Here are 14 absolutely fantastic free short stories that are both rammed with head-fuckery and can be ploughed through on your next short bus trip.
Which means when you’re sat at your desk and your boss asks why you’ve been staring at the clock for 40 minutes, you can tell him it’s because you were pondering the systematic nature of multiple realities. Imagine how smart you’ll feel when they clean out your desk and escort you from the building.
14 mindbending short stories you can read for free
Click the titles to read free online versions of each tale of woe and weirdness.
EXHALATION – TED CHIANG
Did I ever tell you about the time I decided to remove my lungs, attach some extra ones, and then take my head apart so that my brain didn’t explode? No? Well it’s a good job somebody wrote about the exact same experience then. Chiang’s tale is very strange, but also says a lot about what it is that makes us human, and how we define ourselves.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Ursula K. LeGuin
How far would we really go to create a perfect world? That’s the question at the centre of this short, sharp tale from sci-fi high priestess (and feminist icon) LeGuin. As it turns out… pretty darn far. The whole thing is just four pages long, Ideal for a lunchtime freakout.
The Jaunt – Stephen King
King is a big name but he’s also so prolific that there are plenty of hidden gems to be uncovered in his back catalogue, and The Jaunt is packed with the kind of superb world-building that made other short stories like The Mist so bloody terrifying. It’s also nice to see King reach out into a new genre. Here it’s sci-fi, as a young family get ready for their first ‘Jaunt’ to Mars. Teleportation takes just an instant. You take some gas, you go to sleep, and you wake up on a new world. But not everyone goes to sleep. And neither will you after you read it:
He-y, come on ou-t! – Shinichi Hoshi
If something seems to good (or in this case, useful) to be true. An odd little tale about an odd little hole in the ground, with a killer twist. It’ll take you five minutes to read, but will keep you wondering about the nature of buried secrets for a long time to come.
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The setting is typical enough. A young woman tries to convalesce in an old mansion, with predictably unsettling results. It’s not a ghost story though, but a look at a young woman’s descent into madness as she begins to obsess over her restricted world. Gilman’s twisted tale makes for an excellent creep-fest, but also stands as a thoughtful look at the role of women in 19th century America.
The Rats in the Walls – H.P. Lovecraft
If you really want your brain to shake like jelly then H.P is a damn fine place to start. Monstrous, uncaring gods and creeping ocean monstrosities that will make you question your very sanity, and your place in the universe. The Rats in the Walls keeps the horror closer to home, as a young man returns to his ancestral home, only to be kept awake by scurrying rats. On further investigation he finds out what they’ve been eating and just who put the food supply there in the first place. You’ll never look at that weird uncle of yours the same way again.
La Noche Boca Arriba – Julio Cortázar
Unfortunately most of the translations don’t do it justice, but Cortázar’s short tale is justifiably famous outside of Argentina. It’s a simple enough tale. At least to start with. A young man has an accident on his motorbike. He’s dragged to safety and taken to hospital, where he drifts in and out of… uh… possibly consciousness, possibly of this universe. It’s a short, visceral thrill that will leave you with a metallic blood tang in your mouth.
The Nine Billion Names of God – Arthur C. Clarke
It’s medically impossible to list a bunch of short stories without including Clarke, who must himself have pumped out about nine billion tales over the years. On the plus side most of them are amazing, but few are as melon-twisting as this five-pager involving monks, a supercomputer and an attempt to…. hang on… accelerate the way the universe works. The last line will stay with you for a long time. Depending on how much time you have left of course.
THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS –RAY BRADBURY
A low key entry but this will still make you wonder just what the hell you’re doing with your life. TWCSR is an odd beast, detailing the day-to-day activities of an automated house of the future. Sounds boring? Wait until you learn just where the house is, and why it’s running out of water. You can read the whole story here, or check out this fantastic adaptation by the BBC Stereophonic Workshop:
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream – Harlan Ellison
Ellison often seems unjustly forgotten by modern readers. It may be down to his rather dry prose, or it might be because he tends to write hate-filled mind-stranglers that will weird you the fuck out. Featuring surgically mis-shapen ape-men with giant penises , violently psychotic supercomputers (again), and an environment designed to actively hate those who live in it, it’s a tough read, but an oddly rewarding one.
An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge – Ambrose Bierce
Worth checking out not only because it’s one of the first experiments with stream-of-consciousness storytelling, but also because it’s probably the only book on our list that’s inspired an episode of American Dad! Set during the civil war, a condemned man waits to be hung, but escapes at the last second, with some truly, truly odd consequences. Lots of flashbacks and even a… no, I don’t want to spoil it. Go read it, or for maximum weird factor, watch this restored film version with the lights out.
I Don’t Know Timmy, Being God Is A Big Responsibility – Sam Hughes
There’s a theory that our whole world might just be an enormous computer simulation. It would at least explain the absence of aliens. But not who programmed it, or why. Here’s where you get to find out.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges
If everyone believes something, does it need to be real to exist? How do you make an idea come to life? I’m not explaining the concept very well, but then again, I’m not Jorge Luis Borges. A nonstop assault of intellectual exploration that forces you to start asking all sorts of questions about the world around you. And not all those questions have answers.
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