The Literature of Cruelty.

[T.E. Grau]

House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill.

The descriptions of Medieval "cruelty plays" in the book is particularly interesting, and quite unsettling.

Some first rate doll, taxidermy, and puppet horror, as well. A brilliant novel.

[Mr.Plores]

There is a trilogy by a norwegian author called Jens Bjørneboe. The trilogy is called "Bestiality's History". Bjørneboe was an alchoholic, anarchist, socialist and manic depressive. He offed himself with a shotgun.

Besides from those traits he also was an excellent writer. Brutality's History is about the narrator working as a judge's assistant in a small town in Germany. He calls the germans "small bearcubs". The first book starts with the unveiling of a pedophilia network among the aristocracy and officials in the small town, followed by more hypocrisy and cruelty from the representatives of the state. It then develops into a narration of the protagonist's travel around the world, his inquiry into the most terrible execution methods, his travels in the third world, child prostitution and other atrocitites. The last book I believe is the narrator's account of his stay in an insane asylum and his chat with an arabic philospher.

I can't do the book enough justice really. It has to be read., I am unsure of there is an english version there, but I can almost guarantee there is a german translation somewhere. It is not weird fiction but rather like a "travel journal" into a horrendously bleak world. The west is rich, superfluous, depraved and decadent. Africa and the Orient are perverted and filth-ridden slums. It is written with simple and to the point language, which only emphasizes the main argument: this is a fiction novel but at the same time it is not. The horrors it speaks of are part of our everyday reality. No need for suggested monsters and underlying nightmares.

I read the trilogy two times in high school, actually a teacher suggested it to me! It got me in a really weird state of mind for a 17 year old and I am forever thankful for that.

I should read it again and if you guys find a translation in english I highly recommend it.

Edit;: the books title

[Revenant]

I know this might seem a bit "lightweight" compared to the stories already listed, but I always thought "Sardonicus" was a nasty little piece of gothic fiction.

[MTC]

Disagreeable Tales by Léon Bloy (Wakefield Press 2015)



Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder, and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty from the "ungrateful beggar" and "pilgrim of the absolute," Léon Bloy. Disagreeable Tales, first published in French in 1894, collects Bloy's narrative sermons from the depths: a cauldron of frightful anecdotes and inspired misanthropy that represents a high point of the French Decadent movement and the most emblematic entry into the library of the "Cruel Tale" christened by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Whether depicting parents and offspring being sacrificed for selfish gains, or imbeciles sacrificing their own individuality on a literary whim, these tales all draw sustenance from an underlying belief: the root of religion is crime against man, nature and God, and that in this hell on earth, even the worst among us has a soul.

[Chroale]

If you're good at German, I'd recommed "Pastor Ephraim Magnus" of Hans Henny Jahnn.

[ToALonelyPeace]

From the author of "Notes of an Anatomist", Gonzalez-Crussi praised the Marquis. This is quite a recommendation. I fear I'll need to read de Sade next.

