"A Prayer for the Dying" by Stewart O'Nan.
<SPOILER>It's about an entire town dying of a disease (yellow fever, maybe?) a few years after the Civil War. The protagonist is the last one alive and he goes more than a little crazy. And the act he commits while grieving for his wife freaked me out so much that I'm not even going to say it here.</SPOILER>
It seriously disturbed me and, five years on, I still feel a shiver thinking about it. It was recommended to me by my husband, who seriously should have known better. We'd only been married about 18 months at the time and I guess he didn't realize how sensitive I would be about that kind of fiction - it had never come up before.
The interesting thing is that I am a lot more sensitive than I once was. I used to enjoy reading about WW2, both fiction and non-fiction, and now I simply cannot take it. Well, I still enjoy stories about the homefront, human interest stories, stuff like that, but I can't handle accounts of battles or pretty much anything involving the Nazis or the Holocaust. I even had to give away a complete Bodie and Brocke Theone series that, once upon a time, I had enjoyed very much.
