Nightmare Fuel / Vorkosigan Saga

• Shards Of Honor:
  • Aral recalls his memory of when a death squad, sent by his own great uncle Emperor Yuri, came to assassinate him and his family when he was eleven years old, and how his mother was killed when one of the assassins fired a sonic grenade into her stomach, which deafened Aral for a time. Later, he recounts how he got his chance for revenge against Yuri for killing his family, by partaking in the emperor's Death by a Thousand Cuts — when he was thirteen years old. And Aral was given the 'honour' of making the first cut in Yuri's stomach. He remembers going out onto a balcony afterwards to get away from Yuri's screaming as he was dismembered, profoundly sorry that his hearing had returned.
  • Cordelia gets tied spreadeagled and naked on a bed while Ges Vorrutyer prepares to have Bothari do a Rape by Proxy. The moment with Bothari mentally broken and crouching over Cordelia is horrifying...but then he refuses to do the act, as Cordelia is Aral's prisoner. Of course, Vorrutyer then goes into ecstasies about how he can use Cordelia to torture Aral, and attempts to rape her himself — which is when Bothari grabs him by his hair and slits his throat, showering Cordelia in blood.
• Barrayar: Padma Vorpatril's last minutes of life, both before and after he was drugged up to the gills on fast-penta. Much more before, though, since he surely knew his captors would get him to tell them where his beloved wife and unborn son were, and kill them all — and there was nothing he could do to stop it. And then he's shot and killed in front of Alys; for decades afterwards she remembers the smell of his burning hair and burning her own death offering triggers her.
• The Warrior's Apprentice:
  • When Miles tells Bothari to make a jump pilot talk, he instantly regrets it, as Bothari becames a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant who finds a particularly nasty way to torture the pilot into talking. To make things worse, the pilot dies of shock not long after.
  • A lot of The Warrior's Apprentice if you haven't read Shards of Honor first and the revelations about Bothari have no more context for you than they do for Elena. Which turns the story from tragedy to horror, because then the plot is "discovering that your father whom you respected is a Nazi war criminal", more or less. It's a very different book if you don't know Bothari's backstory.
• Mirror Dance:
  • Mark goes into the backstory of what Baron Ryoval did to his family once he killed his father and took over House Ryoval: he killed any of his brothers who could have proved a threat to him, and forced his younger brothers and sisters into sexual slavery (after heavy body modification) and sent them to serve in 'very-private bordellos'. Mark muses that "I suppose they're all dead now. If they're lucky." The tagline for House Royval is "Dreams Made Flesh" and it specializes in the sex trade and made-to-order sex slaves; one of the mercifully brief glimpses we get into the workings of the House is Miles witnessing one of the research/torture labs, where human captives are used as test subjects and culture dishes. "They had been human, once, those lumps of flesh, scar tissue, and growths."
  • When Ryoval gets his hands on Mark, even though he knows he's not 'Admiral Naismith' (Miles having really pissed off the Baron in an earlier adventure) he proceeds to have him tortured, force-fed and raped until Mark develops multiple split personalities in order to survive. Mark repays this torture by attacking Ryoval when his guard is down, nailing him right in the throat with his foot and then kicking him to death. He then uses a drill to destroy Ryoval's brain so there's no chance of it being transplanted into a new clone. Even Mark's sub-personality of 'Killer' finds it hard to get through.
    • What's more, Ryoval recorded the sessions on several cameras from different angles. Mark, after the fact, calls upon Elena Bothari-Jesek to find and delete the videos because he doesn't want his family to ever see them, knowing how dreadful it would be for them. Elena, ignoring his warning to not look at the contents of the videos, has to experience the horror of watching someone who looks very much like her childhood friend (and whom she unwittingly abandoned to this hell) endure what seems like weeks of torture.
• Memory:
  • Near the climax, just after Haroche has offered Miles everything he thought he wanted to cover up the former's effective assassination of Simon Illyan, there is an exchange where Miles mentions to his mother and Simon that he's "wrestling with temptation", and upon the latter jokingly asking who was winning, Miles says "I... think I'm going for best two falls out of three". As Miles would later confirm, that was Not Hyperbole. He was that close to taking the bribe.
  • Simon's memory chip breaking down is a cross between nightmare fuel and Tear Jerker. Watching the stone-cold, unflappable spymaster rapidly degenerate into a gibbering helpless mess, who can't even remember what day it is, is as tragic as it is horrific. One doctor muses that if they hadn't been able to remove the chip, Simon would likely have died of sheer exhaustion or from injuring himself.
• Komarr features a truly horrendous description of Etienne Vorsoisson's death by suffocation, caused at least partly by his desperate and futile attempts to escape being chained to a fence before his breath mask runs out of oxygen. Miles is imprisoned in the same manner and powerless to help Tien; he can only watch him die in one of the ugliest ways he's ever seen, and then has to wait next to his corpse in the faint hope of rescue, all the while dreading the possibility that the stress he's under will trigger one of his seizures and he'll suffer the same fate as Vorsoisson.
• In Diplomatic Immunity, Ker Dubauer's lovely selection of Cetagandan bioweapons will leave you begging for a Mercy Kill before you literally boil into a steaming puddle of melted entrails. Oh, and they leave the brain intact so you're conscious up till the last minute. Russo Gupta's description of waking up after having somehow survived the bioweapon, and finding the remains of his friends splattered all over their ship, is utterly horrific. When Bel (and then Miles) are dosed with them late in the novel, you can practically feel the sheer unadulterated panic radiating off the pages.
• "The Flowers of Vashnoi" has a home in an irradiated zone where there are rows of the skulls of dead children, because local people send their mutated infants to a woman who takes care of them til they eventually die of radiation poisoning.