UKC

Working my way through Philip Pullman’s adaptation of the Grimms’ tales, and reached “Hans-my-Hedgehog” tonight… an everyday tale of a boy who was born half man, half hedgehog, was rejected by his family (so far, so Kafka), went of on the back of a cockerel to live in the forest, raising pigs, playing bagpipes and giving directions to a succession of lost Kings and their entourages. I’m honestly not making this stuff up…

At one point he decides he’s had enough of living in the forest, by which point he’s got so many pigs that “the forest was full of pigs from one end to the other”. So he visits his father and tells him to get the villagers together, and that they will have as much bacon as they want- and then “the village had such a slaughter as could be heard from two miles away”.

Good grief. I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight… 😧

I'm not sure what you're saying/asking. The original Grimm brother's tales are a re-telling of ancient folk stories. They're often brutal and scary, but with a moral lesson at the core.

The modern versions are very watered down. Has Pullman made them more visceral or restored the originals?

Restored original, I’d say. Most of them so far have featured inventively sadistic punishments meted out to those deserving of them, sometimes just mutilation, more often execution. Being sealed in a nailed barrel and rolled around until dead, or having feet encased in shoes of red hot iron and forced to dance until she died (Snow White’s stepmother, that wasn’t in the Disney version), that sort of thing.

But the vision of mass slaughter of hundreds, maybe thousands, of pigs, their death squeals audible for miles around as the carnage unfolded, seemed to top the lot. Especially as it was rather unexpectedly dropped in half way through an otherwise quite jolly tale.

They’re very entertaining, they all rattle along at a good pace, and have plenty of humour along with the darkness.

I am aware of the Pullman version, I have not read it but I believe it as you say, a restoration to the original stories. I did once read a couple of original Grimms. Am I right in recalling that in The Princess and the Frog, she doesn’t kiss him and find him turning into a handsome prince but instead picks him by the hind legs, dashes his brains out against a wall, and throws the dead frog down a well, and that’s the end of it, with no moral obvious to me?! 

Hansel and Gretel, kept in cages, pushing the witch into the fire. Red Riding Hood, she gets eaten, the woodsman cuts off the wolf's head and Red pops out. Does Granma survive, can't remember. And so on... 

Yes- there are notes at the end of each of the tales with Pullman’s ‘take’ on them, and citing similar tales from across Europe. 

Yes- I think it is the vivid detail of the violence, and how it is dispensed without batting an eyelid, or raising eyebrows of onlookers, even when impressively disproportionate, that took me by surprise. I knew that the “unsanitised” versions were darker- I just hadn’t realised quite how much relish they had in describing inventive ways that characters met sticky ends…

Have you read "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque.

The big difference is that events in that book are based on what he saw and experienced himself.

120days of sodom but I only got part way through it

The opening of Ministry for The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is pretty harrowing but quite excellent as a piece of writing.

Sounds a bit like Homer.

Possible Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy?

Its brilliant though, I was struck by how something can be so readable, and paint such a vivid picture while also containing such utterly unpleasant moments!  

The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage live happily together. The Bird brings home wood from the forest; the Mouse delivers water, makes the cooking fire, lays the table; and the Sausage cooks.

Doesn't end well for any of them. 

Seem to remember American Psycho has some quite long and detailed passages.  Good read though…

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. 

tony & sarah

Sounds like what is happening in Gaza.

There was a passage in Martin Gilbert's "The Holocaust" about a young girl who survived a mass execution at Babi Yar. The bullet only grazed her but she fell into a body-filled trench anyway and lay there feigning death for well over a day, subsequent victims of the atrocity piling up on her as she  struggled to avoid suffocation. I forget the details of how she made her escape before the trench was filled in, but the image has lived with me ever since. Nothing I have read in the world of fiction comes close, for me at least.

I also think that historical realities such as The Holocaust are far more horrifying than anything in fiction. I can't remember if what I'm thinking about also happened at Babi Yar, it might have been somewhere in one of the Baltic states. It was a photograph taken by a German soldier at a mass execution of Jews. In it there is a young boy within seconds of his own death who has just seen others in front of him being killed. The expression on his face is both horrific and heartbreaking. It fully epitomises in my mind the absolute depths of depravity that human beings can descend into. It's also a reminder of the dangers of not stopping extremists getting into power, something that unfortunately seems to be lost on many today.

Some years ago I started planning to DIY build a cold water swimming pool.  This led me to several papers describing incidents of trans-anal evisceration, eg

https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2010/192/9/swimming-pool-filter-induced-tran...

Planning hasn’t yet resumed.

Fiction wise, not much turns my stomach but the obvious shock jock scene in The Wasp Factory did. 

I’m too much of a soft touch to read Grave of the Fireflies, but the Wikipedia page for the short story was brutal enough.

Edit: I once translated a short piece on the death of Sinis which ended “this feeding the crows for miles around”.  The mental image from that stuck with me.

Portait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce

The sermon by the priest about the horrors of Hell were breathtakingly terrifying. 

I was thinking exactly the same, some of the passages in Outer Dark, the baby eating bit I had to read twice to believe what I had read.

