Quote:
Originally Posted by Winters_Sorrow  One of the nastiest torture devices I ever saw, just for it's gruesome horribleness, (who thinks up this stuff??  ) was something I saw in the London Dungeons - thankfully only an exhibit these days - and was a cage placed on the lower torso of the subject, who was strapped down, into which starving rats were placed. Then hot coals were put on top of the cage which a) heated the metal causing extreme pain and b) encouraged the rats to seek escape through the only 'soft' wall of their cage - i.e. burrowing through the subject. |
That was in George Orwell's 1984.
I agree with the poster who said that it is easy to turn a torture scene into pornography - a particularly sick form of pornography (and before anyone says I'm being prudish, I've actually written erotica for publication, but that's not what I'm talking about).
I think for a good torture scene you need to think of something which is psychologically difficult to read, rather than just going for the obvious i.e. gore. Actually, I heard something on the news recently that was so horrible, it stuck in my brain for days - it happened in real life, during the Ruanda civil war, a woman was forced to hang her own baby. A truly chilling and awful act. I don't think a person who did such a thing would ever be quite whole again.
I don't know about the style of your novel, and what you're looking for, but something that causes your reader to have a cold chill down their back, rather than just reaching for a bucket (or worse - getting turned-on !), will be something that would have real impact.