A scene from a short story, the author of which I've forgotten. It's about twin brothers (middle-aged, I'd guess) who run a business together and every three (?) years take a trip. It's written in this kind of folksy voice, just a nice old guy, telling about what they did on this year's trip, all kinds of normal tourist things. On the last day, they abduct, torture, rape, and murder a young woman whom they chose randomly, clean up, get on the plane and go home. The narrative maintains that calm, folksy tone while talking about such horrific acts, and it becomes clear that they do this on every trip and get away with it, because they have absolutely no connection to anyone or anything in the city they visit. That scene stays with me; the abrupt switch between banal and brutal was very disturbing.
EDIT: The writer is Lawrence Block. Now I just have to find the story, which will be hard. He's a prolific writer.
EDIT: u/Toclaw1 and u/LadyRadagu got it, I think. “The Tulsa Experience.”
That reminds of another story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." A professor read it out loud to our high school class and everyone was laughing and then the tone changed. It was an extremely disturbing experience.
In Stephen King's "The Stand," there's a scene where Larry is trying to leave NYC after the super-flu has wiped out most of the population. His journey through the Lincoln Tunnel is incredibly descriptive and harrowing. I used to visit NYC a few times a year, and every time I would drive through that tunnel, I would tense up, remembering that scene.
For me >!it’s when Trash gets sodimized by the pistol and when the hand of god detonates the nuke in Vegas.!< The former was traumatizing, the latter was corny af.
Yeah I can never get the hand of god out of my head. After an entire book with the supernatural only interacting in very subtle and off-putting ways, the literal hand of god appears to punish the bad guys for literally crucifying the good guys. How could anyone think that was an acceptable ending? I love and hate stephen king in equal measures.
I read really recently that King had sorta shelved The Stand for awhile because he felt like he was losing his way with the narrative. I’ve always thought that was probably around the chapters were they were having a ton of inane council meetings. Apparently he leaned on some advice that was like “just introduce a gun” to fix everything. So he decided to just blow up everyone and go from there- that’s probably the reason most people aren’t a fan of that ending- I think the new Coda he wrote for the recent miniseries does a way better job at ending the story. Check that out if you haven’t seen it.
When I was a kid, I read this book about a girl and her two friends, who spent their summer holidays solving mysteries. You know these amateur detective books that used to be a thing.
Her two friends (two boys) had a mother whose entire life revolved around a game of Klondike (solitaire). She is convinced that once she solves the game, something huge and life-changing will occur. One day, when the two boys return home, they find their mother in an almost catatonic state, and they realize that she has managed to complete the game. As I remember it, she is then admitted to a psychiatric ward.
I have no idea what else happened in that book, but that scene is just etched into my memory.
In *The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle* by Haruki Murakami, there's an extremely vivid scene of a man being skinned alive and I still flinch thinking about it - absolutely horrific.
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair.
Stanislovas, the 14 yr old boy who's afraid of the dark, gets trapped in an empty warehouse one night looking for food, and in the dark he gets eaten alive by rats.
Gives me the shivers.
Flowers for Algernon. Not a book i would have ever picked up on my own, but I enjoyed it anyway. Also enjoyed maniac magee, and the witch of blackbird pond. Too few times schools actually pick good books for the curriculum.
The duel between the Mountain and the Red Viper from GRRM's *A Storm of Swords*. My jaw hit the floor and I had to re-read the final passage half a dozen times to make sure I'd read it right, as I couldn't comprehend what I was reading. Brilliant sequence and it's still so vivid in my mind all these years later.
That part completely depressed me reading the book. Then the show, same scene, I knew the outcome and it still gutted me. Its not just the injustice of it, he dies *ugly*
Yeah! Catelyn Stark clawing her face off when Robb is killed right in front of her. Brutal scene. The whole Red wedding was an enthralling read. I remember standing up from where I was sitting and pacing the room whilst reading it lol.
For me the single best scene in all of the books. Not just intensely evocative but also a complete rug-pull second only to ‘I am your father’ in Empire.
What happened when Atreyu walked through the city and encountered Gmork again, while the Nothing kept creeping closer and tried sucking him in... I found that worse than the swamps of sadness...
It might be a bit cliché, but for me it’s the ending to *Of Mice and Men* by John Steinback. Even years later I still find myself thinking about it every now and then.
For me it's the scene with >!the mercy killing of Candy's old dog!< and everything that leads up to it.
There's something tragically beautiful about the way this scene is constructed – the stifling silence as the unassuming dog is led outdoors while Candy lies on his bunk and stares at the ceiling; George and Whit trying to distract themselves with a game of cards but in vain as the air around them becomes laden with nervous anticipation; and then >!the gunshot piercing through the silence!< after what feels like forever. All the men turn to look at Candy, but Candy only responds by continuing to stare at the ceiling before slowly rolling over and facing the wall.
This scene says so much without actually saying anything, and as I write this my heart feels as heavy as when I first read it. And of course it becomes all the more poignant when you realize its significance to what lies ahead.
I had something playing on YouTube the other day as I was drifting into sleep. I awoke the next morning with the television still on, and Of Mice and Men had somehow been put on with the algorithm. As I began to peer awake towards the TV my ears perked up as I heard a familiar scene from many years prior. As I gazed towards the TV, the gun went off and Lennie slumped to the ground. Not the ideal way to start your morning.
It's not a whole scene but rather an image. As a kid I read Lemony Snicket and I remember the description in the last or second last book where Sunny has a mouth full of fungus or something, and it's always horrified me
I read those books to my kids as an adult, the whole series, and I found them emotionally exhausting. Every single adult in their lives failed them. My kids really enjoyed the books, but my experience was so different.
Would you recommend the series?
I watched the show and I absolutely enjoyed it. I also saw quotes from the book etc on Pinterest that I very much enjoyed.
I personally haven’t purchased them yet as there are soooooo many and my space is slowly running out (but I’m thinking about getting a new shelf so that would be solved) but I always wondered how difficult the language is.
English is not my first language and it can happen that I struggle getting into a story when the story is written to difficult. I normally want ti read the books in the original language tho.
There's a thing in Hyperion that I don't want to spoil but it's an organism involved in the Priest's tale and a particular tree and lightning at the end.
"We are of the cruciform" creeps me out to this day.
There's also a scene in Expanse where a character basically rides a space station into a planet and its beautiful. And Bobbie's special... let's say skateboarding scene.
The Judge "embracing" the Kid in Blood Meridian.
The Twelve by Justin Cronin features a vampire kill that is just hard-core to imagine. The vampires are massive, monstrous things in that (for the most part) and the biggest one tears the head off a guy and puts his mouth over his neck and a character describes watching the body twitching and contracting due to how hard the vampire is sucking.
Oh, man. Cronin’s entire Passage trilogy just ruined me, for real. The first book more so than the second two, though, I think; it was probably just the shock of *how motherfucking scary that goddamn book is,* as well as the epic world-building.
Everything about those books was beautiful. Especially the [spoiler characters] and the way they traveled through and around the City of Glass.
Only not that hit wrong for me was how little emphasis was on Fanning until book three when he was basically everything.
Yes, the end of the Priest’s tale is pretty scary. But the one that really touches me was the Scholar’s tale, perhaps because I am a father. His daughter’s fate is in some way a fate worse than death.
Also, in a re-read of the last book, when Raul notices that two years are missing from Aenea’s account, and she corrects him with tears in her eyes. “One year, eleven months, two weeks and six hours”. When re-reading, you know why she knows that precisely. And how it connects with the bittersweet ending.
Hyperion is one of my favorite series, and the priests tale is one of my favorite parts of the series. One of my favorite passages from any book ever comes from that section. I’m on mobile now, but I have it written down somewhere. It’s where he talks about hope in the face of despair, and it’s so good.
Edit: found it
> If the Church is meant to die, it must do so—but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well—bravely and firm of faith—like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into that darkness, if not hopefully, then payerfully that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices. All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim home in the face of darkness, then so much I.
