The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Oh that fucking thing.
Edit: wait so what exactly is the point of this?
It's supposed to make you feel very weird because it is innate tribal behaviour that is not very far from the surface. Individual vs group, traditions, rituals, sacrifice, and the perverse gratitude that you are the survivor etc.
Read it then go read Facebook for a bit...you start to see people for what they are. Panicky, social, tribal animals.
Came here to say this. Now I have to dig even deeper into my high school trauma to find something else, thanks. 🤣
Was gonna say this. Fucked me up for a bit after I read it.
Flowers for Algernon, that was thought provoking but also way too heavy for a 7th grade English class.
This shit made me fucking sob, I was also in seventh grade. I came to this comment section to mention it. Unforgettable
Jesus Christ. I read that aged 27 and cried like a baby. Way too heavy for grade school.
That was 5th grade for me. I still wonder what that teacher was thinking.
Same here. We read FFA, The Veldt, The Tell Tale Heart, All Summer in a Day, and a few other short stories in some "advanced readers class," that we had to go to the library once a week to attend.
I think they were trying to fuck up all the smart kids.
Was making sure this had a mention. This was brutal to read in 6th grade at 10 in the morning.
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
Tap for spoiler
It’s written as journal entries by a woman who may or may not have been insane before she got locked in an asylum or possibly just a room in her house by her husband. There’s a woman in the wallpaper who creepily crawls along the wall but actually it’s her shadow because she’s the creepy woman crawling around the room and rubbing up against the wall. Of course you don’t really know this until she starts really sounding crazy and starts ripping up the wallpaper trying to free the woman in the walls. In the end her husband returns home and either he faints or she fucking murders him with the blade she uses to sharpen her pencil. The book ends with her thinking she’s been freed, not by escaping through the now unlocked door but by entering the yellow wallpaper. There’s also a creepy film adaptation we watched that was… unsettling.
It was quite scarring for most of the kids in my 7th grade class.
Also I’ve only just now realized that wallpaper back then could have contained arsenic so going insane from being in contact with it constantly enough to stain your skin is a very real possibility.
The Yellow Wallpaper caused my first panic attack (not to knock the story itself; it's an important feminist work)
The scariest part for me was that >!her husband is a doctor. She has stereotypical postpartum depression, but her husband's idea of "helping her get healthy" is to lock her in an empty room, alone, and forbid her from doing anything, including writing. But she can have all the air she wants! !<
!Everyone around her thinks they're helping while actively making her life worse.!<
Came here to say this. Fucking traumatising.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin is the one that came to mind for me.
Thank you for linking it. I really enjoyed reading it.
The Hatchet when he kills the rabbit.
My 4th grade teacher read a chapter to the class every day, same with the sequel. I specifically remember the part where he was standing outside naked in winter and some tree bark just kinda exploded, and he was freaking out trying to decide if the freezing bark caused it to expand and explode or if a hunter was out there shooting bullets at him. Also, the part where he finds an orange-drink packet in the survival supplies of the plane and describes the taste of it.
Edit: I think the tree bark part was in the sequel, Brian's Winter.
The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury.
They didn't make everyone read it though, just us "gifted/advanced" kids. It was one of several short stories that were in a special program book that I had to read.
I still think those kids were brats.
Edit: just looked it up and this was supposed to be 9th grade English??? We fucking had to read that as 5th graders.
Edit 2: I need to stop thinking about this, they also made us read All Summer in a Day, Flowers for Algernon, and The Tell Tale Heart in that class
I also took the "fucked up stories for smart kids" class
This was the one. Every once in a while my brain just says "hey, remember that fucked up story where the kids had a smart room that became whatever they wanted and it spoiled them to the point they murdered their parents with lions? Wasn't that fucked up? Let's think about how fucked up it was for a while!"
It was 7th grade for me, but still, I can't believe we read that as kids.
Oh I was gonna call out All Summer in a Day cause holy fuck Ray Bradbury has some issues with kids..
I mean he is right too but damn those stories stick with you. And also did that and basically all the ones you pointed out as a "gifted class". Do you think they literally had just 1 syllabus for us weird kids for the whole nation to try and scare us back into line or what? Cause, seems like we all getting traumatized by stories of death and emotional torture at like 11 by the same stories.
