or "weird" fiction such as that of H.P. Lovecraft, but that is, well, fiction. To me, the truly disturbing things are the ones that have actually happened, and that could happen again or continue to happen.

Edited to fix typo.

Essa, have you read Secrets of the Temple? It has been a few days since I read it, and I'm still feeling uneasy.

Robert

> 13 No, in fact I haven't, but it does sound like an interesting -- and, yes, disturbing -- read. :-/ I will have to give it a look. Is it accessible to the layperson (i.e. the non-economist)?

Well, I mentioned it for its darkness, but I can recommend it for its lucidity. I am not an economist. I had an economics period a few years back, and I'm four or five books into a "who's guilty" phase right now; I understood it.

One important caveat is that it is long. A much less important caveat is that Greider is leftish.

It is, by the way, not a long, dark slog despite the greedy incompetence one can infer from it.

Robert