As a high schooler, I have read many short stories, be it from my English classes or in my own free time. Over the years, there have been many short stories that would keep me up at night because I wasn’t able to stop thinking about them. While there are clearly more than five amazing short stories, here are five that you should definitely read.
The Bradbury Short Stories
Ray Bradbury is well-known for his sci-fi and dystopian stories, including Fahrenheit 451, his most famous novel. From a young age, I’ve been reading his books and short stories, and many of them are very memorable.
The Illustrated Man
Some short stories may inspire characters in larger novels. “The Illustrated Man” follows an unnamed character interacting with the Illustrated Man, who acknowledges his flaws. “The Illustrated Man” inspired the main antagonist in the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. The concept of the Illustrated Man’s story is really interesting, especially when you consider that he is the antagonist of a different and larger story. “The Illustrated Man” is only 9 pages long, and I love it because it’s really cool how it ties in with the larger novel. I believe the short story and novel can be read in any order and it would still have the same effect. I read the short story after and thought it came together very nicely.
The Pedestrian
So there is one short story that I’ve read in my eighth grade English class, and being that it’s on the list, you have to know that it’s good. My English teacher initially told me that I’d like Bradbury, and I wasn’t sure why until we had to read it. “The Pedestrian” is set in a dystopian society, where a man who is walking on the sidewalk late at night gets arrested just for… walking. He is stopped by a police car with no person inside it for walking on the sidewalk at all, and the main point, a recurring theme in his novels and short stories, is that technology will bring people to lose their humanity by being static and lazy.
The Veldt
“The Veldt” is a really cool story about people overusing technology that I personally loved reading in eighth grade English. The story is very memorable because of how they are not dependent on each other. All of Bradbury’s writing serves as a cautionary tale to his readers, and this is another example of it. Because of how much the children relied on their technology, they didn’t have the need for their parents. This is a warning to people both who may depend on technology heavily for themselves and/or for others that it can replace important figures in people’s lives.
Joe Hill Short Stories
Some of my favorite short stories ever! The Black Phone is the first horror book that I have ever read, and before reading it, I thought this would be a full length novel. Opening the book up and seeing that it was a compilation of short stories, I wasn’t sure what to think, but it was really worth it to read through all of these. “Best New Horror,” as some of the others, really gave me a sense of how horror could be written instead of being in the movies. Although there are no jump scares, the writing is absolutely gruesome and thorough with descriptions. You can easily get a sense of who these characters are and what their motives are in barely 20 short pages.
Best New Horror
“Best New Horror” in The Black Phone is written in third person limited, meaning that the narrator follows only one character. This character, the protagonist, is an editor specifically of horror. Instantly, I loved that Hill broke the fourth wall writing a character who loves to read horror. Eventually, the editor, to make this short story fit the genre of horror, ends up in a situation where he could use his knowledge of the stories he edits to get him out of the situation. This is one of the many stories he has written within the novel that make the readers inference what happens after the story ends, and that is another thing I love about his style of writing.
The Black Phone
“The Black Phone” is a short story within the novel The Black Phone, and it’s also become a movie. I enjoyed this story because the concept was really cool. Anything with ghosts in horror is really interesting, and if you’ve ever seen the trailer for The Black Phone, the whole premise is that a kidnapper of multiple children killed these kids, and their ghosts can talk to the protagonist, another kid, through the black phone on the wall. It’s always entertaining to read a story about children because not many stories are about them, and because there are dead kids, it is more disturbing. You should definitely read this short story because first, it’s a movie, so you know it’s good already, and second, there was no boring page in “The Black Phone.”