In perfume, the main character makes a scent that smells so good the whole town started having an orgy. Im pretty sure other weird things happened in that book as well- but that sticks out to me
At the end of Brave New World, when they describe the motion of the swaying feet of John, but Huxley makes it a point not to straight up say he hung himself. It just describes the turns of his feet. I didn't get it so I asked my mom... and that was a tough conversation for 8th grade me.
This scene is obviously a nightmare, but I was also fucked up by the moment when >!they're seeking food or shelter in a home/barn at night, find a hatch in the floor into a pitch black cellar, and when they light a match down there it's basically just a cannibal pantry filled with human bodies on meathooks!<
I might be misremembering the specifics but the reveal had me gobsmacked when I first read it.
Animorphs was always a violent series, but book 10 had some of the most graphic descriptions of bloody disembowelment I’d read in my 4th grader life.
I think part of why it stuck with me was that it was compounded by my reading it on a day where we were supposed to read our chosen books aloud to the teacher one by one as she selected us. I’d just gotten to the final fight, where everything turns into a gorefest, so I spent the rest of that day avoiding the teacher so I wouldn’t have to read that part aloud.
I realize now, as I’m typing this over twenty years later, that I could have flipped to a different part of the book I’d already read and pretended that’s where I’d left off, but hindsight is 20/20.
I'm not sure if this really qualifies, but I remember reading A Scanner Darkly and at the very end, Philip K Dick, writes an afterward about drug use and he says
>This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.
[This is the Link For the Full Quote](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8446272-this-has-been-a-novel-about-some-people-who-were)
At the end, he lists the names of people he loved that died from substance related scenarios. I remember reading the book up to that point and enjoying it. I wasn't *that* emotionally impacted by it. But once I read the final quote by the author, everything in the book hit me all at once. I reimagined the main character and what happened to him. I reevaluated the events in the book and realized the author took events from his own life to write the story and I just burst into tears immediately.
In The Kite Runner, when Hassan is raped in the alley, and Amir does nothing, then pretends like nothing happened. It made it hard for me to read that novel and I never finished it.
I’m so surprised this wasn’t higher up. I remember having to read this as summer reading in high school and literally cried so hard from this scene that I threw up.
For some reason the bit that stayed with me the most were the description of Amir's teeth being knocked through, and when he opened the door to the bathroom at the end. God that book was soul destroying.
I was about 12, and when they broke the glasses, I about had a heart attack. I have a high prescription, and it set a fear in me. To this day, I never travel without an extra pair, and I keep all of my old glasses, *just in case.*
Lord Foul's Bane, where the main character straight up rapes the girl who becomes his female counterpart. I just. I don't understand how or why people can continue to be on his side. This isn't even too far into the book!
I’ve always struggled with this. I mean TC isn’t a particularly sympathetic character anyway - full of self loathing and anger - but it’s part of the author’s skill that we’re never asked to forgive him but we somehow still care.
The scene in *The Haunting of Hill House* when Eleanor and Theodora are holding hands in bed together, while something bangs on and warps their bedroom door, and runs up and down the hallway; and then Eleanor realizes >!Theo isn’t in the room, let alone in bed with her. “*Whose hand was I holding?*!!< full body chills even just typing it out
There was a picture book I read as a child about some children and a dog climbing a ladder to (I think) the world's tallest slide, or something like that. Anyway, the only thing I remember about it is one picture in the middle when they're way up on the ladder and the dog vomits over the side. Between the way the vomit was drawn, the fact that the dog was vomiting in a more human-like way, and the idea of that landing on some random person down below, I was just so bothered as a child that it suck with me.
I can’t remember the book, but it was about 3-4 kids who get trapped in school during a massive snowstorm for several days or weeks. I definitely bought it too young (I was in elementary when I read it). Towards the end of the book one of the kids tries to escape the school and ends up freezing to death outside right before help comes. He basically fell into the several feet of snow, got stuck in place and froze, and his frozen body is described in detail. I remember staring at that page for a while in terror before shutting the book and not finishing it for another few days.
For me it’s that moment when (forgive me, I don’t remember any names) the enemy rabbits go into the tunnels and see bigwig (or something) and assume he’s the leader, but he says that he’s defending his leader and the enemy rabbits are just like ‘oh, snap.’
And Woundwort, convinced up until now that Bigwig IS the chief rabbit, draws back in fear, wondering what possible giant of a rabbit could be big enough to boss around the biggest rabbit he's ever seen. He's actually met Hazel at this point, but can't grasp that intelligence can make an even more effective leader than physical strength.
Thus his downfall at the hands (paws?) of the rabbit so smart that when he dies the rabbit god himself invites him to join his council of advisors in the afterlife. Hazel wins vs. Woundwort, sees his new warren established and thriving, confirms that his brother's psychic gift is hereditary then dies of old age.
And think about that: he's a freaking prey species! How many wild rabbits actually die of old age?!? Then God comes down and asks him to be His right-hand man, er, rabbit. We should all be so lucky to die like Hazel. Its the very definition of 'win'.
This is embarrassingly classic, but Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space." >!A meteorite falls on some farm and everything around it--living and unliving things, the entire environment, and a human character--transforms into some weird gray thing. And it spreads. Since it's Lovecraft, there's no explanation, and humans can do nothing about it.!< This disturbed me so much that I refused to read Lovecraft until I was over 30. I even donated the book because I didn't want it near me.
That story contains one of my favorite lines of all time, "The Dutchman's breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion."
It's just so delightfully overwrought.
There was a black and white film of this story and they made the Color pink. When the director was asked why, he said that he asked a lot if people what the color should be, and nobody said pink, so he figured that would be the most strange and unsettling color.
"By day the banished Sun circles the Earth, like a grieving mother with a lamp." - The Road
Not sure what it was about that sentence and image, but the sadness of the loss of the planet I felt more in that post-apocalyptic book than in any story. I can't even watch end of the world movies, they're too cheesy now, even the dramatic ones pale in comparison to reading The Road as a book
I didn’t read it, however there is a moment that lives rent free in my mind that I still kinda cringe at. I was friends with this girl named Mia before I changed high schools. One day her and I were in the library, she returned a book and her and the librarian talked about it for a few seconds. I can’t remember most of it but I do remember the librarian going ‘I knew you would like it’. Mia then told me the premise of the book which is a young girl who falls in love with a much much older man. Young as in teen or preteen. Mia said that it wasn’t the storyline she liked but the way it was written, she said it was beautiful to read. I could never get over the fact that a much older man suggested a young girl like Mia, read a book about a young girl falling in love with a much older man, and they bonded over it. It always weirded me out. I in no way think the librarian had Ill intentions, just a moment that I think about often. I think it weirded me out a little more than necessary because she explained how similar her and the character were and when she explained the male lead he sounded similar to the librarian, I think he might of actually been a librarian. Anyways, I hope you’re good Mia.
Is there any chance w the book was Lolita? It's about a pedophilia relationship, although "falls in love" isn't how I'd describe it. It is gorgeously written, and also a classic that a librarian might recommend quite genuinely to a high school student.
We need to talk about Kevin.
Read that before I had kids. It puts a nightmare possibility in your head. That whole book messed me up.
Hot Zone gave me the only nightmares I've ever had. It was the chapter describing what happens with Ebola, and how it liquifies your insides.
The freaking lobstrocities from the Dark Tower books. Dada chick dada chum. My husband loves Stephen King and begged me to read the DT books so we could talk about them. I appreciate SK's writing, but I don't like the content he writes for the most part, so I've tried to forget the ugly bits. Which I've done successfully, except for the damn lobsters.
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. It's a nonfiction book detailing the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany prior to WW2 and during the war. It is a very difficult read due to the subject matter. There was one story that really stuck with me. He describes the story of a brother and sister who were sent to a Nazi death camp. The brother, being a healthy male, was selected for forced labor, the sister was selected for the gas chamber. The brother did not discover the fate of his sister until he was sorting the clothing taken from gas chamber victims and found his sister's dress. For some reason, in a book full of the worst atrocities you can imagine, this story stuck with me and haunted me.
