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.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was the one that did it for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There will come soft rains, I presume, is what inspired that post. It has done a number on many a childchildren
The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
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.
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.
Short stories:
Short-ish:
Guts by chuck palahniuk.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. If comics count, The Enigma of Amigara Fault.
Im still scarred by my english teacher enthusiastically reading certain scenes of Equus to the class.
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. 😂
Lord of the flies
!shortstories@literature.cafe
Whatever you choose, post right there 😭
The Jaunt
Borrasca (just the original, not the add-on parts)
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!
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.
SCP-093.
"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/
Into the Wild (1996) is a popular pick for something both scarring but also uncontroversial.
Less exciting would be The Pinballs (1976).
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
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
Space might be the final frontier but it is by no means forgiving
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.
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.
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.
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.
Asimov's Breeds There a Man ...?
A suicidal genius figures out the relationship between his brilliance and his mental health.
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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