History NightmareFuel / Literature

* ''Boot Camp'' by Morton Rhue. Parents send a 16 years old boy David into the titular boot camp, simply because he meets with the wrong girl. What unfolds there is pure horror. Imagine Literature/NineteenEightyFour [[JustForFun/RecycledInSpace with]] [[JustForFun/RecycledInSpace ''Teenagers'']] and with the personnel convinced that they are doing a good thing by breaking the protagonist. Oh, and the whole thing is BasedOnATrueStory - such camps actually exist in the USA!

* * ''Boot Camp'' by Morton Rhue. Parents send a 16 years old boy David into the titular boot camp, simply because he meets with the wrong girl. What unfolds there is pure horror. Imagine Literature/NineteenEightyFour [[JustForFun/RecycledInSpace with ''Teenagers'']] and with the personal convinced that they are doing a good work by breaking the protagonist. Oh, and the whole thing is BasedOnATrueStory - such camps actually exist in USA!

* [[http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/phillips/index.html "The Yellow Pill]]: A famous psychologist has to counsel a fellow who shot five people in a supermarket. Said fellow insists he is right, and the ordinary surroundings are the illusion. He's right. The psychologist takes medication and snaps out of it, realizing he is on a spaceship, surrounded by dead aliens. When he tries to talk down the patient, the man gives a little speech about needing to accept what he's done, then walks out the airlock thinking he's leaving by the front door. Cue ExplosiveDecompression.]] Well, actually, it's even worse than that--the aforementioned trope is [[AvertedTrope averted]], and when the fellow's [[EyeScream eye pops]] as he walks out the airlock, he's still alive and aware, convinced that he needs to just work through the "hallucination."

* In ''[[Literature/TheWomensRoom The Women's Room]]'' by Marilyn French, the chapters depicting Chris's rape at the hands of a teenage boy are the darkest and most chilling in the book. Partly because of [[BreakTheCutie what it does to Chris]], partly because it's the catalyst that leads Val to become an extreme radical feminist which, in turn, leads to her death]], and partly because it's so raw and real, and the police and legal system's callous treatment of Chris and her mother Val - referring to Chris as 'the rape case', claiming she was a 'pretty white princess' who wanted 'a little black meat' (her rapist was black), lawyers sneering at her and suggesting she asked for it - is something that many rape victims have to deal with, even today. (''The Women's Room'' was written in the '70s.) Also doubles as a TearJerker, ''especially'' when Val decides to pack Chris off to a commune in the hope that it will help her recover, and Chris is furious and refuses to speak to her mother again.

* The Creator/DaleBrown novel ''Wings of Fire'' has terrifying descriptions of the effects of neutron bombings. Corpses everywhere, blood from ears and eyes and a radiation-aborted fetus, coming out through the mother's vagina]].

* The penultimate chapter of ''Literature/VernonGodLittle'', in which he comes as close as he possibly could to be executed for a crime he didn't commit (''the needle is in his arm'')]]. Oh, and the prison has become part of a reality TV show, so his fate is in the hands of the voting public, which is uncomfortably plausible.

* Scott Smith's ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruins The Ruins]]'' particularly the point where Eric goes down the pit]]). There's also a point when a character is convinced that the vines are underneath his skin and he starts cutting himself open to get rid of it. And he's right. There's also the very end where it's all but explicitly stated that the whole ordeal is going to start again with the would-be-rescuers. Goddamn, that's one sadistic plant.

** Every victim of the two killers is dispatched in vividly gruesome detail, and most are also brutally tortured before and during the act. Jay's proclivities are revealed when he smiles down at a kid he named "Fido" who grins back at him because he can't do anything else; Jay scrubbed his lips away with a wire brush]].

* ''Literature/TheGoneAwayWorld''. The basic premise of it is that the governments of the world develop a bomb which strips the information from matter, theoretically erasing the matter from existence. But instead, the matter left becomes desperate for information, and becomes a physical manifestation of the thoughts of the animals and humans around it, frequently modifying the bodies of the creatures it affects, leaving hideous monstrosities, often incapable of surviving their horribly messed up bodies. Now that's all creepy enough, but think about how it would affect anyone with paranoia and appreciation for creepy-pasta. Just think about the results of that for a bit.]]

* Creator/GarthNix wrote a short story called "The Hope Chest" that manages to cross the MagicalGirl trope with ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' and the [[Literature/TheGunslinger first book]] of ''Franchise/TheDarkTower''. The main character is living in the Wild West [[AC:With MindControl [[ANaziByAnyOtherName Hitler!]]]], and after everyone in the town slowly falls under his control, she opens the Hope Chest her mother left for her and finds a white, girly sheriff's outfit and some guns. She then falls into a trance and shoots everyone in the village when they try to stop her reaching the dictator's train, and kills her sister when she turns out to be his girlfriend. Then she shoots him, and as the story ends, the train is somehow travelling between worlds and anything resembling the life she used to have is in tatters.]] MindScrew ahoy, and good luck sleeping.

* A short story, "Menagerie, a Child's Fable", from Charles R. Johnson's 1982 collection ''The Sorcerer's Apprentice''. The owner of a pet shop died and no one came for the animals. It may have been some sort of political or religious allegory, but by end of it, the cat had raped the rabbit and [[MixAndMatchCritters gotten her pregnant]], and the whole place ended up being set on fire when one of the monkeys got ahold of the owner's gun]]. And the responsible dog who was just trying to do his best? He gets shot.