😳🤢
 

Oh god. I watched the Ghibli animation. Possibly the most harrowing 90 mins ever committed to film. Glad I did, but I don’t plan on doing it again.

Chuck Palahniuk did a short story about that. I went to an event where he read it live. They had an ambulance standing by as several people fainted at every event. 

Yes… you could see where that was going from early on… 😁

I think the some of the additional shock value from Grimms’ tales is that they were aimed at children. The youngsters were clearly made of stern stuff back in the day, I’d have been scarred for life…!

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk has a few short stories, including that one, in that are woven into an overarching larger story. 

Any of the news reports on Gaza!

Most distressing, violent, dark and depressing literature: it's likely to be a novel by Bret Eastern Ellis. I read Less than Zero and was depressed for a week. I couldn't bring myself to read anything of his again. American Pscyho sounds horrendous...

But, I agree with other commentators who've referred to the unfolding genocide in Gaza. To watch no one lift a hand to stop it... whilst the UK and US give bombs, planes, intelligence, reconnaissance flights, military defence and political cover... It's a catastrophe piled on a catastrophe that is emptying the world of any sense of righteousness, solidarity, empathy, or justice. Adorno is supposed to have said: "After Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric." After Gaza, to talk of justice is barbaric. From now on, we will only be able to speak of injustice.

Yes that’s the one for me. The tree of dead babies was an incredible passage. I had to take several pauses during The Road too. 
As an aside, Philip Pullman wished my eldest son a Happy Birthday on Twitter once. I like him. 

I stopped reading that book after the opening story. Needed a break.

Some of the scenes in American Psycho are like if you tried to imagine the most horrific, terrible thing you could do to a person you wouldn't get close to what the author came up with. Book makes the film look like a Disney film.

I went to a Christian Brothers' school so got the live version.

Philip Gourevitchs’s reportage of the Rwandan Genocide of the 1990s makes for some pretty abhorrent reading, particularly because of the apathy of the Belgian/French and UN supported agency’s who were there at the time and near enough helped the Hutu power movement in committing the atrocities. 

It's pretty unrelenting at the start, it becomes a bit more optimistic later on in some respects, although stuff like the direct action by the Sons of Kali would likely gather rather mixed views if it occurred in real life (they start shooting private jets out of the sky and targeting large emitters of carbon dioxide).

Saw the heading and instantly thought of the Grimms

Use of Weapons is another candidate (Iain M Banks)

Haunted by Chuck Palahnuik (author of Fight Club) is leagues worse than anything else I've ever read. So many grim and gory events make it quite 'challenging'. 

If you rated MFTF then I can recommend The Deluge by Stephen Markley. Probably the single most terrifying piece of cli fi I've ever read in its weaving together of political, societal and climatic breakdown.

Without any doubt in my mind (and I've read a lot) it is the accounts of what GIs did to the inhabitants of My Lai, with accompanying photos

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

Indeed, the film sanitized the horror in the same way Grimm's tales have been. 

Yes... words fail. And yet this event is slowly being forgotten. Along with the Haditha massacre in Iraq in 2005, in which the photos are horrifically reminicient of the My Lai massacres. There is so much blood on the USs hands, but they still have the audacity to present themselves as the upholders of freedom, peace and democracy.

Marabou Stork Nightmare by Irvine Welsh.  Horrible book.  Forced myself to finish it, reading in my lunch breaks, hoping it would get less grim.  It didn’t.

Oh god, I remember that one. A book with absolutely no redeeming features and the one book I've read that I really wish I hadn't. I decided Irvine Welsh was a deeply unpleasant person and will never read anything of his ever again after that.

I'm well read but read at face value and don't go too deep in to the 'meaning' whereas my wife as an English Lit lecturer obviously does (she despairs of me). She did her dissertation on The Wasp Factory back in the day and her copy sat on our bookshelf for years before I picked it up, the story itself is grim enough but J's detailed margin notes absolutely ruined any limited enjoyment I might have had of the book.

I can see it on the shelf now - it's not a book I want to read twice!

And a great route name given the first ascentionist (I wondered where the name came from!)

https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/glen_croe-593/marabou_stork_nightm...

I was trying to remember that one.... The one with the chair. **shudders* Dark. He had a serious talent for the macabre plot twist. RIP... 

Yup. Don’t read “Filth”. Really, don’t. You get to spend several hundred pages inside the head of a deeply unpleasant person inhabiting a deeply unpleasant world. And it’s every bit as enjoyable as that sounds.

Japan's Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Gold is the worst for me, there are a few others along similar lines which I'm surprised haven't been mentioned, the rape of nanking, ordinary men, the killing fields. I don't think fiction can every be as harrowing. Not a book, but Dan Carlin's episode Destroyer of Worlds has stuck with me regarding the realities of nuclear warfare, every time I think about nuclear war I am reminded of his reading of first hand descriptions of the effects of radiation on people's bodies after the bombs were dropped on Japan.

not sure what to conclude as i have read an awful lot of these books.  Well impressed that someone named Three Day Road!  Although I did not find it as harrowing as the others ones in this list.

My vote is 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' by Lionel Shriver.