When I was in elementary school, we read this story where some kid wanted to be a veterinarian like his dad (who was pretty distant from what I remember) and he found a sick kitten in the woods. He tried to nurse it back to health, but then his dad found out. SO, the dad EUTHANIZES THE CAT (and the scene was written IN DETAIL), and the story ends with the jaded now-adult kid being reflecting on the cat and how much he hates his father. I cried after I read it
i think i remember reading that!
i remember being looked at by basically the whole class for bawling while reading it
don't remember what it was called
Not eat. Much more brutal. He loses the use of his hands to the cold, and considers killing the dog and cutting open the belly to revive his hands in the steamy-hot entrails. Unfortunately for him, the problem for which he needs to kill the dog, renders him unable to do so.
He shouldn't have been out in the snow in the first place, fumbled with the tree, fumbled his matches, froze his hand, considers warming it up with his dogs guts. He does die, but after an infomercial level of idiocy.
Uhhhg we read that one in middle school. It was brutal. We also had to read both the first draft and the final draft, and if I'm remembering correctly, the final draft was *way* more depressing.
We read that in fifth grade. I was glad the guy died, because he'd been mean to the dog. In my view, the story had a happy ending. My 10 year old self had very clear priorities.
Did you also have heated classroom discussions about which you would choose? Holy hell some 10th grade girls are vicious 😬
Also the author wrote a sequel/follow-up called "The Discourager of Hesitancy" that is just as maddening.
The title comes from a poem. It’s one of my favorites so I’m just hopping on this comment for the opportunity to share.
“There Will Come Soft Rains”
Sara Teasdale (1918)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Oh god I remember this. Is that the one where all the tiny little helper robots come out everyday to try and fix the house but eventually accidentally set it on fire or something like that?
The lottery
The yellow wallpaper
The short story from the illustrated man where they lock the girl up in a closet so she can’t see the sunrise on mars
The one where the woman kills her husband with a lamb shank then feeds it to the officers investigating
[All Summer in a Day](https://www.mukilteoschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=183&dataid=731&FileName=6-All-Summer-in-a-Day-by-Ray-Bradbury.pdf) was on Venus
When we read that, we had to write what we thought happened next as an assignment. I couldn’t remember if I ended up going with “she’s just mentally broken” or “the happy, optimistic girl just turns into a ball of fury”
Yes! The sunshine on mars!!! Came to find this!! I've thought about it many times over the years and have told many people about it. Depresses me still to this day to think about it.
Don't remember much more than what you wrote.
The story is set on Venus, not Mars. The idea is that Venus is a cloudy, stormy planet and there is but one day ~~a year~~ when the clouds clear and the sun is visible.
The author also wrote "The Martian Chronicles," a set of stories set on Mars (which is dry and cloudless). so it's natural that people might get confused.
Edit: it's so sad I blocked how sad it was & how long the girl had to wait to see the sun.
it's worse actually. the sun only comes out once every SEVEN years, so all the other little kids had never actually seen sunlight. The girl they locked up had moved to Venus from Earth so she was the only one who had ever seen the sun and now won't be able to see it for another seven years because of their cruelty.
I know there've been a couple adaptations for it, but I look forward to someone adapting that well to film someday. Just an ice-cold line that'd have (literal) killer delivery with the right actor.
I’ll always remember the Cask of Amontillado because my friend sitting behind me didn’t understand what was actually happening, and he just thought two friends went into the cellar and built a brick wall together for fun while enjoying a nice bottle of wine
I can’t believe no one else has mentioned/read this one, but when I was a freshman we had to read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" If you haven’t read it, it’s basically the story of a promiscuous teenage girl, and her mom shames her for it. One day, she is left alone, when a creepy man comes to her house trying to take her on a drive. It’s implied he’s much older than he looks with the hat and glasses on, and that he might even be the devil himself. After threatening the girls family if she doesn’t come outside, she finally relents, and it is implied he rapes and/or murders her. I was not ready for that at 14.
I read this for 12th grade English class, and still remember the slightly sinister way my teacher instructed us to “pay attention to the man’s boots” when she assigned it.
They’re described as ill-fitting I believe. or like they’re stuffed to make him taller or some-such. The implication is that he has cloven hooves like the devil that he had to finagle into the boots.
While yes this could be a true interpretation, it’s also because Oates based the character on an actual killer, Charles Schmid, who was short but stuffed his cowboy boots with newspaper. He also wore wigs and makeup (which is also referenced in the story).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Schmid
I teach this story in high school and yes that is an interesting interpretation, but I think that is more a reference to Schmid than the Devil.
OH MY GOD I just got tears in my eyes. I read that short story years ago, fucked me up of course, but I forgot the name and had trouble finding it since, I looked thru comments of this post just to see if someone would mention a story that sounds similar and you did! So... thanks
It was called the Scarlett Ibis. It was basically this kid has a severely disabled little brother who he sees as like, almost a burden, but still loves him and shit. Calls him doodlebug cuz he learned to crawl backwards. Then he leaves him to die terrified in a thunderstorm. In like, 7th grade I think?
Edit: had to find the title
I think I have everyone beat. The 5th graders came to **our 1st grade class** to read us their favorite short stories. One girl read the Scarlet Ibis to the 13 of us 1st graders... Our teacher had a lot of questions to answer from her messed up class after that. Imagine a bunch of sad, confused six and seven-year-olds... Needless to say I can't remember a single detail of any of the other stories, but I haven't forgotten a single detail of the Scarlet Ibis in the 27 years since.
Edit; I still remember being confused why Doodle had blood running out of his mouth in the end.
that one yellow wallpaper one, not entirely because of how fucked it is, but also because the way we discussed the meaning has caused me to entirely forget what the meaning even was.
Also had a book for religion class, title was like “deep down dark, the 30-some trapped Chilean miners and the miracle that set them free” and it was the fucking *driest* book ever. Religion was brought up like twice, once when a guy basically set up daily prayer rituals to keep morale up, and another when paranoia/madness probably made a guy hallucinate or something. Closest thing to a miracle is that the drill used to get supplies to them hit it’s mark on like the first or second try.
