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Many people have a visceral reaction to Palahniuk’s Guts, but it never hit me particularly hard. That and the underage incest impreg fantasies, it was always a bit of a turn off.
Honestly, for me, nothing beats good old Edgar Allan Poe, and he’s already in the syllabus.
I had started reading his short story collection (that contains Guts, forget what its called) back in high school after reading like three of his other books in a row (Lullaby, Survivor and Fight Club), and I was just burnt out on the shock factor thing.
Never finished the collection.
That would probably be Haunted. Yeah, I see what you mean.
That said, Palahniuk will always have a special place in my heart for introducing me to one of my favorite authors, Amy Hempel. (See eg https://www.csub.edu/~mault/palahniuk.htm )
Also, from a Reddit AmA, my favorite quote about the writing process. Someone asked a question along the line of, how do you know when you are done writing? When it’s polished enough? And he answered something along the lines of “I have a simple rule. A writing project isn’t done until I want to kill myself and everyone else involved with it”.
I was in the final stages of writing my doctoral dissertation back then, and boy did it resonate with me.
My head immediately went to tell tale heart.
Poe had lots of fucked up stories. The red death is another that stuck with me.
Hardfought, by Greg Bear. Sci-fi set in the far future, spoken with a military patois that is difficult to understand but is meant to highlight the alienness of the forever war that the story takes place in. Themes upon themes fifteen-plus layers deep, even though this is only a novella.
I have something north of 3,000 volumes in my library, and if I was to pick the most influential fiction story of my life, this would be it. I had difficulty reading it as a teenager who was typically reading at a university level while in high school, so it’s going to take serious effort by most to truly benefit from it. But when you finally understand those themes… holy shit.
The Dweller in the Gulf by Clark Ashton Smith.
Guts - Chuck Palahniuk
When someone mentioned it, I was like "it's just a story, in a book, and I've read some shit. How bad can it be?" Well, it can be really bad, I wanted to unread it. The memory is fading now, but I still have an "ugh" feeling
SCP-093.
High school teacher had us read Survivor Type - thus began my love for stephen king
When the Wind Blows.
Blood Child ild by Octavia Butler. Humans living on an alien reservation have the males implanted by the insect like alien's eggs and they start burrowing out of your flesh when they're ready.
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
Space might be the final frontier but it is by no means forgiving
I am a huge fan of hard sci-fi, but always hated Cold Equations.
The FTL ships can drop out of Hyperspace close enough to a planet for a rocket propelled ship to reach it, but the big ship can’t just drop the cargo off or have a purpose built cargo shuttle drop it off?
How do they unload the big cruisers anyway? Land the whole big ship?
The big ships run on such a tight schedule and rocket fuel is so precious due to weight that the computer calculates the fuel requirements to the milligram, but doesn’t allow for alternate landing sites? These supplies are supposed to be critical, but if your pilot can’t find a perfect spot instantly, or gets blown off course by a gust of wind, he’s going to crash and die on the way down? The fuck kind of emergency response is that. Like sending a food truck with no brakes.
The weight of a human when compared to cargo and vehicle dry mass is negligible. A margin of error for landing would easily account for the deltaV required to decelerate 100kilos.
The tightest moon landing, fuel wise, was Apollo 11, and even they probably had about 45 seconds of fuel left when they finally touched down. At the time it was thought to be 15 seconds, but later analysis found a fault with the fuel level sensor that’s caused it to read lower than it should.
Even in the 60s, NASA made sure there was enough fuel to allow the astronauts to pilot to a good landing site. And in Apollo, every ounce counted, the margins were extremely tight.
It would be a better story concept as a long haul trip where food, water, and oxygen would be used at twice the intended rate and that’s why the stowaway had to go. But fuel should not have been the primary reason.
I was 12 or 13 when I first encountered this story and my takeaway from it was that engineers are kind of shit at their jobs.
Let's assume for a moment that the constraints are plausible (they're not, as Zron pointed out): given this overwhelming lean toward unforgiving harsh reality ... why were there no security checks, etc. in place to deal with the inevitable occurrences when someone would be in a place they're not supposed to be upon launch? Good engineers plan for failures of systems, not just their presence. If those rockets are such utter and complete death traps, why was the security around them so lackadaisical? The engineers who set up that system probably also set up a 15cm wide stairway up 150m to get to the rocket without providing guide rails.
See, my contemporary high-school complaint was “if the weight constraints are really so precise, then a successful liftoff would have already burned too much fuel because there’s too much weight, and this ship is doomed no matter what.”
To be fair, I learned a lot from that story. Just not quite what the teacher intended.
Come and See by Soviet Union
There will come soft rains, I presume, is what inspired that post. It has done a number on many a child
I remember in high school our text book had some paragraphs from various literature books. One of the books was called zombie (or zombies) so of course I checked it out, even if the teacher skipped it. The section was just a description or something, nothing particular, but I decided to borrow the book at the library anyway, and the full story was basically (spoilers ahead, it's gory):
Tap for spoiler
This guy kidnapped people (men, women) to give them a lobotomy, then kept them in his bathtub to rape them until they started to rot
I wonder if somebody did it as an Easter egg or what
The cold equations
I remember having read this one as a child in elementary school. Had to keep the anthology book it was in checked out for several months, as I kept re-reading it trying to grapple with the ethics of the story. It was brutal for a 10yo.
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
https://archive.org/details/coldequationsoth0000godw
Or
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Asimov's Breeds There a Man ...?
A suicidal genius figures out the relationship between his brilliance and his mental health.
"On the Quay at Smyrna" by Ernest Hemingway. A very short read, almost a vignette, but it left me depressed. Too on the nose for the current world situation.
Copy-pasta deserves a unit in my classroom, the Russian sleep experiment
I try to not remember The Veldt but I still liked it as a good read. I also hated Harrison Bergeron but I think I was suppose to?