I was in the “gifted/advanced” track too. Teachers saw this one of two ways. Half of them got the memo: you got extra interesting stuff to noodle through because we're all under-stimulated in a typical class. The others decided to just double your homework load and call it a day. At least the teachers in the first group had some interesting takes on brain teasers and reading material.
And on that note: I must have thought about Flowers for Algernon every week since I read it. Since the 90's. I'm tired, boss.
The Most Dangerous Game
Is Man... cala. Mancala, but where all the pieces are replaced with bits of TNT.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Leguin
We had to read a story in 10th grade about this family that's out on a road trip when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. A car pulls up and the driver steps out to assist the family. However, the grandmother (who up to this point was doing nothing but bitch and whine about everything) recognizes the stranger as a wanted criminal she saw on TV and stupidly points this out to everybody. Which naturally results in the entire family being executed one-by-one because they're now witnesses.
A whole family erased, just because granny couldn't keep her fat mouth shut for 5 minutes.
Hadn't read it before, so I just did. (It's only 13 pages)
!Not only did Grandma call out the misfit to everyone, she caused the car accident in multiple ways: Bringing a cat on the trip, directing the family down a dirt road to a place she misremembered from a different state, scaring the cat enough that it clawed her son, the driver, in the shoulder, causing the car to flip and THEN was willing to sell out her entire family to survive.!<
Fuck grandma.
Yeah, she was terrible throughout the whole story. Not one redeeming quality.
Well that summary's an uncomfortable parallel for modern events
Not short stories, but I have two books that I read in high school that have stuck with me more than most:
You read Where the Red Fern Grows in high school? We read it in fourth grade. It was pretty traumatizing. Great, but traumatizing.
I read Fahrenheit 451 and my ass takes everything way too literally so maybe that’s why I was able to handle it. I liked it as a story and kinda saw the deeper meaning, good book
"A modest proposal" by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it
Hmm, for short stories, it's probably "The Most Dangerous Game."
Plot with massive spoilers
MC is a big game hunter traveling by boat to the Amazon to hunt jaguar. He is warned by locals about a local island called Ship-Trap island. He falls overboard and swims to Ship-Trap island, where there's a big mansion inhabited by General Zaroff, another big game hunter. Zaroff explains that he got bored of hunting animals and set up the island to attract ships, and when a ship wrecks on the island, he gives the sailors a knife and a head start, and if they can survive 3 days, they are set free. Zaroff then sets off to hunt them with a small caliber pistol.
Plot happens, and at the end the MC makes it look like he committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. Zaroff returns home, and the MC is waiting for him in his bedroom. Zaroff congratulates him, but the MC says the hunt isn't over, and we see the MC sleeping in Zaroffs bed at the end of the story.
The themes are pretty disturbing if you stop to think about it, and even if you don't, there's a fair amount of violence.
Fuck yeah. Loved this short story.
If I hadn't been really into Tom Clancy novels, it probably would've scarred me for life. But I was already reading about terrorists trying to mass-genocide most of the planet (Rainbow Six) and assassins shooting people in the eyes at near-point blank (forget the specific book), so a little gore didn't phase me.
I remember a story about a dying woman who predicted that she would die when the last leaf of a plant outside her house falls. But the leaf actually did fall, and her friend put up a fake one there. The woman gets better but her friend dies because of pneumonia. This was from back when I was maybe 10-11yo and I remember it for some reason. I think the moral of the story is that willpower is strong, but idk about that ending.
The Library of Babel by Borges melted my brain as a teenager.
This one is SOOOOOO COOL though. Did not encounter it until I was in college
there is also a searchable website for that: libraryofbabel.info
A retiring teacher at our school had his class read a story that lit a fire under a bunch of parents. It was The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Direct link since the closing parenthesis breaks the formatting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story)
Fall of the House of usher
This one was a banger, my dad played it in the car on a roadtrip when I was like 10. Shit was fucked up
Usher II by Ray Bradbury!
the only thing I remember about that one is how verbose it was. sentences over 50 words long were not uncommon
Came here for this one.
Man, did it fuck me up. Existential incest insanity.
