I realize booktubers on YouTube are pushing new books to get views.
But I note a recurring trend: a tuber discussing six novels released in the last--being generous here--5 years, and titling their piece something like "The Most Disturbing Books I Have Ever Read."
I'm not here to point out the jejunosity of all this.
I am here to pile on, too. 😏
My seven picks are not novels, which should surprise no one who follows my blog.
Criteria: eliciting a gasp or two, and horripilation.*
1. "The Withered Arm" (1888) by Thomas Hardy
2. "The New Mother" (1882) by Lucy Clifford
3. "Lord of the Fleas" (2012) by Reggie Oliver
4. "The Red Bungalow" (1919) by Bithia Mary Croker
5. "The Shadow" (1910) by Edith Nesbit
6. "Herself" (1894) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
7. "Cain" (1865) by Amelia B. Edwards
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• AFFECT HORROR Since the beginning of the 1980s, it has become common to state not only that certain emotional responses are normally generated in the reader of horror texts, but also to claim that these responses are, in themselves, what actually define horror. No other genre has ever been defined in terms of the affect it generates in the reader, with the result that critics and writers have found it easy to claim that horror is not therefore a genre at all, but a kind of peculiar sensation that may be generated in the telling of genre stories of any category, or indeed in the telling of texts which have not normally been submitted to generic definition, like Franz Kafka’s "Metamorphosis" (1915). Horror (in this understanding) is a kind of afflatus, a wind from anywhere. As this understanding is hard to describe or to assort with other kinds of understandings of other genres, literary studies have tended not to focus constructively upon horror as formless affect....
Source: The Darkening Garden A Short Lexicon of Horror (2006, 2014) by John Clute can be found in the essay collection Stay.
Staya.co/d/eqEGRrz
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Please share your own list.
Jay