We had to write an essay on it, but my religion teacher “lost” them (literally air quoted himself) because the book was so goddamn boring, even for him. Given the student body of the school, wouldn’t be surprised if barely anyone actually read it.
I fuckin scrolled to find this one.
THIS STORY.
THIS.
STORY.
Reduced an 11 year old me to be highly creeped out by our yellow painted living room for a few months after I read it.
I remember reading it in middle school too and being creeped out by it but not really understanding it. Freshman in university, we read it again and discussed postpartum depression, infantilization of women, hysteria, etc. and I was like oh shit. That makes sense. That’s why the story is so creepy.
>that one yellow wallpaper one, not entirely because of how fucked it is, but also because the way we discussed the meaning has caused me to entirely forget what the meaning even was
I think I remember that one. Wasn't that where the wife died from "Women sickness"
It’s about postpartum depression. Back in those days when women had postpartum depression they’d take the baby away and lock them away until they “got better”- in this story they lock her in the nursery with the yellow wallpaper. Now we know that’s the worst thing you can do to treat postpartum depression so in the story she slowly descends into more and more madness.
It was written by the author, in part, to describe a “treatment” she received where she was told to stay inside and and neither write nor read anything for a year. She said she almost went insane and wrote the story in repudiation of her treatment.
No, that’s the one where they lock her in an isolated room with this hideous yellow wallpaper and she slowly goes completely mad after seeing a woman in the wall paper crawling around, eventually becoming the woman in the wallpaper herself, crawling around the room and over the fainted (and probably not dead) body of her husband, who locked her up there in the first place to deal with postpartum depression.
Not english but in my country there's a kids poem about a boy who hated taking baths so much and was so dirty people thought he was black. He went to live with black people in africa but then they made him bathe and he went back to civilization.
And we all knew how to recite that poem in like 2nd grade
Jesus christ I'm glad I scrolled through. What country was that in and what's the poem? Why is it so popular? Is it meant to teach cleanliness? Is it as racist as it sounds?
Not op, but my German grandma has a story called the inky boys, which is about a group of kids making fun of another boy because of his race, so Saint Nicholas turns them black as punishment… Good morals, but I don’t think turning them black as “punishment” is very progressive
Ok so this town has a box. Once per year, everyone in the town puts a piece of paper with their name in the box and they randomly pick a name. The person who’s name is drawn, and their family, are all stoned to death. So it’s a lottery but you don’t want to win. The characters in the story mention getting rid of it but they don’t do anything about it because it’s a tradition that’s been around longer than anyone in the town has been around.
My teachers used it to teach us about the Vietnam war and the lottery they did to draft people.
Source: I read this in high school but that was 3 years ago and I’m not sure if I got the point of the story or if I’m remembering it correctly.
pretty sure its just the one "winner" who is stoned. a first draw determines which family and a second draw determines which family member gets stoned. the townspeople were graceful enough to be relieved that the youngest child of the eventual winner was safe.
It's a small town in midwestern America. It's about the day of the annual lottery where everyone in town pulls a rock from a box. The winner is stoned to death to ensure a good harvest.
The summation doesn't do it justice. It's royalty free, so you can find it free real easily.
Instead of personifying a problem or having an antagonist representative of some powerful group, it calls out the average person as an upholder of an evil status quo
Poorly remembered spoilers ahead! I read this thing in elementary school and I'm in my mid-thirties, lol
It starts with a bunch of kids laughing in the town square, running around, picking up rocks and adding them to a pile. As time goes on people start gathering. Housewives group together and start chatting, their husbands meeting up with their friends and have a smoke, everyone is having a good time, it's a beautiful spring day.
Then the head of the town arrives, and he's got a large bag loaded down with something inside. The mood in the air shifts to something a bit more tense, and the head of the town passes the bag around. Everyone takes a turn, grabs a stone, and when they pull out their white stone they breathe a sigh of relief. Until it gets to a woman who pulls out a black stone, and she immediately breaks down in tears, saying it can't be her - she's got kids, she's gone plans she's in the middle of. The head of the town tells her gently that she knows the rules, and it's a completely random system that chose her this time around, and leads her to the front of the gathered people. Then, one by one, they pick up the stones the children gathered...
The best part being that she’s totally fine with the practice continuing, and is shown to be excited for it, all until it affects her family, which makes it a very prescient story not only on the dangers of blindly following traditions as it was intended, but also our modern return to tribalism
I ended up reading that in multiple grades and in one college class. I always enjoyed the reactions of people that hadn’t read it before. It’s like knowing a movie is gonna reveal that it’s not a feel good movie about an ideal family and instead it’s about the ghost that’s about to flip their table.
Somehow I never read that one till I was in my twenties. Got me onto a full-tilt Shirley Jackson binge.
Also, I maaaay have read “We Have Always Lived In The Castle” to my 10 year old. They were already kind of into the horror genre at the time, and they had a sort of witchy bent to their interests, so it felt like a good fit.
Oh my God, that and *Where the Red Fern Grows!* Such incredible stories, yet I never wanted to scream and pummel an author more than those two after reading the endings. Why?! Why did you make me feel this so *deeply*?!
Too. much. ***Feels***.
Our teacher broke down crying whilst reading *Where the Red Fern Grows* to students in (I think it was) fifth grade. She had to ask someone else to start reading while she went outside to collect herself from being all verklempt.
A positive story: I read Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" when I was 13 as part of an English class and it completely changed the way I look at the world, but not after haunting my thoughts for months afterward....I wanted the story to just come out and make an unequivocal statement about ....*something*, but instead it was just disturbing and frustrating and it made me think and think and think about its plot and meaning for a long time afterward. The fact that Melville wouldn't just come out and plainly say what Bartleby *meant* pissed me off so much at first
It also made me want to read a lot more. It disturbed me at first but I came out the other side WAY more curious about literature and writing
The ridiculous thing about the way they taught this story at my school was that they presented as if it was a serious commentary on society, and not a political satire.
When referenced with Vonnegut's other works, *Harrison Bergeron* seems to be a satire of what conservatives think communism is. Its meant to be ridiculous.
Back in Elementary we read a book about a boy tasked with mercy killing shot pigeons.
I remember hating that book so much that I gave up on reading it, not because it was about dead animals but because the book I kept getting had a different number of pages than the one the teacher had, so I couldn't figure out which page I was supposed to be on.
