They Bite by Anthony Boucher is like four pages long and had me jumping at every shadow in the corner of my eye for a week. I found it in my grandparents' copy of Alfred Hitchcock's 30 Best in Horror or something like that, bought a copy for the brother I like because it shook me so badly (I verified it was in there)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier
That name sounds lovely
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.
Into the Wild (1996) is a popular pick for something both scarring but also uncontroversial.
Less exciting would be The Pinballs (1976).
Had to look this up, because I briefly thought you were referring to "Pinball, 1973" by Haruki Murakami.
My freshman college English prof assigned House of Leaves.
It was awesome watching the preppy kids descend into madness
That book drove me to madness, not because of the creepy content but just because there was so much going on in the endnotes. I'm compulsive about reading all the footnotes and endnotes in anything I read, but I generally hate having to keep one finger in the page I'm on in the main text while reading through the notes in their tiny font (e-readers are a godsend to me, as long as they handle notes decently, which not all of them do). I had a hardback copy of House of Leaves so it was a bit of a physical ordeal and my hands hurt all the time.
"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/
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
We read this in university computer science ethics. It gets you thinking, which is good.
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
Asimov's Breeds There a Man ...?
A suicidal genius figures out the relationship between his brilliance and his mental health.
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
https://archive.org/details/coldequationsoth0000godw
Or
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
A textbook on integral calculus
That'a fair. We have to learn how to read textbooks and manuals at some point.
The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
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.
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.
SCP-093.
When the Wind Blows.
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.
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.
Damn near anything Ray Bradbury wrote. I swear he just wanted to traumatize anyone that read any of his work.
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
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.
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.
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.
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