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- “Gentlemen, your verdict” by Michael Bruce - trolley problem on a submarine (attention: weird vertical formatting)
- “Just Lather, That’s All” by Hernando Téllez" - a barber during a civil war
The second one actually gave me half of a mental breakdown, but not because it was too violent for me.
One analysis that I read made the exact opposite conclusion that I made, and it showed me this: in the subject of English, two diametrically opposed points can both be equally correct! Nothing is fixed! Reality is mutable!Also The Lottery, The Veldt, Harrison Bergeron (which others have already mentioned)
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
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.
Edit 2: I need to stop thinking about this, they also made us read All Summer in a Day, Flowers for Algernon, and The Tell Tale Heart in that class
Oh I was gonna call out All Summer in a Day cause holy fuck Ray Bradbury has some issues with kids…
I mean he is right too but damn those stories stick with you. And also did that and basically all the ones you pointed out as a “gifted class”. Do you think they literally had just 1 syllabus for us weird kids for the whole nation to try and scare us back into line or what? Cause, seems like we all getting traumatized by stories of death and emotional torture at like 11 by the same stories.
I was in the “gifted/advanced” track too. Teachers saw this one of two ways. Half of them got the memo: you got extra interesting stuff to noodle through because we’re all under-stimulated in a typical class. The others decided to just double your homework load and call it a day. At least the teachers in the first group had some interesting takes on brain teasers and reading material.
And on that note: I must have thought about Flowers for Algernon every week since I read it. Since the 90’s. I’m tired, boss.
This was the one. Every once in a while my brain just says “hey, remember that fucked up story where the kids had a smart room that became whatever they wanted and it spoiled them to the point they murdered their parents with lions? Wasn’t that fucked up? Let’s think about how fucked up it was for a while!”
It was 7th grade for me, but still, I can’t believe we read that as kids.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Was gonna say this. Fucked me up for a bit after I read it.
Came here to say this. Now I have to dig even deeper into my high school trauma to find something else, thanks. 🤣
To Build a Fire by Jack London
We had to read “The Call of the Wild” by the same author. Every few chapters the main character, a dog, would wax poetic for a few paragraphs about how addicting the warm, salty taste of human blood was in his mouth.
Been looking for this book for a long time, maybe someone here can help? It was in french, no idea if it was ever translated. The whole story is a guy in room alone with his dad, the dad is in a coma and expected to die (I believe the familly decided to unplug him). The guy is bitching to his dad, telling him how much he hates him for being an abusive asshole or something. It was really crude and emotonial. At the end, instead of dying when he’s unplugged, the dad wakes up. Maybe it was not a novel, but a part of a book, and maybe the title had the work Duck in it.
how about steinbecks the pearl
scarred for life from a 7th grade shortish story
It wasn’t in English class but I will never forget a book we read in another class I can’t remember the subject of that class for some reason. The book was “A Child Called It” that just describes horrid child abuse.
I remember reading The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty sometime in late middle school, I wanna say.
teacher let us know after that it was about the Irish civil war, and that things similar to the story had actually happened.
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.
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”?
Yes, that’s the one. I couldn’t remember the name.
I forget a lot of it, except that last bit where the Misfit says something like “she could’ve been a good person if there’d been someone to shoot her every day of her life.”
Wow a lot more diverse than I was expecting, I figured 50% of these would be the tell-tale heart by Poe
I’m fairly sure I read that in high school. I took it as the man haunted by his own conscience, not at all traumatizing
Maybe I was older than the kids who were upset by it
Not short stories, but I have two books that I read in high school that have stuck with me more than most:
“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
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.