"The Darkness Out There" by Penelope Lively.
In short, a "nice old lady" tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.
I think it was there for the "the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy".
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce.
Came here to post this.
how about steinbecks the pearl
scarred for life from a 7th grade shortish story
1984 for me. This was back in the early 80's so the book was a bit of a deal at the time. So very very glad I was introduced to this book at such a young age. Disturbing, but a good preparation for the world I was going to be living in as an adult.
To Build a Fire by Jack London
It’s a simple story about a guy trying to build a fire.
Tap for spoiler
He fails to build said fire.
We had to read "The Call of the Wild" by the same author. Every few chapters the main character, a dog, would wax poetic for a few paragraphs about how addicting the warm, salty taste of human blood was in his mouth.
I had to read "Speak". It was basically a short story about a girl getting SA'd and then treated like crap by everyone till the last couple pages. I do not think it had the intended effect they were going for.
From high middle-high school timeframe, probably The Yellow Wallpaper, I just think about that one at least a few times a year. And I only read it the one time in school.
The less well known one I remember from elementary school was My Brother Sam is Dead. It's about a family during the American revolution, where the father just wants to stay out of all of it and live their lives, but the eldest son wants to join the revolution. The whole story is just the hardships the family has to go through after the son runs off with the only gun to fight and ends up dying, and how that affects the family and the youngest brother, who the story is told from the perspective of.
None of my friends remember My Brother Sam is Dead, but if I'm remembering right, the ending is kinda dark for a bunch of 3-5th graders.
Most of the stuff we read in class was fine, or we knew was going to be fucked up as it was Gifted and Talented class.
The book that fucked me at the time more than those was reading Maus. At like 12. And if I bring it up with mother, she'd say it was my fault for reading it, instead of, you know, maybe she should vet the book instead of going "oh cartoony of the holocaust, that's fine"
Holocaust was fine, every Hanukkah one of our 7 gifts works be a book, and you'd run out of noob holocaust books that relayed to judiasm real quick. But most were written for kids so.
Not Maus
read Maus a few months ago (as a 30 year old man) and it has hung over me like a dark cloud. I had to physically set the book down and walk away when it got to the diagrams of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, detailing how industrialized the extermination was. absolutely horrifying.
Which is why I don't recommend it to preteen me at all! I think it's extremely important now, but man. Not uh. Not to a kid.
Fun fact: Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, also created the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards.
The Veldt. Also, All Summer In A Day.
The one that stuck with me is The Cask of Amontillado.
The Cask of Amontillado.
I remember reading it, and seeing it as a metaphor for killing off an aspect of yourself, like being a drunk, no matter how long or hard the process is, and hoping that it will never come back to haunt you.
The names are quite similar and I was trying to sober up at the time; I wasn't going to admit to the grade 9 class the latter.
Montresor = Mon trésor is "my treasure"
Fortunato = the root word is "fortune"me too but thats because i had to read it like 5 times to even understand what happened in the story
In my fifth grade English class the four term themes were Civil War, Holocaust, dog books, and choose-your-own. For the first three units, my parents read all four options ahead of time and had me assigned to the least traumatizing. For the last term I picked Julie of the Wolves, a dog book disguised as a Wolf book; I'd always wondered why my second grade teacher suddenly stopped reading it to us at story time.
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
I was assigned The Westing Game no led than three times from K-12
My favorite report I wrote was when I got to pick Terry Pratchett's Night Watch in my dual-credit community college English course and the red pen in the margins of my report was all compliments
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
"The Veldt" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"? Those two stick with me due to two good readings of it.
The Veldt read by Leonard Nimoy and Tell-Tale Heart acted out by Vincent Price Part 1 and Part 2.
Ooh that's a good one. All of Vonnegut's stories have stuck with me. The first one I read was called Deadeye Dick, which I checked out from the library by chance because the title was funny to immature teenaged me. That sent me down the rabbit hole to read a bunch of other novels by him.
Not a bad trip. Funnily enough, DD is probably one of the few things I haven't read yet. I probably started work cat's cradle (pretty late).
