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I remember a story about a dying woman who predicted that she would die when the last leaf of a plant outside her house falls. But the leaf actually did fall, and her friend put up a fake one there. The woman gets better but her friend dies because of pneumonia. This was from back when I was maybe 10-11yo and I remember it for some reason. I think the moral of the story is that willpower is strong, but idk about that ending.
Mine is the one where the soldier returns from WWI completely desensitized to murder and fucked in the head.
He starts stabbing little girls, just like in the war. “Poor people” by Móricz if anyone is interested.
if anyone is interested.
Nah I’m good 👍
Fucking hell.
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.
Well that summary’s an uncomfortable parallel for modern events
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.
Yeah, she was terrible throughout the whole story. Not one redeeming quality.
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.”
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
Tap for spoiler
It’s written as journal entries by a woman who may or may not have been insane before she got locked in an asylum or possibly just a room in her house by her husband. There’s a woman in the wallpaper who creepily crawls along the wall but actually it’s her shadow because she’s the creepy woman crawling around the room and rubbing up against the wall. Of course you don’t really know this until she starts really sounding crazy and starts ripping up the wallpaper trying to free the woman in the walls. In the end her husband returns home and either he faints or she fucking murders him with the blade she uses to sharpen her pencil. The book ends with her thinking she’s been freed, not by escaping through the now unlocked door but by entering the yellow wallpaper. There’s also a creepy film adaptation we watched that was… unsettling.
It was quite scarring for most of the kids in my 7th grade class.
Also I’ve only just now realized that wallpaper back then could have contained arsenic so going insane from being in contact with it constantly enough to stain your skin is a very real possibility.
The Yellow Wallpaper caused my first panic attack (not to knock the story itself; it’s an important feminist work)
The scariest part for me was that >!her husband is a doctor. She has stereotypical postpartum depression, but her husband’s idea of “helping her get healthy” is to lock her in an empty room, alone, and forbid her from doing anything, including writing. But she can have all the air she wants! !<
!Everyone around her thinks they’re helping while actively making her life worse.!<
that is NOT how lemmy spoilers work
Which part? The spoiler tag is working on my client. Or did you mean the content?
that is the reddit spoiler format. your client is broken.
Came here to say this. Fucking traumatising.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin is the one that came to mind for me.
Thank you for linking it. I really enjoyed reading it.
“The Cold Equations” kinda fucked me up not gonna lie.
Came here to mention this one. I’ll be 36 soon and that story still haunts me 20 some odd years after reading it in class. Link for the curious.
The Hatchet when he kills the rabbit.
My 4th grade teacher read a chapter to the class every day, same with the sequel. I specifically remember the part where he was standing outside naked in winter and some tree bark just kinda exploded, and he was freaking out trying to decide if the freezing bark caused it to expand and explode or if a hunter was out there shooting bullets at him. Also, the part where he finds an orange-drink packet in the survival supplies of the plane and describes the taste of it.
Edit: I think the tree bark part was in the sequel, Brian’s Winter.
It was the sequel, and he’s not naked. He realized when one exploded infront of him and a (frozen) fragment got lodged in his hood
I must be combining scenes, but I distinctly remember one where it was made a point that he was naked at a point.
You’re dragging my memory back something like 20 years, but I feel like there was one he decided to get naked in summer and just stop for a few minutes. Nothing life threatening at that moment.
Could have been one of the 3 times he was warned winter was coming, but he was too distracted.
how about steinbecks the pearl
scarred for life from a 7th grade shortish story
I had to read “Speak”. It was basically a short story about a girl getting SA’d and then treated like crap by everyone till the last couple pages. I do not think it had the intended effect they were going for.
The Veldt. Also, All Summer In A Day.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Leguin
Ooh that’s a good one. All of Vonnegut’s stories have stuck with me. The first one I read was called Deadeye Dick, which I checked out from the library by chance because the title was funny to immature teenaged me. That sent me down the rabbit hole to read a bunch of other novels by him.
Not a bad trip. Funnily enough, DD is probably one of the few things I haven’t read yet. I probably started work cat’s cradle (pretty late).
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
Fall of the House of usher
Came here for this one.
Man, did it fuck me up. Existential incest insanity.
This one was a banger, my dad played it in the car on a roadtrip when I was like 10. Shit was fucked up
Usher II by Ray Bradbury!
the only thing I remember about that one is how verbose it was. sentences over 50 words long were not uncommon
“A modest proposal” by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it
