The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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When the Wind Blows.
Blood Child ild by Octavia Butler. Humans living on an alien reservation have the males implanted by the insect like alien's eggs and they start burrowing out of your flesh when they're ready.
Copy-pasta deserves a unit in my classroom, the Russian sleep experiment
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.
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.
I try to not remember The Veldt but I still liked it as a good read. I also hated Harrison Bergeron but I think I was suppose to?
I think Harrison Bergeron was just bad.
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.
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.
By the Waters of Babylon still haunts me in the best way.
Exit by Harry Farjeon.
I read Flowers for Algernon as an adult. It hit me hard. I have since heard that it is read i school many places in the US.
Edit: I've only read the novel he wrote based on the short story, but I guess the short story is equally as good since it won the Hugo award while the novel won the nebula award.
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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 horrors of one’s own mind vastly outweigh the horrors found on screens, imo.
I read that 25 years ago and instantly regretted it
The king in yellow
I've been recommended this book twice. Guess I should get on it.
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.
It might not be disturbing, but I think that anyone that is going into the Engineering field should read Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke.
The Pedestrian, Ray Bradbury.
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.
That's what I loved about it is that it took itself seriously. How people realistically responded to what happened to Gregor
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!
I only recently discovered Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, but I think that would need to be in the conversation.
Still think about this from HS. Years later. Such a good one.
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.
We had to read this book called A Prayer for Owen Meany in school. Lots of weird stuff in that one. Main thing that stood out to me was a part where the mc is tied up to his girl cousin and gets an erection
Was a full, but short, novel that I think was summer reading: The Chocolate Wars.
Not traumatizing as much as just a shit message. Don't quietly try to opt out of what the public wants, don't rock the boat, or you'll be executed publicly as a spectacle while your peers cheer.
Kid doesn't want to participate in his high school chocolate selling fundraiser, bunch of other things happen in between, and then his classmates organize a rigged boxing match between him and the biggest school bully where they all cheer while the bully beats the main character to death. And it just hard cuts, ends there.
What a garbage book.
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.
It isn't a short story, but it might as well have been.
In my high school senior level English class, they had us read "On the Beach." The class as a whole did not like it. We told the teacher that we would not be reading further and would not be engaging on the book any more. It took a week and they moved us on to "Wuthering Heights" which was far easier to read.
"Wuthering Heights" which was far easier to read.
Oh my!
In case you don't know, the plot of on the beach is that nuclear war happened and the only people still alive are in Australia. The story follows their acceptance of impending death as the fallout reaches them. I'd rather young adult angst than full on suicidal discussions. I have my own thoughts on that, thankyouverymuch. I don't need a book to slap me in the face with them for a school grade.
There will come soft rains, I presume, is what inspired that post. It has done a number on many a child
hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
That story wasn't even assigned to us. I read The Martian Chronicles for fun as a kid and stumbled into that lovely scene of existential dread.
I absolutely loved Martian Chronicles as a 10yo. I found it disturbing, but it also helped me develop a sense of empathy at a critical time when I was a real asshole
The Jaunt
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. 😂
!shortstories@literature.cafe
Whatever you choose, post right there 😭
Have no clue what it was called but I remember having to read a short story that included a guy who would take the family cat into a locked room and watch porn…
Borrasca (just the original, not the add-on parts)
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