We read The Yellow Wallpaper and that was pretty effed.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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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.
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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.
Still think about this from HS. Years later. Such a good one.
This is the best answer. Iirc it was actually printed in one of my HS English books, and is actually a short story.
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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.
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The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
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.'
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The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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.
"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/
There will come soft rains, I presume, is what inspired that post. It has done a number on many a child
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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 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.
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.
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When the Wind Blows.
My freshman college English prof assigned House of Leaves.
It was awesome watching the preppy kids descend into madness
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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.
I remember in high school our text book had some paragraphs from various literature books. One of the books was called zombie (or zombies) so of course I checked it out, even if the teacher skipped it. The section was just a description or something, nothing particular, but I decided to borrow the book at the library anyway, and the full story was basically (spoilers ahead, it's gory):
Tap for spoiler
This guy kidnapped people (men, women) to give them a lobotomy, then kept them in his bathtub to rape them until they started to rot
I wonder if somebody did it as an Easter egg or what
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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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was the one that did it for me.
SCP-093.
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
!shortstories@literature.cafe
Whatever you choose, post right there 😭
Copy-pasta deserves a unit in my classroom, the Russian sleep experiment
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. 😂
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?
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