Perhaps most depressing are the testimonies of those who kill, maim and destroy to feel a twisted sense of celebrity or power.
"From a writer's point of view, it was an ideal childhood," she told the psychiatrist Anthony Clare: she had felt "utterly twisted and tormented by the situation", which later impelled her to write it down.
That's been a debate ever since I've been in the arts and you have those moments when you feel bitter and twisted and go... arghhh.
Only Dennis Cooper could make a book this black and twisted feel so pleasant.
For prom-going LGBTQ teens, the high school ritual can sometimes feel like a twisted "Mean Girls" plotline where spiteful overlords try to dictate what they can wear, who they can hang with and how they can behave.
"It felt like a twisted ankle," Beatty said.
The marvellous fable at the heart of it feels like a twisted fairy tale (Dickens was friends with Hans Christian Andersen, who showed up at Dickens's country house, in 1857, and refused to leave for five weeks).
Smith has since backpedalled on the story that it was inspired by a dream he'd had as a little boy about being lost in the woods, but there is still something about it that feels like a twisted fairy tale: the organ's ghoulish murmur, the ghostly guitars, the sudden flashes of synthesiser.
Other times, it feels like a twisted version of Seinfeld: you find yourself nodding in agreement as Limmy points out the oddities of everyday life – except instead of a sarcastic New York standup comic, he plays a recovering drug addict or the host of a call-in show who dresses as some sort of mythical creature.
It felt like a twisted version of the classic scene of paternal neglect wherein a child waits expectantly on his front steps with a fishing pole for his absentee father to arrive … only in this version, the father shows up and implicates the son in a criminal conspiracy.
