 Today on Typical Books I want to talk about the Disturbing Book Iceberg. Now much like the Disturbing Film Iceberg, there's a whole lot of these images all over and I went to Reddit a long time ago and found one that I liked. And I can't find it again so I don't know who made it because everyone seems to make their own. And I don't feel like making my own Disturbing Books Iceberg because I find it's weird that these iceberg images sort of help dictate what people ought to watch or they're not positioned like this is my personal iceberg. They're usually put out there more so with the Film Iceberg as this is the list that you must watch and you may as well ignore the first three tiers because that's for wusses. And then the middle and the bottom are for the hardcore and the very bottom sometimes contains things that are unobtainable. I'd heard conversation about this on the Page to Screen podcast with Stuart Bannerman and reminded me of the time that a very prolific horror author shared on Twitter or ex horror movie Iceberg that contained a lot of these films that you can't get unless you are an FBI agent or peruse the dark web and look for things that ought not be seen. So like that is not a horror iceberg. So when I found a lot of these horror literature icebergs I was really intrigued because we didn't seem to delve into the dark deep depths of horror literature the way we ought to or the way we could the way that these horror movie icebergs have been taken and subverted by some users to include snuff films like real snuff films or films that are entered into evidence into ongoing or past FBI investigations on very horrible monstrous killers. So we don't tend to do that. We don't have like the Dahmer files. I have a binder that belongs to my husband that is FBI file the release documents on Jeffrey Dahmer. That's a horror book that would be I guess in that bottom tier the base of the iceberg. Now we all know how an iceberg works. The tip is usually what you see what protrudes above the murky depths that everyone can see and that's typical horror movies and in this case horror books. And then as you go down deeper the iceberg gets bigger weirder wilder and darker. The darker is really the key thing here. So I found quite a few of these. They're all very different. There seems to be even more horror literature icebergs which is interesting because there's way less videos on horror book icebergs and I've seen a few that contain like hundreds of books. And what's the point of that really just to list every disturbing book and to really try and like put them into different levels of horror. Now I do have a video on my channel here that is like a primer it's a workshop that I gave for a at a library for a writer's group about the different degrees of horror. And that sort of breaks down where you begin with a very light horror and where you end with extreme and splatter punk in a very basic way. And in that I note titles that are widely read available in classics of each specific sub genre and degree of darkness within it. So I really was really drawn to this. So when I found this particular one it listed a lot of books I was very familiar with and I can't argue too much with their placement on the iceberg. So if you're going to be looking for a horror fiction iceberg I think this might be a good start. A lot of the booktubers I talked to all of the time seem to talk about darker fare we all read a lot of darker extreme fiction from time to time sometimes exclusively and you have channels like plagued by visions with one Valencia who has extreme horror and disturbing books as like a staple for better or worse on his channel mostly for the better because yeah I like extreme fiction don't we all? It seems to me that on book talk and booktube and Instagram even the disturbing books seem to get a lot of attention for whatever reason a lot of the time from people who don't typically read extreme or dark fiction or delve into it for some sort of novelty sake. So that's not what this is here although I do have some selections and suggestions for the later portion of the show. So am I talking about a horror fiction iceberg today isn't really a pissing contest or a dick swinging contest or a hen pack however you'd like to position this like it's not necessarily ranking books that are more important or extreme than others and it is really subjective okay like all of these are and that's why there's so many that exist and it's like again weird to me that so many horror fiction icebergs exist but no one really talks about them. There's a couple videos online where people talk about these horror fiction icebergs they're usually very long videos seem to be kind of clickbaity and it's people talking in kind of monotone it's faceless channels for the most part and they play video games along in behind so it seems to be a bit of a cash grab I'm not really sure what the angle is there but they're useless they're not really useless so here I'd like to talk a little bit about these books and the iceberg that I've chosen is pretty basic like I said we don't go into the deep deep super dark extreme there are some very dark books on this list of course but not into like illegal things and things you can't find which I will mention a bit at the end but we start out nice and easy we have The Shining, Salem's Lot, The Amityville Horror, The Turn of the Screw, Animal Farm, Dracula, Coraline, Frankenstein, The Haunting of Hill House and The Diary of a Young Girl which is The Diary of Anne Frank if you knew it by that title in high school so yes very basic some not even horror dark books nonfiction makes an entry in this list and that's why I gravitated toward this one and we've got this nice little picture a little illustration that millennials seem to love these sort of line drawings I'm not really sure why of a guy that looks fairly content and full of self-assured confidence he's pretty okay with this list of books and you should be some of them are upsetting and some of them are horror there are people that don't like to read these sorts of things Amityville Horror might be a bit much for some people Coraline might be a little dark if you're young Frankenstein may be boring a little too literary but yeah The Shining is too scary for some people yeah this level is basic horror if you have never read a horror book something from this level really works I've read all of these books