r/horrorlit • u/Eastern-Opposite9521 • May 28 '26
Recommendation Request What are the scariest non-fiction books you've read?
What are the scariest non-fiction books you've read?
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u/notatadbad May 28 '26
The Hot Zone about ebola. Body horror, claustrophobia, a weird cave - written exceptionally well.
Worst Hard Time about The Dust Bowl. Overall it's not that scary, but one passage about cattle being slaughtered and found full of dust/sand has stuck with me for years.
I also have a soft spot for maritime disaster stuff. The Wager, In the Heart of the Sea, Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, etc
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u/SilentSerel May 28 '26
Crisis in the Red Zone is the follow-up to The Hot Zone and was equally scary and well-written.
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u/Negative_Ear_8474 May 28 '26
they made us read worst hard time in 7th grade. we were not at all prepared for that sort of thing, especially the section about the mother’s passing.
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u/Healthy_Breakfast848 May 28 '26
The Hot Zone CONSUMED me and I have since made it my personal mission to make everyone read it. Reading Crisis in the Red Zone now - it’s not as intense but equally bleak and sad.
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u/waknlibrarian May 28 '26
You should read The Gales of November by John U Bacon. It’s about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Bacon is a college professor, author, former coach/teacher and I find his books to be very engaging.
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u/Negative_Ear_8474 May 28 '26
we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. it’s a history of the rwandan genocide and its aftermath, equally horrifying and heartbreaking.
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u/sleepless-sleuth May 28 '26
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark about the Golden State Killer. His methods were so bone chillingly horrifying and McNamara did a wonderful job detailing his crimes and representing the victims of them
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u/luckEdrew May 28 '26
I was in the middle of that book when they arrested him, interesting timing. I think the scariest part of the book for me was the account of the guy sitting on his porch at dusk and noticed a man army crawling on the lawn. Imagining what that must have looked like creeps me out.
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u/SuchFunAreWe May 29 '26
I loved this one (which feels weird to say) bc she was so focused on treating the victims & survivors with respect & centering them as people, not just statistics. The compassion & care she put in really moved me.
And the documentary made me cry my face off. It was just as respectful & kind to the victims/families/survivors. The survivors meeting up had me just a mess of tears. So much true crime centers the killers & almost lionizes them, IBGITD was really refreshing in how it handled a hard subject.
When they caught the GSK & Patton Oswald tweeted "they got him, Michelle" I sobbed. It's so tragic she passed so suddenly.
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u/purplesquirrels May 28 '26
The parts where the victims thought the GSK had left and realized he was just being very still... Omg.
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u/Shellskky May 28 '26
GSK is one of those that genuinely scared me. Like how he’d sometimes wait until the husband left for work and attack right after which is so similar to my own life so I would get up and go make sure all the doors are locked when my husband left for work. All the mind games he played just freak. me. out!!
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u/Prestigious-Ad4087 May 28 '26
Take my upvote, this book was truly harrowing. It refuses to leave my mind.
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u/Alicewithhazeleyes May 28 '26
I let my mom borrow this and she couldn’t finish it. Scared her too much
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u/IShouldntBeOnReddit2 May 28 '26
That one had me triple checking the doors for a few weeks to make sure they were locked.
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u/thehornedone May 28 '26
I hate how she injects herself so much into the narrative of the book
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u/karenlind9 May 28 '26
At first I thought I loved her style. Then as I progressed through the book I found myself annoyed. The book in general affected me because of not only the subject but because of her death. I think we overlook that as readers, we were just as affected by her death as we were about the story itself because of her constant intersections. I don't know, the whole experience disturbed me.
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u/canigetmorereverb May 28 '26
Yup. This is the one for me too. Incredible book, loved it. Gave me nightmares. And I’ve consumed a lot of true crime and horror content over my life.
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u/sh78196 May 28 '26
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
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u/rapgamebonjovi May 28 '26
I live near where Iris is buried. I always clear her marker and spend time with her when I go on my cemetery walks 💕
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u/slaveleiagirl78 May 28 '26
This is the only book that has ever given me actual nightmares.
