History NightmareFuel / Literature

* Being [[MediaNotes/SchoolStudyMedia compulsory reading]] in Polish schools, ''Antek'', a novella by the Polish author Bolesław Prus, traumatized a lot of teenagers with the part where a little peasant girl goes down with fever, so her mom - going by the advice of the local elderly "wise woman" - puts her into a flaming oven for a period of "three Hail Marys", hoping to burn out the fever. [[FamilyUnfriendlyDeath The consequences are predictable]].

* NightmareFuel/TheThreeBodyProblem

* Being [[UsefulNotes/SchoolStudyMedia compulsory reading]] in Polish schools, ''Antek'', a novella by the Polish author Bolesław Prus, traumatized a lot of teenagers with the part where a little peasant girl goes down with fever, so her mom - going by the advice of the local elderly "wise woman" - puts her into a flaming oven for a period of "three Hail Marys", hoping to burn out the fever. [[FamilyUnfriendlyDeath The consequences are predictable]].

* ''A Long Long Way'' by Sebastian Barry is a wonderfully-written, thought-provoking, [[TearJerker tear-jerking]], intensely violent and frightening novel of the UsefulNotes/FirstWorldWar. Gruesome battle scenes (people having arms and faces blown off, or being gassed) are placed up against scenes of happy banter between the soldiers - which makes it worse as you just know that these men are going to die at some point. Worst of all? It's about Irish soldiers in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. While an uprising takes place in Dublin that will eventually lead to the splitting of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and subsequently UsefulNotes/TheTroubles. Making the soldier's efforts, fighting for a country that will eventually break away from them, seem [[ShootTheShaggyDog utterly futile]], at least to them. It's almost a relief when the main character dies at the end.

* ''Millions of Cats''. In this charming children's picture book, an elderly couple wants to adopt a cat, so the husband goes out and finds a hill covered with "... hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats..." Unable to decide which one to take back, he leads the whole pack back home so his wife can choose one. She asks the kitties which of them is the prettiest, sparking a kitty holocaust as all the cats tear each other apart fighting over who it is. Out of all the trillions of cats, only one survived, [[BeautifulAllAlong because it didn't think it was pretty and hid while the rest killed each other]]. [[EsotericHappyEnding And this is supposed to be a happy ending?]]

* "George Clooney's Moustache" by Rob Shearman, collected in ''Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical''. It starts out as a StockholmSyndrome tale of kidnap and rape, then goes FromBadToWorse.

* NightmareFuel/TheShadowOfKyoshi

* NightmareFuel/TheLittleMatchGirl

* NightmareFuel/TheRepublic

* The ''Skeleton Creek'' series. It gets really crazy when Henry, Ryan McCray's father's best friend was part of the crossbones, and was responsible for most of the deaths of the Crossbones. The videos also have disturbing things in them, and some have unexpected {{Jump Scare}}s. Many of the videos throughout the books involve Old Joe Bush's Ghost and assorted scares.

* Joyce Carol Oates's ''[[https://joycecaroloates.substack.com/p/thanksgiving Thanksgiving]]''. In it, a girl and her father go out to do the grocery shopping for the sick mother, in preparation for Thanksgiving. They take a wrong turn and find themselves in the parking lot of a strange, dilapidated grocery store. The building itself is falling apart and barely lit, all of the customers in there are sad and defeated-looking, all of the employees are ominous, and all of the food is described as being rotted or spoiled. The message is to look for good things among the bad, but there's a lot of flat out terrifying here. The narrator explains that this wrong turn brought them through a run-down, unfamiliar section of the town and to an A&P that wasn't the one they usually go to but several of the miserable customers inside were people she recognized, as if she and her dad had briefly wandered into [[DarkWorld some nightmarish mirror version of existence during their ordinary grocery store trip]].

* Joyce Carol Oates's ''Thanksgiving''. In it, a girl and her father go out to do the grocery shopping for the sick mother, in preparation for Thanksgiving. They take a wrong turn and find themselves in the parking lot of a strange, dilapidated grocery store. All of the customers in there are sad and defeated-looking, all of the employees are ominous, and all of the food is described as being rotted or spoiled. The message is to look for good things among the bad, but there's a lot of flat out terrifying here.

* NightmareFuel/TheVillainessReversesTheHourglass

* ''[[Literature/AllYesterdays All Tomorrows]]'' by Nemo Ramjet. The artist's unsettling but very good art doesn't help any...