What would you pick?
What would you pick?
151 comments
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It was not in English... But we had to read the golden egg. Story about a guy who s girl is missing. He keeps looking for her. Has driems about them being close together but not seeing the other. . At the end he finds a guy who sais he can do the same to him as he did to the girlfriend. Last you know he is like burried..
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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was the one that did it for me.
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guy maupassant? e.g. the necklace
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Oh man, let's talk about short stories that defined my taste in literature!
- To Build A Fire: definitely built a fascination in me of the morbid and got me way more into survivalism than quick sand ever did. I live in a cold place too and that put it well into perspective how dangerous that can be.
- The Sniper: This was my start into war literature, and what a good start. I keep coming back to this one when I hear people talk about a civil war in the US. It's more unsettling now than ever before.
- The Lottery. How couldn't that be on the list?
- Cask of Amontillado: big vibes. Poe made me goth-brained no doubt.
Our school also had us read Robert Frost. Really great way to introduce kids to the idea that 'some folks just kinda wanna die all the time'. That and why child labor laws are good and important.
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Guts by chuck palahniuk.
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did you hold your breath?
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I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. If comics count, The Enigma of Amigara Fault.
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Short stories:
- Flowers for Algernon
- I have no mouth and I must scream
Short-ish:
- Of mice and men
- Brave new world
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Except I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, my highschool definitely made us read those.
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"Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch" still haunts me...
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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
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We actually had to read that for our English course. What still haunts me is how weird random German words look in an English book. Like they're not supposed to be there
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Random shitposts on the internet have wiped away all the trauma I got from anything I read in school.
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The Dweller in the Gulf by Clark Ashton Smith.
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Hardfought, by Greg Bear. Sci-fi set in the far future, spoken with a military patois that is difficult to understand but is meant to highlight the alienness of the forever war that the story takes place in. Themes upon themes fifteen-plus layers deep, even though this is only a novella.
I have something north of 3,000 volumes in my library, and if I was to pick the most influential fiction story of my life, this would be it. I had difficulty reading it as a teenager who was typically reading at a university level while in high school, so it’s going to take serious effort by most to truly benefit from it. But when you finally understand those themes… holy shit.
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The cold equations
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I remember having read this one as a child in elementary school. Had to keep the anthology book it was in checked out for several months, as I kept re-reading it trying to grapple with the ethics of the story. It was brutal for a 10yo.
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Maybe not disturbing enough, but the short story that really stuck with me was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_to_the_Slaughter
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I don't know about scary, but I would assign Teddy by J. D. Salinger.
Also, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.
Another one I really like that I feel like nobody else has ever read is: After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned by Dave Eggers (it's written from a dog's POV)
I guess this is more "short stories that I like" lol
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After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned by Dave Eggars (it’s written from a dog’s POV)
Man, the title and brief synopsis has been enough to fuck up my day, thanks.
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It's actually more fun than you'd expect lol
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We had to read 'Der Vorleser' in which a 15 year old boy gets into a relationship with a 36 year old woman. A strange choice to force kids about that age to read (we were a bit older than 15, I think. But still...)
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Or they become President of France
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Turkish elementary-school books.
Wanna read about a small girl getting beat up by her dad and kicked out before freezing to death as she vividly imagines her dead grandma and lighting matchsticks to prolong her suffering for 20 pages?
I think author was either Russian or Danish. Still no clue why that was a required read at age of 7 in my school.
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not hans christian Anderson's "little matchstick girl"?
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It is a depressing storie. Even while it has a she is better now - end
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Yeah, sounds like a variation of that. Or maybe even the inspiration for it, who knows.
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The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Was on my way to post this. Revisited in ethics 101 in college, and again in ethics in technology(uni). 'Harm reduction' is the answer you are looking for, because no matter how perfect you think your ethic framework is, nature and bad actors will never respect it or take responsibility. Reality mocks philosophy's 'utopias.'
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I like the other interpretation, where the writer inserts the suffering so you the reader would find it more believable because you've been conditioned to accept that we can't have a good society without making at least some people suffer for it.
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Somebody always suffers in a utopia. That's why othering people is the first step in taking away rights. Gestures very loudly at current events
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We read this in university computer science ethics. It gets you thinking, which is good.