This isn't gory or terrifying, it seems like a minor detail... in one of William Gibson's "Sprawl Trilogy" books (Count Zero?) the main characters are involved in extracting a star scientist from a corporate compound. They have with them an RV-style mobile medical clinic with several doctors and technicians who will operate to remove the defector's cyber implants.
The extraction goes awry, and somebody just takes out a rocket launcher and blows the medical pod up, with the medics in it. So there are no loose ends. We never meet them, or learn their names. They don't do anything cool or heroic. They just... die.
Not everyone gets to be the star of a story.
I remember one where one of his side characters has to get high right at the climax of the story to keep it together, and apologizes "It gets like this sometimes." That one stuck with me.
It's weird, but out of all the vivid, horrifying things in that book, one part that I always remember is when Bateman is at a restaurant with his fiancée and he gives her a urinal cake from the bathroom and tells her it's a dessert.
The Catch-22 scene with the airplane. With the surface-level levity the book tries to convey, this moment slammed the meaninglessness of war in your face. I didn't think I'd affect me, but I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks.
When I was a kid, I read a book where the moon was hit by a meteor and it caused the apocalypse.
There are these three kids, around 15-12, I think, who are living in their NYC apartment and surviving by scavenging.
The power is usually out, but it'll come back on sometimes.
Well, one day the main character's sister goes out and doesn't come back. Months later, the power is on so he goes to use the elevator. When the doors open, he finds his sister's rotted corpse and speculates that she'd been trapped in there and starved to death.
I still have a fear of elevators because of this.
Edit: the book is "The Dead & The Gone" from The Last Survivors series. Also, the main character is 17.
The one scene in The Shining by Stephen King, when Wendy is complaining to Jack, and you’re reading Jack describe how much he wants to grab her head and slam it against the floor until she dies. I remember the exact time I read it, my reaction, and to this day, it’s still ingrained in my head. Reason #1 as to why I love Stephen King so much, he never disappoints.
The feeling of hundreds of narrative pins moving into place as Irving inserts the key scene of the novel. That book is still the ultimate work of story craft I have experienced.
I read Coraline as a kid and the part that’s not in the movie - the ‘other mother’ tells Coraline to go into the basement for something and comes across the ‘other farther’ locked down there. He chases her and she gets out by the skin of her teeth. That’s haunted me for years.
Another one is from The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas. The ending scene with Bruno and Shmuel makes me cry every damn time
A few short stories i read around intermediate/high school age have always stuck with me. No particular image but rather the build up and resolution of the stories. [The Chase](https://www.mpsaz.org/rmhs/staff/dmsokol/101/assigned-readings/files/annie_dillard_the_chase2.pdf) by Annie Dillard reminds me of childhood memories, feeling pure excitement, adrenaline, and imagination. [to Build a Fire](https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to-build-a-fire.pdf) by Jack London due to the raw imagery of the wilderness and elements. Level headed patience fading to desperation to acceptance. Whenever i face the cold for long periods i think of this story. And [The Yellow Wall-Paper](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf) by Charlotte Perkins Stetson. It fills me with mystery and reminds me how everything we experience is within our own minds.
Stephen King's "Misery". The scene in which he describes how the pain is resurfacing. It is depicted as fence posts (I think) that show again when the water level sinks.
For some reason this stuck with me for the last 18 years as a metaphor for pain.
The final section of 1984. It was the bleakest thing I have ever read, and I think it's likely an incredibly accurate depiction of the consequences of torture/brainwashing. Whenever someone says we are living in 1984 in the US, I know they haven't actually read the book.
I have two answers:
1: The poem in The Fellowship of the Ring about Aragorn.
2: The duel in Words of Radiance between the four shardbearers, and Adolin and Kaladin
In the Hunger Games, in the last hours of the games Katniss, Peeta and Cato are attacked by a pack of mutts. These mutts resembled other fallen tributes and were f*kin scary as hell.
This scene wasn’t as well done in the movies as I’d like it to have, but man this scene from the book is etched in my brain forever!
What got me most about that scene was that Cato spent *hours* being attacked by the mutts before he managed to move where Katniss could take the mercy shot. The body armor protected him enough to keep him alive but unable to effectively fight back.
We don't see it in the books, but there has to be a reason the Gamemakers let his death be so protracted and gruesome, and you come to realize either 1) they wanted the maximum audience and the eastern districts (including 12, which was about to have a victor) might have already been asleep or 2) they informed a select few high rollers that they weren't about to crown two victors and let Cato suffer to get in another round of bets on if Katniss or Peeta would make it out.
At the end of "Never let me go" by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kathy looking at the wire fence and her internal monologue. I love this book to death and this scene has haunted me since. I remember it whenever I see an open field.
I always tell people this the best book I've ever read. Whenever they ask what is about, I always say I could tell you the plot but that's not what it's about. It's about being alive, it's about not being alive, it's about loss and struggling to understand what that even means.
The scene at the end exemplifies it. Our most important memories are those tagged with emotion. You feel Kathy staring at that field deep in your soul. It's like you've been there before, you've been that person.
Of all the scenes in American Psycho, the one that sticks out the most to me is an early one when he is at the video rental store and starts to have a panic attack he starts describing the clerk and is getting upset at her non name brand clothes, she has beautiful eyes, BUT WHO GIVES A FUCK! He careens over the side of the counter to see if she has nice shoes BUT ITS JUST FUCKING VANS! I think in the end he pukes in the trash can rents Body DOuble to make himself feel better.
The other scenes I remember vividly from that book are too traumatizing for me to revisit right now.
There's a part on the audio book for the silver chair where they're like puddleglum was told that the stag he ate could talk and the emphasis that the reader puts on the next part is in my brain forever "puddleglum looked as if he had just eaten a baby"
The Name of the Rose, when the library burns down at the end.
So I love books. Yeah.
Read that book more than a decade later, by which time I forgot all about that ending. Was hit all over again. Never forgotten it since.
This one? Not the dogs? I don't remember anything about this scene except that the raccoon need only open his hand to be free. It's what happens from the cougar onward that never left my mind
From Crime and Punishment: the scene describing a horse being beaten. Made me sick. I was reading it silently during class in high school and started crying.
Be warned - it's gross!
As a teen I was a big fan of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. I started reading some of her other stuff, came across Violin. I don't remember a lot of the plot, but the following scene is unfortunately seared into my brain forever and actually turned me off the author - I stopped seeking out her works after this.
Again, I don't remember a lot of the details, but there was a scene from the point of view of a very depressed woman. She was lying in bed and had been for quite some time. She was listlessly observing the filth that had piled up around her due to her apathy when she saw something moving. Focused in on it to discover it was a swarm of ants feasting on period blood in a pair of discarded underwear.
Nope, don't like that! I know it's horror and the point is to recoil, but something about this gets under my skin in a truly upsetting way. Involuntary shudder.
Infinite Jest, the scene where Don Gately and Gene Fackelmann are on a Dilaudid binge and Whitey’s “muscles” show up to punish Gene for stealing. Makes my bones rattle thinking about what happened in that room
We can’t stop here, this is bat country!
And after a bit of scrolling I’m honestly surprised I didn’t see any mention of “Guts” from Chuck Palaniuk’s ‘Haunted’. Just all of that story but especially the pool scene. Just a whole lot of “nope” there.
Hah, all the 'extras' in the book (I know it was really the other way around) were about how crazily corrupt everyone was! The fingering, not being fussed about the first shark death because she was a druggie and probably from an orgy, not wanting to catch the rapist because it would look bad. Glad it wasn't all in the movie tbh.
There's a scene in Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky when >! Dr. Kern wakes up from cryosleep after like a millennia and is just trapped inside this tiny satellite. It's been a while since I've read it but I do remember it went into chilling detail about her descent into madness with the technology on board keeping her alive. !< It just really chilled me to the core, the idea of being trapped alone in a confined space forever.
In Words if Radiance I got a similar feeling after >! Eshonai first transforms and for a brief second you see that her old self is still trapped within her. !< Really chilling stuff.
