🎃 disturbing books for halloween season

It's understandable that most of those recommended readings for Halloween focus on works where the main element is horror, but I got the feeling that disturbing books are underexplored in this context so I compiled this list where you can find something different you might enjoy reading.

Disturbing is very relative but I believe any of these books will have an impact on most readers. Here are 10 books I read and recommend if you want to read something unusual that is less about horror, but still gives an unsettling and unnerving feeling for the season. I'm writing this in September so you can have enough time to prepare.

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai (1985)

In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias—long-thought dead—returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.

The Maimed by Hermann Ungar (1922)

Set in Prague, The Maimed relates the story of a highly neurotic, socially inept bank clerk who is eventually impelled by his widowed landlady into servicing her sexual appetites. At the same time he must witness the steady physical and mental deterioration of his lifelong friend who is suffering from an unnamed disease. Part psychological farce, Ungar tells a dark, ironic tale of chaos overtaking one's meticulously ordered life.

The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade (1785)

In this disturbing novel, considered by Sade to be his magnum opus, four friends seclude themselves in a castle in the Black Forest to hear from four procuresses stories of their lives in brothels and the kinks of their clients. To stage this sadomasochistic experience from which no one will emerge unscathed, the libertines rely on their wives, daughters, and a retinue of young men, all forced to submit to their passions.

Blindness by José Saramago (1995)

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing.

Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1936)

Death on the Installment Plan is the story of young Ferdinand's first 18 years. His life is one of hatred, of the grinding struggle of small shopkeepers to survive, of childhood sensations and fantasies—lusty, scatological, violent, but also poetic. There is a running battle with his ineffectual insurance clerk of a father, with his mother, who lives and whines around the junkshop she runs for the boys benefit; there is also the superbly funny Meanwell College in England, where the boy went briefly, a Dickensian, nightmare institution. Always there is humiliation, failure, and boredom, at least until he teams up with the "scientist" des Pereires. This inventor, con-man, incorrigible optimist—whose last project is to grow enormous potatoes by electricity—rescues him, if only temporarily; for the reader he is one of the most lovable charlatans in French literature.

Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars (1926)

Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski (1946)

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.

The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso (1970)

The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as his companions.

Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928)

In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop (1972)

Lucien is an antique dealer and collector in Paris. He's a lover of Japanese netsukes—and of the dead, whom he brings to the half-shade of his apartment. Whether they're named Henri or Suzanne, they have one thing in common: the pale blue skin, the fixed gaze, the silent lips. And they are all loved. In diary entries, Lucien records his affairs with the dead.