which is pretty cool I like that and that's part of what I like about this list is there are some new titles for me that I'll have to look up so yeah but this first level we got it pretty pretty clinched under control calm cool collected basic horror then we get into the next level where our dude on the side our little illustration is kind of like well still feeling pretty okay even though it has Lolita on it which may really deserve a lot of people a head full of ghosts cool a kite runner now we've got some dark things much like the diary of Anne Frank going on in here heart of darkness I am legend 1984 night which I'll have to look up the Lord of the Flies the Exorcist Pat Cemetery and Dante's Inferno and the lottery so surely Jackson has featured in both of these levels and I like that I've read these except this book night which I'll have to look up I'll just let my fingers do the walk-in night is a 1960 holocaust memoir so much like the diary of Anne Frank or the diary of a young girl so yes dark stuff still not poison to your brain still stuff that is acceptable in schools still stuff that is talked about in cafes around the world and have been for many years in a lot of cases books that have been major emotion pictures of course same with the other level so we've got like the Exorcist and Pat Cemetery some very basic horror staples which you may even lump into that first group so still looking pretty confident looking pretty cool I've read all of these except night and the kite runner and night sounds more interesting to me so I'm not sure if I'm going to hunt down these books but yeah still pretty basic books lots of people have read if you've read the kite runner or night let me know what they're like then we get into darker our little illustrated gentleman has a straight mouth kind of like hmm I don't know yes we have a few darker books like Johnny Godd is gone which I haven't read but I've seen the film and it is featured in that Metallica video as well the Metallica song one is based on this film the book perhaps James Hadfield's a pretty big reader the cement garden something I've not read in the tall grass in cold blood the road battle royale invisible monsters lunar park house of leaves as I lay dying and train spotting now these are all very different books very different books we have very different decades that a lot of these books were written in but I think the one theme here is just the desolation the nihilism the darkness the true darkness laying in the heart of man the long lonesome night of the soul kind of stuff the reckoning of being human and the darkness and evil that surrounds us in this world whether it be within us or around us that we can't control so yeah dark evil war desolation madness sadness we're still okay though we're still okay it's not so bad I mean that is horror after all a lot of these books aren't technically horror a lot of people wouldn't say that these are horror books especially when you start including things like train spotting and lunar park or haunted like they're not really horror they're dark transgressive maybe just tragedies they're basically tragedies more modern tragedies they're dark urban realism I'm not really sure where they fit outside of just transgressive literature so yeah that's sort of what we're doing they don't really lump in with those first two categories which were pretty horror and fairly tame these are pretty dark so you're going to have a themes of war again which seems to be a theme to this is always like a one or two war picks but they are like very dark sociopolitical sociologically dark now we start getting into some fun our little dude I'm not really sure what's going on he looks pretty distraught he's got like a goatee I think he's grown a goatee I'm not really sure why that maybe he's spent too long in the deep dark underground which I can't really relate to I think that the next picture and the picture above should just be the same just straight mouth kind of like because these books are pretty similar coin locker babies my eyes are black holes perfume story of a murder the troop requiem for a dream blubber island the laws of the skies and tender is the flesh now we're just taking that same theme from the level above it's deep darkies and we're just going deeper and darker still very similar books nothing much different but if you didn't like that level above you're not going to like this layer at all we're getting frozen solid here folks this is darker stuff I have not read coin locker babies heard a lot about it but if you've read it let me know what it's like and if you would recommend my eyes are black holes I have heard of not read perfume story of a murder is a classic friend of my Patrick Suskins book was what he picked up at the airport of all things read it on a flight enjoyed it so much but then handed it to me thinking you would love this book and I did I love the film too and we have the troop which gets a lot of talk some people can't dig it they feel like ooh it's just trying to be Stephen King I enjoyed the troop a lot I like a lot so yeah I highly recommend the troop I don't find that it's this deep and dark to go along with these other books requiem for a dream very dark reckoning great writing too that's another thing that all these books have in common here blubber I've not read I don't think it's the Judy bloom book but then it could be because blubbers band for having a lack of moral tone I just looked up laws of the skies and I'm very interested in the laws of the skies if you read it let me know it sounds like lord of the flies meets the troop and I'm very interested in checking that out never heard of it before but if it's in this level I think I'll enjoy it because I've enjoyed every book that I've read in this level and above so far so in a lot of these sorts of iceberg things you're starting to get into this darker stuff that it starts to stop being commercially available or readily available things these movies weren't in theaters sometimes you start to get into books that are usually from smaller presses a lot of them aren't available at the libraries when you're getting into these darker things and some of them are just super popular regardless of that and have had a whole other life breathed into them like the cipher Regina from Regina's haunted library just talked about the cipher in the most recent issue of bookworms where I also review