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High school teacher had us read Survivor Type - thus began my love for stephen king
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"Computers Don't Argue" by Gordon Dickson. Guy gets shipped the wrong book by a book club, tries to return it, gets sent to a collections agency, and things spiral completely out of control from there. It's lived rent-free in my head since I read it years ago. (apologies for the mobile-unfriendly format, this is the only source I know for this story) https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133
"Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow is a more up-to-date discussion of the same kind of power dynamics though. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/
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A Modest Proposal traumatized one girl in my class.
We all had to write our own versions, trade them randomly, and read them aloud. She ended up with mine: Have the death row inmates build a prison on the moon, then turn off their air supply to complete their sentence. (Wrote it before I'd read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)
She finished reading, and exclaimed "What is WRONG with you!?" She knew it was mine because of how hard I was laughing at her panic.
I was outdone by the quiet girl who included a recipe for "kitten kurry" in her essay though. I really should have tried to get with her, lol.
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If we're talking the one by Dr. Johnathan Swift, about selling poor people babies and kids for food, then I absolutely agree. I just found and read it on Gutenberg and it was a little disturbing, in an interesting but absolutely messed up way.
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Peak satire
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That's the one! It was an honors English class & the topic for the week was satire. The teacher had print copies of The Onion that were being passed around the class and I was cracking up the whole time.
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We read The Yellow Wallpaper and that was pretty effed.
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Came here to say this. The Yellow Wallpaper is definitely unsettling.
Either that or any of Shirley Jackson's short stories.
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Ha ha, great minds, I've just said The Lottery!
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My freshman college English prof assigned House of Leaves.
It was awesome watching the preppy kids descend into madness
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That is not a short story lol
Crazy book though.
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That book drove me to madness, not because of the creepy content but just because there was so much going on in the endnotes. I'm compulsive about reading all the footnotes and endnotes in anything I read, but I generally hate having to keep one finger in the page I'm on in the main text while reading through the notes in their tiny font (e-readers are a godsend to me, as long as they handle notes decently, which not all of them do). I had a hardback copy of House of Leaves so it was a bit of a physical ordeal and my hands hurt all the time.
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"On the Quay at Smyrna" by Ernest Hemingway. A very short read, almost a vignette, but it left me depressed. Too on the nose for the current world situation.
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The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
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That one became a meme, which I loved
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Great story, but I think I read this one in school
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Into the Wild (1996) is a popular pick for something both scarring but also uncontroversial.
Less exciting would be The Pinballs (1976).
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Had to look this up, because I briefly thought you were referring to "Pinball, 1973" by Haruki Murakami.
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Someone else mentioned Flowers for Algernon, so mine will be ģWhere the Red Fern Grows_. Such an emotional roller coaster.
And while I won't downplay those K-12 books, I think anyone who's ever taken a Russian Literature class in college will agree that Russian authors are next level for depressing novels. Few things compare to the bleak, gray, petty, inescapable, hopeless lives portrayed by authors like Sologub, and while English translations would certainly be accessible to high school students, I'm really glad they don't include them.
Unless someone's going to say they were given The Petty Demon as a reading assignment in high school.
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A textbook on integral calculus
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That'a fair. We have to learn how to read textbooks and manuals at some point.
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I only recently discovered Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, but I think that would need to be in the conversation.
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This is the best answer. Iirc it was actually printed in one of my HS English books, and is actually a short story.
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I discovered the book after the residents of Springfield went mad trying to win the local lottery, only to discover a chilling tale of conformity gone mad.
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Still think about this from HS. Years later. Such a good one.
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I read that in 9th grade and it didn't phase or really scare me. In my case, I think it's because I was used to more violent video games.
Either way, I would agree. Was a pretty good story, all things considered.
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In my highschool German class we read Kafkas "Metamorphosis", it gave me weird dreams for weeks.
In a literary sense it's a masterpiece, simple yet intricate. The first sentence alone is genius :
"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt"
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect".
No backstory, no explanation, the reader is left with the same confusion as the characters. Then the societal observations he weaves in are sharp yet puzzling.
I recommend it highly, but be prepared for strangeness and being left with an uneasy feeling.
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Kafka's story is crazy... He wrote all this amazing shit, but refused to publish it. His dying wish to his best friend was to destroy all of his work. Kafka died penniless.
