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Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.
Was that before or after the school-shooting lockdown drills?
After the hide under your desk from nuclear bombs drills but before the active shooter drills.
Nuclear attack drills? I don’t think we ever did those, I’ve just heard about them from older people. How old are you? I thought those stopped in like the 80s or something.
I grew up in a small town in Canada. We never had any kind of lock down drills.
Dang, things must be pretty good up in Canada. People are sending their children to first grade with ballistic-shielded backpacks down here.
Either I have a higher tolerance than most or my English teachers were pansies.
Though we did read the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in 8th grade.
Wait…you read the play version of a book? The fuck?
Flashbacks to when only the teacher and I understood A Modest Proposal and not being able to explain to anyone else in that class that i was appreciating that he was sassing the english NOT the actual idea of eating babies. 🙃
Y’all are taking about the girl with the green ribbon, my first year college lit teacher had us read a short story where a kid fist-fucked his mom and I’m feeling like maybe my education was problematic.
Terrible!
Tell me the title so I can shun it!
Oddly enough, Google is not turning up the story but it’s coming back with a lot of results
9th Grade English, got assigned Invisible Man by Ellison. It wasn’t science fiction like I thought it’d be 😅
Maybe try a poem.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Holy fuck who wrote this?
“Alright Class, today we are going to read “The Jaunt” by Stephen King and write a report about the effects of eternal nothingness on the human psyche” -my sick fuck English teacher in grade 7 for some reason.
I just read this as an adult a few weeks ago actually. Pretty dope thing to have read in class but I can see how it would make a lasting impression
I mean I loved it. We also got to read some ray bradbury and Isaac Asimov in that semester.
Asimov in school is a true power move, hell yeah. I did reas Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 and that book changed my (literary) life as a kid. My school was christian so good literature was few and far between
Oh we just read The Veldt, which was a bomb ass short story to get to read in grade 7.
That’s a great one. Maybe it’s time to reread the bradbury anthology collection I have. Some of his work can be a total brain bender
Yeah it was great for me because from grade four on I was super into reading horror and sci fi, and when we got to read them in class and all my friends also had to read it I got to talk about it with people.
Ray Bradbury “The Pedestrian”
This is not limited to short stories and English. If I had not been an avid reader when entering my teen years, the selection of books thrown at me in school would have turned me into a passionate hater of books.
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Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.
I had blocked that one from my memory; I remember now. Thanks. ಠ_ಠ
“Alright, class! We’re gonna read a story about a guy who locks himself in a hotel room with a decked-out kitchen, a surgery machine, and every prosthesis one could need, and this guy is gonna eat himself from the bottom up and describe it in careful, emotional, joyous detail!”
Yeeeeah, fuck that shit, decades later.
“The Savage Mouth” is the English title, by Komatsu Sakyou.
I have a similar reaction, but it was to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, about a woman locked in a room for a long period of time to deal with her mental health, and the solitude drives her quite insane. In quite haunting detail.
Fun historical note: many yellow paints and dyes used in that time period had some sort of neurotoxic heavy metal (probably mercury, IIRC) that actually caused or at least exacerbated symptoms of mental illness. Many of these compounds were relatively safe to use as paint in England, but when used in warmer, humid climates, they broke down and caused hallucinations as well as respiratory complications that caused the patients to be bedridden (further worsening the symptoms).
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing! I wonder if the author knew that, or if yellow was just used a lot… (I’ve seen occasional older advice to paint kitchens yellow to make them “feel sunny”, but imho that’s not an easy color to live with. My mom had a patterned yellow antique couch that was just absolutely hideous… but it was the style at some point…)
Granted I haven’t read that story in a long time, but I think they knew about any of this at the time the story was written. However, I seem to recall that this was a fairly autobiographical story about the author’s experiences with post-partum depression and the “treatment” thereof, so it might just be that the cost the yellow wallpaper because it mirrored her experiences
Hot.
Omg.
I got pictures of the text in English, further down my comment history. CTRL-F “autocannibalism”. I don’t have any Japanese copies, that was a long time ago.
CTRL-F “autocannibalism”.
Buddy no
This thread unlocked an old memory of a poem we read Sophomore year about a frog getting killed by a lawnmower.
All of it was a largely unmemorable slog with one teacher being adamant that their interpretation was the only correct one every time, even after they chose a book with a living author and I got it in writing that what the teacher thought was not the author’s intent. I actually made use of the business letter lesson from an earlier year…
Except one class was good and did stick with me. As a result Atwood still has me bugged out over chickie knobs and pigoons, especially now that we pretty much have both. And depression over alex the parrot.
Are we ready to talk about The Girl with the Green Ribbon now?
Is that the one where
(spoiler to be nice cuz if it’s the one I’m thinking of it was actually pretty good)
Tap for spoiler
it gets untied and her head falls off?
I got that book from the library when I was less than ten and I remember that one fucking with me.
Yep
Shit I haven’t thought about these sort of weird semi-horror books in such a wildly long time. I used to go out of my way to find somewhat morbid stuff like that (not to be edgy, but because I was reading prolifically, and ahead of my age group, so it was a whole new paradigm).
Thanks for the reminder :)
You’re welcome
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Red Spot