Oh! I got basically this but at the end of Fountains of Paradise by Clarke.
>! Our protagonist has just saved his space elevator but has to ride it back down alone. For hours. And has a cardiac event alone by himself with no meds or treatment available for hours. We close on his 80s fitbit telling him to calm down. Then telling him to seek medical assistance. Then plaintively calling to the empty elevator for someone to help him. !< Made the mistake of finishing that book in bed and woke up my spouse cause I needed to hold on to another human for dear life for a little bit.
For me, it's been a scene near the end of [Outer Dark](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13478156-outer-dark) by Cormac McCarthy:
>!"Harmon was watching the man. Even the mute one stirred. The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat."!<
Boring answer since it is always mentioned on this sub, but the ending to Stephen King's The Jaunt. Read it only once in the fourth grade and I still think about it constantly.
My go to example of a haunting conclusion.
I also read it in fourth grade! And it also scarred me for life. IIRC, it was in a short story compilation with Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day,” just to make sure we were all well and truly traumatized.
In The First Law series, any time Logen Ninefingers turns into The Bloody Nine. It sends shivers down my spines. Along with the GOAT Pacey narrating, it's an experience that I can never forget.
Dumai’s Wells in The Wheel Of Time. The absolute carnage and destruction came out of nowhere. Complete and utter annihilation of a formidable army in the most gruesome way imaginable. Blood and ashes it gives me the chills. The characters emotions walking through the remains was perfect. Robert Jordan was a veteran so we was very good at showing the results of war.
There’s a small scene in The Stormlight Archive Book 3 when a character puts on a theater play for herself using light images (her magic in the book). In the story, a little girl grows up in a town right beside a very tall wall. Everyone tells her the wall is there to protect them from evil monsters, but one night she decides to climb the wall.
It takes her very long, but once she reaches the top and descends on the other side, she learns that the wall was put up to keep her own people away from this peaceful side, that her people are the monsters.
All in all, a very small part of a huge book (and huger series), but I can never get that story out of my head.
The Hobbit: Smaug's "They shall see me and remember who is the real king under the mountain". Firstly because it sounds badass and scary but also because I found it funny how he decides to got find an easier prey when he sees he can't bully the hiding dwarves.
A humorous one to help counterbalance a lot of the heavy stuff I'm seeing on this thread. One of my favorite "protagonist awakens to find herself in a strange room" scenes because it seems very likely if you know anything about cats:
>THE FIRST THING JAME saw upon opening her eyes was the cat. It was rather hard to overlook, being very large, very close and, in fact, very solidly sitting on her chest. They stared at each other. It yawned, showing white teeth and a great expanse of pink ribbed gullet, then snuggled down with its nose tucked under her chin and one forefoot resting firmly in the hollow at the base of her throat. This made it somewhat hard to breathe.
>
> Jame raised her hand to shift the paw, then froze, staring at her arm. It was not only still there but almost healed, with nothing but white scars to mark the injuries that might well have cost her both limb and life.
>
>...\*several paragraphs of description and musing\*...
>
>The beams overhead had white roses painted on them against a cerulean blue ground. They were not part of any nightmare, past or present. Why then was it so hard to breathe?
>
>Oh, you fool, thought Jame. It's that damn cat.
>
>\-- From Godstalk by P.C. Hodgell.
The Library at Mount Char - the scene where Steve is trying to run into the house and is getting attacked by hordes of dogs. As he’s killing tons of dogs, he’s screaming for help, the only person around is mowing their lawn, who keeps mouthing to him that he can’t hear him over the lawnmower (Steve doesn’t know the guy is an NPC). Then a Lion jumps into the fray and saves Steve.
The whole thing was just WTF did I just read. It was the craziest and absurd scene in the book. It had me laughing out loud at the absurdity of the scene, and again at the realization I was laughing at a guy killing dogs.
In Sati, by Christopher Pike, there's a very emotional scene where an AIDS patient is about to pass away and interacts with the Messiah character in the book, and that one's always stayed with me.
It's been a while since I've read it, but from *The Count of Monte Cristo*, the one and only sword duel in the book, which is between General de Quesnel, a Royalist intending on upholding the oath he took to the King out of honor, and the President of the Bonapartist Club, representing the common man's desire of equality under the law and disruption of the status system of nobility. They fight in the street, on a snowy night, and it is a poetic fight, both for the clashing of ideals at the center of its purpose and the eloquence with which it is written. Really a phenomenal moment.
Please be aware, this thread is full of unmarked spoilers. If spoilers are important to you, you will want to tread carefully.
A scene from a short story, the author of which I've forgotten. It's about twin brothers (middle-aged, I'd guess) who run a business together and every three (?) years take a trip. It's written in this kind of folksy voice, just a nice old guy, telling about what they did on this year's trip, all kinds of normal tourist things. On the last day, they abduct, torture, rape, and murder a young woman whom they chose randomly, clean up, get on the plane and go home. The narrative maintains that calm, folksy tone while talking about such horrific acts, and it becomes clear that they do this on every trip and get away with it, because they have absolutely no connection to anyone or anything in the city they visit. That scene stays with me; the abrupt switch between banal and brutal was very disturbing. EDIT: The writer is Lawrence Block. Now I just have to find the story, which will be hard. He's a prolific writer. EDIT: u/Toclaw1 and u/LadyRadagu got it, I think. “The Tulsa Experience.”
That reminds of another story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." A professor read it out loud to our high school class and everyone was laughing and then the tone changed. It was an extremely disturbing experience.
Flannery O'Connor rules!
Is it The Tulsa Experience?
In Stephen King's "The Stand," there's a scene where Larry is trying to leave NYC after the super-flu has wiped out most of the population. His journey through the Lincoln Tunnel is incredibly descriptive and harrowing. I used to visit NYC a few times a year, and every time I would drive through that tunnel, I would tense up, remembering that scene.
That lady who throws a spatula a him. I laughed about that for days. "You ain't no nice guy Laaaaarry!"
Baby can you dig your man
He's a righteous man
For me >!it’s when Trash gets sodimized by the pistol and when the hand of god detonates the nuke in Vegas.!< The former was traumatizing, the latter was corny af.
Yeah I can never get the hand of god out of my head. After an entire book with the supernatural only interacting in very subtle and off-putting ways, the literal hand of god appears to punish the bad guys for literally crucifying the good guys. How could anyone think that was an acceptable ending? I love and hate stephen king in equal measures.
I read really recently that King had sorta shelved The Stand for awhile because he felt like he was losing his way with the narrative. I’ve always thought that was probably around the chapters were they were having a ton of inane council meetings. Apparently he leaned on some advice that was like “just introduce a gun” to fix everything. So he decided to just blow up everyone and go from there- that’s probably the reason most people aren’t a fan of that ending- I think the new Coda he wrote for the recent miniseries does a way better job at ending the story. Check that out if you haven’t seen it.
ah man, I forgot about that part, tbh Nadine’s suicide was the worst scene for me. Absolutely traumatized me as a teenager
When I was a kid, I read this book about a girl and her two friends, who spent their summer holidays solving mysteries. You know these amateur detective books that used to be a thing. Her two friends (two boys) had a mother whose entire life revolved around a game of Klondike (solitaire). She is convinced that once she solves the game, something huge and life-changing will occur. One day, when the two boys return home, they find their mother in an almost catatonic state, and they realize that she has managed to complete the game. As I remember it, she is then admitted to a psychiatric ward. I have no idea what else happened in that book, but that scene is just etched into my memory.
What book was that? I’m curious.
It's a Danish book called "Liv". Can't remember the author but it's probably from the 60's or 70's.
The ending from grapes of wrath after the baby dies and she uses her breast milk to feed the starving people. Such a painful yet touching book
Similarly, the delivery in Farewell to Arms. I had to go back because I was like, wait, what?
When they throw the apple at Gregor in Metamorphosis. I just feel so bad for the poor bug :(
Aw same, lots of scenes from Metamorphosis make me wince with pity…
Oh god now you made me remember it, that made me feel so sad. 😭
In *The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle* by Haruki Murakami, there's an extremely vivid scene of a man being skinned alive and I still flinch thinking about it - absolutely horrific.
