Yeah, Piggy's death in Lord of the Flies has always freaked me out. My 7th (8th?) grade teacher made me read it out loud in class. Pretty graphic death, and especially horrible when it happens to a schoolkid just like you.

Yeah, somebody's never read The 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade. I haven't ever finished it. Got to the part with the "Hell Libertine" and said nope.

I'm surprised that one guy from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle didn't make it. He slipped and fell into a rendering cauldron at a rendering plant and was cooked to death in boiling pig fat.

AdmirableSnackbar: Of all the options for a Stephen King entry, they chose an undead character? Should have been Randall Flagg. That was uncomfortable to read.

ladyfingers they taste like ladyfingers

SlothB77: no entombed alive? fail. that is a horrible death to suffer.

That's bad but if you're in a coffin you'd suffocate within about 25 minutes according to what I've heard. It would be a panicky, desperate 25 minutes but there a lot more painful ways to go. Being walled up Edgar Allen Poe style would be a little longer.

Moriarty falling down a waterfall was gruesome? I'm sure it wasn't pleasant for Moriarty but "gruesome" is a bit much.

I would put little Stanislovas' death from The Jungle (Upton Sinclair). Poor kid passed out from sickness/hunger on the floor of the factory and was eaten by rats. That freaked me out as a 4th grader.

I suppose Jesus got it pretty bad in The Bible (various authors) as well.

I confess that Easton-Ellis is a guilty pleasure of mine. But that scene with the rodent and the PVC is just...man that was just disturbing.

Uncle Tractor: I wouldn't call it over-rated, but IMHO the gore distracted from what I saw as the real theme in the book, which was a guy who was so numbed to humanity that he only saw people in terms of what they wore or owned. That's what I'm left with, anyway.

The real theme of the book is desensitization. It's written in a deliberate, straight-forward, amoral, utterly soulless style to turn you, the reader, into a psychopath. The repetition of what everyone's wearing, the graphic depictions of violence and rape, the lack of any emotion of imagery or color in the writing, and the obsession with minutiae and the details of specific music in the 80s, is intentional. At first it shocks you, then it wears on you, and by the end of the book where every page is just a scathing account of mutulation and carnage, it ceases to have any more effect on you. The book's first-person narrative has turned you into him.

The movie is a good, complimentary companion to the book but conveys none of the book's depth and depravity. The book could never be made in full -- it would literally be 2 hours of x-rated torture porn.

Richard Roma: dahmers love zombie: Yeah, somebody's never read The 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade. I haven't ever finished it. Got to the part with the "Hell Libertine" and said nope.

Does it even quality as a novel? I used to work shipping/receiving in a bookstore and one of our ongoing jokes was to, whenever we got a copy of that book in, open it at random and read the first sentence our eyes fell on. It doesn't appear to be anything other than nonstop descriptions of sexual sadism. I've written grocery lists with more of a plot.

Seriously. A better literary death, if you must go de Sade, would be the play Marat/Sade and the description of the execution, which is too horrible to reprint here. Possibly the most grisly depiction of death ever committed to print.

Wasn't Looking at his Neck: I'll just say that *Spoiler*....

Rubin's in Where the Red Ferns Grows was a migraine inducing yet wonderful passage to read while I was 8 to 10. Don't remember precise age

Came here to say this. Blood bubble bursting was particualrly fascinating yet disturbing to 4th grade me

gingerjet: I own two of his books but never read them. Whenever I see the titles all I can think of is Easton-Ellis as a bitter old queen banging twinks a dozen at a time and trolling twitter. Which kind of ruins any possible enjoyment I would get out of the books.

Well, if that's the standard, there's all manner of books I should hate because of the author's well-known assholery. Or songs. Or my favorite athletes scoring a touchdown.

I say give him a try. The writing can be flawed at times (depending on one's definition of 'flawed'), but I've always enjoyed him. Particularly his short stories.

How about the original Snow White? At Snow White's wedding, the wicked stepmother queen is forced to put on red-hot iron shoes and dance in them till she drops dead.

Barricaded Gunman: MagSeven: I would put little Stanislovas' death from The Jungle (Upton Sinclair). Poor kid passed out from sickness/hunger on the floor of the factory and was eaten by rats. That freaked me out as a 4th grader.

I'm more freaked out by the idea of you reading The Jungle in the 4th grade.

I remember getting a big list of around 100 books and we had to read and write a report on 4 of them before the end of the year. The Jungle was my second pick. It took me about a month to read and it was nothing like I expected it to be. I was expecting, you know, a jungle! Looking back I know I didn't really understand the political themes, just that bad things were happening to good people. That's what my report was mainly about.

The Slush: Also, where is Lovecraft?

This. A short list compiled from memory:
Herbert West - Reanimator - title character is torn apart by zombies
The Rats in the Walls - Narrator eats his friend
The Color out of Space - People are literally dissolved by a sentient beam of light
Cool Air - Doctors body rapidly decomposes when his air conditioning cuts out

and so on