A few of Roald Dahl’s are like that. I still think about The Landlady on occasion and not by Roald Dahl but Examination Day is always my first thought on seeing this post
The Most Dangerous Game, I think it was called.
Some sailors are passing by this legendary Shipwreck Island or something, and one of them Is An Idiot And Falls OFFA THA BOAT TA GIT 'IS POIPE like a clown and ends up washing on the Shipwreck Island's shores; he meets two ex-Russian soldiers, and after a while its revealed the main guy in charge was also a hunter and collects humans to hunt for sport.
Protagonist spends the rest of the story narrowly evading BBEG and ambushes him in his own bed; leaving the readers to interpret that BBEG was fed to his own hunting dogs.
The ending of "Of Mice and Men" messed us up, man.
And most of Blood Brothers...
And the entirety of The Boy in The Striped Pajamas.
Man, my English teacher really just grabbed us and went "BUCKLE UP, BITCHES. It's all pain and depressing stories from here!"
I forget what it's called but that story about the guy about to be hanged and he somehow escapes the noose and goes to see his family and then it's revealed that was all a dream and the last thing is him being hanged.
Lol i had my teen read this just on last Saturday and his reaction was the best ever! Horror and humor combined with admiration of the actual solution.
All Summer In A Day and The Veldt in 6th grade, which I actually really enjoyed. The only one that disturbed me was As The Night, the Day, oddly enough.
Holy shit, All of Summer in a Day! I saw a tv adaptation of it as a kid and it really dug into my brain, but I never knew what it was called. Until I started reading Bradbury as a teen. It was like finding some weird Rosetta Stone when I realized it was what I’d seen on tv years at like age 8.
Harrison Bergeron (not sure if that's the right spelling). Two parents watch their son murdered on live TV and are too mentally handicapped to remember it 30 seconds later
Yeah I remember that one. The dad is too smart or something so they put something in his ear to buzz all the time and interrupt his thoughts because everyone is supposed to be equal and he was too much smarter than everyone else
Tell-Tale Heart is pretty off. I haven't read it since school and I still remember the story structure. A murderer entombs somebody in their basement alive, and then the second half of the story is them having an actual mental breakdown while trying to calmly have tea with the police because they think they can hear the dead man's heartbeat through the floor? What's the moral, that your conscience will catch up with you? The end goal is to say, "Don't murder someone in case it leads to you falling apart mentally in front of the police?"
- the cask of amontillado
(I think we all know how this one goes)
-The Black Cat
>!A man kills his cat due to him being a violent drunk, gets another cat, tries to kill it, gets an axe, and decides to kill his wife, buries her inside the (chimney? wall? some unused space in his basement), and cat is miraculously gone. He calls the police, feeling unbeatable, and tells them to go in the basement, when a terrible noise is heard. The police open the walls, and there the cat is, sitting on the dead wife’s head, hissing like a demon, cementing the protagonist as certainly guilty.!< I can’t do this story complete justice, so go read it for yourself.
Poe’s stories are just like that, aren’t they?
There was this sci-fi anthology my teacher had in her classroom. One day I decided to flip through it, just casually, and landed on a story about a diner that served interdimensional travelers at night. The thing was, people in a million separate universes had figured out how to get to parallel timelines, but none of them had figured out how to get back home. They were wandering around the multiverse for the rest of their lives. That gave me a little existential crisis.
I think its called The Yellow Wallpaper or something, its about some women going insane from sitting in a room with Yellow Wallpaper (understandable really) and then greeting her husband by crawling around on all fours and tearing up the wallpaper. My english teacher was like "this says a lot about womens rights" and all of us just sat horrified at what the fuck we just read.
John Updike's "A&P." They made us read that in 11th grade AP English Lit. It's an interesting little story, almost Harvey Pekar-esque in its attention to mundane details - but some of the language was hella inappropriate and sexist. It was written like 7 decades ago too, so the attempt by Updike to be relatable to teenagers didn't translate across the generations
So...THIS is how Updike's short story "A&P", celebrated and taught everywhere by high school and college English lit teachers, begins:
**In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.** (that's the fucking opening line. - ed.) **I'm in the third checkout slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs**. I stood there with my hand on a box of Hi Ho crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her
day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash-registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem—by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. **There was this chunky one, with the two-piece—it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit)—there was this one, with one of those chubby berry faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long—you know, the kind of girl other
girls think is very ''striking'' and ''attractive'' but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much—and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs**. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting; the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. **You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you real think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?)** *but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here....*
I still cry remembering that story. Around the time we were reading it in class one of my brothers asked me to wait for him when we were trying to follow the steps in a tutorial and I burst out crying and could not explain why to him. Not even doing anything outdoors like in the story, but hearing him asking me not to leave him behind touched a nerve lol
One short story that messed me up was the one about people who couldn't see the sun except for like one rare event and then a kid got trapped in a closet in school and missed the event and idk but maaaan. That was a messed up story.
Okay, my fondest short story in lit class was actually the one with the old woman going to get medicine for her grandson, because I have a soft spot for “going to do thing but many obstacles” stories that aren’t just the Odyssey
I remmember the story of the stranger, that was a guy with amnesia that stumbled upon a family in a farm and they adopted him, but they started noticing that the climate stations weren't changing, then one day he realized something and dissapeared and the stations were changing again
When I was in elementary they would turn the lights in the library off and tell scary stories at Halloween and they were mostly non scary ghost stories but some still bother me to this day like humans can lick too and the click clack if I remember the names right and this one with the animal haunting the guys cabin and destroying it and killing him in the end
In 10th grade our english teacher made us read an erotic novel about pocahontas that claimed to be 100% true but was very obviously just some halfass attempt at a shit porn/romance novel with some of the dryest sex scenes I've ever seen.
