There has been some discussion in the fanfic forum about whether or not certain stories are actually dangerous to some readers' mental well-being, and, if they are, whether these stories should be forced to carry a MAJOR BUMMER warning, so that sensitive FoLCs can avoid them.

I'm not trying to bring up the particular story that sparked the most recent debate. (Hey, if I was, I wouldn't discuss it in the Off Topic forum.)

But the question I want to bring up is a broader one. Do some stories - and I don't mean primarily fanfic stories - actually make you feel literally sick? Do they make you feel so bad that you wish you hadn't read them?

When I studied English at the university of Lund here in Sweden in the late seventies, one of the books we were required to read was Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. I apologize for showing a picture of the movie adaption rather than the cover of the book:

[Linked Image]

The kid you can see here is the main character of the book, and his name is Pinky, or so I think. (Hey, it's been such a long time since I read it.) Pinky is seventeen years old (I think), a scrawny kid, and it was a big deal to him that he was a Catholic. Back then, I was trying quite hard to be religious, and it was important to me to try to cling to the belief that religious people were good people. And to me Catholic people were religious people, and since they were religious people, they had to be at least moderately good.

You can see in the picture that Pinky's cheek is slashed. Well, you see, Pinky the pimply Catholic kid is a gang leader, and he and his gang regularly attack other people and slash them with razor blades. And sometimes other gangs slash them back.

Pinky has a girlfriend too. There is something fragile, delicately hopeful in the relationship between the girl and Pinky, or at least I remember it like that. The love between the two of them is the last hope in a world of razor blades and darkness. But in the end of the book the girl dies. I don't remember how or why, but she may have become pregnant, and she may have had a botched illegal abortion. I don't know. I don't remember. But I do seem to remember that the cottony strands of sympathy and tentative love making up the togetherness between Pinky and the girl were soiled and torn, and the girl died, and there was nothing, nothing left to hope for or live for other than evil deeds and razor blades, wielded by a kid who made a point of the fact that he was a Catholic.

I'll tell you what - when I had finished reading that book, I felt mentally sick, soiled and queasy. I tasted bile. And for years afterwards, parts of the Swedish cultural elite clamoured for the Nobel Prize committee to give the prize for Literature to Graham Greene. Every time they demanded that Graham Greene should be given the Nobel Prize for Literature, I felt slightly seasick.

Have I read anything else by Graham Greene? Actually, I've tried. Somebody recommended "Travels With My Aunt", which was supposedly guaranteed to be sweet and WAFFY. But as soon as I opened the book, I felt I couldn't go on reading.

So I just wonder if anyone else here has had the same experience - if you have read a book that darkened your mood for an appreciable time afterwards, and made you wish that you had never read it?

Ann