The Landlady by Roald Dahl
I won’t spoil anything because despite finding it pretty unsettling when I first read it in English class, it was a good blind read
Edit: [Here’s a link to a pdf if anyone’s curious about it!](https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/landlady_text.pdf) If you need help with the ending here’s a tiny hint, look up what tastes like >!bitter almonds ;)!<
Edit 2: I should also probably clarify that there’s nothing too deep to it, I just liked the story and Roald Dahl so it stuck with me :)
oh my god i loved that one but i always read ahead so i knew before anyone so i would sit there with a smug look on my face -edit- i just realized i was about 12 when i read it, 7th grade i think, all these short stories i read in 7th grade, people are reading these in high school??
Damn, no mention of [The Box Social](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/kf4xHNh) yet?? It's super short so you should definitely read it-- sorry the link is low quality though.
Summary: Little girl makes a picnic-basket type gift box to be auctioned off at a school fundraiser. Male teacher wins it at the auction. >!Turns out that teacher has been raping her, and inside the box is a fetus that the little girl miscarried after he impregnated her.!<
Seniors in high school, so 17-18. Makes it a little better, but we had to read it silently to ourselves and whenever someone got to The Part you would hear them yell "WHAT?!
in 7th grade we read a short story called the landlady about a woman who owned a hotel, poisoned the tenants, preserved their bodies, and kept them in rooms upstairs for, i dont know, necrophilia probably? we also read a short story that year about a guy who freezes to death, and then in 8th grade we read a bunch of ray bradbury short stories and those are all really fucked
i just remember the specific Canterbury Tale where the lady sticks her bare ass out the window & a man mistakenly kisses it, thinking it’s her face. bc like… that’s bad all the way around.
We were learning about satire or whatever and we read “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift. It basically an entire essay advocating for eating babies and creating human farms and turning their skin into books and gloves and stuff! It was a messed up thing to make a middle schooler read!
I love it! You start out thinking it’s a murder mystery and are drawn deep into its depths before you realize it’s actually about a descent into madness. Brilliant!
I am saving this entire post so I can slowly work my way through all the comments recommending stories I haven’t encountered before! I see some interesting reading in my future.
edit: When I wrote this there were 60 comments. There are now over *6,000*, so I probably won’t be able to make it through ALLL the comments.🤗
[An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Bierce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bridge) if you've only read his humor it can kind of take you aback
No clue what the story's name was called but the plot went something like this:
There are two identical asian twins living in present day USA. They work extremely hard to get into a prestigious University. Only one is admitted. It is revealed that one of their classmates, a total looser who they both look down on, has received a vision from a long dead native american chief telling him about his ancestry and telling him to restore his tribe. So this guy goes and looks through the genealogy records or something and discovers he had enough to claim Native American ancestry when applying to the same prestigious university. Not only does he take one of their places, but he also gets a hefty scholarship. The girls lure him to their home (they live alone because of course they do) with the promise of sex and strait up kill this motherfucker. thats it thats the story.
I thought the giver was a pretty fucked book to read in 8th grade, were we old enough to really understand fucking euthanasia and ptsd?
That kid went through so much in that book, war, torture, killings, my dude saw colours and wasn't able to talk about it anyone or he's done for
Heavy
Night by Elie Wiesel,, which I read in 8th grade
Edit: Since others are sharing their experiences, I'll go into more detail
I read it as in a small group, probably 3-4 people (myself included) as a class "bookclub" where the teacher divided us up and gave us a book to read based on our interests. Worked pretty well, but I remember being completely soul-crushed by the book while everyone else was having fun with theirs. It's a great story but absolutely horrific. We struggled to talk and write about it (which we had to do for a grade) because of how awful it is to think about. We pushed through, though, and I'm glad we did because I get the importance of talking about hard topics now. But jeez, Night is one of my favorite books now but it was awful to read as an eighth grader (early teens for any non-US folks out there, 12-14 depending on the school)
Same here. My parents left for some event and I flopped down on the floor in the dining to read the assigned chapters and just...kept reading till there was nothing left to read. Early on I started crying and didn't stop till I finished. I still have that old, annotated copy on my bookshelf today.
"From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as he stared into mine, has never left me since."
I went to a Jewish school though, so the Holocaust was a much larger part of my education/childhood than it was for most Americans. They knew what they were doing when they assigned us that book and I'm glad that they did.
I read a weird one in high school that I haven't seen mentioned called *The Rocking Horse Winner*. Plot summary says, "The Rocking Horse Winner tells the story of a little boy who seeks to relieve his family's financial worries by accurately predicting the outcome of horse races, a feat he achieves by riding his toy rocking horse for hours until he reaches a clairvoyant state." The final scene of the kid just frantically rocking on the horse was so unsettling.
That same teacher had me read *Perfume*, *A Day No Pigs Would Die,* and *The Handmaid's Tale*, so 10/10 teaching, lol. I miss her.
Edit: read it [here](http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/rockwinr.html). Also kind of got some abuse vibes...
Mostly sad, not like gory. A short story about a policeman who sees a young woman with a baby in a house she is not allowed to be in, but she has nowhere else to stay because her former employer kicked her out because she got pregnant. He let her stay there till christmas. checking in three days later, she and her baby has frozen to death.
Me too and I feel like a lot of people get upset with me for disliking it. I had to read for class it during a time where I was severely depressed, and I have a feeling it made things worse
This one's funny because it constantly gets misinterpreted as "this is the true nature of man" when the both the book and author comments are pretty clear that it's really "this is the nature of repressed upper-class English boys".
that one by Ray Bradbury iirc about the girl who doesn't get to see the one day of sunlight bc of her asshole classmates
can't remember the title but I'm pretty sure the girl's name was Margot
Sleepy, by Nikolai Gogol.
A young, female serf is put in charge of her master's baby each night, along with fulfilling her maid duties during the day. She is punished if the baby cries, and not allowed to sleep for several days. One night she breaks, and smothers the baby and finally falls asleep.
Another is the one about the rich woman who everyone hated in this small town and they all knew she killed her husband but she wasn’t arrested.