Wow a lot more diverse than I was expecting, I figured 50% of these would be the tell-tale heart by Poe
I'm fairly sure I read that in high school. I took it as the man haunted by his own conscience, not at all traumatizing
Maybe I was older than the kids who were upset by it
It wasn't a short story, but a book that told a story in poems. The mc struggled with writing poetry and then he watched his dog get hit by a car and that made his poetry good or some shit. A room full of 5th graders wept. Book is called Love that Dog
We also read Old Yeller and cried collectively.
My 5th grade teacher loved that reoccurring theme, I guess? Dude was weird as hell.
When I was a kid the lady who ran a daycare out of her home that I attended would play the old yeller movie for us and it was probably our favorite film. I learned later from my mom that the secret is she conveniently ends the film before the ending so it's just a happy story about a good doggie
Man, what is it about teachers assigning books about dogs dying?
Ikr?
Well "love that dog" made me cry a little just now, so thanks for that.
You're welcome. I haven't read it in years because it's so sad. I have a copy sitting on my shelf because it's genuinely a good book, but I haven't cracked it open.
"The Cold Equations" kinda fucked me up not gonna lie.
Mine is the one where the soldier returns from WWI completely desensitized to murder and fucked in the head.
He starts stabbing little girls, just like in the war. "Poor people" by Móricz if anyone is interested.
if anyone is interested.
Nah I'm good 👍
Fucking hell.
There's a story called "Time Safari" that ends in a dude just straight up killing another dude. This was in a kid's literature book.
Also I think Casque of Amontillado is funny.
I thought that was called a Sound of Thunder. Because the last line went "there was a sound of thunder, then silence." Or something to that effect, heavily implying that the time safari employee killed the hunter who stepped off the trail and on to a butterfly.
I also remember that one of the results of stepping on the butterfly was that all English words were spelled fonetically (typo intentional), a "mistake" I would happily go back in time to commit.
I also remember this short story, the death of the butterfly also changed the results of an election.
(It probably was I read this story over 10 years ago)
I remember that. Either Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov.
Hunting party goes back in time to hunt dinosaurs right.
Huh I never realized how weird of a story that is to tell to kids
Don't even get me started on a tall tale heart or that one story about this dude fantasizing about escaping while getting hanged
“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel García Márquez would have been that, but it lost its impact because my generation associates the name Esteban with the silly bellhop from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
I’ve been trying to find this ridiculous sci-fi story I read in elementary school. I thought it was Ray Bradbury but then I recalled it was, I believe, from a collection edited by and/or with a foreword by Bradbury.
The scenario was that people in the future had become so dependent on mechanized transportation that their legs atrophied. Walking around normally was seen as very strange as everyone used these hovering personal transport devices. I think the story basically just described the protagonist walking around town and taking strolls at night and how odd everyone else thought it was.
Archive.org's scan of it if you want to read it again.
Thanks! I feel like I might have conflated two stories though. The Pedestrian is definitely the one in the second half of what I described. I’m not sure about the first part of what I recounted though, it could have been a different story. I’ll have to read it and check it out.
Yeah, reading it, I definitely mixed the two. The first one I was thinking of for sure had a lengthy very sci-fi set-and-setting exposition where it explained that people flew around in hovering vehicles and their legs had atrophied. I can't remember the plot or anything that happened in the story, though, only that, so I think I just imagined that it had the plot of this Bradbury story. I've been wondering about it for a long time... I read it over 40 years ago and it was in a collection of stories probably published in the 60s.
“The Savage Mouth” by Komatsu Sakyou, which involves
Tap for spoiler
A man eating himself in a locked hotel room and relishing every bite. Very body horror, much terrifying, cops rule it a homicide
Or “Cogwheels” by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, which
Tap for spoiler
ends abruptly with the author’s real-world suicide. Story is the thinnest veneer of fiction, and at some point I think he just stopped writing a story and was trying therapy on a page, then gave the fuck up on everything.
Tap for autocannibalism, I guess
There was a short story I read by one of the great Russian authors (name escapes me atm). A young man made a bet with a banker that he would spend 10 years in solitary confinement and be provided with any reading material he asked for. If he could endure it the whole 10 years, the banker would reward him with a handsome amount of money.
Tap for spoiler
He sticks it out for nearly the entire period and leaves the night before the time is up.