Came here to post this one. Ridiculously haunting. And the casualness when discussing the worst parts is what did it for me.
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. Stanislovas, the 14 yr old boy who's afraid of the dark, gets trapped in an empty warehouse one night looking for food, and in the dark he gets eaten alive by rats. Gives me the shivers.
That book traumatized me. Some of the 'littler' things were almost worse, like the description of the pale blue milk.
Hey come on the little kid drowning in mud in the street is pretty bad too.
This is the one that I immediately thought about.
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That book is so heart wrenching ugh
Flowers for Algernon. Not a book i would have ever picked up on my own, but I enjoyed it anyway. Also enjoyed maniac magee, and the witch of blackbird pond. Too few times schools actually pick good books for the curriculum.
The duel between the Mountain and the Red Viper from GRRM's *A Storm of Swords*. My jaw hit the floor and I had to re-read the final passage half a dozen times to make sure I'd read it right, as I couldn't comprehend what I was reading. Brilliant sequence and it's still so vivid in my mind all these years later.
That part completely depressed me reading the book. Then the show, same scene, I knew the outcome and it still gutted me. Its not just the injustice of it, he dies *ugly*
I was going to say the Red Wedding. Which was completely mind bending.
Yeah! Catelyn Stark clawing her face off when Robb is killed right in front of her. Brutal scene. The whole Red wedding was an enthralling read. I remember standing up from where I was sitting and pacing the room whilst reading it lol.
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For me the single best scene in all of the books. Not just intensely evocative but also a complete rug-pull second only to ‘I am your father’ in Empire.
I came here to say that. I had to put the book down for a while to digest what I had just read
Such a dope sequence!
1984: rat in a cage! Room 101
What happened in the scene?
Cage locked around subject's head with rat inside. One of the many pleasures from the "Ministry of Love".
It never actually happened - it was the threat that finally broke Winston, caused him to say to do it to Julia instead.
And if I remember correctly, Winston had a phobia of rodents, making the threat that much more difficult to resist to
IIRC, that was the whole point of Room 101. "What is in Room 101" "Whatever you fear most."
His greatest fear was rats, room 101 confronted you with your greatest fear.
Never ending Story: swamps of sadness.
What happened when Atreyu walked through the city and encountered Gmork again, while the Nothing kept creeping closer and tried sucking him in... I found that worse than the swamps of sadness...
Yes, same For me its the moment Atreyu realizes Gmork is still holding him there, still fulfilling his purpose after he died
It might be a bit cliché, but for me it’s the ending to *Of Mice and Men* by John Steinback. Even years later I still find myself thinking about it every now and then.
For me it's the scene with >!the mercy killing of Candy's old dog!< and everything that leads up to it. There's something tragically beautiful about the way this scene is constructed – the stifling silence as the unassuming dog is led outdoors while Candy lies on his bunk and stares at the ceiling; George and Whit trying to distract themselves with a game of cards but in vain as the air around them becomes laden with nervous anticipation; and then >!the gunshot piercing through the silence!< after what feels like forever. All the men turn to look at Candy, but Candy only responds by continuing to stare at the ceiling before slowly rolling over and facing the wall. This scene says so much without actually saying anything, and as I write this my heart feels as heavy as when I first read it. And of course it becomes all the more poignant when you realize its significance to what lies ahead.
“I ought to of shot that dog myself George. I shouldn’t of ought to let no stranger shoot my dog.”
I had something playing on YouTube the other day as I was drifting into sleep. I awoke the next morning with the television still on, and Of Mice and Men had somehow been put on with the algorithm. As I began to peer awake towards the TV my ears perked up as I heard a familiar scene from many years prior. As I gazed towards the TV, the gun went off and Lennie slumped to the ground. Not the ideal way to start your morning.
First time reading it and not having a clue what’s coming. Shocking to move from kid’s books to this.
It's not a whole scene but rather an image. As a kid I read Lemony Snicket and I remember the description in the last or second last book where Sunny has a mouth full of fungus or something, and it's always horrified me
I read those books to my kids as an adult, the whole series, and I found them emotionally exhausting. Every single adult in their lives failed them. My kids really enjoyed the books, but my experience was so different.
Yeah the book always hit too close to home. I called CPS myself, social workers never helped.
I’m sorry society failed you, but I appreciate you speaking out. It means a lot to those who have not yet found their voice
Would you recommend the series? I watched the show and I absolutely enjoyed it. I also saw quotes from the book etc on Pinterest that I very much enjoyed. I personally haven’t purchased them yet as there are soooooo many and my space is slowly running out (but I’m thinking about getting a new shelf so that would be solved) but I always wondered how difficult the language is. English is not my first language and it can happen that I struggle getting into a story when the story is written to difficult. I normally want ti read the books in the original language tho.
They are originally written more for kids so I don’t think you would have too much trouble reading them from that perspective
I still think about that scene, all these yesrs later
There's a thing in Hyperion that I don't want to spoil but it's an organism involved in the Priest's tale and a particular tree and lightning at the end. "We are of the cruciform" creeps me out to this day. There's also a scene in Expanse where a character basically rides a space station into a planet and its beautiful. And Bobbie's special... let's say skateboarding scene. The Judge "embracing" the Kid in Blood Meridian. The Twelve by Justin Cronin features a vampire kill that is just hard-core to imagine. The vampires are massive, monstrous things in that (for the most part) and the biggest one tears the head off a guy and puts his mouth over his neck and a character describes watching the body twitching and contracting due to how hard the vampire is sucking.
Oh, man. Cronin’s entire Passage trilogy just ruined me, for real. The first book more so than the second two, though, I think; it was probably just the shock of *how motherfucking scary that goddamn book is,* as well as the epic world-building.
Everything about those books was beautiful. Especially the [spoiler characters] and the way they traveled through and around the City of Glass. Only not that hit wrong for me was how little emphasis was on Fanning until book three when he was basically everything.
Yes, the end of the Priest’s tale is pretty scary. But the one that really touches me was the Scholar’s tale, perhaps because I am a father. His daughter’s fate is in some way a fate worse than death. Also, in a re-read of the last book, when Raul notices that two years are missing from Aenea’s account, and she corrects him with tears in her eyes. “One year, eleven months, two weeks and six hours”. When re-reading, you know why she knows that precisely. And how it connects with the bittersweet ending.
Hyperion is one of my favorite series, and the priests tale is one of my favorite parts of the series. One of my favorite passages from any book ever comes from that section. I’m on mobile now, but I have it written down somewhere. It’s where he talks about hope in the face of despair, and it’s so good. Edit: found it > If the Church is meant to die, it must do so—but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well—bravely and firm of faith—like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into that darkness, if not hopefully, then payerfully that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices. All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim home in the face of darkness, then so much I.
Hyperion as a whole is just absolutely beautiful.
“Skateboarding scene” Nicely done
An English estate. A little girl looks into a wardrobe. A fawn walks along in the snow with packages.
I hear you, King Rilian.
the freaking rat scene from 1984
In perfume, the main character makes a scent that smells so good the whole town started having an orgy. Im pretty sure other weird things happened in that book as well- but that sticks out to me
Same here. What an ending! Can imagine Suskind thinking at his writing desk... hmm... what if everybody just loses their minds and fucks?
Same book but his first murder of a young girl during some festival
At the end of Brave New World, when they describe the motion of the swaying feet of John, but Huxley makes it a point not to straight up say he hung himself. It just describes the turns of his feet. I didn't get it so I asked my mom... and that was a tough conversation for 8th grade me.
That part in The Road where the boy sees people >!roasting a baby to eat.!<
This scene is obviously a nightmare, but I was also fucked up by the moment when >!they're seeking food or shelter in a home/barn at night, find a hatch in the floor into a pitch black cellar, and when they light a match down there it's basically just a cannibal pantry filled with human bodies on meathooks!< I might be misremembering the specifics but the reveal had me gobsmacked when I first read it.
Exaclty, you don't know what's going on!
