A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Alex, a teenage thug narrating in invented slang, is reformed by the state through the Ludovico Technique: an injection plus forced viewing of violent films until even the thought of violence makes him ill. The government is delighted with the result. Burgess's question is whether goodness that has been engineered, with choice removed, is goodness at all, and whether a state that can do this to its worst citizen can do it to anyone. That makes it a rare dystopia that unsettles law-and-order readers and liberal reformers alike. The slang takes twenty pages to settle in; after that it becomes part of the pleasure.