Fantastic story, thought about it pretty regularly throughout college.
If this rings any bells, I'd love to be reminded of the name!
Edit: Nvm, I found it! The Bet by Anton Chekhov
There was a Twilight Zone episode like this. Rich person bets person 2 can't speak for some time. Maybe a year. The rich person tries to let person 2 out of the bet, but >!person 2 cut our his tongue or something!< So he wouldn't lose. Rich person >!didn't have the money to pay though!<.
A Modest Proposal was quite memorable
A Worn Path, The Test, and a story I haven't been able to find about kids who go into a carnival fun house but it's really set up to kill them (vats of acid, snakes hanging from the ceiling).
This was 6th grade. I seemed like all the short stories in middle school made the Tell Tale Heart seem cheerful.
And Bartleby, the Scrivener.
I prefer not to
The one that sticks with me is called "the cold equations", and it's about a pilot flying a ship through space and discovering he has a young girl stowing away on board. Since he only has enough fuel to get to his destination if the ship weighs a very specific amount, he has to decide whether or not to jettison the girl out the airlock. I remember liking it, but I've never forgotten how emotional it was to read.
An occurrence at owl creek bridge - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/375
And then “The Cold Equations” https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations/
Both are downers and have stuck with me for 35 years
The Cold Equations
FuUUUuuUkk I found that one on accident at 9 years old digging through my mother's old sci fi collection looking for a Ray Bradbury book.
I think it was the first moment I actually considered mortality in a personal and universal context. The chilling realization that we will all die, and most of the time it will be pointless and arbitrary and with no narrative or inherent justice.
Still really haven't gotten over it decades later, and a lot of my worldview has been affected by it, I believe for the better.
Still if had a choice, I'd rather have waited to read that till 16 at least
Yeppppp, I feel that
I remember reading The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty sometime in late middle school, I wanna say.
teacher let us know after that it was about the Irish civil war, and that things similar to the story had actually happened.
This is the exact story that came to mind when I read the post. This one stuck with me for sure.
For me that is 'The Dreams in the Witch House', but that was 100% self inflicted.
This one seriously made adult me very uneasy.
Same answer i had on tumblr.
The Jaunt
Longer than you think!
It's forever in there! 🤩
If you've never read the story that inspired it, "The stars my destination", I highly recommend it. In that some (most?) people can jaunt at will.
A separate peace was a book we got in highschool where a kid possibly has homosexual feelings for another and throws him out of a tree which shatters his leg and eventually kills him.
Yup. Real fuckin weird one. I'm sure there was a point but I never got it.
o k then...
Huuuuuge paraphrase there but the book is insane and while the kid with the broken leg is away the one who knocked him out of the tree starts wearing the one with the broken leg's clothes and all kinds of weird shit
I still often think about "Flowers for Algernon."
I don't think about it much anymore but I cried at the end, which is a rare occurrence for me
The Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst
This one stuck with me way more than others on here. It horrified me as a middle schooler.
I liked The Yellow Wallpaper
It wasn't in English class but I will never forget a book we read in another class I can't remember the subject of that class for some reason. The book was "A Child Called It" that just describes horrid child abuse.
Something I read in history class and not English lit: Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross.
Most American students learn extremely little about how truly horrific the Holocaust was outside of the concentration camps and medical experimentation. This is a book about local Jews being brutally murdered by their own neighbors in Poland. Not by Nazis. Just your average person.
It was really upsetting but enlightening. Everyone should know about the atrocities that occurred throughout so much of Europe during that time.
Yeah, my dad keeps telling me to read that one. I'm like, no.
Earliest short story I can remember is Monsters are Due on Maple Street in middle school. Didn't quite get the historical context at the time. But the theme of rampant senseless paranoia stuck with me.
Was that a short story before Twilight Zone or was it adapted into from Twilight Zone episode later?
Before Twilight Zone.
This was the short story that came to mind for me as well. And I'm only now realizing it was about the red scare?
The short story that sticks with me from junior high, that I have not been able to track down in the last 40 years or so, was if I remember right another lottery style tale. I think it was just the husband and the one chosen was eaten by the rest of the community - the twist was that the eatee got to choose the method of preparation, and in the story, he chose to be served raw. Anyone recall this story? I'd love to track it down.
