20 Books That Will Mentally Fuck You Up

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Members of Ask Reddit were asked which books mentally fucked them up the most. These were their answers…

1.And Then There Were NoneFantastically plotted, some great characterization, a truly awful sense of dread—the best mystery novel ever for a reason.”

2.Where The Red Fern Grows. Being forced to read that sent grade school me through a roller coaster of emotions.”

3.A Child Called ‘It’

4.I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream gave me nightmares.”

5.Flowers for Algernon, the first book I had a big emotional reaction to.”

6.The Yellow Wallpaper fucked me up for quite a while.”

7.Night by Elie Wiesel. There is nothing more unsettling than reading the inner thoughts of a holocaust survivor.”

8.Go Ask Alice. I read it when I was 12… it was the first time I had read a book like this and it shook me to my core at the end.”

9.Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Blew my young mind away and really made me think about how society is organized.”

10.When I first read Animal Farm in my early teens. I was at the age where I could recognize the parallels with real life and it fucked me up for a long while.”

11.The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It tells the story of American soldiers in Vietnam during the war along with explaining what mental and physical things that each held. What screwed me up mentally was that you couldn’t trust the author—you didn’t know whether he was telling the truth or making the story up.”

12.Lord of the Flies.”

13.Watership Down by Richard Adams. A bloody story about rabbits. Who knew?”

14.American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Much more horrifying than the movie.”

15. House of Leaves was really unsettling.”

16.1984.”

17.We Need to Talk about Kevin. It’s the same plot as the movie just written through letters from the wife to the husband, and oh boy was that intense.”

18. It by Stephen King. I read the first chapter when I was about 8 and literally spent the next two weeks shivering in my bed every night until I got up the courage to talk to Dad, who went and spoiled the ending to reassure me.”

19.Flowers in the Attic.”

20.The Road by Cormac McCarthy.”