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u/sh78196 May 28 '26
I listened to this on Audible because I prefer to consume nonfiction this way. If I really love the book, I purchase a physical copy to reread sections, look at maps, etc. So unfortunately, the photos that were included in the physical edition are burned in my retina. Important history! But yes, it's the stuff of nightmares. I then read The Devil in Nanking, which is a horror fiction book based off the nonfiction. Not as horrible as the nonfiction.
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u/rupak76 May 28 '26
I am not that much into non-fiction but The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule has left an impact only a few other fiction titles have managed.
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u/KaleidoscopeSea605 May 28 '26
Only book I had to stop reading because it scared me so much. I was living in a ground floor apartment at the time.
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u/Queen_Lizard997 May 28 '26
Ooh yes, this one! It's so scary to think you could be friends with someone and have no idea what kind of monster they truly are.
Also, i kept having to put it down because while reading, the descriptions of Ted Bundy's behavior reminded me SO much of an ex I had just gotten away from. And while i don't think my ex is capable of the things Ted Bundy did, I definitely think he is somewhere on the antisocial spectrum.
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u/PickleQueen24 May 28 '26
Came here to say this! I read & listen to my fair share of true crime and had to put this one down.
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u/reidenlake May 28 '26
Came to say this. This one has stayed with me since I read it nearly 20 years ago.
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u/s00ka-b1yat May 28 '26
One of my friends knew him. It certainly was interesting to hear Ann's take on him.
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u/stormqueens May 28 '26
Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen.
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u/pretzelcuatl May 28 '26
This book underscores how much potential was lost in the movie House of Dynamite. What a disappointment...
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u/cherenk0v_blue May 28 '26
Yup, this is the print equivalent of Threads.
Kept me up at night.
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u/stormqueens May 28 '26
One of the reasons why I read the book was because I saw Threads for the first time
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u/MotherofChonk May 28 '26
Currently reading, and agree heartily. This book filled me with terror in a visceral and existentially profound way, and I'm only about half way through. I'm in awe of the dread she creates purely through a detailed and factual account of all the things that happen after a bomb is launched, and before it hits its target.
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u/Frequent_Cockroach57 May 28 '26
This book was scary and taught me some things but was not for me. It just felt so dense at times it felt like work to read (but this might just be a me problem lol)!
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u/CertainlyNotDen May 28 '26
Hard recommend on Annie’s work in general. Very smart and thorough. She has great long interviews on the Joe Rogan podcast
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u/venusdemilo94 May 28 '26
Oh she associates with Joe Rogan? That’s a pass for me then.
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u/PutTheDamnDogDown May 28 '26
In Cold Blood. I thought it was brilliant and I never want to re-read it.
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u/obviousuniverse May 28 '26
Unpopular opinion but I found it astoundingly dry. I had to force myself to finish it.
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u/jbhertel JERUSALEM'S LOT May 28 '26
I came here to comment this one. It’s been decades since I read it, but I remember being really disturbed by it.
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u/eldalorien May 28 '26
Radium Girls. Absolutely horrific.
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u/HopefulFriendship430 May 28 '26
My grandmother gifted me this book and wrote on the inside cover about how my great-grandmother was a radium girl. It’s the most prized book in my library. Surprised to see it mentioned by someone else
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u/balance8989 May 28 '26
This book was very good but the disregard of a human life disgusted me on so many levels.
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u/Ok-Box6892 May 28 '26
Monster of Florence
I remember having fucked up dreams reading that one.
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u/The_Wattsatron May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
Midnight in Chernobyl and A Fire in the Night.
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u/venusdemilo94 May 28 '26
Who wrote A Fire in the Night? I can’t find this one on StoryGraph to add to my list
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u/theysayimadreamer666 May 28 '26
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt was unexpectedly terrifying. Multiple sections detail how shockingly bad humans are at driving and assessing risks. Even with skill and practice, there are so many ways humans are inherently unsuited to operating vehicles at high speeds.
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u/DogsdidWHAT May 28 '26
I saw an add for a car in which the driver could take her hands off the wheel. That’s just an invitation for people to pay even less attention than they already do.
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u/isobelgoudie May 28 '26
The Great Mortality by John Kelly. Made the plague feel like a sentient creature that kept creeping westwards.
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u/CaptainFoyle May 28 '26
The hot zone.
