Desperate for more reading material. Recommend me some great books?
D.A.F. de Sade - Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage;
Lautréamont - Les chants de Maldoror;
Rachael Ross - eeeverything. Google.
120 Days of Sodom=Good reading.
When it comes to the sick, I always enjoyed Georges Bataille. But generally, all of the 1st generation French surrealists is good shit, pushing the limits very, very far.
I enjoy the classics like Of Mice and Men but if you want something related to fetishes I like The Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice (under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure)
Henry Darger. Lord of the batshit. You won't ever find his works in full, so go for whatever you can.
Some more contemporary guro-type stuff:
OFF SEASON and THE GIRL NEXT DOOR by Jack Ketchum
WETBONES by John Shirley
HEADER, THE PIG, TERATOLOGIST, EVER NAT and THE BIGHEAD by Edward Lee
AMERICAN PSYCHO by Bret Easton Ellis
COWS by Matthew Stokoe
FRISK, TRY and MY LOOSE THREAD by Dennis Cooper
you guys will love anything by Philip K. Dick, and a nice little book called "The Wasp Factory" by Iain M. Banks.
Philip K. Dick? You've got to be kidding! I mean, I love the guy's stories but they are not gory in the least. I agree about THE WASP FACTORY, though. Rough stuff.
Yes, PKD is not gory at all, but totally mindfuckingly awesome stuff anyways... his sense of black humor is just brilliant..
I don't know if I can name any really guro-themed books.
Isn't there a moment in PKD's A SCANNER DARKLY where a guy cuts open his own skull because he thinks there's bugs inside? They actually made that book into an animated movie that'll come out from WB this year.
I also recommend
The Handmaid's Tale
Farenheit 461
It
Batman:The Ultimate Evil(no it's not a comic)
The Kryptonite Kid(also not a comic)
The Watchmen (is a graphic novel or long comic but is great)
Solaris
by Stanislav Lem
Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card
all short stories by H.P. Lovecraft and Poe
the short story named "Wendigo" by Blackwood
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Just go into the next bookstore and ask for Solaris by Lem, I promise you, you won't be dissappointed. Not too long either (150 pages or so). Don't watch the Hollywood movie btw.
along with lovecraft I really recommend checking out his influences and contemporaries, like clark ashton smith, william hope hodgson, arthur machen, lord dunsany,etc. thomas ligotti is an uneven but often good author of modern weird horror, worth a look as well.
also: william s burroughs, jg ballard, and (seconding caterpillar) dennis cooper
How dare you people forget Johnny The Homicidal Maniac.
And you call yourself guro freaks... shakes head
/not really serious
Different medium.
Sorry for two-month thread necromancy but I just had to...
Naked Lunch and many other books by William S. Burroughs, while a bit clichéd by the whole Beat lit thing, are AMAZING (though difficult) in their portrayal of human sickness. He really went above and beyond the Harvard Beat chic - WAY beyond. There's scat and insanity and fetishism and fascism in Naked Lunch, but no gore. Sorry.
Also, for some decidedly non-gory reading, try Richard Brautigan - his poetry and his novels. You'll either love him or hate him, but he's great...
JG Ballard, the English author of Crash and many other books, apparently delves deeply into the human psyche. I haven't read much of him, so I can't comment...
> AMERICAN PSYCHO by Bret Easton Ellis
Seconded. And all his stuff ties in together, so if you liked that, go on and read "The Rules of Attraction," "Less than Zero," and perhaps "Glamorama." But I haven't read the last one yet, and aside from AP, none are guro at all.
I'd recommend Jacqueline Carey's "Kushiel's Legacy" series, though it's fantasy with only the mildest guro elements (the main character is an intense masochist).
And also, keeping with de Sade, you all should read Justine. S'a hard read though, and quite long.
Oh, and I second "Story of the Eye."
Read 1984, and shut the fuck up.
Already read it. Great book and more timely now than ever. Wouldn't call it guro but it's certainly one of the scariest and most disturbing books I've ever read.
I have to add this one to the list, too:
Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima
Just read it, it's excellent. Some really good diatribes against rationalisation and a homosexual chauvinism theme. Just excellent!
Tim Waggoner has some good horror books out. PANDORA DRIVE features a character who grows a supernatural monster cock and is a dealy weapon. He literally "cums like a shotgun". And in LIKE DEATH there's a scene in which several kids fuse together to become a collective giant penis so they can fuck a huge gaping vagina the size of a hallway.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
I agree with 5 about the Sleeping Beauty series by Anne Rice, When I was a teen, it always made me horny reading that.
The Blood Countess by Andrei Codrescu. A story about Elizabeth Bathory.
Amphigories by Edward Gorey. Alot of it has to do with little kids meeting untimely deaths.
I just thought of another one, I Love Lord Buddah by Hillary Raphael. It's more about fetishes and suicide then gore, but it's good. It's kinda like anime in a novel.
Does anyone know if the recent Dennis Cooper books deliver the goods? The last one I read was "My Loose Thread".
Actually I was struck by the guro fanatasies Winston Smith has about Julia. He imagines raping her and cutting her throat when he comes, or tying her to a tree and shooting her with arrows. Pretty intense stuff for high school English class :0
can anyone recommend some worthwhile nonfiction accounts of torture, nazi experiments, horrific rape & abuse, murderers, that sort of thing? male or female victims, it's all good
There's a novel called Nihilesthete (Nihilisthete?). . . Can't remember the author off of the top of my head, but it's about a social worker who systematically terrorizes and tortures a disabled (but not necessarily retarded) young man. Not fap material, but very guro.
Les 11 000 vierges, by Apollinaire
Anything Poppy Z. Brite. Though Drawing Blood is my personal favorite, Exquisite Corpse has some excellent gore scenes
I just finished a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow (you might recognize it; they made a kind of shitty horror movie loosely based on the book). It's a true account written by a Harvard ethnobotanist. He tells the story in a very clear and straightforward manner though, so the layman (like me.....) can appreciate it.
It's basically a memoir of his trip to Haiti in the early 1980's, where he was sent to discover how they create zombis. Not especially gory, but rather disturbing (and true!).
Just as a side note, Serpent and the Rainbow is considered one of the more accurate depictions of Vodou in Haiti.
There's a certain amount of criticism regarding the author's social commentary in the book, and also the way he sensationalised some rather mundane activities, but it's considered to be the first accurate "outsider" depiction of the practices.