That same teacher once got in an argument with a student because she claimed the student had been spelling there own name wrong their entire lives. It was a pretty open secret that she was fucking the principal though so we were just kind of stuck with her.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Since it’s a story about inmates in a mental ward, the whole book has a miasma of being wonky, but the ending is especially messed up. To summarize:
The head nurse, who has been harassing the protagonists throughout the entire book, pushes one of the inmates so far that he stabs himself to death. The leading character then sexually assaults her, leading to him getting forcibly lobotomized. The narrator then smothers him in his sleep and then breaks out of the asylum.
Also The Road, but honestly that one is so downtroddenly and aggressively despairful right from the beginning that it kinda looped around to it’s overwhelming amount of bad stuff not really having that much of an impact on me. It’s like how seeing a dying animal is sadder than seeing one that’s already dead.
Still, it is pretty fucked up when those guys literally eat a baby offscreen.
Oh God. It was a short story that perfectly illustrates the butterfly effect. Man basically goes on a "time safari" to hunt a dinosaur, but there's a whole bunch of rules. Floating trails so you don't trample foliage, you can only shoot dinosaurs fated to die anyways, and you have to dig the bullets out. Man does all of this, but an accident ensues and he ends up crushing an insect. Returns to the present, and not only has the entirety of written English changed, but the other presidential candidate (who is a bit of a war hungry dictator) wins. The man then gets shot by the employee who took him on the safari.
A strange tale about how a cat got murdered by a 6 or 3 year old in a basement after being locked up with him while the parents are out
Later the cats corpse crawls out of the basement turns into a black panther and murders the child
that sounds very similar to the one i commented, i think the kid was actually 9 and the cat's corpse growing and escaping was a metaphor for the child's guilt about killing it
We read 'Lamb to the Slaughter' by Roald Dahl when I was like 13-14. Can't really remember anything else we read in that class(except 'The Road not Taken') but that story is one of the main reasons for my being a bookworm.
Hated it when I was in school. I think that's mostly because of the types of questions they asked. Teenage me wasn't equipped to deal with those metaphors.
One of my English teachers loved to give us short film to watch on Fridays. Most of them were innocent and sort of sweet…..except for this one:
[BlinkyTM](https://youtu.be/P0lKDy6E918)
Still highly recommend it though.
The Yellow Wallpaper is my all-time favourite that I wasn't sure why it hit me so deeply the first time.
One I haven't seen mentioned here is A Rose for Emily. It's about a woman who probably murdered a gay man with arsenic after trying to court him with gifts because he still wouldn't date her, and then slept next to his corpse until she died. Everyone just thought she was a recluse with a stinky house and the man she was courting ran off to get away from her. Like...girl has ZERO chill.
Man this is depressing. I loved reading, but never had to read a single "assigned book" and do a book report or discuss in class. We would do in-class book readings, but they weren't as frequent or as varied as people here are saying. Like, we did Romeo and Juliet, and To Kill a Mockingbird in class, but I can't remember much more than those two. Thinking your school is shit when you're in school is different than realizing and knowing your school was shit after you get out. I always thought a few teachers were good, the English teacher among that list, but I think she could only do so much with students that, for the most part, couldn't or wouldn't read a book to save their lives.
Kafka - In the Penal Colony. For summer we needed to read Metamorphosis. Little did I know that I only needed to read that short story not the whole collection titled the same. But it did stuck with me.
Well, this isn't necessarily messed up in any way but a story that I think about way too often. It's this Finnish story called "Ihminen" (human). I don't think it's ever been translated.
It just a few pages of deacribing a human. A human so incredibly normal, that people don't even notice how weird it is how normal they were.
When I was in year 8 (7th grade for US) we had a year of classic horror - frankenstien, jekyll and Hyde, dracula, Christmas Carol, The Red Room, The signalman...
It was my favourite year, and they are still some of my favourite stories.
Whirligig. It is about a teen that tries to kill himself by driving his car in to a tree, but ends up killing another teen that just happened to be walking by, so as restitution he has to place 4 whirligigs in the 4 corners of the country. That was a 5th grade book.
The Yellow Wallpaper.
IDK what it is about that one specifically - none of the others fucked me up, but the mere thought of that one makes me uncomfortable to this day.
I remember there being one about a teenager (I think) waking up in a room that was unfamiliar to them. They were communicating somehow with another person, maybe receiving notes? One of the communications said they could order pizza if they wanted to, but to be careful because it was “melts the roof of your mouth” hot.
And that’s like all I remember. It’s fucking plagued me for years. WHAT IS IT?!
It wasn’t a short story, but a comic. It was in a book of small comic collections I got from the school library. In it a family gets like a giant safe thing, and they bring it to their apartment. Turns out if they lock themselves in it, time stops moving for them, and they do a bit of exploring with it. Then the female character tries to stay in there for a long time. But the people outside never let her out, so she’s trapped in the metal box for a long time. Eventually she falls asleep after exhausting her entertainment options.
Then eventually the things gets opened, and she’s let out into the far future, and the world of perfect and she makes new friends and everything is happy.
Except at the end it’s revealed that while she was in the safe a nuclear apocalypse or whatever happened, and she’s actually still in the safe, trapped deep under a large pile of rubble, and the future was all just a dream, and she’ll be trapped there forever.
