oliver9184

I have just finished reading American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and because it describes some very shocking things it got me wondering whether it was the most disturbing, depraved book I have read.

I thought so immediately after finishing it. But on balance I think I was more appalled by The Room by Hubert Selby Jr. Both books feature very heavy and detailed violence but I found that of American Psycho easier to bear, I think partly because it was tempered by humor and an unreal, slightly absurd atmosphere - and partly because most of the violence was directed against women and, being male, I found it less easy to identify with. The things that are described in The Room were more troubling to me because they mostly happen to men, and their perpetrator was - unlike Patrick Bateman - someone I ended up utterly detesting. Reading The Room was like being deep inside the guy's mind and his most lurid fantasies. The reader is trapped in his mind just as he is trapped in the room - it gets claustrophobic.

So those two are the 'worst' fiction books I've read. I know some people find non-fiction and true crime more affecting because they know that what's described really happened. I'm not one of them but if I was I think Panzram: A Journal of Murder by Gaddis and Long would be the most horrific book I have read so far. Carl Panzram was an American serial killer who lived in the first half of the 20th Century and whose detailed first-hand confessions and memoirs make up the bulk of that book.

Now American Psycho's finished I'm going to read something more wholesome (Moby Dick perhaps) but at some point in the future I may want to read about some more extremely cold-blooded, insanely detailed, elaborate and pointless suffering. What I want to know is: what else is as bad as, or even worse than the three books I've mentioned here? Have you ever had to stop reading, look up and around, and pause a moment for your mind to properly boggle at the awfulness of what you just read? What was that book?