I'm collecting a list of Short Stories That Fucked Us Up As Children. reblog and tell me what I'm missing.
here's the list so far:
the yellow wallpaper
all in a summer day
fever dream
the lottery
hey come on out
by the waters of Babylon
the most dangerous game
flowers for Algernon
a good man is hard to find
skin
to build a fire
silent snow secret snow
bartleby the scrivener
i have no mouth and I must scream
harrison bergeron
lamb to the slaughter
the cask of amontillado
the telltale heart
the vampyre
where did you come from, where did you go
the monkey's paw
I'll add a poll in case it helps haha
which short story messed you up the most?
one of the stories already listed
a different one I'll tell you to add
no short stories but a novel did
no short stories but a different form of story (poem, play, film, etc) did
no story has ever messed me up what's wrong with all of your childhoods
I intend to celebrate the date mentioned in the short story that MOST messed me up as a kid,. Assuming we survive. It's only two yearsish. We should make it.
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury ends on August 5th 2026. Set your calendars.
But Bradbury wrote a fair number of stories that messed me up.
A Sound of Thunder (I think this was actually the first Ray Bradbury story I ever read)
The Fall of the House of Usher II
Pillar of Fire
Marionette, Inc. (Read this and then stream the 70's movie, The Stepford Wives, you'll have enough nightmares to last you a life time)
The Veldt
The Long Rain
Gotcha!
The Toynbee Convector (This is a pretty safe one, I don't think it was a reasonable story to be messed up by. I just have trust issues. See, Gotcha!)
The Aqueduct
The Small Assassin
Probably a fair few others, too. Bradbury definitely had a little thread of the macabre running through his stuff. Put everything together in The Martian Chronicles and it is not a happy picture it is painting. Even Night Meeting, one of my all time favorite short stories, and actually pretty sweet and beautiful, can be existentially dreadful if you think too hard about it.
Some more stories that F'd me up as a young'un (or which you could have read as a kid that could have MESSED YOU UP but I did actually read after being young):
All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein
Equinotical by John Varley
Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge by Mike Resnick
Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick
Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by by Ursula K LeGuin
The Store of Worlds By Robert Sheckley
All the Last Wars at Once by George Alec Effinger
I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
Grail by Harlan Ellison
The Time of the Eye by Harlan Ellison
Jeffty is Fife by Harlan Ellison
The Lingering Scent of Woodsmoke by Harlan Ellison
Shatterday by Harlan Ellison
Let's Go to Golgotha by Garry Kilworth
Mars Attacks by Jim Sheppard
Only a Mother by Judith Merrill (another all time favorite story)
The Dead by Michael Swanwick
The Last Homosexual by Paul Park
Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death by James Tiptree, Jr.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov (second place in the messed me up awards)
Runaround by Isaac Asimov (not actually messed up in-text but I FELT this one as an emotional metaphor)
Spell My Name with an S by Isaac Asimov
Twilight by John W. Campbell
And that's probably more than enough from me, since the possibility it's any of these is fairly low.
The Veldt was FUCKED UP. (I love Bradbury.)
My high school creative writing teacher made us read A Rose for Emily, by William Faulkner, and we were all pretty horrified by that one.
On the subject of There Will Come Soft Rains, there's a beautiful soviet animated adaptation from 1984:
