The Songs of Maldoror

The book opens by warning you off: turn back now, it says, unless your nerve can survive what follows. Comte de Lautréamont's Maldoror ignores its own warning and pulls you through anyway, canto after canto, narrated by a being who wars on God, tortures the innocent for sport, and one night in a storm finds his truest kin not in any man but in a shark, and couples with it in the waves, two monsters recognizing their own cruelty in each other.