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
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 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!)
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
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.
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