His friend read the work, and was so blown away that he defied his best friend's dying wish, and published his work.
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He was very self critical so he refused to publish most of his work, but he was still published and acknowledged during his lifetime although not with the world fame he has now, other famous German speaking authors mention and acknowledge his work during the 20s. Also he died very young, so most of his work was unfinished.
Some argue that, after he wrote "The judgement" in just 8 hours one night, a fiery explosion of creativity and geniality, he was often disillusioned with the slow and exhausting progress most of his other work made.
A lot of his work was unpublished and unfinished until his friend Max Brod published it posthumously against his wishes.
That he died penniless can be described as an exaggeration, he was very successful in his daytime job, although he was not fond of it. But he never managed to earn a living as a writer, so much is true.
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I also found "Metamorphosis" disturbing, until I watched Home Movies' take on it. "I got little tiny BUG FEET / I don't really know what BUGS EAT".
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You should read Kafka's "The Castle" if you haven't. It's a surreal book about navigating an insane bureaucracy. It hit me harder than Metamorphosis, personally.
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Will absolutely do, after writing this comment I pulled out Metamorphosis and read the first couple pages again and it's just so good. Like I said the societal observations are so sharp, I am German native and even more than a hundred years later it is still on point, everybody trying to bring a rational attitude in a otherwise completely absurd situation.
It reminds me a little of the German comedian Loriot, he also had a way of describing exactly that. There is a Loriot sketch where a man enters a bathroom in a hotel, to get a bath, just to find another man sitting in the bathtub. So he gets into the bathtub with him and they start to argue with each other about if they want to have water now and later about if the rubber ducky can also join in the tub, without ever really addressing that they are together in a bathtub. All the while they stay perfectly polite with each other, using each other's full names and titles (Herr Müller-Lüdenscheid! I insist that you water the duck now! - Herr Doktor Knöbel, my duck won't share the tub with you!). It is so absurd it brings me to tears laughing.
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That's what I loved about it is that it took itself seriously. How people realistically responded to what happened to Gregor
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death of a salesman. making depressed highschoolers read that while some of them already may be considering suicide just about did a few of us in. also the plot just sucks.
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I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier
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That name sounds lovely
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Damn near anything Ray Bradbury wrote. I swear he just wanted to traumatize anyone that read any of his work.
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That short story about the automated house that keeps going even though everybody is dead fucked me up pretty good. I can't remember whether that was part of the martian chronicles or not.
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There Will Come Soft Rains
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Oh my God thank you. I'd been trying to think back to an animated short story about a house with no living humans going about it's programmed life that I saw in school in the 80s. On and off for the last 20 years I've searched for Asimov, Clarke, even thinking maybe it was Adams, never considered it was Bradbury. There will come soft rains. 20 years!
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Mine was all summer in a day. I know the feeling.
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I must need to read more, last short stories I read (maybe listened) were relatively tame about being on Mars I think, so possibly not the right collection. Maybe I didn't quite get their message either. Did listen to Something this way comes, which has its disturbing parts but not overly but nicely geared for a younger audience for sure. That said I started reading Stephen King and watching horror movies much younger than is probably expected, think first Nightmare on Elm Street was before 10 heh, King books were later of course.
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Shoot, you beat me to it. I was going to recommend The Long Rain, which I read when I was 12 or so and it certainly traumatized me. (I love it now though)
The entire collection is fantastic though. I highly recommend!!
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I read Flowers for Algernon as an adult. It hit me hard. I have since heard that it is read i school many places in the US.
Edit: I've only read the novel he wrote based on the short story, but I guess the short story is equally as good since it won the Hugo award while the novel won the nebula award.
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I've just read the short story now for the first time.
It's amazing.
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Glad you liked it
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Yep, while I dont remember the book, I remember reading it
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It's really good. I've recommended it to many people before and every one who read it loved it. But it kind of leaves you with a bruised soul for a while after you're done.
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Come and See by Soviet Union
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All Summer in a Day isn’t necessarily scary, but reading it in 6th grade felt like a real eye opener on just how evil people can be, especially when they don’t even understand that they are.
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SCP-093.
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Asimov's Breeds There a Man ...?
A suicidal genius figures out the relationship between his brilliance and his mental health.
