Nightmare Fuel / The Jungle

• The entire premise of the story. A once happy, and close-knit family comes to a new country with hopes of starting a new life of peace, and prosperity only to be slowly, brutally, and methodically ripped apart by means that they cannot control, and have little, if any hope of stopping.
• It starts with the very house the family buys. They're told that it's brand new when that can't be true as nearly half a dozen families have lived in it before, and have all been evicted for being unable to pay rent. It isn't worth even half of what they paid, and are forced to work themselves to the bone to keep. It's made from the cheapest materials, is literally falling apart at the seams, and is stated to have decades of untreated sewage festering underneath it that frequently make the family sick. The ceiling constantly leaks, and there's no insulation so the house is always sweltering, and swarming with vermin in the summer, and freezing cold, and draft-filled in the winter.
• What's even worse is that the very moment the family fails to keep up with rent, they're turned out onto the street, and the place is refurnished, and repainted, and sold to another family of immigrants the very next week who are completely un-the-wiser.
• Just how the family slowly crumbles as the effects of poverty, disease, starvation, addiction, and the brutalities of the people, and environment around them start to take hold. The grandfather dies coughing up blood from pneumonia, and infection after working himself too hard in the sickeningly damp, and disgusting pickling room. One-by-one, the children are pulled out of school to work miserable, and dangerous jobs to help keep the family afloat, and one of them dies screaming in agony after eating tuberculous meat while only the daughter is home to try, and vainly help him. Jonas, the brother-in-law, mysteriously vanishes either by getting killed at work, or by just fleeing the horror of it all. The baby drowns in the street. Ona is forced to be a sex-slave to her boss under threat of her family being blacklisted from work in the entire city. The once loud, and plucky Marija becomes a morose, and withdrawn heroin-addicted prostitute, and Jurgis, the once proud, strong, and determined patriarch is reduced to a crippled, starving, homeless widower that is sent to jail at the end of the story having lost everything.
• Baby Anatas is graphically described as coming down with countless illnesses from the filthy conditions of the slums that leave him covered in red, painful bumps, and wailing in utter pain, and misery while he's tied down to the bed out of fear of him kicking the covers off, and dying of the cold.
• Kotrina, the thirteen-year-old daughter, is implied to have nearly been raped while out selling papers by a man who grabs her by the arm, and tries to lead her down a dark, empty, and secluded alley. Said event leaves her almost too terrified to leave the house.
• The fact that it was so cold that an unnamed boy's ears were broken off when someone attempted to rub some warmth into them. This incident alone is what causes Stanislovas' unparalleled fear of the cold which frequently gets him beat by Jurgis when he refuses to leave the house because of it.
• Stanislovas' then subsequent death by getting eaten alive by rats after he accidently passes out at work from drinking too much.
• Later in the book it's described how unsuspecting women from the countryside are often lured into the city with promises of jobs in packaging plants, and textile factories only to be drugged, and sent to work in brothels as sex-slaves.
• Ona dies in childbirth with it being described as the baby coming out arm first.
• The fear of being replaced at work, and being rendered destitute being so great that an unnamed woman gives birth at work after creeping away into a dark corner, and hides the newborn in a cart of meat that is only just stopped in time before it's dumped into a sausage vat.
• President Theodore Roosevelt read the book, and was in such disbelief over Sinclair's descriptions of life in the meatpacking plants that he wondered how much truth there was to his claims. Roosevelt assigned the Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds to go to Chicago to investigate some meat packing facilities. Learning about the visit, owners had their workers thoroughly clean the factories prior to the inspection, but Neill and Reynolds were still revolted by the conditions. Their oral report to Roosevelt confirmed pretty much everything Sinclair portrayed in the novel, except the "human lard" reports.
• The descriptions of conditions on the factory floors. Even knowing conditions have vastly improved since the time the book was written, just knowing food was once so filth-ridden and unsanitary is enough to make someone lose their appetite for a while.
• The idea of rotten meat teeming with maggots, and other vermin, and crusted with rodent feces being dusted off, and then transported to be turned into sausage, or given away at local canteens as a "free lunch".
• The imagery invoked with some of the meat byproducts themselves, made into canned meat and sausage. "Cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out"? Lovely.
• The somewhat graphic description of the tramps and beggars taken off the streets daily; dying, insane, filthy, disease-ridden, or all of the above.
• Bubbly Creek. Just the thought of a water body in that (real) condition.

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