* ''Mr. Wolf's Pancakes'' is an illustrated children's book in which Mr. Wolf (The Big Bad Wolf) tries to make pancakes. He asks his neighbours (other fable staples, like the 3 Little Pigs and the Gingerbread Man, etc) to help with the various steps of making pancakes, but they all rudely refuse and he has to make them all by himself. Predictably, when the pancakes are made and Mr. Wolf is about to eat them, his neighbours arrive and demand he share them. You would expect the story to end with an Aesop about the rewards of being kind vs the consequences of being rude, or about how you shouldn't judge other people (as most children would consider the Big Bad Wolf to be a villain). Instead, it ends with Mr Wolf eating every single one of his neighbours as punishment for their rudeness.]]

* Viole Falushe in ''The Palace of Love''. He kidnapped a girl who he was in love with and created six copies of her through virgin birth, each exactly like her, in the hope that one will eventually love him. It doesn't help that in the end of the book, Gersen finds one of the copies, who asks him, "Are you The Man? The Man who is coming for me?" and tells him that one day The Man is coming for her, and she must love him. And then, the book implies elsewhere, he will kill her.]]

* Koji Suzuki's ''Rasen'' (''Spiral''), sequel to his more famous ''Literature/TheRing'', where watching a cursed videotape will kill the viewer in a week. Beginning with Ando's autopsy of Ryuji (one of the two protagonists in ''Ring'') we're shown how Sadako really kills her victims, including [[BodyHorror impregnating poor, innocent bystander Mai and discarding her torn corpse after a days-long gestation.]] If that wasn't bad enough, by the end it's revealed that Asakawa's ''Ring'' report has actually ''helped'' Sadako spread her curse through all forms of media, and, eventually, all of mankind will be replaced with clones of Sadako, capable of infinitely reproducing themselves.]]

* ''The Beach Dogs'' by Andy Jennings. Although the title gives the impression that it's about cuddly puppies on a beach, it isn't. The general consensus is that there's something there to make everyone's skin crawl, whether it's the scene where a litter of puppies dies along with their mother in a fire]] or the scene where one of the puppies wanders into a walk-in freezer, gets shut in, and freezes to death slowly]], or even just the fact that one of the dogs gets an infection her her eye which causes it to crust over, and another has a skin disease which made him so itchy that he scratched all his hair off. It also crosses majorly over into TearJerker territory.

* ''Literature/JohnnyGotHisGun'' by Dalton Trumbo. The whole thing is AndIMustScream turned UpToEleven. Oh and such injuries actually happened... The basis for a movie and for Metallica's song "One".

* Rosalie Ham's ''The Dressmaker'' has a couple of instances of this trope: there is a gruesome description of one character cutting another's hamstrings and another character drowns in a silo full of black grain which sucks him under like quicksand when he jumps into it, thinking it was wheat, and the townsfolk can't get the body out, so it just moulders down at the bottom.

* ''Literature/After2003'' by Francine Prose. A school gains a new crisis counselor after a shooting incident, who strictly enforces the zero tolerance policies, gets students expelled over minor issues and has them sent to a program called "Operation Turnaround." Operation Turnaround, is later revealed to be a detention camp for students and teachers, and it is implied that anyone who attempts resistance is killed. And the school where the shooting took place is mysteriously completely cleared out by the end.

* ''Literature/{{After}}'' by Francine Prose. A school gains a new crisis counselor after a shooting incident, who strictly enforces the zero tolerance policies, gets students expelled over minor issues and has them sent to a program called "Operation Turnaround." Operation Turnaround, is later revealed to be a detention camp for students and teachers, and it is implied that anyone who attempts resistance is killed. And the school where the shooting took place is mysteriously completely cleared out by the end.

** Peretti dips hard into the AdultFear in ''The Visitation'', considering it deals with why bad things happen to good people and people who do monstrous things in the name of God. Included: a woman dying from logs falling off a truck, a false Messiah taking sexual advantage of a barely legal teenage girl, and a man nailing his teenage son to a fence to punish him for teenage rebellion.

** "Light Is Like Water": two young boys, after being assured by the author in a literary workshop that "Light is like tap water, on that you switch on and it comes out", discover how to make light to work exactly like water by breaking lightbulbs, which they do when their parents are out. The kids even get a boat for them, which they use to navigate around the house. Then they drown along with their friends during a sleepover where they ere demonstrating this. If you want to know how a short story can evolve from a whimsical premise to the AdultFear of your kids dying while you were distracted, search no more.

* Being [[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]].

* * ''Boot Camp'' by Morton Rhue. Parents send a 16 years old boy David into the titular boot camp, simply because he meets with the wrong girl. What unfolds there is pure horror. Imagine Literature/NineteenEightyFour [[RecycledInSpace with ''Teenagers'']] and with the personal convinced that they are doing a good work by breaking the protagonist. Oh, and the whole thing is BasedOnATrueStory - such camps actually exist in USA!

* ''Literature/SnowDay'':

* The ''Literature/ShadowChildren'' series, which takes place in a dystopia where families are only allowed to have two children, due to food and resource shortages. Any illegal third children are hunted down and exterminated.

* NightmareFuel/MoDaoZuShi

* NightmareFuel/TianGuanCiFu

* NightmareFuel/{{Weenies}}

* NightmareFuel/PhantomsReckoning

** The short story ''WhereAreYouGoingWhereHaveYouBeen'' is about an escaped killer who tries to convince a girl who is home alone to come out of her house and go with him. In the end, the girl opens the door and steps outside. The end.