This is a list of disturbing, resonant and horrifying short stories which students often to study in high school and then can’t get out of their head long after they’ve graduated. Kudos to all the English teachers out there, traumatizing new generations with these excellent works of fiction, all the more disturbing for their brevity!
DISTURBING, RESONANT & HORROR SHORT STORIES
(Where the titles are hyperlinked, I have analysed and the link takes you to another page on this website.)
- “Louisa, Please Come Home“, also by Shirley Jackson. Read it here.
- “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (Read it here.)
- “The Possibility Of Evil” by Shirley Jackson. Read it here.
- “Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson. Read it here.
- “Miss Smith” by William Trevor. Read it here after logging onto JStor through your library.
- “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “All Summer In A Day” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “The Small Assassin” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “Last Night Of The World” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “Usher II” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “The Emissary” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “The October Game” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” by Ray Bradbury. Read it here.
- “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke. Read it here.
- “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. Read it here.
- “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison. Read it here.
- “I Have No Mouth” by Ralph Ellison. Read it here.
- “The Story Of An Hour” by Kate Chopin. Read it here.
- “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin. Read it here.
- “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce. Read it here.
- “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin. Read it here.
- “The Jaunt” by Stephen King. Read it here.
- “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King. Read it here.
- “The Boogeyman” by Stephen King. Read it here.
- “The End of the Whole Mess” by Stephen King. Available in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection, 1993.
- “Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it here.
- “Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it here.
- “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it here.
- “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. Read it here.
- “The Rats In The Walls” by H.P. Lovecraft. Read it here.
- “The Music of Erich Zann” by H.P. Lovecraft. Read it here.
- “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. Read it here.
- “El almohadón de plumas” (The Feather Pillow) by Horacio Quiroga. Read it here.
- “La gallina degollada” (The slaughtered chicken) by Horacio Quiroga. Read it here.
- “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs. Read it here.
- “A Rose For Emily” by William Faulkner. Read it here.
- Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Read it here.
- “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Read it here.
- “A Clean, Well-lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway. Read it here.
- “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway. Read it here.
- “To Build A Fire” by Jack London. Read it here.
- “Spar” by Kij Johnson. Read it here.
- “Hooks and Feelers” by Keri Hulme. See a short film adaptation here. Read it in the Te Kaihu collection.
- “The Box Social” by James Reaney. Read it here.
- “Someone Had To” by Janice Galloway. Read it in Galloway’s Where You Find It short story collection.
- “Reports of Certain Events in London” by China Mieville. Listen to Episode 16 of Elder Sign: A Weird Fiction Podcast.
- “Haircut” by Ring Lardner. Read it here.
- “Flowers For Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. Read it here.
- “Game” by Donald Barthelme. Read it here.
- “And of Clay Are We Created” by Isabelle Allende. Read it here.
- “The Rose-Crystal Bell” by Robert Arthur. Read it here.
- “Click-Clack the Rattlebag” by Neil Gaiman. Read it here.
- “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby. Read it here.
- The Things They Carried is a series of stories by Tim O’Brien. Read it here. “On The Rainy River” is a chapter from it. Read it here.
- “The Blue Lenses” by Daphne du Maurier. Read it here. Also find it in first published in the Ladies Home Journal in May 1959 and in The Breaking Point collection of the same year.
- “Bread” by Margaret Atwood (Read it here.) Is this fiction or a persuasive piece? It sits somewhere between the two as the second-person narrative asks us to contemplate famine.
- “The Flowers” by Alice Walker. Read it here.
- “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift. Read it here.
- “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it here.
- “Bunny Stew” by Mikki Mares. (Read it on my post.)
- “Through the Tunnel” by Doris Lessing. Read it here.
- “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki. Read it here.
- “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke. Read it here.
- “The Riddle” by Walter de la Mare. Read it here.
- “The Tower” by Marghanita Laski.
- “The Painted Door” by Sinclair Ross. Read it here.
- “The Long Sheet” by William Sansom. Read it here.
- “Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver. Read it here.
- “The Gentleman from Cracow” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Read it here.
- “The Feeling of Power” by Isaac Asimov. Read it here.
- “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. Find it in the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. Or read it here.
- “Something Passed By” by Robert R. McCammon. Read this story and others by the same author here.
- “Knock” by Fredric Brown. Read it here.
- “Answer” by Fredric Brown. Read it here.
- “In The Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka. Read it online.
- “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger. Read it here.
- “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov. Read it here.
- “The Lame Shall Enter First” by Flannery O’Connor. Read it here.
- “Sea Oak” by George Saunders. Read it in the December 20, 1998 edition of The New Yorker.
- “The Red Pony“, a novella by John Steinbeck. Read an illustrated edition here.
- “The Chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck. Read it here.
- “The Vertical Ladder” by William Sansom. Read it here.
- “The Country of the Blind” by H. G. Wells. Read it here.
- “The Monster” by Stephen Crane
- “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. Read it here.
- “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” by J. D. Salinger. Find it in the April 8, 1950 edition of The New Yorker.
- “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood. Read it here.
- “A Jury of her Peers” by Susan Glaspell. Read it here.
- “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” by Ken Liu
- “Dislocation” by Fouad Laroui. This is the second story in Laroui’s collection, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers published by Deep Vellum Publishing.
- “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter. Read it here.
- “The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it here.
- “The Tell-tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it here.
- “Just Lather, That’s All” by Hernando Téllez. Read it here.