a bunch of books so if you like all this book talk stuff definitely check out bookworms it's a zine available only in print and limited editions but yeah I have a look at the year to come in horror and suggest a lot of really cool books and of course there's great fiction jg ferrity has a new story in there there's other really great stories there's a stalker story I really loved and some poetry and Regina's look at the cipher so the cipher is on this level where our dudes looking pretty bad he's got long hair he's got the sort of chin strap beard I don't know what the beard is supposed to mean but I mean I think just that unhappy face would work here just an unhappy face last exit to Brooklyn the conspiracy against the human race blindness which I'll have to look up in the miso soup child of god outer dark and American psycho everybody's favorite haunted and the north water now the north water blindness and outer dark are books I've not heard of before out of all of them the north water sounds very interesting to me I've just looked it up and it is a novel about the whale killing business and it looks very very dark so I'm very interested in that actually and it's not like written a hundred years ago so I think that's more appealing to me as well so I'd like to check that out but I don't feel again that this layer is much different than the two above it so like these three are just the deep darkies these are the darkness of human nature the human condition if you will the darkness of being a human animal on planet earth and the psychological darkness of things that people can do to themselves and one another so it's not like I don't know horror it seems to be not a lot of typical horror fair like those first two levels where we recognized all those authors and we have those books all on our shelves I have quite a lot of these and I've read almost all of them but these three levels are just kind of I don't know not always horror they're dark they're scary they're horrific but horror as a genre I'm not really sure if they fit in there really celebrated wonderful dark books though if you like all of the books that we've talked about so far all these levels this is the level of the iceberg where you'd like to see the iceberg end this is where the bottom of the sea is for you you might enjoy in a lonely place by curl edward wagner if you haven't read it already it is a classic 1980s horror short stories by a master who left us way too soon this is a reprint came out by valencourt books I'm enjoying the heck out of revisiting these stories and just dark wonderful great writing and it sort of encompasses all these levels in a way so yeah if you like that if you want to read the precursor to the Blair witch in the story sticks pick this up I have a little selection of books here as well and one book that hasn't been on here is a clockwork orange that I think would fit in the last three levels that we've talked about now these last two levels are dark okay you've seen glimpses of them here but we'll talk about the second last level the second last level isn't that like the punt ultimate it's like you want to be the middle piece in the human centipede the second last level let's go play at the atoms dark very dark uh happy ever after not heard of it the summer I died the girl next door 120 days of autumn off season and the marbled swarm I had the marbled swarm I just love saying the marbled swarm I think pause a second and say it isn't that a wonderful word the marbled swarm it's like cellar door it's better than cellar door I think because it's got that extra role in it in marbled the marbled swarm is on my list because I've enjoyed other Dennis Cooper and I'm on a hunt for a particular book I don't think it's the marbled swarm but I might as well read as much Dennis Cooper as I can because I enjoy it you may not enjoy Dennis Cooper if you've read any Dennis Cooper I didn't like it you may not like a lot of what's on this list uh let's go play the atoms extremely dark if you didn't like the girl next door which it appears here alongside then yeah very dark and you're dealing with not only the dark things people do to one another the other levels dealt with that in a way that is sort of the consequence of being human on earth and trying to get along in our uh social paradigms and and war and murder being a consequence of a lot of that this is beyond that this is where murder turns into play time and it's extremely horrific stuff especially when a lot of it's based on true things now the one book that caught my eye here is the summer I died and if it's the one I'm thinking of where it's two boys are out in the woods shooting at cans and hear a woman screaming and run to help very interested in that premise just as it basically starts with that one line pit I'm that's enough to entice me especially if it takes place in like the eighties which I'm suspecting it does I'm gonna take a look but other than that yeah I've read these books and they are all horrifically dark and it really is that when darkness and murder and death and hatred and evil become fun to these villainous perpetrators and it's a study on that a lot of the times from their point of view which makes it even more disturbing because you're being put in the shoes of that person unwittingly perhaps if you just pick this up off of a rack at a used bookstore without knowing what you were getting into it may be a little little dark but if you're like me and a lot of people are these are really cool books they're all really masterfully written they're all you know teaching us something about the darkness that we would never really dip into as adjusted human beings this is very much a study on the maladjustment and it is horrifying and really interesting to read some books that I could put on these levels is Edward Lee's City Infernal a lot of Edward Lee fits here The Bedwetter now I sat next to Leal and Howard at the HWA meal and just what a what a cool guy funny sweet yeah you wouldn't picture this really fantastic book really dark really warped book about bedwetting and the piss fairy to come out of such a sweet gentleman but hey you know what it's fun and it's dark and it's not on this list probably because it is like I said small press a lot of these maybe didn't get as much fanfare or availability because a lot of them are from smaller presses or may have been banned from time to time in one way