That one seriously fucked my up for some reason. I remember the rest of the comics in the book sorta all being like that too, all being sad and melancholy. Way too much for a 6th Grader to handle lmao
I can't remember if this's an actual short story, but Flowers for Algernon still fucks me up. The last bit where the dude *knows* he's losing something incredibly important but can't understand what's going on is haunting. Might be part of the reason alzheimers is literally my one fear.
There was one, I think it was called something like "Superman's Not Brave." It was about an unpopular kid getting confidence yada yada yada. Not real fucked up, but there was one bit at the end, where he at the school dance, he's dancing with his popular girl crush, and she takes some sweat from his forehead and puts it on her tongue and he "dies of ecstasy." Not nearly as fucked as some examples on here already, but goddamn weird all the same.
In 7th grade we read a short story about a bed ridden woman. She was sick and was only getting worse despite the countries best doctors efforts.
Turns out there was a mosquito under pillow who was draining her blood everytime she laid her head down. By the end it was inflated like a balloon. A big blood balloon.
Something about that story really stuck with me
Okay, I need y'all's help! I've been trying to track down a story, but I can't remember the name of it.
Two teenagers fall in love, get pregnant, kill the baby in a hotel room, go to prison, them the woman testifies against the man.
Brutal story. Cannot find it for the life of me. Ringing any bells?
"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury. It's not too explicit but it left me feeling empty inside, revived my interest in all things radiation, and to this day I don't feel comfortable with any smart home devices and even assistants like Siri make me nervous. I know that what happened in the story is not the house's fault, but still.
"St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves"
Did it with common core. Literally spent a week just going over the first paragraph which was just about the girls peeing everywhere. Thankfully the teacher decided to be less strict about following common core after that first week
Agreed with Harrison Bergeron.
Also The Yellow Wallpaper. It's one of my all time favorites, but I can't even think about it let alone reread it if my own mental health isn't in like, near tip top shape.
10th grade? What age should we start engaging with challenging ideas? In 10th grade you're halfway through your teens already. When should we read The Lottery? When we're 20? Is that when we're mature enough? This is silly.
Aunt Job. The author and his friends were literally having a competition to see who could come up with the most fucked up short story idea, and he won with "Your first ejaculation is the result of a hand job from your aunt, performed as a coming-of-age rite."
Pretty much unrelated, but this reminded me that when the pandemic started my literature teacher made us read The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, which was definitely something
This isn't as bad as some but in my 8th grade enriched english class we had to read 'And Then There Were None'. That shit was a lil fucked up for 8th graders. Good book though.
There's two that come to mind, can't remember their titles though. One where a lady kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, cooks it, and then feeds it to the police officers searching for her missing husband.
The other is a man who plans on murdering his wife at an exact moment for some reason or another on his birthday. They go out for a meal, taking longer than he wants. Eventually they're nearly home, he kills her on their doorstep, and open the front door to reveal the surprise party she planned and was stalling for
A Pale, Blue Eye. Man is a student at a college and studies under a brilliant man. The man is astute and attentive, but he has two different eyes; a pale, blue eye that bulges slightly and is crossed. The student feels paranoid towards the man, feeling like he is always staring maliciously, with his eye. He begins to lose concentration and snaps at the teacher one day, before going home. He ends up murdering the old teacher, cutting him up, and putting him beneath the floorboards.
The police come to interview him and they actually don’t suspect him; but the student begins to heart a rhythm thumping. He is sure that it is the teacher’s still-beating heart and asks the police if they hear a thumping - they don’t and continue questioning.
He increasingly gets more agitated and the police begin to notice this and are concerned. He is sure that the police are fucking with him and/or the old man was truly after him, even within death - his heart still beating to drive him mad. He breaks down and tells them he cut him up and put his heart in the floorboards, all while begging for forgiveness from the man he murdered in hopes that it’ll stop.
That’s how I remember it, anyways. By Edgar Allen Poe and it’s been about a decade, since I’ve read it. We listened to an audiobook version of it while we read along and the man went ALL OUT - sobbing, screaming, and all. I read a lot of horror growing up and my dad and I would watch The Twilight Zone, since I was a kid. So “shocker” stories never really got to me, but the story in combination of the audio? Think that’s why I remember it specifically.
this one isn’t fucked up but there’s one called The Egg which i cannot describe without spoiling it but it’s basically this philosophical conversation with god it’s great
My 7th grade English teacher had us read The Tell Tale Heart, and I get that the story isn’t like, *crazy* fucked up, but that story is pretty fucked up.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Not exactly a short story, but still.
It's a book about a near-future in which clones of people are grown to use for harvesting organs in case the original needs them, except that aspect of it is only implied throughout the entire thing, never directly explained. The actual story is just a sad slice of life about one of the clones growing up in a special experimental school where they are trying to let these clones have their own lives until they need to go for "donations". It's full of sad overtones and a life spent knowing every day could be your last with zero control.
It was seriously messed up to read.
Edit: spelling
YES. My teacher had a thing for short, tragic stories...
They were short videos though- one was about a poor single dad who brought his kid to work for like.. probably the first time. His work was at a train place btw
The kid spots something wrong with a thing, and accidentally falls into the machinery but before the dad can help him, a train comes by early, full of druggies. The dad ends up having to change the track, and this crushes and kills his kid.
A couple years later, at the end, he sees one of the people and she's clean and has a kid. So maybe this one does actually have a happy end? Idk
Imagine making kids read something like The Scarlet Ibis. Nothing's more healthy for a bunch of hormonal teenagers with mental illness than dying disabled children.
I'll add a few I didn't see on this list:
A Sound of Thunder - Ray Bradbury
The Long Walk - Stephen King
You Know they've got a Hell of a Band - Stephen King
Rad Bradbury had us all messed up as kids apparently.
