3.57 avg rating — 6,601 ratings

"One of my favorite books. It's beautifully written and simply art to read, in the way that the classics are. It's also very powerful, intense, and disturbing-- particularly because it's a memoir about sexual abuse and incest. Katheryn Harrison was very brave to have written this."

4.29 avg rating — 1,077,018 ratings

"Dostoevsky puts you in the mind of a murderer, making you feel what he feels. The book evokes a visceral response, a tightening in the chest of anxiety that lasts the whole book. It is one of my favorite books, because it is so well-written and because Dostoevsky so successfully does what he set out to do. But will it leave you disturbed? YES."

4.17 avg rating — 74,870 ratings

"Poe wrote an article about why he wrote the things he wrote-- horror and sorrow. He wrote them both because he wanted his words to come out of the page and affect the reader physically. Sorrow does this with tears (his poetry was often sad), and horror does this with the shock that leads to a gasp. His short stories are horrifying and sick. And he often lulls the reader in only to shock them more. He was a brilliant writer, and this is well worth the read. Just not before bed!"

3.90 avg rating — 65,168 ratings

"Dark fairy tales. Beautifully written, with a rich, aesthetic style and much symbolism. Angela Carter takes sweet fairy tales, ones that have ghouls and tragedies but gloss over them, and she instead highlights them. They're gruesome and clever. I love this book. "

3.90 avg rating — 2,042,424 ratings

"This is psychologically disturbing. It does not go for shock value, it does not scare you with ghosts. It goes deeper than that. A great book, but sad and dark."

3.87 avg rating — 944,016 ratings

"A fiction book, but reads like a memoir. Child molestation is already a disturbing topic, but Nabakov writes about it with such lust and arousal, attempting to put the reader in the mind of a child molester, that it leaves the reader feeling disturbed… and guilty. Brilliant writing!"