or another except for of course like the Jack Ketchum stuff everyone's very familiar with that but yeah Edward Lee could make an appearance on these last two levels for sure and the next one so on the last one because I am not 25 I don't understand why there's a picture of a beluga whale here he looks so happy he looks pretty stoked he's down in the watery depths he's not on the bottom of the ocean I don't know belugas don't really hang out that low I think they're kind of warm of water lovers that's why they keep getting stuck in rivers but yeah belugas happy little belugas swim and wild swim so free that's me here with survivor until one of us is dead which I've not read gone to see the river man which is on my list and I keep looking for it and I keep wanting it and I I'm on a book buying ban right now and I haven't bought it but I'm going to highlight exquisite corpse prodigal blues or prodigal I'm not sure how to pronounce that word ever and cows okay we could go way darker here we could add I don't know about this 19 little stab wounds I just have a gear because I love the cover but the big head by Edward Lee extremely dark rape centric dark sex fantasy and torture and mayhem across the countryside by a deformed monster it is terrifying it is extremely dark it is extremely gory it's extreme dead inside by Chandler Morrison a lot of people talk about this book and I really enjoyed it's masterfully written extremely dark and the subject matter here is darker than survivor probably on par with gone to see the river man maybe a little darker and a little more fantastical gone to see the river man maybe as far as from what I understand of it because I've not read it could happen exquisite corpse could happen and has because it's based on two different serial killers so like you know you want to stay within some realism here for some reason cows fantasy cows is mental cows had me laugh out loud as soon as there's a cow talking through a grate in the floor but again it's very um it's abuse centric where we go from this sort of um maniacal play time in terror and horror in the last level or two this is like fantastical off the wall totally not extreme beyond extreme if you've seen the film the sadness that's what this level is with a happy little beluga heralding it I mean I could look at my entire collection here and pull down 45 other books within a minute but hey I'm gonna leave that to you if you've read something like survivor I don't know it really belongs to levels up to me I don't know if I'm confusing it with a different book gone to see the river man Christopher triana and a lot of his other works and a lot of his contemporaries as far as extreme horror authors go exquisite corpse by poppy z bright which I talked about just recently a lot of us have read that and love it I've got Charlie Jacobs is some bad fascination which kind of goes hand in hand with that sort of story and that's another uh extreme that may belong on this or the level above it for the deep dark darkies you know you've got things like written by serial killers the uh recently up for parole Robert Picton here in Canada wrote a book that's not available you've also got the final truth I believe by Pee Wee Gaskins that is not available or very very hard and expensive to find uh dark stories and manifestos I mean you could include in here that Dahmer files case file it is pretty horrific and belongs here you could include some of the manifestos from other people not so much the unabomber because that was pretty interesting and not on a horror scale necessarily but the manifesto penned by Elliot Rodger which is extremely dark and in some places really well written but you know that might belong here there are other like things written by horror killers letters of Albert Fish perhaps would belong in this section if it was the way that the horror film ones have been subverted and I really think that other people have taken what was a fairly gentle list of horror films that went from light to dark and added in these extremely dark things but you could I can see how people would mistake uh extreme horror fiction like that that uh decorates my shelf and the shelves of a lot of similar channels and people watching I can see how that would be confused with some very deep deep dark very illegal writings that exist things that are banned here in Canada I get a list it's a quarterly list published by our Canadian border services and they let you know what books and DVDs and stuff are banned here in Canada and none of the books I read are on that list so I'm feeling pretty good about that one of the books on this list here that I haven't read is called until one of us is dead I just really like the title so I might slew that one out so the books I haven't really read in this list that I'd like to pick up this book called night maybe of interest to me although very dark nonfiction I want to check out I want to check out the north water which is one that was very interesting to me um maybe I'm gonna look up what this happy ever after is because quite a few things called happy ever after are out and none of them seem to really fit when I was like checking it out I'm gonna of course pick up the marbled swarm and until one of us is dead so yeah that's the list that's one of the best lists I've found that isn't an overwhelming 700 books or whatever and it doesn't seem to have you know no real differentiation between levels although I am combining levels a couple times through this there is a discernible progression from light to dark horror would you agree have you seen a lot of these lists have you watched videos can you point me to a good video like this one about icebergs of horror books if you're interested in more like this of course I do have that workshop here and a pdf of the workshop and it goes through some of the different degrees of horror fiction and it's more targeted for writers but very interesting to readers as well as are these icebergs and that's why they seem to persist I do love looking at these lists of movies that people consider dark and not really from an edge lord perspective of oh you have not seen dark my child I have watched the dark but yeah I've also read the dark but I don't look at them like that I'm looking for new titles if you're like me and you're looking for new titles definitely check out this iceberg thank you so much for watching and have an oaky spooky day