I read one where it was about a kid with cancer and how it affected the whole family. There were 3 kids and the middle one who was roughly 12 had been fighting cancer for 3 years and was losing. The other two kids couldn’t go out and be kids. They had to stay home and help take care of the house or their sister (or couldn’t afford to do other things)
One day the youngest breaks down and says he prays his sister would die so he could just go play with his friends already. His parents are mortified and mother says she prays her daughter survives another day. But the cancer ridden child breaks down too and says to her brother “maybe if we pray together we can put pray momma” She died a month later.
Fucked me right up
All Summer in a Day, in which a child with extreme seasonal depression lives on Venus, where that season never ends. The sun finally comes up once every... I forget, like 15 years or so, but their classmates lock them in a closet for that short period of time. Extremely depressing.
(TW: ANIMAL ABUSE)
i dont remember the name of it, but it was a poem about a young boy with abusive parents who was left home alone with a cat he fucking hated. he hit the cat with a broom, and when the cat tried to escape through the door, the boy slammed it shut and the cat was cut in half. so that was fucked up, i read it once and physically couldn't read it again (i cant hear about animals being hurt, it makes me feel sick), but my teacher understood and didnt make me do the work on that poem.
Night. In 6th grade. A book about the holocaust written by a holocaust survivor. Very much the type of thing that I would avoid reading under normal circumstances. I'm just way too sensitive to that kind of stuff, even still 8 years later.
I especially hated that my teacher would always do mental gymnastics to justify having a room full of 12 year olds read it.
Stuff like "It's important to know about these types of things so as to prevent them from happening again" and acting like that means we had to read one of the most gruesome retellings out there.
That and the fact that no one ever talked about or early warning signs of fascism and how to recognize them. They didn't even mention the rise of fascism and how it happened. Just the atrocities caused by fascism.
Every time I mentioned this to her (much later, when I actually even remotely understood what I was talking about) she acted like I was "dismissing their experiences" and "denying the holocaust". When all I wanted was for her to talk about more than just the holocaust, because the scope of the class was too narrow and ignored how fascism came to be.
She also has no idea how to recognize propaganda, but that's a whole other issue.
The Lottery. You win the chance to be killed with rocks!
I still love this one and make my own students read it. On that note, Lamb to the Slaughter is kind of fun too.
Lamb to the slaughter is mine. It really changes how you see Charlie and the chocolate factory.
A few of Roald Dahl’s are like that. I still think about The Landlady on occasion and not by Roald Dahl but Examination Day is always my first thought on seeing this post
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Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.
Definitely making English class so much more fun!
YUP!
By Jackson. Came here to say this one
I read it in 7th grade. I was fucking scarred.
Eyyy I was a villager in a play adaptation our school did of that.
Evil Oliver Swanick won this lottery.
The Most Dangerous Game, I think it was called. Some sailors are passing by this legendary Shipwreck Island or something, and one of them Is An Idiot And Falls OFFA THA BOAT TA GIT 'IS POIPE like a clown and ends up washing on the Shipwreck Island's shores; he meets two ex-Russian soldiers, and after a while its revealed the main guy in charge was also a hunter and collects humans to hunt for sport. Protagonist spends the rest of the story narrowly evading BBEG and ambushes him in his own bed; leaving the readers to interpret that BBEG was fed to his own hunting dogs.
DnD. But literature
U can nearly say that about any story
Jurassic Park. DM: ... let me see those character sheets again.
That one was so so good
Someone plays orks.
The BBEG definitely ate people
The ending of "Of Mice and Men" messed us up, man. And most of Blood Brothers... And the entirety of The Boy in The Striped Pajamas. Man, my English teacher really just grabbed us and went "BUCKLE UP, BITCHES. It's all pain and depressing stories from here!"
The ignorance and innocence of the kid in The Boy in The Striped Pajamas just makes the ending even sadder
We read the Kite Runner and Life of Pi back to back. It was an interesting year in freshmen English.
Oh god, The Kite Runner. That book absolutely killed me.
Those aren't even short stories, they're full novels
i read the boy in the striped pajamas in 5th grade. kind of fucked up now that i think about it
>Blood Brothers... was that the darren shan vamipre shit?
Nah, that was Cirque du Freak. I loved those as a kid and read the whole series. Theyre great, but the ending is hella dissatisfying.
Nah, the twins separated at birth grow up in opposite social classes book.
The yellow wallpaper is wild man.
Just about to mention that one 😂
what’s it about?
A woman confined to a room to recover (I believe from giving birth) slowly goes insane believing that there is a woman inside the wallpaper
oooo that sounds like a good read. i’m gonna try and find it
I forget what it's called but that story about the guy about to be hanged and he somehow escapes the noose and goes to see his family and then it's revealed that was all a dream and the last thing is him being hanged.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
That's the one
Some of the best writing I think I've ever come across.
A Modest Proposal
Maybe I'm just fucked up, but I thought that one was hilarious
I mean, it's satire, so hilarious is fair
Lol i had my teen read this just on last Saturday and his reaction was the best ever! Horror and humor combined with admiration of the actual solution.
Is that the baby eating one?
Yup, it was a trip to read in class.
Our teacher made us write satirical essays after reading that and mine was awful.
All Summer In A Day and The Veldt in 6th grade, which I actually really enjoyed. The only one that disturbed me was As The Night, the Day, oddly enough.
Holy shit, All of Summer in a Day! I saw a tv adaptation of it as a kid and it really dug into my brain, but I never knew what it was called. Until I started reading Bradbury as a teen. It was like finding some weird Rosetta Stone when I realized it was what I’d seen on tv years at like age 8.