What a great twist. I've had solid success with ChatGPT for stuff like that in the past so put your description in and it couldn't come up with anything.
It did give some useful information which I can paste in here if you don't have an account?
Mostly it was asking if you could remember any other detail like character names, setting or even tone of the writing.
I tried the same thing, no luck. It was in 7th grade if I remember correctly - and that was 1984 for me so it's been a minute. :)
The idea of choosing being served raw should be enough to track it down, and I've occasionally searched for it over the years, but...
A Child Called It and The Lost Boy by David Pelzer. That did some heavy desensitization in the future.
Is no one going to say they don’t have this experience? I can’t remember a single short story I read in any English or literature class ever. I can barely remember any of the books I was forced to read. On the contrary I can remember numerous books I was not forced to read, like Hitchhikers guide.
I remember a few snippets. Hatchet in fifth grade. The outsiders at some point. High school English is mostly blank until senio year at a new school. We did a whole thing on middle English and Chaucer which is probably why I remember.
OH MYGOD I READ HATCHET TOOOOOOOOO
I remember getting yelled at in year 8 for reading a year 11 book (To Kill A Mockingbird), that's all. The book they wanted me to read was boring and I have no idea what it was called.
Touching Spirit Bear
I vividly remember passage describing in great detail of the main character nearly and slowly dying on the island. he was covered with mosquitos and the book dives headfirst into describing in great detail of this guy chewing into a live mouse/rat and then swallowing it.
A Rose for Emily.
It was about some old lady hermit. She had some relationship with the town and after she died they went into her house. >!Emily had been sleeping next to the corpse of her dead husband for probably decades!<.
"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.’’
I was behind in my literature class in like, 7th grade. The books were boring as hell and I couldn't make myself read the chapters at night.
Our teacher gave us a list of bonus titles to catch up for like, 1.5x the points of a normal book, so I jumped on the first one on the list.
I don't remember the title of the book unfortunately, but about one or two chapters or so, the either the main character or their neighbor or something...
Gruesome
...snaps the head of their cat off while petting it
Proceeded to put the book down and hand it back into the teacher and ask for a different one. I don't think she was aware of the content of the book
Of Mice and Men? But I think it was a rabbit usually.
No, that was one of our main books. This was something pretty obscure, I've never seen anyone mention it and I don't really remember any more details than that off the top of my head
The Book of Sand. Not fucked up, just mind-blowing.
This was going to be my answer. Except we didn't even read it as a class. We were doing some other boring stuff and I was flipping randomly through our textbook, where I found it and read it. I still think about it, and sometimes use it in RPGs.
It would've also been super appropriate if I could never find it again in the textbook, but I can't remember if that's true.
Same! And as a matter of fact, I did go for years without finding it again before I came across this website. Borges makes the world a little more magical, obviously.
I remember "To Build a Fire" and another one I can't name about a sniper duel during the Irish Civil War. The ending was wild.
Edit: Was literally called The Sniper feel kinda dumb about that.
Literally called "The Sniper" by Liam O'flaherty
Yeah I looked it up after posting this and found the title. I meant to edit my comment with the name but forgot.
i wasn't assigned it but i would read all the stories in my english book instead of whatever i was supposed to be doing and 'The Red Pony' burned its way into my brain forever. I probably read it in junior high? i dunno. That poor pony.
"A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka. The whole thing is just one disturbing nightmare.
Just read the synopsis on Wikipedia. Holy fuck - Kafka really was something else...and very troubled.
What did I just read? It just seemed so incoherent.
Nobody else for Equus?
shudders
There Will Come Soft Rains
Someone already said it, but The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
The Bet, by Anton Chekov. That story has given me my existentialism
I don’t remember the name of the short story, but I remember that it was about a town that abused someone they kept in a dungeon, and through their abuse they stayed unified. The teacher said it was a lesson in utilitarianism.
Maybe The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursala McGuin?
Definitely that one.
I was a senior in high school when we read the short story "Rape Fantasies" by Margaret Atwood out loud in class. I was 18 and still not ready for it.