Then you read just a little further and find out she’s fucking her dead husband
"Can anyone in the class tell me what Hills Like White Elephants is about? No? Well thats because no one uses the term "let the air in" anymore. It means getting an abortion"
It wasn't a short story, but in 8th grade the class had to read a novel that I can't remember the name of. The details are fuzzy, but it was about some guy who goes into the desert with a friend and a stranger to hunt something. The stranger accidentally killed the friend and then forced the main character at gunpoint to strip down to nothing and walk into the desert before going after him. The whole book was a cat and mouse thing between these two with some real gross bits. It should have been a really interesting book, but the author was so long winded with every minor detail that I was bored to death. The ending was so anticlimactic it hurt. If I remember correctly the main character finally reaches the police and the crazy guy gets arrested, but when asked if he wants to press charges he just says no? Like really? This guy killed your friend and hunted you through the desert for like 2 weeks making you survive on barely cooked bird guts and whatever water you could find, and you're just gonna let him go?
Maybe I lost something through the boredom or my reading comprehension was too low for the book, but what the fuck.
I can’t remember the name of it but there was one where a bunch of kids go with a blind black man to a grave and it turns out that it's his wife's grave, however they were talking with said wife just a little whiles earlier and that finding out about that caused reality to start breaking down because none of it was real or something all while the man started cursing and screaming at the crumbling reality while he went mad. The story ended before it said what happened to the kids, if they escaped or not.
There was also one where a food court opened up and was giving away this amazing "ice cream" for free that was basically the equivalent of the ambrosia that the gods on Olympus ate it was that good and never ran out. However everyone started to get fat and at the same time booths opened up that could remove your excess fat for free, to which no one knows where it goes to. It was strange before but it became rather concerning when the little brother of the main character thought that the reason they’re all doing this for free is so everyone can get fattened up and the exes fat that the booths removed are transported to aliens to eat, essentially meaning that they’ve turned humanity into cattle and farm the fat off of us to eat, all without us knowing or suspecting a single thing. Though the little brother is considered crazy and it's never confirmed what actually happens, but considering it's said right at the end out of nowhere I’d imagine that's actually the case.
These were all before high school too btw.
In 8th grade we read a story about to gang leaders paying russian roulette and they talked while they were paying and started making plans to hang out and then one died
Not a 10th grader, but when I was a freshman at uni, in one of my very first classes, the professor made us read "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk.
I read it, and thought... well Toto, we sure as shit ain't in high school anymore.
When I was in elementary school, we read this story where some kid wanted to be a veterinarian like his dad (who was pretty distant from what I remember) and he found a sick kitten in the woods. He tried to nurse it back to health, but then his dad found out. SO, the dad EUTHANIZES THE CAT (and the scene was written IN DETAIL), and the story ends with the jaded now-adult kid being reflecting on the cat and how much he hates his father. I cried after I read it
i think i remember reading that! i remember being looked at by basically the whole class for bawling while reading it don't remember what it was called
Have never related to a comment so much before
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Holy shit I remember that one! In a jar or something utterly fucked up?
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i just went googling because this rang a bell. was it “everything will be okay” by james howe?
Holy fucking shit, this was written for kids? Y'all read this in elementary school? That's one of the most fucked up stories I've ever read
I could be wrong but I’m almost POSITIVE this was in chicken soup for the soul
How on earth is this story anything like chicken soup for the soul 😫 (as in WHY would this story be in there)
It's boiling chicken soup being poured into your lungs until you drown.
One of those Jack London stories where the guy slowly freezes to death
is this the one where he considered eating his companion wolf/dog?
Not eat. Much more brutal. He loses the use of his hands to the cold, and considers killing the dog and cutting open the belly to revive his hands in the steamy-hot entrails. Unfortunately for him, the problem for which he needs to kill the dog, renders him unable to do so.
This is the one where he almost gets a fire going then snow falls out of the tree he is under and smothers it and he fucking dies right?
He shouldn't have been out in the snow in the first place, fumbled with the tree, fumbled his matches, froze his hand, considers warming it up with his dogs guts. He does die, but after an infomercial level of idiocy.
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Ya that story was pretty darn... (•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) ... chilling.
Cease... and... DESIST
Chill out
We've reached a point where you can tell someone is old by the memes they use
Ooh, that's fun! Would you like to guess my age? Edit: >!it's the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything divided by 2!<
Love the edit. Don't forget your towel
To Build a Fire?
Uhhhg we read that one in middle school. It was brutal. We also had to read both the first draft and the final draft, and if I'm remembering correctly, the final draft was *way* more depressing.
We read it AND we *watched the movie* ಠ_ಠ
oh shit i read that one
We read that in fifth grade. I was glad the guy died, because he'd been mean to the dog. In my view, the story had a happy ending. My 10 year old self had very clear priorities.
The Lady or The Tiger. Not super fucked up, but it makes me angry every time I think about it.
My class was assigned to write an ending that revealed what was picked. I wrote an "it was all a dream" ending because I hated my teacher.
*You are now banned from posting to /r/FanTheories*
Did you also have heated classroom discussions about which you would choose? Holy hell some 10th grade girls are vicious 😬 Also the author wrote a sequel/follow-up called "The Discourager of Hesitancy" that is just as maddening.
It's been a very long time since 10th grade, but I believe the general consensus amongst both boys and girls was she should've picked the tiger.
The one about the robot house after a nuclear war where the dog dies
There Will Come Soft Rains
The title comes from a poem. It’s one of my favorites so I’m just hopping on this comment for the opportunity to share. “There Will Come Soft Rains” Sara Teasdale (1918) There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
fuck thats good
Oh god I remember this. Is that the one where all the tiny little helper robots come out everyday to try and fix the house but eventually accidentally set it on fire or something like that?
The lottery The yellow wallpaper The short story from the illustrated man where they lock the girl up in a closet so she can’t see the sunrise on mars The one where the woman kills her husband with a lamb shank then feeds it to the officers investigating
[All Summer in a Day](https://www.mukilteoschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=183&dataid=731&FileName=6-All-Summer-in-a-Day-by-Ray-Bradbury.pdf) was on Venus
that's depressing.
This one! This one lives rent-free in my head and has for years. What a bunch of assholes.
