The Self Injury Anthology Project: Fictional Literature
Shelley Stoehr - Crosses (Laureleaf/1998)
Book about teens who cut.
Patricia McCormick - Cut (Scholastic Paperbacks/2002)
Book about teen who cuts.
Steven Levenkron - The Luckiest Girl in the World (Penguin USA/1998)
Book about teen who cuts.
Emma Forrest - Thin Skin (Bloomsbury Publishing/2002)
Book about teen who cuts.
Brett Easton Ellis - American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries) (Vintage Books/2000)
References are made to the self injury of Axl Rose. Patrick Bateman also imagines slitting his wrists and spraying the blood over people.
Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club (Henry Holt/1999)
The narrator gets involved in self injury. Saying more would give away the plot.
Jonathan Kellerman - Over the Edge: An Alex Delaware Novel (NAL Penguin/1987)
""Bullshit. You shrinks are all the same." He [Jamey] folded his arms across his chest, kept smashing at the fountain. Pinpoints of blood sprouted on his heel." (Pg. 34)
Kathe Koja - Strange Angels (Delacorte Press/1994)
"and with one arm he shoved her, long piston motion not to hurt but to remove, the way he might push her from the path of a car and then turning, in the sweeping discus motion, to smash his hands against the cabinets, the counters, smash them again and again as if they were a fire he must extinguish, smash them so Grant, frozen, heard the sounds of breakage, of tissue and of flesh in collision, of bone through the gasp and cry of Saskia's shriek, fire-engine shriek and the phone began ringing, ringing, ringing and Robin smashed his hands again, his face locked into an expression so terrible and remote, that of a man who does a duty he loathes but will not pause nor be dissuaded from the doing, who will see it through until the end
and the ringing phone and Saskia screaming "Robin stop it Robin DON'T ROBIN DON'T!" and his hands again, whack like a board against the cabinets." (pg. 250)
Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast (Vintage/1998)
"He brought his clenched fist to his mouth, and bit his knuckles. For a moment the pain seemed to help him. It gave him a sense of his own reality, and as the pain weakened he bit again.."
Poppy Z Brite - Drawing Blood (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group/1993)
"Trevor stuck his pencil behind his ear, laid his sketchbook on the ground in front of him. He let the fingers of his right hand slide down the soft inner skin of his left forearm. The skin there was mottled with old scars, years of slashes and cross-hatchings done with a single-edged Exacto razor blade, the same kind he used for layouts. Perhaps a hundred thin raised lines of skin, paler than the rest of his arm, exquisitely sensitive; some still reddened and hurt once in a while, as if the tissue deep inside his arm had never quite healed. But if you went deep enough into the tissue, no scar ever healed completely.
And this map of pain he had carved out of his skin, this had been no half-assed attempt at suicide, anyway. Trevor knew that to kill yourself you had to cut along the length of your arm, had to lay it open from wrist to elbow like some fruit with a rich red pulp and a hard white core. Had to cut all the way to bone, had to sever every major artery and vein. He had never tried it.
These cuts he had made over the years were more in the nature of experimentation: to test his domain over his own malleable flesh, to know the strange human jelly below the surface, part layer upon cell-delicate layer of skin, part quickening blood, part pale subcutaneous fat that parted like butter at the touch of a new blade. Sometimes he would hold his arm over a page of his sketchbook, let the blood fall on clean white paper or mingle with fresh black ink; sometimes he would trace it into patterns with his finger or the nib of a pen."
J.D. Salinger - Catcher In the Rye (Penguin Books/1958)
References are being made to The Bible, Mark 5:2-5, the man in the tombs. (See Bible references.)
James Mangold et al. - Girl, Interrupted (Faber and Faber/2001)
Adapted from Girl, Interrupted, the movie. (See Movie references.)
Laurie Halse Anderson - Speak (Farrar Straus & Giroux/1999)
Teenager Melinda self injures.
Gordon Houghton - The Dinner Party (Transworld Publishers Ltd/1998)
"The narrator of .. The Dinner Party, is a compulsive self-mutilator. His is a grossly exaggerated and atypical form of the cutting performed by many self-harmers." - Gordon Houghton
Piers Anthony - Virtual Mode (Virtual Mode Series, Book 1) (Putnam Pub Group/1991)
Self injurer features as the heroine of the book.
Poppy Z. Brite - Lost Souls (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group/1992)
"With the pen's tip he jabbed at his wrist until a bead of blood appeared, bright red against his pale think skin, with a prick of light form the lamp shining in it. .. His blood made a trickling path down the inside of his forearm, staining the fine invisible hairs, covering some of his old scars, leaving some of their razor-tracery exposed." (p. 26)
Wally Lamb - She's Come Undone (Scribner/1999)
"I licked my palm and held it to the hot iron. .. The skin hissed on contact; the seeping heat made my hand shake. I held it there. My ring became a circle of deeper pain." (p. 143)
"I held the scalloped blade against my wrist and passed it across. Once, twice - but lightly. The third time, it made a scratch. I saw it more than felt it. The thin red line of blood took me by surprise."
(p. 229)
Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus! (Flamingo/2003)
"I was walking down at the mall, and suddenly I started hitting myself in
the head because I thought I could bash away the feelings. And the thing
is, everybody in the mall looked as if they knew what I was doing, and no
one flipped out." (p. 25)
Rebbecca Ray - Pure (Avalon Travel Publications/2000)
A teenage girl falls into despair during a relationship with an older man and resorts to self-injury.
John Neufeld - Lisa, Bright and Dark: A Novel (New American Library/1995)
Teenage girl self injures.