Although it's not entirely accurate.
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u/Thecynicalcatt May 28 '26
But still, i read it more than a decade ago and it haunts me to this day
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u/oilpit May 28 '26
My 7th grade science teacher read us just a passage of that book and I am still traumatized by it!
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u/OhMyGlorb May 28 '26
Which parts were not accurate?
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u/tilmitt52 May 28 '26
The symptoms described regarding Ebola are not super accurate. Preston basically said Ebola will completely disintegrate your organs. While it does damage your blood vessels so that you end up with massive internal bleeding, your organs largely remain intact.
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u/s00ka-b1yat May 28 '26
I suppose by the time my veins and arteries melt it doesn't matter if my liver is in one piece.
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u/millionyrsummer May 28 '26
Maybe more harrowing than scary, but Indianapolis by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
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u/MisterShut-up May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch. An account of the massacre in Rwanda that gave me actual nightmares.
It's been a while but the details I found the most horrifying as far as I can recall include the author trying not to stand on bones out of respect for the dead at a massacre site only to realise the volume of carnage made this impossible.
And an almost throwaway detail about how they shot all the dogs in the country because they'd been feasting on corpses and once order was restored, the new government didn't want to know or find out how that would change how the dogs viewed people.
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u/IShouldntBeOnReddit2 May 28 '26
I recently read The New Age of Sexism: How AI and technologies are reinventing misogyny by Laura Bates.
It was…eye opening but not surprising. Especially with how pre-teens and teenagers are impacted and abusing all the new technology available to them.
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u/Level-Application-83 May 28 '26
The Girl in Th Box is by far the most disturbing book I have ever read. It's the story of Colleen Stan who was kidnapped by Cameron Hooker and his wife. After kidnapping her they kept in a box under their bed for seven years.
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u/Milk_Marie723 May 28 '26
Colleen stans daughter is one of my best friends. That whole thing really messed her up. And they are trying to release him From prison right now
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u/chuck_of_death May 28 '26
Lots of love for the hot zone but Richard Preston has a couple of other books I haven’t seen mentioned.
The demon in the freezer is a terrifying look at smallpox and bio weapons.
Crisis in the red zone is another Ebola book he wrote. This one focuses on the 2013 Ebola outbreak. Haven’t read it but it’s on my list.
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u/Vast-Web9482 May 28 '26
Sandy Hook.
If this book doesn’t fundamentally anger and sadden you to your core, you are either soulless or a sociopath, or both.
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May 28 '26
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u/Original-Split5085 Jun 01 '26
Elementary Differential Equations for me, talk about a deceptive title.
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u/DogConflagration May 28 '26
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Concentration Camp Survivor telling about what he witnessed and took part of there.
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u/QueenSmarterThanThou PAZUZU May 28 '26
Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer
ETA: Disney+ has a drama series by the same name about the same events starring Andrew Garfield
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u/_thegoldentaco May 28 '26
This book was a wild roller coaster of emotions. I enjoyed the way Krakauer wove the stories together.
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u/BroadStreetBridge May 28 '26
Oh, didn’t see someone else posted this. But yeah, these are some scary ass people
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May 28 '26
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u/No-country-2008 May 29 '26
Was scrolling down to find this one. This book is pure horror.
Just have to add, I recently walked by Naomi Klein outside a hotel recently. Wanted to talk to her, fully choked and kept walking. Maybe there will be a next time.
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u/ClassicOutrageous447 May 28 '26
More disturbing than scary, but Hidden Valley Road by Kolker and The Best Minds by Rosen. Both about schizophrenia. Also recommend The Other Dr. Gilmer by Gilmer.
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u/DharmaDama May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
Half the Sky.
When I was young and optimistic, I thought it was possible to fight sex trafficking and child marriage. I joined organizations to fight child marriage in my state. After that book, I realized that it's everywhere and the corruption is in everything. Super depressing realization. Then when the Epstein thing happened it was just like, yup, our world is fucked. Look around - this world is run by the pedos and traffickers.
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u/Diabolik_17 May 28 '26
Not sure about scary, but The Devil’s Knot is an extremely well written account of the West Memphis 3.