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Guts - Chuck Palahniuk
When someone mentioned it, I was like "it's just a story, in a book, and I've read some shit. How bad can it be?" Well, it can be really bad, I wanted to unread it. The memory is fading now, but I still have an "ugh" feeling-
If I described the texture, you'd never eat calimari again.
(or something like that)
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The horrors of one’s own mind vastly outweigh the horrors found on screens, imo.
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I read that 25 years ago and instantly regretted it
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The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
https://archive.org/details/coldequationsoth0000godw
Or
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
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Many people have a visceral reaction to Palahniuk’s Guts, but it never hit me particularly hard. That and the underage incest impreg fantasies, it was always a bit of a turn off.
Honestly, for me, nothing beats good old Edgar Allan Poe, and he’s already in the syllabus.
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I had started reading his short story collection (that contains Guts, forget what its called) back in high school after reading like three of his other books in a row (Lullaby, Survivor and Fight Club), and I was just burnt out on the shock factor thing.
Never finished the collection.
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That would probably be Haunted. Yeah, I see what you mean.
That said, Palahniuk will always have a special place in my heart for introducing me to one of my favorite authors, Amy Hempel. (See eg https://www.csub.edu/~mault/palahniuk.htm )
Also, from a Reddit AmA, my favorite quote about the writing process. Someone asked a question along the line of, how do you know when you are done writing? When it’s polished enough? And he answered something along the lines of “I have a simple rule. A writing project isn’t done until I want to kill myself and everyone else involved with it”.
I was in the final stages of writing my doctoral dissertation back then, and boy did it resonate with me.
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My head immediately went to tell tale heart.
Poe had lots of fucked up stories. The red death is another that stuck with me.
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Blood Child ild by Octavia Butler. Humans living on an alien reservation have the males implanted by the insect like alien's eggs and they start burrowing out of your flesh when they're ready.
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The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
Space might be the final frontier but it is by no means forgiving
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I am a huge fan of hard sci-fi, but always hated Cold Equations.
The FTL ships can drop out of Hyperspace close enough to a planet for a rocket propelled ship to reach it, but the big ship can’t just drop the cargo off or have a purpose built cargo shuttle drop it off?
How do they unload the big cruisers anyway? Land the whole big ship?
The big ships run on such a tight schedule and rocket fuel is so precious due to weight that the computer calculates the fuel requirements to the milligram, but doesn’t allow for alternate landing sites? These supplies are supposed to be critical, but if your pilot can’t find a perfect spot instantly, or gets blown off course by a gust of wind, he’s going to crash and die on the way down? The fuck kind of emergency response is that. Like sending a food truck with no brakes.
The weight of a human when compared to cargo and vehicle dry mass is negligible. A margin of error for landing would easily account for the deltaV required to decelerate 100kilos.
The tightest moon landing, fuel wise, was Apollo 11, and even they probably had about 45 seconds of fuel left when they finally touched down. At the time it was thought to be 15 seconds, but later analysis found a fault with the fuel level sensor that’s caused it to read lower than it should.
Even in the 60s, NASA made sure there was enough fuel to allow the astronauts to pilot to a good landing site. And in Apollo, every ounce counted, the margins were extremely tight.
It would be a better story concept as a long haul trip where food, water, and oxygen would be used at twice the intended rate and that’s why the stowaway had to go. But fuel should not have been the primary reason.
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I was 12 or 13 when I first encountered this story and my takeaway from it was that engineers are kind of shit at their jobs.
Let's assume for a moment that the constraints are plausible (they're not, as Zron pointed out): given this overwhelming lean toward unforgiving harsh reality ... why were there no security checks, etc. in place to deal with the inevitable occurrences when someone would be in a place they're not supposed to be upon launch? Good engineers plan for failures of systems, not just their presence. If those rockets are such utter and complete death traps, why was the security around them so lackadaisical? The engineers who set up that system probably also set up a 15cm wide stairway up 150m to get to the rocket without providing guide rails.
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See, my contemporary high-school complaint was “if the weight constraints are really so precise, then a successful liftoff would have already burned too much fuel because there’s too much weight, and this ship is doomed no matter what.”
To be fair, I learned a lot from that story. Just not quite what the teacher intended.