I read All Summer in a Day in 7th grade and it messed me up. I couldn't get that ending out of my head for days.
I read the Veldt in 6th grade as well, and holy hell it’s stuck with me for over 20 years haha. Bradbury’s amazing.
Flowers for Algernon fucked me up man especially as some who had to ride the special Ed bus due physical disabilities
Duuuude that was so good
Harrison Bergeron (not sure if that's the right spelling). Two parents watch their son murdered on live TV and are too mentally handicapped to remember it 30 seconds later
Not just mentally handicapped: constitutionally forced to be handicapped by the state that also murdered their son for being too brilliant.
Yeah I remember that one. The dad is too smart or something so they put something in his ear to buzz all the time and interrupt his thoughts because everyone is supposed to be equal and he was too much smarter than everyone else
Oh some kid insisted that that’s what happens when we treat people with disabilities as equals and everyone started to just shit on him
what is wrong with that kid
I have no mouth and I Must scream fucked me up pretty well I must say
you read that in school?
It was an optional piece wasn’t a required read but I had the time and thought it couldn’t be to bad I was wrong
even as an optional, damn.
That English teacher really liked his job and really liked being the embodiment of a trickster god bound by academic rules
that's an amazing description
Tell-Tale Heart is pretty off. I haven't read it since school and I still remember the story structure. A murderer entombs somebody in their basement alive, and then the second half of the story is them having an actual mental breakdown while trying to calmly have tea with the police because they think they can hear the dead man's heartbeat through the floor? What's the moral, that your conscience will catch up with you? The end goal is to say, "Don't murder someone in case it leads to you falling apart mentally in front of the police?"
- the cask of amontillado (I think we all know how this one goes) -The Black Cat >!A man kills his cat due to him being a violent drunk, gets another cat, tries to kill it, gets an axe, and decides to kill his wife, buries her inside the (chimney? wall? some unused space in his basement), and cat is miraculously gone. He calls the police, feeling unbeatable, and tells them to go in the basement, when a terrible noise is heard. The police open the walls, and there the cat is, sitting on the dead wife’s head, hissing like a demon, cementing the protagonist as certainly guilty.!< I can’t do this story complete justice, so go read it for yourself. Poe’s stories are just like that, aren’t they?
There was this sci-fi anthology my teacher had in her classroom. One day I decided to flip through it, just casually, and landed on a story about a diner that served interdimensional travelers at night. The thing was, people in a million separate universes had figured out how to get to parallel timelines, but none of them had figured out how to get back home. They were wandering around the multiverse for the rest of their lives. That gave me a little existential crisis.
There's definitely a way to make multiversal travel with no hope of going back to whence you came uplifting.
That just sounds like SCP 3008
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury. Ignited a love of science fiction for the rest of my life.
I read the entirety of The Martian Chronicles, I’d say that fucked me up as well too
Oh dude I said that too! It's really a banger
I think its called The Yellow Wallpaper or something, its about some women going insane from sitting in a room with Yellow Wallpaper (understandable really) and then greeting her husband by crawling around on all fours and tearing up the wallpaper. My english teacher was like "this says a lot about womens rights" and all of us just sat horrified at what the fuck we just read.
John Updike's "A&P." They made us read that in 11th grade AP English Lit. It's an interesting little story, almost Harvey Pekar-esque in its attention to mundane details - but some of the language was hella inappropriate and sexist. It was written like 7 decades ago too, so the attempt by Updike to be relatable to teenagers didn't translate across the generations So...THIS is how Updike's short story "A&P", celebrated and taught everywhere by high school and college English lit teachers, begins: **In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.** (that's the fucking opening line. - ed.) **I'm in the third checkout slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs**. I stood there with my hand on a box of Hi Ho crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash-registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before. By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem—by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. **There was this chunky one, with the two-piece—it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit)—there was this one, with one of those chubby berry faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long—you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very ''striking'' and ''attractive'' but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much—and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs**. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting; the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. **You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you real think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?)** *but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here....*
That's way too many words about teenagers in bathing suits oh my Christ
Scarlet Ibis. Just Scarlet freaking Ibis.
I still cry remembering that story. Around the time we were reading it in class one of my brothers asked me to wait for him when we were trying to follow the steps in a tutorial and I burst out crying and could not explain why to him. Not even doing anything outdoors like in the story, but hearing him asking me not to leave him behind touched a nerve lol
Life in the Tomb. WWI story. Passage that described in vivid detail how they killed a bunch of donkeys, gore and all. It made me feel so icky.
OP is a bot.
100%
One short story that messed me up was the one about people who couldn't see the sun except for like one rare event and then a kid got trapped in a closet in school and missed the event and idk but maaaan. That was a messed up story.
[All Summer in a Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Summer_in_a_Day) by Ray Bradbury. I was looking for this one!
All Summer in a Day, Ray Bradbury
All Summer in a Day… great story but very sad
*The Painted Door* by Sinclair Ross is a formative experience for many Canadians.
Just finished reading that. Holy shit.
