Of mice and men
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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The Dweller in the Gulf by Clark Ashton Smith.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. If comics count, The Enigma of Amigara Fault.
Random shitposts on the internet have wiped away all the trauma I got from anything I read in school.
"Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch" still haunts me...
Maybe not disturbing enough, but the short story that really stuck with me was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_to_the_Slaughter
Short stories:
- Flowers for Algernon
- I have no mouth and I must scream
Short-ish:
- Of mice and men
- Brave new world
Except I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, my highschool definitely made us read those.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
We actually had to read that for our English course. What still haunts me is how weird random German words look in an English book. Like they're not supposed to be there
High school teacher had us read Survivor Type - thus began my love for stephen king
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 Eggars (it's written from a dog's POV)
I guess this is more "short stories that I like" lol
After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned by Dave Eggars (it’s written from a dog’s POV)
Man, the title and brief synopsis has been enough to fuck up my day, thanks.
"On the Quay at Smyrna" by Ernest Hemingway. A very short read, almost a vignette, but it left me depressed. Too on the nose for the current world situation.
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.
"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.'
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.
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My freshman college English prof assigned House of Leaves.
It was awesome watching the preppy kids descend into madness
That is not a short story lol
Crazy book though.
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.
Into the Wild (1996) is a popular pick for something both scarring but also uncontroversial.
Less exciting would be The Pinballs (1976).
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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)
Come and See by Soviet Union
This has been on my watch list for a while now
Don't do it!
I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier
That name sounds lovely
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
https://archive.org/details/coldequationsoth0000godw
Or
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
That one became a meme, which I loved
Great story, but I think I read this one in school
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.
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