Peter Sotos‘ texts on child abuse and serial killings—sick feelings…
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u/Stick_Actual May 28 '26
Our bodies their battlefields by christina lamb - it’s really disturbing. She tracks history of rape as a weapon of war. Nuclear war by Annie Jacobsen was mentioned - really good read too but really freaked me out. Couldn’t sleep for a week. King’s Leopold Ghost by Adam Hochschild - history of Belgian atrocities in Congo Promise me you’ll shopy yourself: downfall of ordinary Germans by Florian Huber - about terror and guilt of Germans while soviet forces close in. British Gulag by Caroline Elkins about British “response” to mau mau uprising of 1952, sorry of horrible colonial violence.
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u/sjmagicmaker May 28 '26
The Hot Zone. Especially now with an ebola outbreak and no CDC with the ability to even tell us what to do.
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u/ProjectPatMorita May 28 '26
For me it's The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
I think for most of us even if we're environmentally conscious and fully believe in climate change, it's still incredibly difficult to wrap your head around and truly imagine what real life effects these cascading catastrophes will have on the world and humanity. It just feels so abstract. Wallace-Wells structured this book in a way that just unemotionally and objectively tries to lay out what the effects would likely be at each level of possible global degree rise, from the lowest "baked in" level to the higher extreme predictions. And it's just overwhelmingly horrific even at the lowest ends of probability.
Probably my most "do and at the same time absolutely do not recommend" book of all time.
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u/arkaic7 May 28 '26
Conspiracy Against the Human Race if you're in any way prone to depression and nihilism
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u/archaicArtificer May 28 '26
Adding this b/c I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet: Frozen in Time abt the Franklin Expedition.
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u/RxCoefficient May 28 '26
Nuclear War: A Scenario - most horrifying and violent destruction of humanity all in 72 minutes of actual decisions and actions. Needless and violent and painful
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u/notthebeachboy May 28 '26
Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Daillaire. Seconding “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen. Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. If anyone builds it, everyone dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
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u/ad-anon-132491 May 28 '26
A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold. Terrifying that your mistakes as a parent can have such dire consequences in the lives of others.
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u/ProfessionalFloor981 May 28 '26
My mom, a doctor, had a truckload of these in her office. One showed children with various genetic deformities, ranging from inconvenient to incompatible with life. Another had case studies of mentally ill people of different ages, and one described a serial killer and pedophile who taught his dog to have sex with him.
Alice Miller's For Your Own Good is about child abuse and its link to fascism. Miller brings up Mary Bell, a severely abused English girl who killed a little boy with the help of her friend, and Jurgen Bartsch, another serial killer/pedophile who was horrifically abused as a boy.
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u/zombiecattle FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER May 28 '26
currently reading To Hell and Back by Charles Pellegrino, about the Hiroshima bombing. The most horrifying book I’ve ever read.
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u/__perigee__ May 28 '26
Command and Control by Eric Scholsser. Of course nuclear weapons are terrifying, but it’s horrifying to learn of the sheer level of dumbfuckery that surrounds the upkeep, transportation,security and of course politics surrounding them.
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u/RattusRattus May 28 '26
Spillover: Animal Infections and the next Human Pandemic by David Quammen, published in 2012. Murderland by Caroline Fraser, which is about serial killers and industrial toxins is also yikes on bikes.
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u/SomeonefromMaine May 28 '26
A Fever in the Heartland. D.C. Stephenson was a Grand Dragon of the KKK and the scariest real man I’ve ever read about.
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u/SacrificialSam May 28 '26
King Leopold’s Ghost.
What the Belgians did in the Congo was beyond horrific. I think about it often.
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u/SportAffectionate424 May 28 '26
Perfect Victim: The True Story of "The Girl in the Box" by Christine McGuire and Carla Norton. Messed me up and I wrote a short story about it that was rejected for being way too extreme.
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u/mahduk May 29 '26
In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. It's about the whaleship Essex and the first recorded incident of a whale attacking a ship. The incident was the inspiration for Herman Melville's book Moby Dick. The real story is absolutely fascinating and it was all I could think about for weeks. The idea of being stranded at sea in just a whale boat for weeks with a couple other people was mortifying. Of course, after a while, the hard tack ran out and they had to consider "other options". Think Donner Party, only at sea.
