Saturday Book Discussion: Talk about your tearjerkers, your chillers, your mindf***ers

Thank you all for your suggestions for new SBD topics. This being a day when I don't have much time to write a new one, I am going to combine several suggestions into a single topic: instead of just talking about best and worst books we've read, how about the strangest, the saddest, the scariest?

Strangest book

I am not generally a fan of experimental fiction, so I haven't read many really weird books, but I'd have to say House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski was the strangest book I have ever read. Honorable mention goes to Strange Evil by Jane Gaskell.

Saddest book

I don't read a lot of tragedies, and the tearjerker thing just ain't happening, though I can be saddened when a beloved character dies, even when it's manipulative and unsubtle (like in pretty much every YA novel).

Although I did not particularly like Wuthering Heights, it was definitely a powerful novel, and the unrelenting (mostly self-inflicted) tragedy of all Brontë's characters is what makes it timeless. (I still mostly hated it.)

More recently, The Girl Who Played Go was a sad if sadly predictable war story, and Stephen King's Blaze proves that King can make a dimwitted thug more sympathetic and tragic than all the Wuthering Heights/Romeo & Juliet-ripoffs on the YA shelves.

Scariest book

No book has really scared me since I was a child, but Stephen King is still the most reliable creepifier for me. His classic horror novels — Cujo, Christine, Pet Semetary, 'Salem's Lot, It — will definitely deliver for those who are prone to text-induced nightmares, though I think his Richard Bachman novels — Apt Pupil, The Running Man, The Long Walk, Rage — while mostly lacking in supernatural horrors, are actually a lot scarier.

But if I'm going to be honest, the scary book that has had the longest-lasting and most profound effect on me is one I read when I was probably too young to read it. Proof that books can damage impressionable young minds!



I still don't like swimming in the ocean. Just saying.






Previous Saturday Book Discussions.