Tag: books

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an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks

  • the scarlet ibis
  • marigolds
  • the diamond necklace
  • the monkey’s paw
  • the open boat
  • the lady and the tiger
  • the minister’s black veil
  • an occurrence at owl creek bridge
  • a rose for emily
  • (I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)
  • the cask of amontillado
  • the yellow wallpaper
  • the most dangerous game
  • a good man is hard to find

some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15

add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed

The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gift of the Magi, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County, Thank You Ma’am

the box social by james reaney. i remember we all had to silently read it in class, and you would hear the moment everyone reached the Part because some people would audibly go “what”

wHat did I just put my eyes on

“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

Not quite a short story, but read in class: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from The Twilight Zone

Harrison Bergeron, Cat and the Coffee Drinkers

“Where are you going and where have you been” by Joyce carol oates

“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury

the lottery by shirley jackson

i can’t believe Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” wasn’t already mentioned

and also it’s not so much unsettling as more absurdist but “The Leader” by Eugene Ionesco definitely made me go wtf

Ett halvt ark papper.
I cried so much.

Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury 

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, by Donald Barthelme

We read lots of good disturbing shit in hs or in the writing groups I joined in hs but somehow the top of the heap for shit that haunted me’s still indisputably Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief”. It’s not horror as such but it freaked me the fuck out. 

There was another O. Henry short story we read that was also really alarming but I had to google a major spoiler (which is also a warning) to recall the name – “The Furnished Room”.  

there will come soft rains by bradbury was very unsettling for middle school me

I had no idea so many were all written by Ray Bradbury, why did he do this to us

“Emergency” by Dennis Johnson – not entirely disturbing but really weird and there’s one Bad Part

“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver – again not all that bad but sad and kind of creepy 

i had to read a collapse of horses by brian evenson for a writing class last year and it’s. very fucking weird

“the birds” by du maurier

Bradbury wrote a lot of weird shit. But, “The Book of Sand” and"The Library of Babel" by Luis Borges.

“It’s a Good Life” – Jerome Bixby
“The Little Black Bag” – Cyril M. Cornbluth
“The Cold Equations” – Tom Godwin
“The Nine Billion Names of God” – Arthur C. Clarke
“Mars is Heaven!” – Ray Bradbury
“Born of Man and Woman” – Richard Matheson
“That Only A Mother” – Judith Maril
“The Country of the Kind” – Damon Knight
“Mimsy Were The Borogroves” – Lewis Padgett
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – Roald Dahl
“We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” – Neil Gaiman
“BLIT” and “Different Kinds of Darkness” – David Langford (set in the same universe) (there are a couple of other “basilisk” stories and they’re worth checking out)
“The Secret Number” – Igor Teper

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Nearly anything by Borges tbh, he specializes in unsettling

Technically read it on my own in high school but Guts by Chuck Palahniuk wigged me out for a while.

Also, from college, A Very Old Man With Enourmous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Magical realism as a genre and genres inspired by it have some nutty fucking short stories and there are a lot that I remember imagery from but not the titles or authors (Borges is one).

POPULAR MECHANICS

I forget the title, but there was a story in one of my textbooks where the narrator  hangs a kitten after his dad can’t stand its mewing and says someone should kill it.  He gets in very deep trouble with his parents, and his dad says he didn’t mean it.  I felt weird for days.  We didn’t read it in class, but I was one of those bright kids who did extra reading.  For fun.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants,” Carl Stephenson.

“The Voice in the Night”, William Hope Hodgson

“Survivor Type”, Stephen King

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remember the wayside school books those were fucked up

remember that one chapter where a new student came to the class and was wearing like 10 different raincoats and the teacher kept making him take off the raincoats one by one until they got down to the final layer and it was just a dead rat

some other truly exceptional Wayside moments:

-Paul keeps pulling Leslie’s pigtails so he gets sent to the counsellor’s office. The counsellor is a hypnotist named Doctor Pickell, and he hypnotizes Paul into thinking Leslie’s pigtails are snakes. Because he’s a troll, he also hypnotizes Paul into believing Leslie’s ears are delicious candy whenever Leslie says the word “pencil”.

-The class is taken over by the son of hated ex-teacher Mrs. Gorf. Because they killed his mom he uses his superpower of stealing people’s voices to steal their voices and call their parents to say how much each individual student hates their family. The students are forced to listen in silence, crying. (They are saved by the cafeteria lady.)

-Benjamin is too nervous and awkward to correct Mrs Jewls when she gets his name wrong, so he goes by “Mark Miller” for months. He finally says his real name to a substitute teacher. Everyone thinks it’s a great prank and also go by Benjamin for the whole day, including the teacher.

-Louis the yard teacher falls in love with substitute teacher Miss Nogard. She has a third ear on top of her head that allows her to listen to people’s thoughts.

-Joe is the only student to order the potato salad one day. The face he draws in it looks like Mrs. Gorf and she nearly turns Joe into an apple.

-Because Wayside School is 30 stories high, they installed elevators. One only went up and the other only went down, so they got used once and never again.

-Allison gets stuck on the 19th story, which doesn’t exist. Nobody else can see, hear, or remember her. The 19th chapter is three chapters long.

My favorite genre of children’s story is “This would be horror if the characters were adults”

Loved these books. I think I still have them. What about the one kid who got a tattoo on his ankle of a potato? Or the substitute who was evil and they got her to go after her old student who was now a dentist? I still remember the phrase “Rub a monkey’s tummy with your head!”