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Tsunami survivor realizes a part of him died with his friend that day. Messed me up. Don’t remember the name
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin is the one that came to mind for me.
Thank you for linking it. I really enjoyed reading it.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Was gonna say this. Fucked me up for a bit after I read it.
Oh that fucking thing.
Edit: wait so what exactly is the point of this?
It’s been near 15 years since I read it, but it’s kind of a cautionary tale about tradition, superstition, and how easily humans succumb to their base impulses and can commit insane violence.
Seems all too pertinent these days
The qualifier base is exactly right. Like we use base as a pejorative, but it is what we are. That is our base state.
You know what itd take to drop us back to this level? I would say about a week without electricity. If you said to any given group of what, 50 people. Pick numbers out of a hat. The person with the dot dies, but the electricity comes back on. That would be enough.
It’s supposed to make you feel very weird because it is innate tribal behaviour that is not very far from the surface. Individual vs group, traditions, rituals, sacrifice, and the perverse gratitude that you are the survivor etc.
Read it then go read Facebook for a bit…you start to see people for what they are. Panicky, social, tribal animals.
Came here to say this. Now I have to dig even deeper into my high school trauma to find something else, thanks. 🤣
“The Darkness Out There” by Penelope Lively.
In short, a “nice old lady” tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.
I think it was there for the “the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy”.
“A modest proposal” by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it
It wasn’t a short story, but a book that told a story in poems. The mc struggled with writing poetry and then he watched his dog get hit by a car and that made his poetry good or some shit. A room full of 5th graders wept. Book is called Love that Dog
We also read Old Yeller and cried collectively.
My 5th grade teacher loved that reoccurring theme, I guess? Dude was weird as hell.
Man, what is it about teachers assigning books about dogs dying?
Ikr?
When I was a kid the lady who ran a daycare out of her home that I attended would play the old yeller movie for us and it was probably our favorite film. I learned later from my mom that the secret is she conveniently ends the film before the ending so it’s just a happy story about a good doggie
Well “love that dog” made me cry a little just now, so thanks for that.
You’re welcome. I haven’t read it in years because it’s so sad. I have a copy sitting on my shelf because it’s genuinely a good book, but I haven’t cracked it open.
Hmm, for short stories, it’s probably “The Most Dangerous Game.”
Plot with massive spoilers
MC is a big game hunter traveling by boat to the Amazon to hunt jaguar. He is warned by locals about a local island called Ship-Trap island. He falls overboard and swims to Ship-Trap island, where there’s a big mansion inhabited by General Zaroff, another big game hunter. Zaroff explains that he got bored of hunting animals and set up the island to attract ships, and when a ship wrecks on the island, he gives the sailors a knife and a head start, and if they can survive 3 days, they are set free. Zaroff then sets off to hunt them with a small caliber pistol.
Plot happens, and at the end the MC makes it look like he committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. Zaroff returns home, and the MC is waiting for him in his bedroom. Zaroff congratulates him, but the MC says the hunt isn’t over, and we see the MC sleeping in Zaroffs bed at the end of the story.
The themes are pretty disturbing if you stop to think about it, and even if you don’t, there’s a fair amount of violence.
Fuck yeah. Loved this short story.
If I hadn’t been really into Tom Clancy novels, it probably would’ve scarred me for life. But I was already reading about terrorists trying to mass-genocide most of the planet (Rainbow Six) and assassins shooting people in the eyes at near-point blank (forget the specific book), so a little gore didn’t phase me.
I remember being really into Ton Clancy novels around that time too.
Flowers for Algernon, that was thought provoking but also way too heavy for a 7th grade English class.
Was making sure this had a mention. This was brutal to read in 6th grade at 10 in the morning.
That was 5th grade for me. I still wonder what that teacher was thinking.
Same here. We read FFA, The Veldt, The Tell Tale Heart, All Summer in a Day, and a few other short stories in some “advanced readers class,” that we had to go to the library once a week to attend.
I think they were trying to fuck up all the smart kids.
Did the teacher at least spend time discussing it, or did they just lay it on you and let you sort it out for yourselves? Either way, that’s pretty early!
It was discussed chapter by chapter. And we watched the movie version after for good measure.
This shit made me fucking sob, I was also in seventh grade. I came to this comment section to mention it. Unforgettable
Jesus Christ. I read that aged 27 and cried like a baby. Way too heavy for grade school.
Ooh that’s a good one. All of Vonnegut’s stories have stuck with me. The first one I read was called Deadeye Dick, which I checked out from the library by chance because the title was funny to immature teenaged me. That sent me down the rabbit hole to read a bunch of other novels by him.
Not a bad trip. Funnily enough, DD is probably one of the few things I haven’t read yet. I probably started work cat’s cradle (pretty late).
“The Cold Equations” kinda fucked me up not gonna lie.
Came here to mention this one. I’ll be 36 soon and that story still haunts me 20 some odd years after reading it in class. Link for the curious.
I remember a story about a dying woman who predicted that she would die when the last leaf of a plant outside her house falls. But the leaf actually did fall, and her friend put up a fake one there. The woman gets better but her friend dies because of pneumonia. This was from back when I was maybe 10-11yo and I remember it for some reason. I think the moral of the story is that willpower is strong, but idk about that ending.
In my fifth grade English class the four term themes were Civil War, Holocaust, dog books, and choose-your-own. For the first three units, my parents read all four options ahead of time and had me assigned to the least traumatizing. For the last term I picked Julie of the Wolves, a dog book disguised as a Wolf book; I’d always wondered why my second grade teacher suddenly stopped reading it to us at story time.
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
I was assigned The Westing Game no led than three times from K-12
My favorite report I wrote was when I got to pick Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch in my dual-credit community college English course and the red pen in the margins of my report was all compliments
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
“The Veldt” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”? Those two stick with me due to two good readings of it.
The Veldt read by Leonard Nimoy and Tell-Tale Heart acted out by Vincent Price Part 1 and Part 2.
The fall of the house of usher by Mr Poe was also interesting.
SpongeBob did a episode that was a retelling of Telltale Heart even!
Simpsons also, a bit, iirc.
The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury.
They didn’t make everyone read it though, just us “gifted/advanced” kids. It was one of several short stories that were in a special program book that I had to read.
I still think those kids were brats.
Edit: just looked it up and this was supposed to be 9th grade English??? We fucking had to read that as 5th graders.
Edit 2: I need to stop thinking about this, they also made us read All Summer in a Day, Flowers for Algernon, and The Tell Tale Heart in that class
I was in the “gifted/advanced” track too. Teachers saw this one of two ways. Half of them got the memo: you got extra interesting stuff to noodle through because we’re all under-stimulated in a typical class. The others decided to just double your homework load and call it a day. At least the teachers in the first group had some interesting takes on brain teasers and reading material.
And on that note: I must have thought about Flowers for Algernon every week since I read it. Since the 90’s. I’m tired, boss.
I also took the “fucked up stories for smart kids” class
This was the one. Every once in a while my brain just says “hey, remember that fucked up story where the kids had a smart room that became whatever they wanted and it spoiled them to the point they murdered their parents with lions? Wasn’t that fucked up? Let’s think about how fucked up it was for a while!”
It was 7th grade for me, but still, I can’t believe we read that as kids.
Oh I was gonna call out All Summer in a Day cause holy fuck Ray Bradbury has some issues with kids…
I mean he is right too but damn those stories stick with you. And also did that and basically all the ones you pointed out as a “gifted class”. Do you think they literally had just 1 syllabus for us weird kids for the whole nation to try and scare us back into line or what? Cause, seems like we all getting traumatized by stories of death and emotional torture at like 11 by the same stories.
Most of the stuff we read in class was fine, or we knew was going to be fucked up as it was Gifted and Talented class.
The book that fucked me at the time more than those was reading Maus. At like 12. And if I bring it up with mother, she’d say it was my fault for reading it, instead of, you know, maybe she should vet the book instead of going “oh cartoony of the holocaust, that’s fine”
Holocaust was fine, every Hanukkah one of our 7 gifts works be a book, and you’d run out of noob holocaust books that relayed to judiasm real quick. But most were written for kids so.
Not Maus
read Maus a few months ago (as a 30 year old man) and it has hung over me like a dark cloud. I had to physically set the book down and walk away when it got to the diagrams of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, detailing how industrialized the extermination was. absolutely horrifying.
Which is why I don’t recommend it to preteen me at all! I think it’s extremely important now, but man. Not uh. Not to a kid.
Fun fact: Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, also created the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards.
We had to read a story in 10th grade about this family that’s out on a road trip when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. A car pulls up and the driver steps out to assist the family. However, the grandmother (who up to this point was doing nothing but bitch and whine about everything) recognizes the stranger as a wanted criminal she saw on TV and stupidly points this out to everybody. Which naturally results in the entire family being executed one-by-one because they’re now witnesses.
A whole family erased, just because granny couldn’t keep her fat mouth shut for 5 minutes.
Hadn’t read it before, so I just did. (It’s only 13 pages)
!Not only did Grandma call out the misfit to everyone, she caused the car accident in multiple ways: Bringing a cat on the trip, directing the family down a dirt road to a place she misremembered from a different state, scaring the cat enough that it clawed her son, the driver, in the shoulder, causing the car to flip and THEN was willing to sell out her entire family to survive.!<
Fuck grandma.
Yeah, she was terrible throughout the whole story. Not one redeeming quality.
Well that summary’s an uncomfortable parallel for modern events
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”?
Yes, that’s the one. I couldn’t remember the name.
I forget a lot of it, except that last bit where the Misfit says something like “she could’ve been a good person if there’d been someone to shoot her every day of her life.”
