“The Long Rain” by Bradbury was the one that stuck with me.
We read The Yellow Wallpaper and that was pretty effed.
Came here to say this. The Yellow Wallpaper is definitely unsettling.
Either that or any of Shirley Jackson’s short stories.
Ha ha, great minds, I’ve just said The Lottery!
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.
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.
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.
Peak satire
I only recently discovered Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, but I think that would need to be in the conversation.
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.
Still think about this from HS. Years later. Such a good one.
This is the best answer. Iirc it was actually printed in one of my HS English books, and is actually a short story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s what I loved about it is that it took itself seriously. How people realistically responded to what happened to Gregor
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.
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.
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”.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
I had to read this again, tremendous story.
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.’
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
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.
We read this in university computer science ethics. It gets you thinking, which is good.
The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
Great story, but I think I read this one in school
That one became a meme, which I loved
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.
I’ve just read the short story now for the first time.
It’s amazing.
Glad you liked it
Yep, while I dont remember the book, I remember reading it
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.
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.
Damn near anything Ray Bradbury wrote. I swear he just wanted to traumatize anyone that read any of his work.
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!
Mine was all summer in a day. I know the feeling.
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.
There Will Come Soft Rains
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!!
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.
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.
My head immediately went to tell tale heart.
Poe had lots of fucked up stories. The red death is another that stuck with me.
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.
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.
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.
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” feelingThe horrors of one’s own mind vastly outweigh the horrors found on screens, imo.
I read that 25 years ago and instantly regretted it
If I described the texture, you’d never eat calimari again.
(or something like that)
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.
not hans christian Anderson’s “little matchstick girl”?
Yeah, sounds like a variation of that. Or maybe even the inspiration for it, who knows.
It is a depressing storie. Even while it has a she is better now - end
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.