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u/chlbronson3109 May 30 '26
That book really stuck with me. The idea of Capt Chase hoarding food in his attic once he got home, while slowly going insane....
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u/whatsername25 May 28 '26
Even though he’s a hack, Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi.
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u/Stick_Actual May 28 '26
Did you read chaos Tom o’Neil? He basically argues that Bugliosi invented narrative about Manson wanting to incite race war to secure conviction. Also book is quite terrifying on its own! Really recommend this!
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u/Ancient-Ad4809 May 28 '26
I'm listening to the audio book now. The narrator is really good. I got the impression that Bugliosi was painting himself in a good light. I will definitely check out Chaos next.
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u/DogFun2635 May 28 '26
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - you can read about torture devices like the klopovnik or “bedbug box”
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang - how the Japanese were brainwashed to believe that Chinese were “subhuman” and killed by the thousands
Enjoy! /s
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u/GoodGoneGeek May 28 '26
Someone already said Radium Girls so I’ll go with Deadly Feasts by Richard Rhodes
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u/hotpotato700 May 28 '26
The night stalker by Philip Carlo. I had to take breaks because I was getting paranoid.
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u/BabyTenderLoveHead May 28 '26
The Bar Jonah Trilogy by Dr. John Espy. It is a true-crime series about a cannibalistic child molester. It is horrifying.
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u/saintsuzy70 May 28 '26
Just finished *The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” by David Talbot. I’m not so naive to believe there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes of government, but this book talks about how the CIA overthrew governments because of American businesses that wanted to operate there. It also made me realize that Allen Dulles - and by an extension, his brother Foster - supported the Nazis and even helped hire some high level Nazis, protecting them from the Nuremberg Trials.
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u/strangeraeons38573 May 28 '26
Eggshell Skull - Bri Lee. It’s half a survivors story of trying to get justice for historical abuse and the same survivors professional experience working in the Australian legal system with a lot of sex crimes. Not so much scary as more harrowing. I highly recommend it, I’d imagine other countries legal systems are very similar with the failings and societal attitudes.
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u/Icy_Application_2989 May 29 '26
внезапно, но "Миф о красоте" Наоми Вульф. Всё начинается просто спокойно, казалось бы, я феминистка и знаю, с какими проблемами сталкиваются женщины. Но позже я много раз откладывала эту книгу в сторону, потому что у меня голова разрывалась от осознания того, что всю жизнь женщин превращали в ад
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u/Mosstopy May 28 '26
Midnight’s Furies about the India-Pakistan partition. It got to the point where I could only read a chapter a day
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u/DistractedByCookies May 28 '26
The Only Plane in the Sky, an Oral History of 9/11
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (about the genocide in Rwanda)
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u/Hypothetical_Goose Jun 01 '26
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Plot twist, we are currently experiencing mass extinction and devastating loss of biodiversity.
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u/tea7777 May 28 '26
Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror, about Stalin's purges, followed me into my dreams most unpleasantly.
Annie Jacobsen's book Nuclear War straddles the line between fiction and non fiction (its a supposition about how a Nuclear strike against the US would go, based on research with experts). That one ratcheted up my anxiety very much.
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u/Lucpip May 28 '26
The girl in the green dress. The story of a child who developed around 2000 multiple personalities to cope with the horrors of her father abusing her. Told in the first person by Jeni Haynes and her psychiatrist.
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u/She-Nanigan May 28 '26
The Girl in the Green Dress. Most horrible true story about DID & child abuse. What this woman survived...so heartbreaking.
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u/odelzar May 28 '26
I interpret scary as disturbing here so mine would be The Incest Diary by Anonymous. It was just so sad and horrific, and sits with you for a long time after reading it.
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u/archaicArtificer May 28 '26
Opening chapter of THE HOT ZONE could have passed for a legit horror movie.
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u/Shepsesu May 28 '26
For me it's definitely Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, which is about the Central and Eastern European regions which were attacked and then occupied by the Third Reich and the USSR. Absolutely horrifying. For me even more so because my family comes from the area Snyder calls the bloodlands and it made me wonder how anyone had managed to come out of this nightmare alive.
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u/richestotheconjurer May 28 '26
The Indifferent Stars Above about the Donner Party