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The Veldt. Also, All Summer In A Day.
I remember “To Build a Fire” and another one I can’t name about a sniper duel during the Irish Civil War. The ending was wild.
Literally called “The Sniper” by Liam O’flaherty
“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel García Márquez would have been that, but it lost its impact because my generation associates the name Esteban with the silly bellhop from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
In my fifth grade English class the four term themes were Civil War, Holocaust, dog books, and choose-your-own. For the first three units, my parents read all four options ahead of time and had me assigned to the least traumatizing. For the last term I picked Julie of the Wolves, a dog book disguised as a Wolf book; I’d always wondered why my second grade teacher suddenly stopped reading it to us at story time.
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
I was assigned The Westing Game no led than three times from K-12
My favorite report I wrote was when I got to pick Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch in my dual-credit community college English course and the red pen in the margins of my report was all compliments
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
“The Veldt” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”? Those two stick with me due to two good readings of it.
The Veldt read by Leonard Nimoy and Tell-Tale Heart acted out by Vincent Price Part 1 and Part 2.
SpongeBob did a episode that was a retelling of Telltale Heart even!
Simpsons also, a bit, iirc.
Same answer i had on tumblr.
The Jaunt
Longer than you think!
how about steinbecks the pearl
scarred for life from a 7th grade shortish story
I’ve been trying to find this ridiculous sci-fi story I read in elementary school. I thought it was Ray Bradbury but then I recalled it was, I believe, from a collection edited by and/or with a foreword by Bradbury.
The scenario was that people in the future had become so dependent on mechanized transportation that their legs atrophied. Walking around normally was seen as very strange as everyone used these hovering personal transport devices. I think the story basically just described the protagonist walking around town and taking strolls at night and how odd everyone else thought it was.
Archive.org’s scan of it if you want to read it again.
For me that is ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’, but that was 100% self inflicted.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce.
Came here to post this.
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
I also took the “fucked up stories for smart kids” class
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.
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.
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.
Flowers for Algernon, that was thought provoking but also way too heavy for a 7th grade English class.
Jesus Christ. I read that aged 27 and cried like a baby. Way too heavy for grade school.
Was making sure this had a mention. This was brutal to read in 6th grade at 10 in the morning.
This shit made me fucking sob, I was also in seventh grade. I came to this comment section to mention it. Unforgettable
That was 5th grade for me. I still wonder what that teacher was thinking.
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.
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.
A Child Called It and The Lost Boy by David Pelzer. That did some heavy desensitization in the future.
The Most Dangerous Game
Is Man… cala. Mancala, but where all the pieces are replaced with bits of TNT.
The Book of Sand. Not fucked up, just mind-blowing.
This was going to be my answer. Except we didn’t even read it as a class. We were doing some other boring stuff and I was flipping randomly through our textbook, where I found it and read it. I still think about it, and sometimes use it in RPGs.
It would’ve also been super appropriate if I could never find it again in the textbook, but I can’t remember if that’s true.
