Cruel and Unusual Death: Difference between revisions

* In ''The Cone'', by [[H. G. Wells]], a man gets deliberately roasted to death by being thrown onto the top of a blast furnace. Don't read it if you're the slightest bit squeamish. You're welcome.

* In the original draft of [[Stephen King]]'s ''[['Salem's Lot]]'', Doctor Jimmy Cody is eaten alive by a horde of rats. The book's editor convinced King that it went too far, so he replaced it with a scene in which the doctor falls into a booby trap made of butcher knives that have been driven through a table. When the book was rereleased as a "10th Anniversary Edition", he (King) made sure the original scene was restored to the story.

* In one of the ''[[Dune]]'' prequels, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen has his etiquette teacher drowned in raw sewage. The man had been trying to teach the Baron how to behave in polite society.

** May be [[Laser-Guided Karma]], as all of the gods who died in that book had killed someone earlier in the novel. Goddess kills human; Kid kills goddess, Loki kills Kid, Shadow's wife kills Loki, and then dies herself of the self-inflicted wound and loss of the talisman that had brought her back from death.

* In Gary Jennings's historical epic ''[[Aztec]]'', a man has the skin of a little girl placed on his vital areas and is left to let the skin dry and thus suffocate him.

** Card can be fond of this trope; it's probably best illustrated in his short story ''A Thousand Deaths'' in which a repressive government uses [[Justified Extra Lives|cloning and brain-taping technology]] to torture a dissident to death over and over and over again, in increasingly gruesome and detailed manners—and each time make his newly decanted self, fresh from the trauma of dying, clean up the bits of his body. Note that this story actually ''inverts'' the trope however, because the protagonist eventually ''gets used to'' dying horribly, so the torture no longer works.

* [[Matthew Reilly]] seems to like these. We've got shredded to bits by a fragmentation grenade, eaten by killer whales, roasted alive when the sparks from some [[Mook]]s' guns ignite flammable gasses in the air, hung upside-down in a pool full of killer whales and eaten, poisoned by sea snake venom and getting lockjaw, freezing after getting soaked in liquid nitrogen, crushed in a depressurizing diving bell, stabbed in the back by your own squad mate, getting drilled through the head, and being mauled alive by mutant elephant seals. And that's just in his ''second book''.

* {{spoiler|Christina's death}}(from before the story started) from ''[[Haunted (1995 film)|Haunted 1988]]. She set the house on fire, killing everybody who was trapped inside, accidentally got herself set on fire, she jumped into the pond to stop the flames and drowned.

* The worms from David Gerrold's ''[[The War Against the Chtorr]]'' series eat their victims alive, and their mouths are built to inflict about as much pain as possible while they're doing it. But here's the bad part: the worms aren't the ''worst'' thing that can kill you in this story...

* In ''[[Polystom]]'', a servant convicted of murdering an aristocrat is executed using the "skin frame": after fattening him up to loosen the entire skin, the skin around his ankles is cut and pinned to the lower part of the frame and he must hold the upper part of the frame until his arms give way with fatigue.

* In ''Death Masks'', a novel in ''[[The Dresden Files]]'' series, [[Cool Old Guy|Shiro]] is brutalized and tortured to the point that Harry Dresden almost doesn't recognize him anymore.

** It doesn't actually happen, but in the short story "Love Hurts", a Red Court vampire describes to Harry the death her Court has planned for him. It involves a cage lined with sharp objects, the bottom of which is a closed bowl to collect his waste, spears in a rack underneath so anyone who feels like it can prod him with them, and eventual disembowelment and flaying to be turned into a chair in the Red Temple.

* In the first book of the [[Gentleman Bastard Sequence]] Sequence, ''The Lies of Locke Lamora'', a mob leader tries to have Locke drowned in a barrel of horse urine.

** Possibly the worst deaths in the series (though admittedly there is a lot of competition) are the deaths of Rickard and Brandon Stark in the backstory, for both physical and psychological torture. Rickard was roasted alive while his son Brandon watched. Brandon had a noose around his neck and his sword was placed just out of reach, causing him to strangle himself while trying to save his father.