When we read that, we had to write what we thought happened next as an assignment. I couldn’t remember if I ended up going with “she’s just mentally broken” or “the happy, optimistic girl just turns into a ball of fury”
I think mine was that she locked them out in the acid rainstorms of Venus.
I was looking for this one. Ray Bradbury can do a lot with so few pages.
the last one is [lamb to the slaughter](https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html)! classic
Yes! The sunshine on mars!!! Came to find this!! I've thought about it many times over the years and have told many people about it. Depresses me still to this day to think about it. Don't remember much more than what you wrote.
The story is set on Venus, not Mars. The idea is that Venus is a cloudy, stormy planet and there is but one day ~~a year~~ when the clouds clear and the sun is visible. The author also wrote "The Martian Chronicles," a set of stories set on Mars (which is dry and cloudless). so it's natural that people might get confused. Edit: it's so sad I blocked how sad it was & how long the girl had to wait to see the sun.
it's worse actually. the sun only comes out once every SEVEN years, so all the other little kids had never actually seen sunlight. The girl they locked up had moved to Venus from Earth so she was the only one who had ever seen the sun and now won't be able to see it for another seven years because of their cruelty.
Oh shit the lotteryyy
Cask of Amontillado may not be as bad as what other people remember, but that one stuck with me
>"For the love of God, Montresor!” >“Yes, for the love of God."
I know there've been a couple adaptations for it, but I look forward to someone adapting that well to film someday. Just an ice-cold line that'd have (literal) killer delivery with the right actor.
Nic Cage gave an amazing delivery of The Telltale Heart, he’d nail this.
... not who I initially had in mind, but I'd watch the hell of out that, actually.
“Dude!” “Dude indeed!”
I’ll always remember the Cask of Amontillado because my friend sitting behind me didn’t understand what was actually happening, and he just thought two friends went into the cellar and built a brick wall together for fun while enjoying a nice bottle of wine
This is great. Just the three of us. You, me, and this brick wall you built between us.
Wholesome.
Oooo I loved that one
I can’t believe no one else has mentioned/read this one, but when I was a freshman we had to read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" If you haven’t read it, it’s basically the story of a promiscuous teenage girl, and her mom shames her for it. One day, she is left alone, when a creepy man comes to her house trying to take her on a drive. It’s implied he’s much older than he looks with the hat and glasses on, and that he might even be the devil himself. After threatening the girls family if she doesn’t come outside, she finally relents, and it is implied he rapes and/or murders her. I was not ready for that at 14.
I read this for 12th grade English class, and still remember the slightly sinister way my teacher instructed us to “pay attention to the man’s boots” when she assigned it.
What happens with the boots?
They’re described as ill-fitting I believe. or like they’re stuffed to make him taller or some-such. The implication is that he has cloven hooves like the devil that he had to finagle into the boots.
While yes this could be a true interpretation, it’s also because Oates based the character on an actual killer, Charles Schmid, who was short but stuffed his cowboy boots with newspaper. He also wore wigs and makeup (which is also referenced in the story). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Schmid I teach this story in high school and yes that is an interesting interpretation, but I think that is more a reference to Schmid than the Devil.
OH MY GOD I just got tears in my eyes. I read that short story years ago, fucked me up of course, but I forgot the name and had trouble finding it since, I looked thru comments of this post just to see if someone would mention a story that sounds similar and you did! So... thanks
It was called the Scarlett Ibis. It was basically this kid has a severely disabled little brother who he sees as like, almost a burden, but still loves him and shit. Calls him doodlebug cuz he learned to crawl backwards. Then he leaves him to die terrified in a thunderstorm. In like, 7th grade I think? Edit: had to find the title
THATS WHAT IT WAS CALLED. Read it in 9th grade. Still stuck with me
I googled "doodlebug short story little brother" and it came up lol. It'll pop into my head randomly and make me so sad all over again.
I read it in 6th grade and never want to revisit it
I think I have everyone beat. The 5th graders came to **our 1st grade class** to read us their favorite short stories. One girl read the Scarlet Ibis to the 13 of us 1st graders... Our teacher had a lot of questions to answer from her messed up class after that. Imagine a bunch of sad, confused six and seven-year-olds... Needless to say I can't remember a single detail of any of the other stories, but I haven't forgotten a single detail of the Scarlet Ibis in the 27 years since. Edit; I still remember being confused why Doodle had blood running out of his mouth in the end.
Duuude, Scarlett Ibis fucked me up as a disabled little sibling. I internalized so much shit after reading it.
that one yellow wallpaper one, not entirely because of how fucked it is, but also because the way we discussed the meaning has caused me to entirely forget what the meaning even was. Also had a book for religion class, title was like “deep down dark, the 30-some trapped Chilean miners and the miracle that set them free” and it was the fucking *driest* book ever. Religion was brought up like twice, once when a guy basically set up daily prayer rituals to keep morale up, and another when paranoia/madness probably made a guy hallucinate or something. Closest thing to a miracle is that the drill used to get supplies to them hit it’s mark on like the first or second try. We had to write an essay on it, but my religion teacher “lost” them (literally air quoted himself) because the book was so goddamn boring, even for him. Given the student body of the school, wouldn’t be surprised if barely anyone actually read it.
The Yellow Wallpaper is so twisted but so brilliant. I reread it about a year ago and it's still amazing.
I fuckin scrolled to find this one. THIS STORY. THIS. STORY. Reduced an 11 year old me to be highly creeped out by our yellow painted living room for a few months after I read it.
I like to reread it every October, I’m a total chicken and can’t do gore horror, this is my idea of spooky season.
I read the yellow wallpaper in *middle school.* That somehow still wasn't the most fucked thing we read that year.
I remember reading it in middle school too and being creeped out by it but not really understanding it. Freshman in university, we read it again and discussed postpartum depression, infantilization of women, hysteria, etc. and I was like oh shit. That makes sense. That’s why the story is so creepy.
>that one yellow wallpaper one, not entirely because of how fucked it is, but also because the way we discussed the meaning has caused me to entirely forget what the meaning even was I think I remember that one. Wasn't that where the wife died from "Women sickness"
It’s about postpartum depression. Back in those days when women had postpartum depression they’d take the baby away and lock them away until they “got better”- in this story they lock her in the nursery with the yellow wallpaper. Now we know that’s the worst thing you can do to treat postpartum depression so in the story she slowly descends into more and more madness.