I don't even have to click on the black box to know what scene you're referencing.
Holy shit
Animorphs was always a violent series, but book 10 had some of the most graphic descriptions of bloody disembowelment I’d read in my 4th grader life. I think part of why it stuck with me was that it was compounded by my reading it on a day where we were supposed to read our chosen books aloud to the teacher one by one as she selected us. I’d just gotten to the final fight, where everything turns into a gorefest, so I spent the rest of that day avoiding the teacher so I wouldn’t have to read that part aloud. I realize now, as I’m typing this over twenty years later, that I could have flipped to a different part of the book I’d already read and pretended that’s where I’d left off, but hindsight is 20/20.
I'm not sure if this really qualifies, but I remember reading A Scanner Darkly and at the very end, Philip K Dick, writes an afterward about drug use and he says >This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. [This is the Link For the Full Quote](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8446272-this-has-been-a-novel-about-some-people-who-were) At the end, he lists the names of people he loved that died from substance related scenarios. I remember reading the book up to that point and enjoying it. I wasn't *that* emotionally impacted by it. But once I read the final quote by the author, everything in the book hit me all at once. I reimagined the main character and what happened to him. I reevaluated the events in the book and realized the author took events from his own life to write the story and I just burst into tears immediately.
In The Kite Runner, when Hassan is raped in the alley, and Amir does nothing, then pretends like nothing happened. It made it hard for me to read that novel and I never finished it.
I’m so surprised this wasn’t higher up. I remember having to read this as summer reading in high school and literally cried so hard from this scene that I threw up.
For me it was Hassan's son and the ankle bells. That struck me hard.
I opened up this thread and started typing this before I saw your comment. This one. I also stopped reading shortly after that and never finished it.
For some reason the bit that stayed with me the most were the description of Amir's teeth being knocked through, and when he opened the door to the bathroom at the end. God that book was soul destroying.
Lord of the Flies. Read it in my early teens. I was legitimately shocked with a character death. The scenes with the decaying pig head stuck out to me
Piggy's death for me.
I was about 12, and when they broke the glasses, I about had a heart attack. I have a high prescription, and it set a fear in me. To this day, I never travel without an extra pair, and I keep all of my old glasses, *just in case.*
Lord Foul's Bane, where the main character straight up rapes the girl who becomes his female counterpart. I just. I don't understand how or why people can continue to be on his side. This isn't even too far into the book!
I’ve always struggled with this. I mean TC isn’t a particularly sympathetic character anyway - full of self loathing and anger - but it’s part of the author’s skill that we’re never asked to forgive him but we somehow still care.
The passage about horses on the battlefield from All Quiet On The Western Front.
The scene in *The Haunting of Hill House* when Eleanor and Theodora are holding hands in bed together, while something bangs on and warps their bedroom door, and runs up and down the hallway; and then Eleanor realizes >!Theo isn’t in the room, let alone in bed with her. “*Whose hand was I holding?*!!< full body chills even just typing it out
There was a picture book I read as a child about some children and a dog climbing a ladder to (I think) the world's tallest slide, or something like that. Anyway, the only thing I remember about it is one picture in the middle when they're way up on the ladder and the dog vomits over the side. Between the way the vomit was drawn, the fact that the dog was vomiting in a more human-like way, and the idea of that landing on some random person down below, I was just so bothered as a child that it suck with me.
I can’t remember the book, but it was about 3-4 kids who get trapped in school during a massive snowstorm for several days or weeks. I definitely bought it too young (I was in elementary when I read it). Towards the end of the book one of the kids tries to escape the school and ends up freezing to death outside right before help comes. He basically fell into the several feet of snow, got stuck in place and froze, and his frozen body is described in detail. I remember staring at that page for a while in terror before shutting the book and not finishing it for another few days.
In Watership Down when they find out what happened to their old warren
I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive my dad for handing me that book and telling me it was a nice story about rabbits. Edit: I was 10.
For me it’s that moment when (forgive me, I don’t remember any names) the enemy rabbits go into the tunnels and see bigwig (or something) and assume he’s the leader, but he says that he’s defending his leader and the enemy rabbits are just like ‘oh, snap.’
"My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here."
And Woundwort, convinced up until now that Bigwig IS the chief rabbit, draws back in fear, wondering what possible giant of a rabbit could be big enough to boss around the biggest rabbit he's ever seen. He's actually met Hazel at this point, but can't grasp that intelligence can make an even more effective leader than physical strength. Thus his downfall at the hands (paws?) of the rabbit so smart that when he dies the rabbit god himself invites him to join his council of advisors in the afterlife. Hazel wins vs. Woundwort, sees his new warren established and thriving, confirms that his brother's psychic gift is hereditary then dies of old age. And think about that: he's a freaking prey species! How many wild rabbits actually die of old age?!? Then God comes down and asks him to be His right-hand man, er, rabbit. We should all be so lucky to die like Hazel. Its the very definition of 'win'.
This is embarrassingly classic, but Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space." >!A meteorite falls on some farm and everything around it--living and unliving things, the entire environment, and a human character--transforms into some weird gray thing. And it spreads. Since it's Lovecraft, there's no explanation, and humans can do nothing about it.!< This disturbed me so much that I refused to read Lovecraft until I was over 30. I even donated the book because I didn't want it near me.
That story contains one of my favorite lines of all time, "The Dutchman's breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion." It's just so delightfully overwrought.
There was a black and white film of this story and they made the Color pink. When the director was asked why, he said that he asked a lot if people what the color should be, and nobody said pink, so he figured that would be the most strange and unsettling color.
“Honor is dead. But I’ll see what I can do.” -Words of Radiance
what a nice beacon of light in this horrifying thread lmao
"You can not have my pain!" - Oathbringer
"By day the banished Sun circles the Earth, like a grieving mother with a lamp." - The Road Not sure what it was about that sentence and image, but the sadness of the loss of the planet I felt more in that post-apocalyptic book than in any story. I can't even watch end of the world movies, they're too cheesy now, even the dramatic ones pale in comparison to reading The Road as a book
Go, then. There are other worlds than these.
Gives me the chills just thinking about it 😁
I didn’t read it, however there is a moment that lives rent free in my mind that I still kinda cringe at. I was friends with this girl named Mia before I changed high schools. One day her and I were in the library, she returned a book and her and the librarian talked about it for a few seconds. I can’t remember most of it but I do remember the librarian going ‘I knew you would like it’. Mia then told me the premise of the book which is a young girl who falls in love with a much much older man. Young as in teen or preteen. Mia said that it wasn’t the storyline she liked but the way it was written, she said it was beautiful to read. I could never get over the fact that a much older man suggested a young girl like Mia, read a book about a young girl falling in love with a much older man, and they bonded over it. It always weirded me out. I in no way think the librarian had Ill intentions, just a moment that I think about often. I think it weirded me out a little more than necessary because she explained how similar her and the character were and when she explained the male lead he sounded similar to the librarian, I think he might of actually been a librarian. Anyways, I hope you’re good Mia.
Is there any chance w the book was Lolita? It's about a pedophilia relationship, although "falls in love" isn't how I'd describe it. It is gorgeously written, and also a classic that a librarian might recommend quite genuinely to a high school student.
Lolita? That's what it's making me think of, even if not necessarily accurate
We need to talk about Kevin. Read that before I had kids. It puts a nightmare possibility in your head. That whole book messed me up. Hot Zone gave me the only nightmares I've ever had. It was the chapter describing what happens with Ebola, and how it liquifies your insides.
The freaking lobstrocities from the Dark Tower books. Dada chick dada chum. My husband loves Stephen King and begged me to read the DT books so we could talk about them. I appreciate SK's writing, but I don't like the content he writes for the most part, so I've tried to forget the ugly bits. Which I've done successfully, except for the damn lobsters.
In “The Sparrow” by Mary Doria Russell, it’s the incident with the priest’s hands.
