13. ‘Torture the Artist’ by Joey Goebel.
A rich media mogul realizes that his life has done much to staunch “real art” so he starts a program to find talented youths and assign them “managers” who can guide and nurture them to produce works of cultural significance. How do they do this? By secretly turning their lives into a living hell of misery and suffering.
This book has it all, from killing family pets and leaving them beneath the Christmas tree – to bribing or coercing every person that cares about the client to hurt and leave him.
14. If I Stay.
It sets up this whole cutesy happy family relationship with the protagonist being a teenage girl (mom, dad, and younger brother as family), and as soon as you get attached and interested, the whole family dies graphically in a car crash except for the girl, Mia, who is in a coma. She spends the book deciding whether to wake up from the coma or die and be with her family. It was a terribly depressing read.
Bonus points for an awful sequel (spoilers, she lives) where she becomes a famous cello player and sleeps with her ex, who was her heartbroken bf in the first book. It’s all about the pain of time changing and old loss and things left unspoken. Not as bad as the first book but still. Awful.