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If i remember right there's a dystopian bend to it, like it's not about the scarcity of the fuel and more about maximizing profit at the cost of outrageous risk for those who can't afford it
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When the Wind Blows.
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I remember in high school our text book had some paragraphs from various literature books. One of the books was called zombie (or zombies) so of course I checked it out, even if the teacher skipped it. The section was just a description or something, nothing particular, but I decided to borrow the book at the library anyway, and the full story was basically (spoilers ahead, it's gory):
I wonder if somebody did it as an Easter egg or what
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They Bite by Anthony Boucher is like four pages long and had me jumping at every shadow in the corner of my eye for a week. I found it in my grandparents' copy of Alfred Hitchcock's 30 Best in Horror or something like that, bought a copy for the brother I like because it shook me so badly (I verified it was in there)
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There will come soft rains, I presume, is what inspired that post. It has done a number on many a child
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hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
That story wasn't even assigned to us. I read The Martian Chronicles for fun as a kid and stumbled into that lovely scene of existential dread.
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I absolutely loved Martian Chronicles as a 10yo. I found it disturbing, but it also helped me develop a sense of empathy at a critical time when I was a real asshole
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The Jaunt
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Had to scroll to the bottom to finally find this. Scrolled longer than you think! LONGER THAN YOU THINK!
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The king in yellow
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I've been recommended this book twice. Guess I should get on it.
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I'm sure someone will loan you a copy 😉
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Lord of the flies
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That was not short, but it was dark
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Copy-pasta deserves a unit in my classroom, the Russian sleep experiment
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I try to not remember The Veldt but I still liked it as a good read. I also hated Harrison Bergeron but I think I was suppose to?
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Honestly neither The Veldt nor All Summer in a Day shocked me much at all as a kid and in retrospect that says a LOT about my childhood.
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I think Harrison Bergeron was just bad.
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There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
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We had to read this book called A Prayer for Owen Meany in school. Lots of weird stuff in that one. Main thing that stood out to me was a part where the mc is tied up to his girl cousin and gets an erection
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The Magic. I believe it is a short story, and I'm sorry to say I don't know the author. It's quite scary if you follow the instructions. A good lesson in the power of imagination and ritual.
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Was a full, but short, novel that I think was summer reading: The Chocolate Wars.
Not traumatizing as much as just a shit message. Don't quietly try to opt out of what the public wants, don't rock the boat, or you'll be executed publicly as a spectacle while your peers cheer.
Kid doesn't want to participate in his high school chocolate selling fundraiser, bunch of other things happen in between, and then his classmates organize a rigged boxing match between him and the biggest school bully where they all cheer while the bully beats the main character to death. And it just hard cuts, ends there.
What a garbage book.
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Whatever you choose, post right there 😭
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Why stop at a short story? I'll go for a novel.
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That was a good read.
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I've always remembered H. G. Wells' The Red Room, altho it's shorter than most mentioned here I think. Just loved it. So unsettling. So evocative and creepy. It's been maybe thirteen years. 😂
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It isn't a short story, but it might as well have been.
In my high school senior level English class, they had us read "On the Beach." The class as a whole did not like it. We told the teacher that we would not be reading further and would not be engaging on the book any more. It took a week and they moved us on to "Wuthering Heights" which was far easier to read.
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"Wuthering Heights" which was far easier to read.
Oh my!
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In case you don't know, the plot of on the beach is that nuclear war happened and the only people still alive are in Australia. The story follows their acceptance of impending death as the fallout reaches them. I'd rather young adult angst than full on suicidal discussions. I have my own thoughts on that, thankyouverymuch. I don't need a book to slap me in the face with them for a school grade.
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The Jaunt by Stephen King
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I read that last week! God that's a good one
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Borrasca (just the original, not the add-on parts)
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It might not be disturbing, but I think that anyone that is going into the Engineering field should read Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke.
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The Pedestrian, Ray Bradbury.
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Im still scarred by my english teacher enthusiastically reading certain scenes of Equus to the class.
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A Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever
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Have no clue what it was called but I remember having to read a short story that included a guy who would take the family cat into a locked room and watch porn…
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Have them read Mana
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By the Waters of Babylon still haunts me in the best way.
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Exit by Harry Farjeon.
151 comments
Recommend me one fellas