Jesus...
Top of mind for this subject: Flowers for Algernon.
Of Mice and Men might qualify, but weighs in at 100 pages. I'm not sure what the threshold is for "short."
On my own time in High-school, I read: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream.
The Chaser by John Collier… that ending … still gives me chills
Blood Music absolutely terrified me as a freshman in high school
I'm jealous you got to read Blood Music in high school. Though Chrysalids was also great and turned me into a long time sci-fi fan. Despite the horribly hypocritical ending.
Harrison Bergeron, in like 7th grade
The one that sticks out for me is On The Sidewalk Bleeding. Wasn't even the most effed up thing we read in 9th grade, just had the most memorable name.
Been looking for this book for a long time, maybe someone here can help? It was in french, no idea if it was ever translated. The whole story is a guy in room alone with his dad, the dad is in a coma and expected to die (I believe the familly decided to unplug him). The guy is bitching to his dad, telling him how much he hates him for being an abusive asshole or something. It was really crude and emotonial. At the end, instead of dying when he's unplugged, the dad wakes up. Maybe it was not a novel, but a part of a book, and maybe the title had the work Duck in it.
And then my dad woke up and savagely beat me with jumper cables
i figured the tweet was about The Lotterry and everyone would go "Oh it's obviously a tweet about The Lottery" but nope.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. Someone did a great adaptation to film as well.
For me the school book short story that grabbed me was The Smallest Dragonboy by Anne McCaffrey. Not super scary, just sticky.
That one with the little girl and mr beasly her "imaginary" friend
- "Gentlemen, your verdict" by Michael Bruce - trolley problem on a submarine (attention: weird vertical formatting)
- "Just Lather, That's All" by Hernando Téllez" - a barber during a civil war
The second one actually gave me half of a mental breakdown, but not because it was too violent for me.
One analysis that I read made the exact opposite conclusion that I made, and it showed me this: in the subject of English, two diametrically opposed points can both be equally correct! Nothing is fixed! Reality is mutable!Also The Lottery, The Veldt, Harrison Bergeron (which others have already mentioned)
Alan and Naomi by Myron Levoy
It's a novel, but not a very long one.
The Tell Tale Heart.
Though it did spark a lifetime interest in video games featuring necromantic main characters.
My senior year in high school, my English teacher started the year by having us turn in a list of all of the books we had read. My list was much longer than most of my classmates. He then assigned us books to read and report on based on some criteria (hypothesis: books that would make us miserable). I got assigned two existentialist plays, "Waiting for Godot" and "No Exit." I think those plays did permanent damage to my psyche.
(Sidenote: a classmate who didn't read very much got assigned Virginia Wolff. She thought it very unfair that I only had to rea d couple of plays.)
During online school we had to read about the "Edmund Fitzgerald" and there was a cringy song too. We were constantly being accused of skipping classes because zoom was under too much load and never loading, or would make 2 separate calls for some reason. Whole society under collapse and we had to uproot all of education just so we could learn that a fucking boat sank. THATS ALL THE UNIT WAS. Just a stupid boat sinking.
My cousin was a teacher during COVID, working in rural Australia.
There wasn't enough internet there for video, there was barely enough for email. So he was driving to a different student's house each day and teaching one kid at a time
I think he was only responsible for a handful of kids
That was the busiest time at work for me, I work in government information technology and my team was delivering a system to help businesses keep paying their locked down at home staff. We had to work in the office, in a place designed to hold a thousand people, but only twenty of us were there, until we were enabled to work from home
COVID was worse than any fiction I ever read. So many people died. So many people live-blogged their own deaths
wow that's a lot worse than my story of a stupid boat, crazy that there are still people that don't have stable Internet.
The egg by Andy Weir
Snow Fox in second grade had the entire class sobbing.
gonna show my age here but the novel I am David by Anne Holm is still with me several decades after reading it for English Lit.
Harrison Bergeron
Zapped while zipping...
Not in english, but we read Anne Frank's Diary in grade 8, Andorra by Max Frisch in grade 9 or 10.
But the most disturbing was "Der Sandmann" in grade 11 and "Der gelbe Vogel" (originally "Alan and Naomi") in grade 9.