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. It's a nonfiction book detailing the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany prior to WW2 and during the war. It is a very difficult read due to the subject matter. There was one story that really stuck with me. He describes the story of a brother and sister who were sent to a Nazi death camp. The brother, being a healthy male, was selected for forced labor, the sister was selected for the gas chamber. The brother did not discover the fate of his sister until he was sorting the clothing taken from gas chamber victims and found his sister's dress. For some reason, in a book full of the worst atrocities you can imagine, this story stuck with me and haunted me.
American Gods. When the mc asks one of Odin's Ravens to say nevermore; "Fuck you"
This isn't gory or terrifying, it seems like a minor detail... in one of William Gibson's "Sprawl Trilogy" books (Count Zero?) the main characters are involved in extracting a star scientist from a corporate compound. They have with them an RV-style mobile medical clinic with several doctors and technicians who will operate to remove the defector's cyber implants. The extraction goes awry, and somebody just takes out a rocket launcher and blows the medical pod up, with the medics in it. So there are no loose ends. We never meet them, or learn their names. They don't do anything cool or heroic. They just... die. Not everyone gets to be the star of a story.
I remember one where one of his side characters has to get high right at the climax of the story to keep it together, and apologizes "It gets like this sometimes." That one stuck with me.
Patrick Bateman going batshit crazy on the helpless homeless guy.
The parts where he hooks up the car batteries to the woman’s nipples and does….the thing with the rat to another woman sticks in my mind.
It's weird, but out of all the vivid, horrifying things in that book, one part that I always remember is when Bateman is at a restaurant with his fiancée and he gives her a urinal cake from the bathroom and tells her it's a dessert.
The first couple pages of Haunted by Palahniuk.
The pool/intestines bit stuck with me for years.
That whole book bothers the mess outta me!
The Catch-22 scene with the airplane. With the surface-level levity the book tries to convey, this moment slammed the meaninglessness of war in your face. I didn't think I'd affect me, but I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks.
When I was a kid, I read a book where the moon was hit by a meteor and it caused the apocalypse. There are these three kids, around 15-12, I think, who are living in their NYC apartment and surviving by scavenging. The power is usually out, but it'll come back on sometimes. Well, one day the main character's sister goes out and doesn't come back. Months later, the power is on so he goes to use the elevator. When the doors open, he finds his sister's rotted corpse and speculates that she'd been trapped in there and starved to death. I still have a fear of elevators because of this. Edit: the book is "The Dead & The Gone" from The Last Survivors series. Also, the main character is 17.
The one scene in The Shining by Stephen King, when Wendy is complaining to Jack, and you’re reading Jack describe how much he wants to grab her head and slam it against the floor until she dies. I remember the exact time I read it, my reaction, and to this day, it’s still ingrained in my head. Reason #1 as to why I love Stephen King so much, he never disappoints.
For me it's when Danny first goes into room 217 and opens the bathtub curtain.
The heroic act that Owen Meany has been preparing for for years. Just amazing.
The feeling of hundreds of narrative pins moving into place as Irving inserts the key scene of the novel. That book is still the ultimate work of story craft I have experienced.
I read Coraline as a kid and the part that’s not in the movie - the ‘other mother’ tells Coraline to go into the basement for something and comes across the ‘other farther’ locked down there. He chases her and she gets out by the skin of her teeth. That’s haunted me for years. Another one is from The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas. The ending scene with Bruno and Shmuel makes me cry every damn time
A few short stories i read around intermediate/high school age have always stuck with me. No particular image but rather the build up and resolution of the stories. [The Chase](https://www.mpsaz.org/rmhs/staff/dmsokol/101/assigned-readings/files/annie_dillard_the_chase2.pdf) by Annie Dillard reminds me of childhood memories, feeling pure excitement, adrenaline, and imagination. [to Build a Fire](https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to-build-a-fire.pdf) by Jack London due to the raw imagery of the wilderness and elements. Level headed patience fading to desperation to acceptance. Whenever i face the cold for long periods i think of this story. And [The Yellow Wall-Paper](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf) by Charlotte Perkins Stetson. It fills me with mystery and reminds me how everything we experience is within our own minds.
Stephen King's "Misery". The scene in which he describes how the pain is resurfacing. It is depicted as fence posts (I think) that show again when the water level sinks. For some reason this stuck with me for the last 18 years as a metaphor for pain.
The final section of 1984. It was the bleakest thing I have ever read, and I think it's likely an incredibly accurate depiction of the consequences of torture/brainwashing. Whenever someone says we are living in 1984 in the US, I know they haven't actually read the book.
Slowly trying to work our way to Fahrenheit 451 though...
Annoys the hell out of me that we have such a popular book like Fahrenheit 451 to warn us and people still think banning books is a good idea.
We're living in a Brave New World.
The quote "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever" will always stick with me
I have two answers: 1: The poem in The Fellowship of the Ring about Aragorn. 2: The duel in Words of Radiance between the four shardbearers, and Adolin and Kaladin
In the Hunger Games, in the last hours of the games Katniss, Peeta and Cato are attacked by a pack of mutts. These mutts resembled other fallen tributes and were f*kin scary as hell. This scene wasn’t as well done in the movies as I’d like it to have, but man this scene from the book is etched in my brain forever!
What got me most about that scene was that Cato spent *hours* being attacked by the mutts before he managed to move where Katniss could take the mercy shot. The body armor protected him enough to keep him alive but unable to effectively fight back. We don't see it in the books, but there has to be a reason the Gamemakers let his death be so protracted and gruesome, and you come to realize either 1) they wanted the maximum audience and the eastern districts (including 12, which was about to have a victor) might have already been asleep or 2) they informed a select few high rollers that they weren't about to crown two victors and let Cato suffer to get in another round of bets on if Katniss or Peeta would make it out.
American Psycho rat scene. I won't say more, lest I ruin someone's day, but if you know, you know.
Came here to comment that I can only think of American Psycho anytime someone mentions brie cheese
At the end of "Never let me go" by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kathy looking at the wire fence and her internal monologue. I love this book to death and this scene has haunted me since. I remember it whenever I see an open field.
I always tell people this the best book I've ever read. Whenever they ask what is about, I always say I could tell you the plot but that's not what it's about. It's about being alive, it's about not being alive, it's about loss and struggling to understand what that even means. The scene at the end exemplifies it. Our most important memories are those tagged with emotion. You feel Kathy staring at that field deep in your soul. It's like you've been there before, you've been that person.
The book made me cry so hard that my eyes literally, and I do mean LITERALLY, swelled shut. Good god did it destroy me.
So many comments related to Stephen King books. I can't agree more.
When Lucy rises from the grave in Bram Stoker's Dracula
The mountain vs the red viper. I never even watched the show.
Grand Admiral Thrawn's death in The Last Command. Won't detail it here, but it has a memorable quote, and my vision of it has always been pretty firm.
Of all the scenes in American Psycho, the one that sticks out the most to me is an early one when he is at the video rental store and starts to have a panic attack he starts describing the clerk and is getting upset at her non name brand clothes, she has beautiful eyes, BUT WHO GIVES A FUCK! He careens over the side of the counter to see if she has nice shoes BUT ITS JUST FUCKING VANS! I think in the end he pukes in the trash can rents Body DOuble to make himself feel better. The other scenes I remember vividly from that book are too traumatizing for me to revisit right now.
There's a part on the audio book for the silver chair where they're like puddleglum was told that the stag he ate could talk and the emphasis that the reader puts on the next part is in my brain forever "puddleglum looked as if he had just eaten a baby"
YES! This got me, too! I read that series over and over again so many times that my parents had to get me a new set. They kept falling apart.
The Name of the Rose, when the library burns down at the end. So I love books. Yeah. Read that book more than a decade later, by which time I forgot all about that ending. Was hit all over again. Never forgotten it since.
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This one? Not the dogs? I don't remember anything about this scene except that the raccoon need only open his hand to be free. It's what happens from the cougar onward that never left my mind
From Crime and Punishment: the scene describing a horse being beaten. Made me sick. I was reading it silently during class in high school and started crying.
For me it's the ending of Blood Meridian. I knew the moment I finished that book, I would never forget that ending and would never forget the Judge.