* ''[[The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle]]'', by Haruki Murakami, illustrates, in horrific detail, just how terrifying it would be to watch someone getting skinned alive.

** Antpelt is beaten so badly in a ''training session'' in the Dark Forest ([[It Makes Sense in Context|which he was visiting in a dream)]] that he died in real life.

* The death of Annalina Aldurren in the final book of the ''[[Sword of Truth]]'' series is particularly cruel. The actual death is fairly quick (you don't live very long when someone blasts a foot-wide hole in your chest), but the killers then disintegrate her body, not just to cover their tracks, but explicitly stating that they're doing it so nobody will ever know what happened to her.

** In the first book, we have the death of Demmin Nass, [[The Dragon]], pedophile, child murderer, and all around bastard. After taunting Kahlan about how Richard was dead and he was going to let his men rape her to death while her friends are forced to watch, she goes into a [[Tranquil Fury]] [[Unstoppable Rage]] and confesses him, then chops off his testicles and feeds them to him before embedding an axe in his head.

* The short story ''Dark Red Mind'' has a scene where, after finding out that [[The Mole|the Colonel was in on the villain's plan]] the whole time, the three lead superhumans kill him in a truly nightmarish way. The Colonel gets in his car, turns the key in the ignition, and looks into the rear-view mirror to find Justin and Bethany sitting in the backseat. Just before he can get out, Justin uses his telekinesis to forcibly buckle the Colonel's seatbelt as tight as he can, making sure he can't get out. But that's not enough. Bethany uses her phasing powers on his hands ''without even touching him'', making sure he won't even have a physical chance to escape. Then, the third superhuman, Kaitlyn, with the ability to cut through things with her mind, slams her hands on the hood of the car. The Colonel begs for mercy, and Justin, with his only line in the story, simply replies, "Sorry, man. None left for you." Then Kaitlyn uses her power to ''cut through his neck as slowly as possible'' until she finally cuts all the way through.

** All of this is happening while [[Soundtrack Dissonance|Nocturne #2 in E-Flat Major is playing on the car radio.]]

* In the ''[[The Draka|Domination series]]'' by S.M. Stirling the stock punishment for any dissent is to be staked. The victim slowly dies, but if they tire and relax they'll just fall onto the stake more. It takes some skill to make the stake just the right length so as not to kill the victim too soon.

* In ''[[Jack Ryan|Without Remorse]]'', John Clark tortures and kills a drug dealer by jamming him into a decompression chamber and giving him the bends.

** And it goes on for an entire chapter. With all the detail and exhaustive research that Tom Clancy is famous for.

* [[Richard Morgan|Richard Morgan's]] fantasy novel ''[[The Steel Remains]]'' has one society sentence various people to death by gradual, mechanically-assisted impalement. This happens to a childhood friend of the main character. Later, due to a journey through possible alternate worlds/lives, the central character himself lives through such an experience. The description is... memorable, and not in a good way.

* The Short Story ''Jericho'' has the titular hero exiled by his own people, captured by humans, beaten, whipped, and eventually castrated and skinned alive.

* Failing to bind an Andat in ''[[The Long Price Quartet]]'' can have some pretty horrific consequences. For example, having your veins fill up with crushed glass. Or growing twisted mouths all over your body that vomit up you blood. Or slowly filling up with seaweed and black ice until your stomach ruptures.

* The last chapter of Zola's ''Nana'' focuses on other characters as they visit the title character's deathbed. The cheerful prostitute, who single-handedly ruined the fortunes of some of the richest men in France through sheer profligacy, dies horribly disfigured by smallpox.

* Given ''[[The Monk]]'' is a Gothic novel, they have to make it extreme, but it's a bad death even for a woman as heartless as the prioress. She gets ripped to shreds by an angry mob.

* In "The Quest for Blank Claveringi", a short story by Patricia Highsmith, the protagonist is stranded on an island {{spoiler|populated by [[It Can Think|''intelligent'']] man-eating snails the size of Buicks}}. Suffice it to say this does not end well.

 

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