For me that was “The Man in the Well” which the school librarian read to us in 4th grade during library story hour.
Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
The reply to that just being “Yes, for the love of God,” was cold as ice.
Funnily enough I did on a similar post a month ago.
i remember that post, was actually hoping to find it again as there had been some great recommendations! glad you mentioned it here.
Was that before or after the school-shooting lockdown drills?
After the hide under your desk from nuclear bombs drills but before the active shooter drills.
Nuclear attack drills? I don’t think we ever did those, I’ve just heard about them from older people. How old are you? I thought those stopped in like the 80s or something.
I grew up in a small town in Canada. We never had any kind of lock down drills.
Dang, things must be pretty good up in Canada. People are sending their children to first grade with ballistic-shielded backpacks down here.
Maybe try a poem.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell, 1945
Holy fuck who wrote this?
I should have attributed, sorry.
Randall Jarrell, published in 1945.
Bomber ball turret gunners and tail gunners had the shortest life expectancy of any combat occupation in the war, as these were the first targets of incoming fighters. I found one site that said tail gunners’ combat life expectancy was four missions.
Ball turrets couldn’t reload in flight. The ball was too small for parachutes, and the mechanisms jammed or froze often. Typically they put small, young, single guys in them.
Either I have a higher tolerance than most or my English teachers were pansies.
Though we did read the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in 8th grade.
Wait…you read the play version of a book? The fuck?
I don’t know that I’ve ever read the Diary in it’s entirety, but I’ve heard that there are some rather explicit parts, especially pertaining to Anne’s puberty, so maybe they did it to avoid that.
Those parts were not released by Anne’s father, they aren’t in any official edition.
“Alright Class, today we are going to read “The Jaunt” by Stephen King and write a report about the effects of eternal nothingness on the human psyche” -my sick fuck English teacher in grade 7 for some reason.
I just read this as an adult a few weeks ago actually. Pretty dope thing to have read in class but I can see how it would make a lasting impression
I mean I loved it. We also got to read some ray bradbury and Isaac Asimov in that semester.
Asimov in school is a true power move, hell yeah. I did *read Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 and that book changed my (literary) life as a kid. My school was christian so good literature was few and far between
I’m jealous of anyone who got to do bradbury in class. I did a book report on him but there was no class discussion. I just reread Kaleidoscope the other day, one of my faves. Actually most stuff from The Illustrated Man was dope.
Oh we just read The Veldt, which was a bomb ass short story to get to read in grade 7.
That’s a great one. Maybe it’s time to reread the bradbury anthology collection I have. Some of his work can be a total brain bender
Yeah it was great for me because from grade four on I was super into reading horror and sci fi, and when we got to read them in class and all my friends also had to read it I got to talk about it with people.
9th Grade English, got assigned Invisible Man by Ellison. It wasn’t science fiction like I thought it’d be 😅
Incredible book
Flashbacks to when only the teacher and I understood A Modest Proposal and not being able to explain to anyone else in that class that i was appreciating that he was sassing the english NOT the actual idea of eating babies. 🙃
Ray Bradbury “The Pedestrian”
My dad read “All summer in a day” to me when I was 5ish. I think I was being mean to another kid and he was trying to teach me a lesson. That story still sucks me up.
Y’all are taking about the girl with the green ribbon, my first year college lit teacher had us read a short story where a kid fist-fucked his mom and I’m feeling like maybe my education was problematic.
Terrible!
Tell me the title so I can shun it!
Oddly enough, Google is not turning up the story but it’s coming back with a lot of results
Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.
I had blocked that one from my memory; I remember now. Thanks. ಠ_ಠ
This is not limited to short stories and English. If I had not been an avid reader when entering my teen years, the selection of books thrown at me in school would have turned me into a passionate hater of books.
“Alright, class! We’re gonna read a story about a guy who locks himself in a hotel room with a decked-out kitchen, a surgery machine, and every prosthesis one could need, and this guy is gonna eat himself from the bottom up and describe it in careful, emotional, joyous detail!”
Yeeeeah, fuck that shit, decades later.
“The Savage Mouth” is the English title, by Komatsu Sakyou.
I have a similar reaction, but it was to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, about a woman locked in a room for a long period of time to deal with her mental health, and the solitude drives her quite insane. In quite haunting detail.
Fun historical note: many yellow paints and dyes used in that time period had some sort of neurotoxic heavy metal (probably mercury, IIRC) that actually caused or at least exacerbated symptoms of mental illness. Many of these compounds were relatively safe to use as paint in England, but when used in warmer, humid climates, they broke down and caused hallucinations as well as respiratory complications that caused the patients to be bedridden (further worsening the symptoms).
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing! I wonder if the author knew that, or if yellow was just used a lot… (I’ve seen occasional older advice to paint kitchens yellow to make them “feel sunny”, but imho that’s not an easy color to live with. My mom had a patterned yellow antique couch that was just absolutely hideous… but it was the style at some point…)
Granted I haven’t read that story in a long time, but I think they knew about any of this at the time the story was written. However, I seem to recall that this was a fairly autobiographical story about the author’s experiences with post-partum depression and the “treatment” thereof, so it might just be that the cost the yellow wallpaper because it mirrored her experiences
Hot.
Omg.
I got pictures of the text in English, further down my comment history. CTRL-F “autocannibalism”. I don’t have any Japanese copies, that was a long time ago.
CTRL-F “autocannibalism”.
Buddy no
“Class, today we’re going to start a VERY long lesson on allegory. It starts today with the reading of this short story, and it ends 30 years from now when you’re watching your last parent die in a hospital bed of old age with nothing you can do about it.”
Flowers for Algernon moment
Just think of the rabbits.
That’s a novella but definitely more disturbing and more universal than most of the short stories in this thread
U ok bro?
I am! Thanks for asking.
I was riffing off the OP post. We’re exposed to ideas early in life (at school) that we don’t understand the gravity of until much later.
Watership Down (1978) was fucking terrifying as a child.
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