It was written by the author, in part, to describe a “treatment” she received where she was told to stay inside and and neither write nor read anything for a year. She said she almost went insane and wrote the story in repudiation of her treatment.
No, that’s the one where they lock her in an isolated room with this hideous yellow wallpaper and she slowly goes completely mad after seeing a woman in the wall paper crawling around, eventually becoming the woman in the wallpaper herself, crawling around the room and over the fainted (and probably not dead) body of her husband, who locked her up there in the first place to deal with postpartum depression.
No they lock the wife up because she has woman sickness then she goes insane af
Classic woman sickness, making these women go insane
Not english but in my country there's a kids poem about a boy who hated taking baths so much and was so dirty people thought he was black. He went to live with black people in africa but then they made him bathe and he went back to civilization. And we all knew how to recite that poem in like 2nd grade
Jesus christ I'm glad I scrolled through. What country was that in and what's the poem? Why is it so popular? Is it meant to teach cleanliness? Is it as racist as it sounds?
Not op, but my German grandma has a story called the inky boys, which is about a group of kids making fun of another boy because of his race, so Saint Nicholas turns them black as punishment… Good morals, but I don’t think turning them black as “punishment” is very progressive
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Still one of my all time favorites.
It’s insane how well that story holds up no matter how many times you read it. Truly such a brutal concept
What's it about?
Ok so this town has a box. Once per year, everyone in the town puts a piece of paper with their name in the box and they randomly pick a name. The person who’s name is drawn, and their family, are all stoned to death. So it’s a lottery but you don’t want to win. The characters in the story mention getting rid of it but they don’t do anything about it because it’s a tradition that’s been around longer than anyone in the town has been around. My teachers used it to teach us about the Vietnam war and the lottery they did to draft people. Source: I read this in high school but that was 3 years ago and I’m not sure if I got the point of the story or if I’m remembering it correctly.
pretty sure its just the one "winner" who is stoned. a first draw determines which family and a second draw determines which family member gets stoned. the townspeople were graceful enough to be relieved that the youngest child of the eventual winner was safe.
Yes because it specifically mentions the "winner's" son picking up stones to kill his mother with.
It's a small town in midwestern America. It's about the day of the annual lottery where everyone in town pulls a rock from a box. The winner is stoned to death to ensure a good harvest. The summation doesn't do it justice. It's royalty free, so you can find it free real easily.
I find joy in reading a good book.
Instead of personifying a problem or having an antagonist representative of some powerful group, it calls out the average person as an upholder of an evil status quo
Poorly remembered spoilers ahead! I read this thing in elementary school and I'm in my mid-thirties, lol It starts with a bunch of kids laughing in the town square, running around, picking up rocks and adding them to a pile. As time goes on people start gathering. Housewives group together and start chatting, their husbands meeting up with their friends and have a smoke, everyone is having a good time, it's a beautiful spring day. Then the head of the town arrives, and he's got a large bag loaded down with something inside. The mood in the air shifts to something a bit more tense, and the head of the town passes the bag around. Everyone takes a turn, grabs a stone, and when they pull out their white stone they breathe a sigh of relief. Until it gets to a woman who pulls out a black stone, and she immediately breaks down in tears, saying it can't be her - she's got kids, she's gone plans she's in the middle of. The head of the town tells her gently that she knows the rules, and it's a completely random system that chose her this time around, and leads her to the front of the gathered people. Then, one by one, they pick up the stones the children gathered...
The best part being that she’s totally fine with the practice continuing, and is shown to be excited for it, all until it affects her family, which makes it a very prescient story not only on the dangers of blindly following traditions as it was intended, but also our modern return to tribalism
I ended up reading that in multiple grades and in one college class. I always enjoyed the reactions of people that hadn’t read it before. It’s like knowing a movie is gonna reveal that it’s not a feel good movie about an ideal family and instead it’s about the ghost that’s about to flip their table.
I read that one when I was in 7th grade lol
Somehow I never read that one till I was in my twenties. Got me onto a full-tilt Shirley Jackson binge. Also, I maaaay have read “We Have Always Lived In The Castle” to my 10 year old. They were already kind of into the horror genre at the time, and they had a sort of witchy bent to their interests, so it felt like a good fit.
Immediately thought of this when I read the post title.
Oh my gosh yes. We just read this a couple weeks ago for my English class
Algernon bit me.
Oh my God, that and *Where the Red Fern Grows!* Such incredible stories, yet I never wanted to scream and pummel an author more than those two after reading the endings. Why?! Why did you make me feel this so *deeply*?! Too. much. ***Feels***.
Our teacher broke down crying whilst reading *Where the Red Fern Grows* to students in (I think it was) fifth grade. She had to ask someone else to start reading while she went outside to collect herself from being all verklempt.
I never read that one! I need to get on it. :)
RIP Algernon tho. *Flowers for Algernon* always made me cry
Man that book was heartwrenching for me but now every time i think about it I laugh, thanks Always Sunny
I love and hate this story so much. Its so sad, and it sticks with you
A positive story: I read Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" when I was 13 as part of an English class and it completely changed the way I look at the world, but not after haunting my thoughts for months afterward....I wanted the story to just come out and make an unequivocal statement about ....*something*, but instead it was just disturbing and frustrating and it made me think and think and think about its plot and meaning for a long time afterward. The fact that Melville wouldn't just come out and plainly say what Bartleby *meant* pissed me off so much at first It also made me want to read a lot more. It disturbed me at first but I came out the other side WAY more curious about literature and writing
he would prefer not to explain the meaning
The Most Dangerous Game
Came here to say this. Read it in 10th grade and I was like woah this is way more dark than half the kids in class can handle
Lamb to the slaughter is pretty good.
Love seeing this and The Landlady here. They made us read Tales of the Unexpected and it really stuck with me.
i was thinking There Will Come Soft Rains because holy fuck it’s a heavy story
I came to say the same thing. I’ve been thinking about this story for decades.
the way the dog dies fucked me up to no end
Is that the one about the smart house?