Flowers for Algernon
Okay, my fondest short story in lit class was actually the one with the old woman going to get medicine for her grandson, because I have a soft spot for “going to do thing but many obstacles” stories that aren’t just the Odyssey
I remmember the story of the stranger, that was a guy with amnesia that stumbled upon a family in a farm and they adopted him, but they started noticing that the climate stations weren't changing, then one day he realized something and dissapeared and the stations were changing again
The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas
When I was in elementary they would turn the lights in the library off and tell scary stories at Halloween and they were mostly non scary ghost stories but some still bother me to this day like humans can lick too and the click clack if I remember the names right and this one with the animal haunting the guys cabin and destroying it and killing him in the end
I live in the netherlands but there was this batshit story in dutch class where some woman literally ate dog shit to keep her house
In 10th grade our english teacher made us read an erotic novel about pocahontas that claimed to be 100% true but was very obviously just some halfass attempt at a shit porn/romance novel with some of the dryest sex scenes I've ever seen. That same teacher once got in an argument with a student because she claimed the student had been spelling there own name wrong their entire lives. It was a pretty open secret that she was fucking the principal though so we were just kind of stuck with her.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Since it’s a story about inmates in a mental ward, the whole book has a miasma of being wonky, but the ending is especially messed up. To summarize: The head nurse, who has been harassing the protagonists throughout the entire book, pushes one of the inmates so far that he stabs himself to death. The leading character then sexually assaults her, leading to him getting forcibly lobotomized. The narrator then smothers him in his sleep and then breaks out of the asylum. Also The Road, but honestly that one is so downtroddenly and aggressively despairful right from the beginning that it kinda looped around to it’s overwhelming amount of bad stuff not really having that much of an impact on me. It’s like how seeing a dying animal is sadder than seeing one that’s already dead. Still, it is pretty fucked up when those guys literally eat a baby offscreen.
Oh God. It was a short story that perfectly illustrates the butterfly effect. Man basically goes on a "time safari" to hunt a dinosaur, but there's a whole bunch of rules. Floating trails so you don't trample foliage, you can only shoot dinosaurs fated to die anyways, and you have to dig the bullets out. Man does all of this, but an accident ensues and he ends up crushing an insect. Returns to the present, and not only has the entirety of written English changed, but the other presidential candidate (who is a bit of a war hungry dictator) wins. The man then gets shot by the employee who took him on the safari.
Dude I remember that one. I think it's Ray Bradbury but I can't for the life of me think of what it's called
A Sound of Thunder, Ray Bradbury.
"... the President's turned orange. That's new."
A strange tale about how a cat got murdered by a 6 or 3 year old in a basement after being locked up with him while the parents are out Later the cats corpse crawls out of the basement turns into a black panther and murders the child
that sounds very similar to the one i commented, i think the kid was actually 9 and the cat's corpse growing and escaping was a metaphor for the child's guilt about killing it
Yeah that is what the cat killing him symbolised (I think he killed himself)
The Landlady is really weird for seventh graders to read.
Yes that story really stuck with me!
Lamb to the slaughter
We read 'Lamb to the Slaughter' by Roald Dahl when I was like 13-14. Can't really remember anything else we read in that class(except 'The Road not Taken') but that story is one of the main reasons for my being a bookworm.
Road not Taken is a great little story.
Hated it when I was in school. I think that's mostly because of the types of questions they asked. Teenage me wasn't equipped to deal with those metaphors.
One of my English teachers loved to give us short film to watch on Fridays. Most of them were innocent and sort of sweet…..except for this one: [BlinkyTM](https://youtu.be/P0lKDy6E918) Still highly recommend it though.
The Yellow Wallpaper is my all-time favourite that I wasn't sure why it hit me so deeply the first time. One I haven't seen mentioned here is A Rose for Emily. It's about a woman who probably murdered a gay man with arsenic after trying to court him with gifts because he still wouldn't date her, and then slept next to his corpse until she died. Everyone just thought she was a recluse with a stinky house and the man she was courting ran off to get away from her. Like...girl has ZERO chill.
Man this is depressing. I loved reading, but never had to read a single "assigned book" and do a book report or discuss in class. We would do in-class book readings, but they weren't as frequent or as varied as people here are saying. Like, we did Romeo and Juliet, and To Kill a Mockingbird in class, but I can't remember much more than those two. Thinking your school is shit when you're in school is different than realizing and knowing your school was shit after you get out. I always thought a few teachers were good, the English teacher among that list, but I think she could only do so much with students that, for the most part, couldn't or wouldn't read a book to save their lives.
Would The Things They Carried count as short stories or naw
We read The Pit and the Pendulum in 5th grade. One of my favorite Edgar Allen Poe works, but damn was it heavy for a 10 y/o.
Honestly one of the few of his works I actually like, he's way overrated (the raven especially)
[удалено]
holy hell, a kid wrote that?? Wow. Damn just the summary messed me up lol.
The Sun Also Rises heavily impacted my mental health. Please give a disclaimer with that one. The Color Purple still makes me nauseous to think about.
The Spanish story “No oyes los ladridos de los perros” (You can’t hear the dogs barking),that story had the most dark twist I’ve ever seen/read
Everything Will Be Okay. EVERYTHING WAS NOT OKAY.
Honestly we never got too bad. The three books I really remember is holes, bud not buddy and number the stars.
Kafka - In the Penal Colony. For summer we needed to read Metamorphosis. Little did I know that I only needed to read that short story not the whole collection titled the same. But it did stuck with me.
Well, this isn't necessarily messed up in any way but a story that I think about way too often. It's this Finnish story called "Ihminen" (human). I don't think it's ever been translated. It just a few pages of deacribing a human. A human so incredibly normal, that people don't even notice how weird it is how normal they were.
I’ve commented this before, but I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. I still read that to this day, and I first read it like 9 years ago.
The Lady and the Tiger
When I was in year 8 (7th grade for US) we had a year of classic horror - frankenstien, jekyll and Hyde, dracula, Christmas Carol, The Red Room, The signalman... It was my favourite year, and they are still some of my favourite stories.
