Plot: French teenagers run amuck, shed inhibitions, have sex in weird places, kill people, the usual.

Why it's on the list: Bataille's obscene novella is a surrealistic blend of eggs, eyeballs and bodily fluids, the literary equivalent of a depraved Dalí or Bosch painting. The cover blurb states that it is a "legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden, obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes." Those crazy French.

Excerpt: She had no qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing.

Simone meanwhile amused herself by slipping the eye into the profound crevice of her ass...she tried to keep the eye there simply by squeezing her buttocks together. But all at once, it zoomed out like a pit squooshed from a cherry, and dropped on the thin belly of the corpse, an inch or so from the cock.

In the meantime, I had let Sir Edmond undress me, so that I could pounce stark naked on the crunching body of the girl; my entire cock vanished at one lunge into the hairy crevice, and I fucked her hard while Sir Edmond played with the eye, rolling it, in between the contortions of our bodies, on the skin of our bellies and breasts. For an instant, the eye was trapped between our navels.

"Put it in my ass, Sir Edmond." Simone shouted.