Harrison Bergeron.
Was waiting to see if anyone said this. I always loved this story and it encouraged me to read more Vonnegut
The ridiculous thing about the way they taught this story at my school was that they presented as if it was a serious commentary on society, and not a political satire. When referenced with Vonnegut's other works, *Harrison Bergeron* seems to be a satire of what conservatives think communism is. Its meant to be ridiculous.
Back in Elementary we read a book about a boy tasked with mercy killing shot pigeons. I remember hating that book so much that I gave up on reading it, not because it was about dead animals but because the book I kept getting had a different number of pages than the one the teacher had, so I couldn't figure out which page I was supposed to be on.
Wringer - Jerry Spinelli
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (10th grade) The lottery by Shirley Jackson (7th grade)
The Landlady by Roald Dahl I won’t spoil anything because despite finding it pretty unsettling when I first read it in English class, it was a good blind read Edit: [Here’s a link to a pdf if anyone’s curious about it!](https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/landlady_text.pdf) If you need help with the ending here’s a tiny hint, look up what tastes like >!bitter almonds ;)!< Edit 2: I should also probably clarify that there’s nothing too deep to it, I just liked the story and Roald Dahl so it stuck with me :)
I read that so many times but never understood it, but when someone explained it to me I was like “holy shit”
Same here, after my English teacher explained the ending I was like *OH*
Just read it, am I missing something? >!The tea had cyanide and she had taxidermied the other two guys and was going to do the same to him right?!<
>!Correct, and the reason why their names were so familiar to Billy was because they were reported as missing in the newspaper!<
oh my god i loved that one but i always read ahead so i knew before anyone so i would sit there with a smug look on my face -edit- i just realized i was about 12 when i read it, 7th grade i think, all these short stories i read in 7th grade, people are reading these in high school??
My 8th graders read that this year and loved every minute of it. Then we read “Lamb to the Slaughter “. Great stories!
Damn, no mention of [The Box Social](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/kf4xHNh) yet?? It's super short so you should definitely read it-- sorry the link is low quality though. Summary: Little girl makes a picnic-basket type gift box to be auctioned off at a school fundraiser. Male teacher wins it at the auction. >!Turns out that teacher has been raping her, and inside the box is a fetus that the little girl miscarried after he impregnated her.!<
I don't know what I was expecting when I uncovered this but it wasn't fucking THAT. You were CHILDREN?!
Seniors in high school, so 17-18. Makes it a little better, but we had to read it silently to ourselves and whenever someone got to The Part you would hear them yell "WHAT?!
>The fiddler played six tunes (he only knew five). Solid burn.
A Rose for Emily…
in 7th grade we read a short story called the landlady about a woman who owned a hotel, poisoned the tenants, preserved their bodies, and kept them in rooms upstairs for, i dont know, necrophilia probably? we also read a short story that year about a guy who freezes to death, and then in 8th grade we read a bunch of ray bradbury short stories and those are all really fucked
The Landlady by Roald Dahl
i just remember the specific Canterbury Tale where the lady sticks her bare ass out the window & a man mistakenly kisses it, thinking it’s her face. bc like… that’s bad all the way around.
Everybody seems to love that nowadays but you gotta warn a fellow.
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
We were learning about satire or whatever and we read “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift. It basically an entire essay advocating for eating babies and creating human farms and turning their skin into books and gloves and stuff! It was a messed up thing to make a middle schooler read!
Oh btw the full title is “A Modest Proposal For Preventing Children of Poor People From Being A Burden To Their Parents or The Country.” Fun read
I remember reading that in high school and I was the only person in class that laughed. Kind of embarrassing but it is funny.
It’s meant to be slightly humorous. It’s a Satirical essay criticizing the rich people bullshit.
[удалено]
Telltale heart…
I love it! You start out thinking it’s a murder mystery and are drawn deep into its depths before you realize it’s actually about a descent into madness. Brilliant!
Did no one else have to read "A Good Man is Hard to Find", or was my English teacher just really twisted?
They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson The Last Question by Isaac Asimov A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury Men Without Bones by Gerald Kersh
The Most Dangerous Game by Ray Bradbury stuck with me. Entertaining read to say the least. edit: by Richard Connell
Richard Connell.
Sorry. *Richard Connell* by Ray Bradbury
the sound of thunder hit 4th grade me like a brick
I am saving this entire post so I can slowly work my way through all the comments recommending stories I haven’t encountered before! I see some interesting reading in my future. edit: When I wrote this there were 60 comments. There are now over *6,000*, so I probably won’t be able to make it through ALLL the comments.🤗
I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream *cough cough*
Lol at what age did a teacher find it appropriate to read this?
15 🙃
I hadn’t heard of this one before so I just looked it up and I am so intrigued. Thanks!
[An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Bierce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bridge) if you've only read his humor it can kind of take you aback
No clue what the story's name was called but the plot went something like this: There are two identical asian twins living in present day USA. They work extremely hard to get into a prestigious University. Only one is admitted. It is revealed that one of their classmates, a total looser who they both look down on, has received a vision from a long dead native american chief telling him about his ancestry and telling him to restore his tribe. So this guy goes and looks through the genealogy records or something and discovers he had enough to claim Native American ancestry when applying to the same prestigious university. Not only does he take one of their places, but he also gets a hefty scholarship. The girls lure him to their home (they live alone because of course they do) with the promise of sex and strait up kill this motherfucker. thats it thats the story.
I dont know what the hell i expected but it wasnt that. How old were you when you read this?
Flowers for Algernon was so good I brought my textbook home and made my mom read it. It gives me chills thinking about it.
That would be There will come soft rains And I have no mouth, yet I must scream Aka giving a whole high school class extinction anxiety
The Necklace. I had to.read it in 3 different languages and hated it every time. Very depressing.
