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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Oh that fucking thing.
Edit: wait so what exactly is the point of this?
It’s been near 15 years since I read it, but it’s kind of a cautionary tale about tradition, superstition, and how easily humans succumb to their base impulses and can commit insane violence.
Seems all too pertinent these days
Ohhh. I remember now. Thank you.
The qualifier base is exactly right. Like we use base as a pejorative, but it is what we are. That is our base state.
You know what itd take to drop us back to this level? I would say about a week without electricity. If you said to any given group of what, 50 people. Pick numbers out of a hat. The person with the dot dies, but the electricity comes back on. That would be enough.
It’s supposed to make you feel very weird because it is innate tribal behaviour that is not very far from the surface. Individual vs group, traditions, rituals, sacrifice, and the perverse gratitude that you are the survivor etc.
Read it then go read Facebook for a bit…you start to see people for what they are. Panicky, social, tribal animals.
Came here to say this. Now I have to dig even deeper into my high school trauma to find something else, thanks. 🤣
Was gonna say this. Fucked me up for a bit after I read it.
Flowers for Algernon, that was thought provoking but also way too heavy for a 7th grade English class.
This shit made me fucking sob, I was also in seventh grade. I came to this comment section to mention it. Unforgettable
Jesus Christ. I read that aged 27 and cried like a baby. Way too heavy for grade school.
That was 5th grade for me. I still wonder what that teacher was thinking.
Did the teacher at least spend time discussing it, or did they just lay it on you and let you sort it out for yourselves? Either way, that’s pretty early!
It was discussed chapter by chapter. And we watched the movie version after for good measure.
Same here. We read FFA, The Veldt, The Tell Tale Heart, All Summer in a Day, and a few other short stories in some “advanced readers class,” that we had to go to the library once a week to attend.
I think they were trying to fuck up all the smart kids.
Was making sure this had a mention. This was brutal to read in 6th grade at 10 in the morning.
“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 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.
The Yellow Wallpaper caused my first panic attack (not to knock the story itself; it’s an important feminist work)
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 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.
The Most Dangerous Game
Is Man… cala. Mancala, but where all the pieces are replaced with bits of TNT.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Leguin
Not short stories, but I have two books that I read in high school that have stuck with me more than most:
You read Where the Red Fern Grows in high school? We read it in fourth grade. It was pretty traumatizing. Great, but traumatizing.
I read Fahrenheit 451 and my ass takes everything way too literally so maybe that’s why I was able to handle it. I liked it as a story and kinda saw the deeper meaning, good book
“A modest proposal” by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it
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.
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 removed 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.
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.”
Well that summary’s an uncomfortable parallel for modern events
Hmm, for short stories, it’s probably “The Most Dangerous Game.”
Plot with massive spoilers
MC is a big game hunter traveling by boat to the Amazon to hunt jaguar. He is warned by locals about a local island called Ship-Trap island. He falls overboard and swims to Ship-Trap island, where there’s a big mansion inhabited by General Zaroff, another big game hunter. Zaroff explains that he got bored of hunting animals and set up the island to attract ships, and when a ship wrecks on the island, he gives the sailors a knife and a head start, and if they can survive 3 days, they are set free. Zaroff then sets off to hunt them with a small caliber pistol.
Plot happens, and at the end the MC makes it look like he committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. Zaroff returns home, and the MC is waiting for him in his bedroom. Zaroff congratulates him, but the MC says the hunt isn’t over, and we see the MC sleeping in Zaroffs bed at the end of the story.
The themes are pretty disturbing if you stop to think about it, and even if you don’t, there’s a fair amount of violence.
Fuck yeah. Loved this short story.
If I hadn’t been really into Tom Clancy novels, it probably would’ve scarred me for life. But I was already reading about terrorists trying to mass-genocide most of the planet (Rainbow Six) and assassins shooting people in the eyes at near-point blank (forget the specific book), so a little gore didn’t phase me.
I remember being really into Ton Clancy novels around that time too.
A retiring teacher at our school had his class read a story that lit a fire under a bunch of parents. It was The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Direct link since the closing parenthesis breaks the formatting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story)
Strange if its broken for some it works okay when I click on it.
The original link works fine for me, are you looking at it using actual lemmy, or an app?
Using Sync for mobile, it omits the closing parenthesis, but on web it works fine.
Sounds like the problem is with the app.
It is. Same happens to me often (also with sync). It’s slightly annoying.
The Library of Babel by Borges melted my brain as a teenager.
This one is SOOOOOO COOL though. Did not encounter it until I was in college
there is also a searchable website for that: libraryofbabel.info
“The Darkness Out There” by Penelope Lively.
In short, a “nice old lady” tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.
I think it was there for the “the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy”.
