Maybe not disturbing enough, but the short story that really stuck with me was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_to_the_Slaughter
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Short stories:
Short-ish:
Except I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, my highschool definitely made us read those.
I don't know about scary, but I would assign Teddy by J. D. Salinger.
Also, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.
Another one I really like that I feel like nobody else has ever read is: After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned by Dave Eggars (it's written from a dog's POV)
I guess this is more "short stories that I like" lol
High school teacher had us read Survivor Type - thus began my love for stephen king
"On the Quay at Smyrna" by Ernest Hemingway. A very short read, almost a vignette, but it left me depressed. Too on the nose for the current world situation.
We had to read 'Der Vorleser' in which a 15 year old boy gets into a relationship with a 36 year old woman. A strange choice to force kids about that age to read (we were a bit older than 15, I think. But still...)
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.
not hans christian Anderson's "little matchstick girl"?
Yeah, sounds like a variation of that. Or maybe even the inspiration for it, who knows.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
We read this in university computer science ethics. It gets you thinking, which is good.
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.'
I like the other interpretation, where the writer inserts the suffering so you the reader would find it more believable because you've been conditioned to accept that we can't have a good society without making at least some people suffer for it.
"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/
My freshman college English prof assigned House of Leaves.
It was awesome watching the preppy kids descend into madness
That is not a short story lol
Crazy book though.
That book drove me to madness, not because of the creepy content but just because there was so much going on in the endnotes. I'm compulsive about reading all the footnotes and endnotes in anything I read, but I generally hate having to keep one finger in the page I'm on in the main text while reading through the notes in their tiny font (e-readers are a godsend to me, as long as they handle notes decently, which not all of them do). I had a hardback copy of House of Leaves so it was a bit of a physical ordeal and my hands hurt all the time.
They Bite by Anthony Boucher is like four pages long and had me jumping at every shadow in the corner of my eye for a week. I found it in my grandparents' copy of Alfred Hitchcock's 30 Best in Horror or something like that, bought a copy for the brother I like because it shook me so badly (I verified it was in there)
I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier
That name sounds lovely
Come and See by Soviet Union
The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
That one became a meme, which I loved
Great story, but I think I read this one in 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.
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
https://archive.org/details/coldequationsoth0000godw
Or
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
SCP-093.
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.
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.
Peak satire
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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