i figured the tweet was about The Lotterry and everyone would go “Oh it’s obviously a tweet about The Lottery” but nope.
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.
The one that sticks with me is called “the cold equations”, and it’s about a pilot flying a ship through space and discovering he has a young girl stowing away on board. Since he only has enough fuel to get to his destination if the ship weighs a very specific amount, he has to decide whether or not to jettison the girl out the airlock. I remember liking it, but I’ve never forgotten how emotional it was to read.
Does he eject her?
!Yes. She goes willingly after learning her brother is on the colony that the pilot is sent to bring supplies to. The pilot allows her one last video call to him before she is jettisoned.!<
If she’s onboard and the ship is running that tight with fuel, then they already missed.
Seems like if jettisoning weight was the issue dumping some of the less essential supplies would work just as well…
The ship was built as simply as possible and fueled with the precise amount needed for it’s weight, there was nothing else to jettison besides the young woman. The plot was intentionally structured around an impossible scenario because the editor of the magazine the story originally appeared in wanted to subvert the “engineer action hero saves the day with a clever idea” trope that was common when it was written. The heavily contrived scenario is the weak point by most people’s estimation, but overall the writing is well done and characterizations are very good.
The story bugs a lot of people due to the total lack of any safety margin for such an important mission as delivering emergency medical supplies. A guy named Don Sakers even wrote a rebuttal called The Cold Solution that was meant to point out a few things the original story overlooked without the idea of a bare minimum ship being changed.
Oh believe me, even though I thought it was a good read, I have a lot of criticism for the story. God forbid literally any kind of emergency happens and additional fuel is needed to avoid catastrophe. I get wanting to maximize space for supplies, but the risk far outweighs the benefits of operating on such tight margins.
Sometimes teachers field stories like this to foster critical thought and encourage insightful book reports. It’s stimulating material even with a flawed premise, and that’s the point.
My teachers always seemed to be the type that had these stories in the curriculum, but weren’t the type to follow up with the thinky-thinky bits. This had rather predictable results.
Space OSHA really fucked up on regulating this vessel.
Nah, in the future we’ll have Space Force and no OSHA
The egg by Andy Weir
A Rose for Emily.
It was about some old lady hermit. She had some relationship with the town and after she died they went into her house. >!Emily had been sleeping next to the corpse of her dead husband for probably decades!<.
A separate peace was a book we got in highschool where a kid possibly has homosexual feelings for another and throws him out of a tree which shatters his leg and eventually kills him.
Yup. Real fuckin weird one. I’m sure there was a point but I never got it.
o k then…
Huuuuuge paraphrase there but the book is insane and while the kid with the broken leg is away the one who knocked him out of the tree starts wearing the one with the broken leg’s clothes and all kinds of weird shit
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
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.
Ohhh. I remember now. Thank you.
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.
There’s a story called “Time Safari” that ends in a dude just straight up killing another dude. This was in a kid’s literature book.
Also I think Casque of Amontillado is funny.
Huh I never realized how weird of a story that is to tell to kids
Don’t even get me started on a tall tale heart or that one story about this dude fantasizing about escaping while getting hanged
I thought that was called a Sound of Thunder. Because the last line went “there was a sound of thunder, then silence.” Or something to that effect, heavily implying that the time safari employee killed the hunter who stepped off the trail and on to a butterfly.
I also remember that one of the results of stepping on the butterfly was that all English words were spelled fonetically (typo intentional), a “mistake” I would happily go back in time to commit.
I also remember this short story, the death of the butterfly also changed the results of an election.
(It probably was I read this story over 10 years ago)
I remember that. Either Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov.
Hunting party goes back in time to hunt dinosaurs right.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. Someone did a great adaptation to film as well.
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.
The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury.
They didn’t make everyone read it though, just us “gifted/advanced” kids. It was one of several short stories that were in a special program book that I had to read.
I still think those kids were brats.
Edit: just looked it up and this was supposed to be 9th grade English??? We fucking had to read that as 5th graders.
Edit 2: I need to stop thinking about this, they also made us read All Summer in a Day, Flowers for Algernon, and The Tell Tale Heart in that class
Oh I was gonna call out All Summer in a Day cause holy fuck Ray Bradbury has some issues with kids…
I mean he is right too but damn those stories stick with you. And also did that and basically all the ones you pointed out as a “gifted class”. Do you think they literally had just 1 syllabus for us weird kids for the whole nation to try and scare us back into line or what? Cause, seems like we all getting traumatized by stories of death and emotional torture at like 11 by the same stories.
I also took the “fucked up stories for smart kids” class
This was the one. Every once in a while my brain just says “hey, remember that fucked up story where the kids had a smart room that became whatever they wanted and it spoiled them to the point they murdered their parents with lions? Wasn’t that fucked up? Let’s think about how fucked up it was for a while!”
It was 7th grade for me, but still, I can’t believe we read that as kids.
I was in the “gifted/advanced” track too. Teachers saw this one of two ways. Half of them got the memo: you got extra interesting stuff to noodle through because we’re all under-stimulated in a typical class. The others decided to just double your homework load and call it a day. At least the teachers in the first group had some interesting takes on brain teasers and reading material.
And on that note: I must have thought about Flowers for Algernon every week since I read it. Since the 90’s. I’m tired, boss.
“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.!<
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.
Most of the stuff we read in class was fine, or we knew was going to be fucked up as it was Gifted and Talented class.
The book that fucked me at the time more than those was reading Maus. At like 12. And if I bring it up with mother, she’d say it was my fault for reading it, instead of, you know, maybe she should vet the book instead of going “oh cartoony of the holocaust, that’s fine”
Holocaust was fine, every Hanukkah one of our 7 gifts works be a book, and you’d run out of noob holocaust books that relayed to judiasm real quick. But most were written for kids so.
Not Maus
read Maus a few months ago (as a 30 year old man) and it has hung over me like a dark cloud. I had to physically set the book down and walk away when it got to the diagrams of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, detailing how industrialized the extermination was. absolutely horrifying.
Which is why I don’t recommend it to preteen me at all! I think it’s extremely important now, but man. Not uh. Not to a kid.
Fun fact: Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, also created the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards.
A Modest Proposal was quite memorable