Quote

In our day, the dangerousness of this man would not hinge on the logical strength of his system, but in the 18th century it may have been so. That was, we like to think, the Age of Reason. And Sade's pestilential pages come prepackaged in a reasoning format that must have been pure dynamite in those days. When Bressac tries to persuade Justine to assist him in poisoning his mother, truly noble paragraphs of 18th-century prose are arrayed in support of his argumentation: the power to destroy a fellow human being is illusory; man has no power to destroy, at most he changes the forms of na-ture. All forms weigh the same in the eyes of nature, where nothing is created or destroyed, but merely transmuted. Many are the occasions on which Justine is forced to invoke the terrible pains of remorse to dissuade evildoers. But her appeals clash against the baseness of Sadeian ''heroes,'' whose attitude is voiced in this terrible reply: Don't you see, Justine? Man does not repent of what he is in the habit of doing. Get used to evil, and remorse will vanish. If you so much as feel a twinge of remorse after having committed a crime, commit still another one. Ten, 20 or 30 evil actions shall remove all possibility of remorse. The proof is in the many living examples of what people call ''hardened criminals.'' For statements of this kind, if too insistently and successfully reiterated - ''Justine'' sold six editions in its first two years in print - Sade today, I am afraid, would not remain a free man indefinitely. Suppose we could bring back some of Sade's contemporaries. Rousseau the novelist would still thrill us if he could work among us, provided he made some concessions to modern usage. But I truly doubt that anyone would take him seriously as the political scientist, sociologist and philosopher that he fancied he was. Diderot, ''the father of witty conversation,'' might make it big on the lecture circuit, but academicians would spurn him for losing time in trifles. Dr. Johnson would have some following, but I am afraid he would not reach a mass audience. Television would be out of the question for the good doctor. Why, with all that winking, lip-smacking, snorting and shoulder-shrugging, he would never be as successful as our well-groomed TV personalities. Voltaire, of course, could do anything. He would thrill us and instruct us and amuse us. The problem is, overly preoccupied with the church, he would continue thundering about irrationality in Christian doctrine, and critics would ask why such a genius insists on wasting his talents on topics that are no longer ''relevant.'' Sade alone would terrify. For Sade alone would stand apart from all these great men, and in the isolation of his cell (for, surely, we would imprison him) would continue distilling the nihilistic tenets of a philosophy whose central tenet simply says Le prochain ne m'est rien - the brotherhood of man means nothing to me. ''Man is alone in the world. All creatures are born in isolation, and without any need for each other,'' he insisted. The only possible relationship Sade admits is that of crime, or of carnal concupiscence. Two centuries after Sade, we have continued to repeat to ourselves that a larger plan integrates all people into the universal community and rules, or ought to rule, their behavior. But we have behaved as if such a link did not really exist. We have stood indifferent to genocide in Germany, while it occurred, and to mass extermination in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, to name only a few recent hecatombs. It is worthy of note that while the carnage was going on, we felt, in all candor, quite at ease. The record will show that the entire world looked on with utter indifference at horrifying deeds and that millions in Vancouver, Beijing or Australia lose no sleep over thousands upon thousands of killings in Central America. Everyone knows it. For, tell me, how could one live if one were deeply troubled by these things? (''Don't you see, Justine? Men are not disturbed for doing what they do by habit.'') In other words, millions of men die unjustly, at the hands of other men, all the time. And our response to this is: ''I know it, and that is quite sufficient. Enough said; spare me the gory details.'' But suppose someone were rash enough to persist. Assume a man were to be found who kept describing, denoting, copying, with lifelong, obsessive insistence, all the details and horrors of all crimes. Woe to him! An entire society, bristling with indignation, would crush this hideous violator of its accepted standards. Who knows, if the pestilent descriptions were to fall into unprepared hands - why, the young might be induced to raping, or thieving, or killing! Worded differently, all the outrage that slumbered during the actual performance of wholesale atrocity is suddenly awake, and ready to punish the man who, by being too spirited and imaginative a portraitist, might misguide the incautious. Would we not punish such a man, just as his countrymen did? It would feel so good to avenge a single rape after having stood indifferent to the sacrifice of millions! Sade, of course, went too far. Not only did he dare to shake the complacency of society, but he made of it a profession of faith. Not only was he the denotator of crime in its infinite morphologies, but he built a system with his denotations. He dared to maintain that the fundamental relationship between human beings is not one subordinate to a higher, supra-individual value, but purely and simply this one: violence and cruelty. ''The merit of Sade,'' wrote Simone de Beauvoir, ''is not only to have cried loudly what all confess shamefully to themselves: it is to have taken sides. Instead of indifference, he chose cruelty. And this is why he finds so many echoes today, when the individual is aware of being the victim not so much of the malice of men as of their good conscience.'' Adapted from the chapter ''The Divine Marquis'' in ''On the Nature of Things Erotic'' by F. Gonzalez-Crussi, to be published next month by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

[chaingang]

Quote Originally Posted by vapidleopard

THE CONSUMER by Michael Gira. Hard to find cheap but I assure you the tone is unremittingly cruel and void of even a shred of dignity. One I haven't got to myself yet is TODDLER HUNTING AND OTHER STORIES by Kono Taeko, which I believe is rife with cruelty. Different from THE PAINTED BIRD but equally shattering are Kosinski's COCKPIT and STEPS. Don't come back whimpering that you didn't ask for this ;)

The Consumer is one of my favorite books of all time. Phenomenal and unique collection of stories. I've been waiting 20 yrs to see someone pick up Gira's mantle and expound upon it. New Juche is the only person I've seen come close. Track down everything he's done at all costs - one of the most incredible writers I've stumbled upon in a long time.

[ThisCreepingEvil]

This is sadly not somethign available to English speakers, but Czech writer Josef Šlejhar's entire work consists of stories of hatred, murder, hypocrisy, theft, torture and suffering. Not to plug meself needlessly, but I've done two episodes on his work on my youtube channel, and the sheer extent to which he will wallow in the misery of his characters is astounding. As an aside, the man wrote hundreds of pages to express how much he hated his own wife, and his hatred of the countryside, which he considers to be a place where full of drunk, sadistic, lying, hypocritical thieves, was such that he had to move from the farm, as he had made all his neighbours hate him due to how he described their hometown in his works. Just to give an example, his description of the misery and exploitation of textile factory workers is significantly more miserable than his story of a deadly plague killing people in horrible agony. If I am to compare him to anyone, I would say he is most like Leon Bloy, except that he also hates the city almost as much as the countryside, and unlike Bloy, who has this ideal of his home nation he still worships despite no one being able to live up to it, Šlejhar has no great alleigance to anything beyond pure, uninhabited nature.