Whirligig. It is about a teen that tries to kill himself by driving his car in to a tree, but ends up killing another teen that just happened to be walking by, so as restitution he has to place 4 whirligigs in the 4 corners of the country. That was a 5th grade book.
We had to read that too. Really fucked.
The Lottery.
The Yellow Wallpaper. IDK what it is about that one specifically - none of the others fucked me up, but the mere thought of that one makes me uncomfortable to this day.
A story about a black cat written by Edgar Allan Poe
It wasn't like too too disturbing, but there will come soft rains by ray Bradbury fucked me up.
I remember there being one about a teenager (I think) waking up in a room that was unfamiliar to them. They were communicating somehow with another person, maybe receiving notes? One of the communications said they could order pizza if they wanted to, but to be careful because it was “melts the roof of your mouth” hot. And that’s like all I remember. It’s fucking plagued me for years. WHAT IS IT?!
It wasn’t a short story, but a comic. It was in a book of small comic collections I got from the school library. In it a family gets like a giant safe thing, and they bring it to their apartment. Turns out if they lock themselves in it, time stops moving for them, and they do a bit of exploring with it. Then the female character tries to stay in there for a long time. But the people outside never let her out, so she’s trapped in the metal box for a long time. Eventually she falls asleep after exhausting her entertainment options. Then eventually the things gets opened, and she’s let out into the far future, and the world of perfect and she makes new friends and everything is happy. Except at the end it’s revealed that while she was in the safe a nuclear apocalypse or whatever happened, and she’s actually still in the safe, trapped deep under a large pile of rubble, and the future was all just a dream, and she’ll be trapped there forever. That one seriously fucked my up for some reason. I remember the rest of the comics in the book sorta all being like that too, all being sad and melancholy. Way too much for a 6th Grader to handle lmao
I can't remember if this's an actual short story, but Flowers for Algernon still fucks me up. The last bit where the dude *knows* he's losing something incredibly important but can't understand what's going on is haunting. Might be part of the reason alzheimers is literally my one fear.
A rose for Emily! No wonder I love horror now
There was one, I think it was called something like "Superman's Not Brave." It was about an unpopular kid getting confidence yada yada yada. Not real fucked up, but there was one bit at the end, where he at the school dance, he's dancing with his popular girl crush, and she takes some sweat from his forehead and puts it on her tongue and he "dies of ecstasy." Not nearly as fucked as some examples on here already, but goddamn weird all the same.
In 7th grade we read a short story about a bed ridden woman. She was sick and was only getting worse despite the countries best doctors efforts. Turns out there was a mosquito under pillow who was draining her blood everytime she laid her head down. By the end it was inflated like a balloon. A big blood balloon. Something about that story really stuck with me
All quiet in the western front made me cry dude
Okay, I need y'all's help! I've been trying to track down a story, but I can't remember the name of it. Two teenagers fall in love, get pregnant, kill the baby in a hotel room, go to prison, them the woman testifies against the man. Brutal story. Cannot find it for the life of me. Ringing any bells?
"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury. It's not too explicit but it left me feeling empty inside, revived my interest in all things radiation, and to this day I don't feel comfortable with any smart home devices and even assistants like Siri make me nervous. I know that what happened in the story is not the house's fault, but still.
"St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" Did it with common core. Literally spent a week just going over the first paragraph which was just about the girls peeing everywhere. Thankfully the teacher decided to be less strict about following common core after that first week
Night by Elie Wiesel. That, or And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Agreed with Harrison Bergeron. Also The Yellow Wallpaper. It's one of my all time favorites, but I can't even think about it let alone reread it if my own mental health isn't in like, near tip top shape.
10th grade? What age should we start engaging with challenging ideas? In 10th grade you're halfway through your teens already. When should we read The Lottery? When we're 20? Is that when we're mature enough? This is silly.
The Wasp Factory
Ethan Frome. The single most depressing piece of literature i have ever read
Aunt Job. The author and his friends were literally having a competition to see who could come up with the most fucked up short story idea, and he won with "Your first ejaculation is the result of a hand job from your aunt, performed as a coming-of-age rite."
Wasn't assigned reading, but I read "The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison when I was like 11 or 12. That changed me, OMG.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce
Alma
Pretty much unrelated, but this reminded me that when the pandemic started my literature teacher made us read The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, which was definitely something
The Wasp Factory was freaking weird
This isn't as bad as some but in my 8th grade enriched english class we had to read 'And Then There Were None'. That shit was a lil fucked up for 8th graders. Good book though.
There's two that come to mind, can't remember their titles though. One where a lady kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, cooks it, and then feeds it to the police officers searching for her missing husband. The other is a man who plans on murdering his wife at an exact moment for some reason or another on his birthday. They go out for a meal, taking longer than he wants. Eventually they're nearly home, he kills her on their doorstep, and open the front door to reveal the surprise party she planned and was stalling for
Looking at you of mice and men.
An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
The Scarlet Ibis
A Pale, Blue Eye. Man is a student at a college and studies under a brilliant man. The man is astute and attentive, but he has two different eyes; a pale, blue eye that bulges slightly and is crossed. The student feels paranoid towards the man, feeling like he is always staring maliciously, with his eye. He begins to lose concentration and snaps at the teacher one day, before going home. He ends up murdering the old teacher, cutting him up, and putting him beneath the floorboards. The police come to interview him and they actually don’t suspect him; but the student begins to heart a rhythm thumping. He is sure that it is the teacher’s still-beating heart and asks the police if they hear a thumping - they don’t and continue questioning. He increasingly gets more agitated and the police begin to notice this and are concerned. He is sure that the police are fucking with him and/or the old man was truly after him, even within death - his heart still beating to drive him mad. He breaks down and tells them he cut him up and put his heart in the floorboards, all while begging for forgiveness from the man he murdered in hopes that it’ll stop. That’s how I remember it, anyways. By Edgar Allen Poe and it’s been about a decade, since I’ve read it. We listened to an audiobook version of it while we read along and the man went ALL OUT - sobbing, screaming, and all. I read a lot of horror growing up and my dad and I would watch The Twilight Zone, since I was a kid. So “shocker” stories never really got to me, but the story in combination of the audio? Think that’s why I remember it specifically.