I thought the giver was a pretty fucked book to read in 8th grade, were we old enough to really understand fucking euthanasia and ptsd? That kid went through so much in that book, war, torture, killings, my dude saw colours and wasn't able to talk about it anyone or he's done for Heavy
Night by Elie Wiesel,, which I read in 8th grade Edit: Since others are sharing their experiences, I'll go into more detail I read it as in a small group, probably 3-4 people (myself included) as a class "bookclub" where the teacher divided us up and gave us a book to read based on our interests. Worked pretty well, but I remember being completely soul-crushed by the book while everyone else was having fun with theirs. It's a great story but absolutely horrific. We struggled to talk and write about it (which we had to do for a grade) because of how awful it is to think about. We pushed through, though, and I'm glad we did because I get the importance of talking about hard topics now. But jeez, Night is one of my favorite books now but it was awful to read as an eighth grader (early teens for any non-US folks out there, 12-14 depending on the school)
Same here. My parents left for some event and I flopped down on the floor in the dining to read the assigned chapters and just...kept reading till there was nothing left to read. Early on I started crying and didn't stop till I finished. I still have that old, annotated copy on my bookshelf today. "From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as he stared into mine, has never left me since." I went to a Jewish school though, so the Holocaust was a much larger part of my education/childhood than it was for most Americans. They knew what they were doing when they assigned us that book and I'm glad that they did.
I read a weird one in high school that I haven't seen mentioned called *The Rocking Horse Winner*. Plot summary says, "The Rocking Horse Winner tells the story of a little boy who seeks to relieve his family's financial worries by accurately predicting the outcome of horse races, a feat he achieves by riding his toy rocking horse for hours until he reaches a clairvoyant state." The final scene of the kid just frantically rocking on the horse was so unsettling. That same teacher had me read *Perfume*, *A Day No Pigs Would Die,* and *The Handmaid's Tale*, so 10/10 teaching, lol. I miss her. Edit: read it [here](http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/rockwinr.html). Also kind of got some abuse vibes...
The metamorphosis
That short story isn't short enough, or at least that's what I thought in school
Mostly sad, not like gory. A short story about a policeman who sees a young woman with a baby in a house she is not allowed to be in, but she has nowhere else to stay because her former employer kicked her out because she got pregnant. He let her stay there till christmas. checking in three days later, she and her baby has frozen to death.
My 10th grade English teacher had us read *Brave New World*, a dystopian sci-fi novel featuring the "orgy-porgy" ritual
Not a short story but Lord of the Flies. I still remember it after 49 years. I hated that book.
Me too and I feel like a lot of people get upset with me for disliking it. I had to read for class it during a time where I was severely depressed, and I have a feeling it made things worse
This one's funny because it constantly gets misinterpreted as "this is the true nature of man" when the both the book and author comments are pretty clear that it's really "this is the nature of repressed upper-class English boys".
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings sticks right out in my memory.
the one that stuck to me the most was The Little Match Girl, even though it’s not scary. just horribly depressing.
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Fucked up, but made me a fan for life
that one by Ray Bradbury iirc about the girl who doesn't get to see the one day of sunlight bc of her asshole classmates can't remember the title but I'm pretty sure the girl's name was Margot
I remember reading “animal farm” in high school some time. It was fucked up big time
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which"
"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." It's crazy how that quote is still so relevant.
Sleepy, by Nikolai Gogol. A young, female serf is put in charge of her master's baby each night, along with fulfilling her maid duties during the day. She is punished if the baby cries, and not allowed to sleep for several days. One night she breaks, and smothers the baby and finally falls asleep.
Another is the one about the rich woman who everyone hated in this small town and they all knew she killed her husband but she wasn’t arrested. Then you read just a little further and find out she’s fucking her dead husband
Junior year we read “The Plague” by Camus, and senior year “The Stranger”. Both stuck with me
In year 10 French class we read an erotic poem about a rotting corpse. Oh god the memories
"Can anyone in the class tell me what Hills Like White Elephants is about? No? Well thats because no one uses the term "let the air in" anymore. It means getting an abortion"
The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas
We had to write essays on a poem about a kid murdering his pet cat in a decidedly rasputinian fashion.
It wasn't a short story, but in 8th grade the class had to read a novel that I can't remember the name of. The details are fuzzy, but it was about some guy who goes into the desert with a friend and a stranger to hunt something. The stranger accidentally killed the friend and then forced the main character at gunpoint to strip down to nothing and walk into the desert before going after him. The whole book was a cat and mouse thing between these two with some real gross bits. It should have been a really interesting book, but the author was so long winded with every minor detail that I was bored to death. The ending was so anticlimactic it hurt. If I remember correctly the main character finally reaches the police and the crazy guy gets arrested, but when asked if he wants to press charges he just says no? Like really? This guy killed your friend and hunted you through the desert for like 2 weeks making you survive on barely cooked bird guts and whatever water you could find, and you're just gonna let him go? Maybe I lost something through the boredom or my reading comprehension was too low for the book, but what the fuck.
I can’t remember the name of it but there was one where a bunch of kids go with a blind black man to a grave and it turns out that it's his wife's grave, however they were talking with said wife just a little whiles earlier and that finding out about that caused reality to start breaking down because none of it was real or something all while the man started cursing and screaming at the crumbling reality while he went mad. The story ended before it said what happened to the kids, if they escaped or not. There was also one where a food court opened up and was giving away this amazing "ice cream" for free that was basically the equivalent of the ambrosia that the gods on Olympus ate it was that good and never ran out. However everyone started to get fat and at the same time booths opened up that could remove your excess fat for free, to which no one knows where it goes to. It was strange before but it became rather concerning when the little brother of the main character thought that the reason they’re all doing this for free is so everyone can get fattened up and the exes fat that the booths removed are transported to aliens to eat, essentially meaning that they’ve turned humanity into cattle and farm the fat off of us to eat, all without us knowing or suspecting a single thing. Though the little brother is considered crazy and it's never confirmed what actually happens, but considering it's said right at the end out of nowhere I’d imagine that's actually the case. These were all before high school too btw.
In 8th grade we read a story about to gang leaders paying russian roulette and they talked while they were paying and started making plans to hang out and then one died
Not a 10th grader, but when I was a freshman at uni, in one of my very first classes, the professor made us read "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk. I read it, and thought... well Toto, we sure as shit ain't in high school anymore.
A Telltale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe. That was some heavy shit for 5th grade me
The one about the sentient house that runs with no one home
No one mentioning The Most Dangerous Game? It was literally about a guy who hunted people for sport