“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us,” Franz Kafka once wrote. “If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?”

That’s all very well, Kafka, but how about the books literally about wounding and stabbing? On this week’s books podcast, the Guardian’s resident thriller fan Alison Flood struggled to finish The Flower Girls, a new thriller by Alice Clark-Platts, the plot of which contains similarities to the James Bulger murder case. This sparked a discussion on the books desk about the books that have most disturbed us: commissioning editor Richard Lea had nightmares after reading Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One; I once had someone hide my copy of American Psycho so I’d stop dwelling on it; and associate culture editor Claire Armitstead once destroyed a copy of Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, because she was so disturbed by a particular scene: “I put it in the fire! I have never destroyed another book … but I didn’t want anyone else to read what I’ve read.”

On Twitter, readers shared the books that have most disturbed them: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life was a common choice, as was John Fowles’s The Collector and VC Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic. (Which, as one user tweeted, everyone seems to read far too young.) Others included:

Commonly, readers reported having to physically distance themselves from the book itself:

Share yours

What books have most unsettled, shocked or disturbed you, and why? What did you do to cope – did you stop reading the book, hide it or even destroy it? Share your experiences in the comments below and we’ll publish some of the best contributions on the website this week.