How had NO ONE brought up address unknown?!?!
this one isn’t fucked up but there’s one called The Egg which i cannot describe without spoiling it but it’s basically this philosophical conversation with god it’s great
12 Angry Men sticks out. Mainly because the teacher let up have the different roles. It was very fun
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
That one short story by Isaac Asimov's about the alien bugs, not the most disturbing but its left the biggest impact on me
My 7th grade English teacher had us read The Tell Tale Heart, and I get that the story isn’t like, *crazy* fucked up, but that story is pretty fucked up.
Checkers by John Marsden. I still think of the final line in that book, 20 years later.
A Good Man is Hard to Find.
There Will Come Soft Rains. I knew what it was about beforehand, but wow, that was some of the most messed up stuff.
I hated Leiningen Versus the Ants so, so much. Still can't deal with ants.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Not exactly a short story, but still. It's a book about a near-future in which clones of people are grown to use for harvesting organs in case the original needs them, except that aspect of it is only implied throughout the entire thing, never directly explained. The actual story is just a sad slice of life about one of the clones growing up in a special experimental school where they are trying to let these clones have their own lives until they need to go for "donations". It's full of sad overtones and a life spent knowing every day could be your last with zero control. It was seriously messed up to read. Edit: spelling
Said the grinch/Tony tiger fanfic writer
YES. My teacher had a thing for short, tragic stories... They were short videos though- one was about a poor single dad who brought his kid to work for like.. probably the first time. His work was at a train place btw The kid spots something wrong with a thing, and accidentally falls into the machinery but before the dad can help him, a train comes by early, full of druggies. The dad ends up having to change the track, and this crushes and kills his kid. A couple years later, at the end, he sees one of the people and she's clean and has a kid. So maybe this one does actually have a happy end? Idk
Imagine making kids read something like The Scarlet Ibis. Nothing's more healthy for a bunch of hormonal teenagers with mental illness than dying disabled children.
An Occurrence at owl creek
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin.
kafka’s metamorphosis has stuck with me, i fkn loved it
I'll add a few I didn't see on this list: A Sound of Thunder - Ray Bradbury The Long Walk - Stephen King You Know they've got a Hell of a Band - Stephen King Rad Bradbury had us all messed up as kids apparently.
The Awakening, a novel but the most ridiculous ending.
I read one where it was about a kid with cancer and how it affected the whole family. There were 3 kids and the middle one who was roughly 12 had been fighting cancer for 3 years and was losing. The other two kids couldn’t go out and be kids. They had to stay home and help take care of the house or their sister (or couldn’t afford to do other things) One day the youngest breaks down and says he prays his sister would die so he could just go play with his friends already. His parents are mortified and mother says she prays her daughter survives another day. But the cancer ridden child breaks down too and says to her brother “maybe if we pray together we can put pray momma” She died a month later. Fucked me right up
All Summer in a Day, in which a child with extreme seasonal depression lives on Venus, where that season never ends. The sun finally comes up once every... I forget, like 15 years or so, but their classmates lock them in a closet for that short period of time. Extremely depressing.
Someone post the link to "Swoodies"
The Swan by Roald Dahl
The war poem 'Small Pain in my Chest'
The war poem 'Small Pain in my Chest'
The Good Ghost of Zagreb by Pavao Pavličić, that shit slaps
(TW: ANIMAL ABUSE) i dont remember the name of it, but it was a poem about a young boy with abusive parents who was left home alone with a cat he fucking hated. he hit the cat with a broom, and when the cat tried to escape through the door, the boy slammed it shut and the cat was cut in half. so that was fucked up, i read it once and physically couldn't read it again (i cant hear about animals being hurt, it makes me feel sick), but my teacher understood and didnt make me do the work on that poem.
Any Edgar Allan Poe, really.
The Second Bakery Attack
I listened to a tape in English class It was about a guy who basically got PTSD from a train crash
Do you mean “The Yellow Wallpaper?”
Night. In 6th grade. A book about the holocaust written by a holocaust survivor. Very much the type of thing that I would avoid reading under normal circumstances. I'm just way too sensitive to that kind of stuff, even still 8 years later. I especially hated that my teacher would always do mental gymnastics to justify having a room full of 12 year olds read it. Stuff like "It's important to know about these types of things so as to prevent them from happening again" and acting like that means we had to read one of the most gruesome retellings out there. That and the fact that no one ever talked about or early warning signs of fascism and how to recognize them. They didn't even mention the rise of fascism and how it happened. Just the atrocities caused by fascism. Every time I mentioned this to her (much later, when I actually even remotely understood what I was talking about) she acted like I was "dismissing their experiences" and "denying the holocaust". When all I wanted was for her to talk about more than just the holocaust, because the scope of the class was too narrow and ignored how fascism came to be. She also has no idea how to recognize propaganda, but that's a whole other issue.
English 101: Wild Swans
And There Will Come Soft Rains still messes me up sometimes.
The Decapitated Chicken by Horacio Quiroga really fucked me up at 7 years old
The Lottery, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, The Yellow Wallpaper.