Not in english, but we read Anne Frank's Diary in grade 8, Andorra by Max Frisch in grade 9 or 10.
But the most disturbing was "Der Sandmann" in grade 11 and "Der gelbe Vogel" (originally "Alan and Naomi") in grade 9.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
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.
Came here to say this. Now I have to dig even deeper into my high school trauma to find something else, thanks. 🤣
Flowers for Algernon, that was thought provoking but also way too heavy for a 7th grade English class.
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.
That was 5th grade for me. I still wonder what that teacher was thinking.
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
Tap for spoiler
It’s written as journal entries by a woman who may or may not have been insane before she got locked in an asylum or possibly just a room in her house by her husband. There’s a woman in the wallpaper who creepily crawls along the wall but actually it’s her shadow because she’s the creepy woman crawling around the room and rubbing up against the wall. Of course you don’t really know this until she starts really sounding crazy and starts ripping up the wallpaper trying to free the woman in the walls. In the end her husband returns home and either he faints or she fucking murders him with the blade she uses to sharpen her pencil. The book ends with her thinking she’s been freed, not by escaping through the now unlocked door but by entering the yellow wallpaper. There’s also a creepy film adaptation we watched that was… unsettling.
It was quite scarring for most of the kids in my 7th grade class.
Also I’ve only just now realized that wallpaper back then could have contained arsenic so going insane from being in contact with it constantly enough to stain your skin is a very real possibility.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin is the one that came to mind for me.
The Hatchet when he kills the rabbit.
My 4th grade teacher read a chapter to the class every day, same with the sequel. I specifically remember the part where he was standing outside naked in winter and some tree bark just kinda exploded, and he was freaking out trying to decide if the freezing bark caused it to expand and explode or if a hunter was out there shooting bullets at him. Also, the part where he finds an orange-drink packet in the survival supplies of the plane and describes the taste of it.
Edit: I think the tree bark part was in the sequel, Brian's Winter.
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.
I also took the "fucked up stories for smart kids" class
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.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Leguin
Not short stories, but I have two books that I read in high school that have stuck with me more than most:
"A modest proposal" by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it
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.
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.
A retiring teacher at our school had his class read a story that lit a fire under a bunch of parents. It was The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
1984 for me. This was back in the early 80's so the book was a bit of a deal at the time. So very very glad I was introduced to this book at such a young age. Disturbing, but a good preparation for the world I was going to be living in as an adult.
"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".
how about steinbecks the pearl
scarred for life from a 7th grade shortish story
From high middle-high school timeframe, probably The Yellow Wallpaper, I just think about that one at least a few times a year. And I only read it the one time in school.
The less well known one I remember from elementary school was My Brother Sam is Dead. It's about a family during the American revolution, where the father just wants to stay out of all of it and live their lives, but the eldest son wants to join the revolution. The whole story is just the hardships the family has to go through after the son runs off with the only gun to fight and ends up dying, and how that affects the family and the youngest brother, who the story is told from the perspective of.
None of my friends remember My Brother Sam is Dead, but if I'm remembering right, the ending is kinda dark for a bunch of 3-5th graders.
The Veldt. Also, All Summer In A Day.
I had to read "Speak". It was basically a short story about a girl getting SA'd and then treated like crap by everyone till the last couple pages. I do not think it had the intended effect they were going for.
Wow a lot more diverse than I was expecting, I figured 50% of these would be the tell-tale heart by Poe
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
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
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.
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
There's a story called "Time Safari" that ends in a dude just straight up killing another dude. This was in a kid's literature book.
Also I think Casque of Amontillado is funny.
Mine is the one where the soldier returns from WWI completely desensitized to murder and fucked in the head.
He starts stabbing little girls, just like in the war. "Poor people" by Móricz if anyone is interested.
I’ve been trying to find this ridiculous sci-fi story I read in elementary school. I thought it was Ray Bradbury but then I recalled it was, I believe, from a collection edited by and/or with a foreword by Bradbury.
The scenario was that people in the future had become so dependent on mechanized transportation that their legs atrophied. Walking around normally was seen as very strange as everyone used these hovering personal transport devices. I think the story basically just described the protagonist walking around town and taking strolls at night and how odd everyone else thought it was.
“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel García Márquez would have been that, but it lost its impact because my generation associates the name Esteban with the silly bellhop from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
A Modest Proposal was quite memorable
“The Savage Mouth” by Komatsu Sakyou, which involves
Tap for spoiler
A man eating himself in a locked hotel room and relishing every bite. Very body horror, much terrifying, cops rule it a homicide
Or “Cogwheels” by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, which
Tap for spoiler
ends abruptly with the author’s real-world suicide. Story is the thinnest veneer of fiction, and at some point I think he just stopped writing a story and was trying therapy on a page, then gave the fuck up on everything.
A Worn Path, The Test, and a story I haven't been able to find about kids who go into a carnival fun house but it's really set up to kill them (vats of acid, snakes hanging from the ceiling).
This was 6th grade. I seemed like all the short stories in middle school made the Tell Tale Heart seem cheerful.
And Bartleby, the Scrivener.
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