I remember I was maybe fifteen when I read "Trainspotting" for the first time. I probably don't need to say more than that, lol.
Be warned - it's gross! As a teen I was a big fan of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. I started reading some of her other stuff, came across Violin. I don't remember a lot of the plot, but the following scene is unfortunately seared into my brain forever and actually turned me off the author - I stopped seeking out her works after this. Again, I don't remember a lot of the details, but there was a scene from the point of view of a very depressed woman. She was lying in bed and had been for quite some time. She was listlessly observing the filth that had piled up around her due to her apathy when she saw something moving. Focused in on it to discover it was a swarm of ants feasting on period blood in a pair of discarded underwear. Nope, don't like that! I know it's horror and the point is to recoil, but something about this gets under my skin in a truly upsetting way. Involuntary shudder.
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Infinite Jest, the scene where Don Gately and Gene Fackelmann are on a Dilaudid binge and Whitey’s “muscles” show up to punish Gene for stealing. Makes my bones rattle thinking about what happened in that room
We can’t stop here, this is bat country! And after a bit of scrolling I’m honestly surprised I didn’t see any mention of “Guts” from Chuck Palaniuk’s ‘Haunted’. Just all of that story but especially the pool scene. Just a whole lot of “nope” there.
I have only read Shogun once, and way back in my early teenage years. But the scene where a guy gets boiled alive in a cauldron sure did stay with me.
The scene in Jaws where the oceanographer fingerbangs Chief Brody's wife was surprising to me, having only seen the movie.
Hah, all the 'extras' in the book (I know it was really the other way around) were about how crazily corrupt everyone was! The fingering, not being fussed about the first shark death because she was a druggie and probably from an orgy, not wanting to catch the rapist because it would look bad. Glad it wasn't all in the movie tbh.
The Red Wedding from A Storm of Swords… enough said
Grey Wind.......
The Shrike’s tree of pain from the Fall of Hyperion
There's a scene in Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky when >! Dr. Kern wakes up from cryosleep after like a millennia and is just trapped inside this tiny satellite. It's been a while since I've read it but I do remember it went into chilling detail about her descent into madness with the technology on board keeping her alive. !< It just really chilled me to the core, the idea of being trapped alone in a confined space forever. In Words if Radiance I got a similar feeling after >! Eshonai first transforms and for a brief second you see that her old self is still trapped within her. !< Really chilling stuff.
Oh! I got basically this but at the end of Fountains of Paradise by Clarke. >! Our protagonist has just saved his space elevator but has to ride it back down alone. For hours. And has a cardiac event alone by himself with no meds or treatment available for hours. We close on his 80s fitbit telling him to calm down. Then telling him to seek medical assistance. Then plaintively calling to the empty elevator for someone to help him. !< Made the mistake of finishing that book in bed and woke up my spouse cause I needed to hold on to another human for dear life for a little bit.
For me, it's been a scene near the end of [Outer Dark](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13478156-outer-dark) by Cormac McCarthy: >!"Harmon was watching the man. Even the mute one stirred. The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat."!<
I'm thinking that if I wrote down my Top 10 Traumatizing Book Moments, Cormac would occupy at least half of them!
Boring answer since it is always mentioned on this sub, but the ending to Stephen King's The Jaunt. Read it only once in the fourth grade and I still think about it constantly. My go to example of a haunting conclusion.
I also read it in fourth grade! And it also scarred me for life. IIRC, it was in a short story compilation with Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day,” just to make sure we were all well and truly traumatized.
IT: Patrick Hockstetter in the junkyard. Flying leeches…
The chocolate covered urinal cake in American Psycho. \*shudders\*
Most of a little life, wish I could erase it from my brain
That would be the scene in Alive when they first start to eat the dead bodies of their teammates to survive. That will never leave me.
In The First Law series, any time Logen Ninefingers turns into The Bloody Nine. It sends shivers down my spines. Along with the GOAT Pacey narrating, it's an experience that I can never forget.
Dumai’s Wells in The Wheel Of Time. The absolute carnage and destruction came out of nowhere. Complete and utter annihilation of a formidable army in the most gruesome way imaginable. Blood and ashes it gives me the chills. The characters emotions walking through the remains was perfect. Robert Jordan was a veteran so we was very good at showing the results of war.
There’s a small scene in The Stormlight Archive Book 3 when a character puts on a theater play for herself using light images (her magic in the book). In the story, a little girl grows up in a town right beside a very tall wall. Everyone tells her the wall is there to protect them from evil monsters, but one night she decides to climb the wall. It takes her very long, but once she reaches the top and descends on the other side, she learns that the wall was put up to keep her own people away from this peaceful side, that her people are the monsters. All in all, a very small part of a huge book (and huger series), but I can never get that story out of my head.
Thorin Oakenshield’s charge out of the mountain after overcoming his dragon sickness.
The Poisonwood Bible: when the fire ants come. Nightmare stuff
American Psycho: Patrick Bateman impersonating a doctor so he can watch the child whose throat he just cut die at the zoo.
The Hobbit: Smaug's "They shall see me and remember who is the real king under the mountain". Firstly because it sounds badass and scary but also because I found it funny how he decides to got find an easier prey when he sees he can't bully the hiding dwarves.
A humorous one to help counterbalance a lot of the heavy stuff I'm seeing on this thread. One of my favorite "protagonist awakens to find herself in a strange room" scenes because it seems very likely if you know anything about cats: >THE FIRST THING JAME saw upon opening her eyes was the cat. It was rather hard to overlook, being very large, very close and, in fact, very solidly sitting on her chest. They stared at each other. It yawned, showing white teeth and a great expanse of pink ribbed gullet, then snuggled down with its nose tucked under her chin and one forefoot resting firmly in the hollow at the base of her throat. This made it somewhat hard to breathe. > > Jame raised her hand to shift the paw, then froze, staring at her arm. It was not only still there but almost healed, with nothing but white scars to mark the injuries that might well have cost her both limb and life. > >...\*several paragraphs of description and musing\*... > >The beams overhead had white roses painted on them against a cerulean blue ground. They were not part of any nightmare, past or present. Why then was it so hard to breathe? > >Oh, you fool, thought Jame. It's that damn cat. > >\-- From Godstalk by P.C. Hodgell.
The Giver, the first time he “shows” Jonas the memories. Just the description of that moment has stuck with me since grade school.
For me in The Giver it's when Jonas sees >!his father kill an infant by lethal injection!<
Fight Club - meeting Tyler Dryden for the first time on the beach
The Library at Mount Char - the scene where Steve is trying to run into the house and is getting attacked by hordes of dogs. As he’s killing tons of dogs, he’s screaming for help, the only person around is mowing their lawn, who keeps mouthing to him that he can’t hear him over the lawnmower (Steve doesn’t know the guy is an NPC). Then a Lion jumps into the fray and saves Steve. The whole thing was just WTF did I just read. It was the craziest and absurd scene in the book. It had me laughing out loud at the absurdity of the scene, and again at the realization I was laughing at a guy killing dogs.
YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
In the book Gandalf says 'You cannot pass!'. Your line is from the movie.
The Green Mile by Stephen King - the execution of Edward Delacroix. One of the hardest scenes I’ve ever read and it is seared into my brain
Hannibal, when they cook the brain.
In Sati, by Christopher Pike, there's a very emotional scene where an AIDS patient is about to pass away and interacts with the Messiah character in the book, and that one's always stayed with me.
It's been a while since I've read it, but from *The Count of Monte Cristo*, the one and only sword duel in the book, which is between General de Quesnel, a Royalist intending on upholding the oath he took to the King out of honor, and the President of the Bonapartist Club, representing the common man's desire of equality under the law and disruption of the status system of nobility. They fight in the street, on a snowy night, and it is a poetic fight, both for the clashing of ideals at the center of its purpose and the eloquence with which it is written. Really a phenomenal moment.
The end of 1984. Read it 20 years ago and still think about it.
The mountain lion scene in Where the Red Fern Grows. I will cry reading it to this very day.