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  • The Acts of Caine gives us the Black Knife Kiss, a.k.a. 'how a vicious yet primitive tribe of ogrilloi neutralizes any spellcasters they capture before they can torture them', a.k.a. 'thanks a fucking lot Matt Stover; I didn't need to read that'.
    • The sanitized version is: An ogrilloi (orc) bites down and sucks the eye out of the spellcaster's head. And there is one ogrilloi per eye.
  • Adventure Hunters: Part of the torture Marcus inflicts on Golon to force Regina into helping him with the golems is taping the victim's eye with a chisel as the first step in gouging it out if his second victim does not cooperate.
  • From the Agent Pendergast series:
    • During the climax of Cemetery Dance, the novel's Big Bad Alexander Esteban winds up getting his eye ripped out. However it's still stuck to the root, causing it to hang from his face and bounce off him a couple times.
    • In the end of Corrie's subplot in Two Graves she discovers that Foote was the one who framed her father for robbery, but gets taken hostage by him. Despite being shot, Corrie's father takes one look at his daughter in danger and snaps, leading him to take advantage of an opening and eventually gouge Foote's eye out with a penknife, with a pretty graphic description of everything that oozes out.
  • ALiCE (2014):
    • Matthew and Morgan are identical twins but have different colored eyes, apparently because Mad Scientist doctors decided to remove one eye from each of them and transplant it into the other twin, ‘correcting’ their heterochromal eyes. The transplant didn’t go well so the transplanted eye in each of them is sightless.
    • When Michael demonstrates how he killed himself, his eye turns bloodshot and cracks appear on his face.
  • Always Coming Home has the story of Junco, who spent a day staring at the sun trying to learn the secrets of the universe. The doctors only managed to restore his perpheral vision.
  • The Graycaps in Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris stories make a habit of plucking out the eyes of their enemies. In the case of their first known victim, the founder of the titular city, they carefully preserved his eyeballs and left them to be found decades later along with his chronicler's journal. It's implied that they might use human eyeballs to grow some beneficial fungus on them.
  • In Dan Brown's Angels & Demons, Vittoria's father has his eye cut out by an assassin trying to bypass an iris scanner and get into his lab to steal a container full of anti-matter.
    • Vittoria later gets revenge on said assassin when she stabs a red-hot branding iron straight into his eye, she even got to say the "an eye for an eye" line.
  • In Antlers, Colorado Mac has her right eye clawed out by a skinwalker just prior to her death. Her ghost is still missing it.
  • Baccano!:
    • In a flashback, Czeslaw Meyer gets stabbed in the eye with a red-hot poker. Good thing he can healor not.
    • It's later revealed that Nice Holystone lost her eye because she played with gunpowder as a child. She hasn't learned her lesson, either — she keeps a spare bomb in her empty eye socket!
    • In the light novels, Firo takes one of Huey's eyes as part of a plan orchestrated by Renee. Huey actually is willing to accept this, as long as he gets one of Renee's eyes in return. Furthermore, Huey's daughter Leeza gets revenge on Firo by taking one of his eyes. "An eye for an eye" was in full force during those novels.
  • Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts: Shouko frequently pokes Yuuji's eyes when there's even the slightest instant she suspects Yuuji to be a little sexually liberated.
  • Hitagi Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari nearly stabs Koyomi Araragi in the eye with a mechanical pencil after he so much as talks about another female using her first name without an honorific.
    Araragi-kun, your wounds heal very quickly, don't they? So I bet it'd be okay if I just took out an eyeball.
    • She also jabbed him in the eyes with her fingers once for referring to her as Senjougahara-chan rather than Senjougahara-sama like she wanted.
  • In The Ballad of Black Tom, Black Tom cuts Detective Malone's eyelids off. He'll have to wear tinted goggles for the rest of his life, both to protect his eyes from damage and to stop other people from seeing his deformity. He also has to douse his eyes with a solution throughout the day to stop them from drying out.
  • Battle Royale has a rather large description of Chigusa clawing out one of Niida's eyes, with her middle finger and thumb (deciding that this had more strength than her pointer and thumb). This was followed by testicular crushing. But that's another trope.
  • Bazil Broketail: When he loses his patience with Thrembode and openly attacks him, the wizard throws some sort of magical powder into Lukash's eyes, blinding him.
  • For raising the stolen Orb of Aldur in anger in desperation to save his people, Torak lost his left eye and a bit more of the left half of his face to the otherworldly flame of the Orb. And since he is a God, the wounds never heal, the flame that replaces his eye always burns, and Torak still suffers…and this is over 5,000 years before the beginning of the story proper.
  • Belisarius Series: Emperor Justinian has his eyes put out during the Nikas Revolt, thus removing him from eligibility for the throne, under Roman law. In retribution, his wife later has the eyes of one of the conspirators put out, after which she urinates in his now empty eye sockets, as she promised she'd do just after Justinian's eyes were put out.
    • Calopodius later on lost his eyes in a mortar attack.
  • Before Beyond the Western Sea begins, Mr. Grout has a stake driven into his eye during a prizefight.
  • Biblical examples:
    • Joshua, in the book of the same name, that if the Israelites clung to the remnant of the nations God had driven out, and made marriages with them, then those nations would figuratively be (among other things) thorns in their eyes.
    • In Judges 16:21, the Philistines put out Samson's eyes. He later retaliated in a Taking You with Me fashion.
    • In 2 Kings 25:7 King Zedekiah's eyes were also put out - after having to watch his own sons being killed in front of him.
    • There's a metaphorical (we hope) example in Matthew 18:9, when Jesus tells you to pluck your own eye out if it causes you to sin.
  • In Black Legion, Khayon's captors have both his eyes and psychic eyesight removed. During the Battle of Prospero, Khayon himself drove a thumb into a Space Wolf's eye to start tearing his head apart.
  • Bless Me, Ultima has Ultima's Owl Avatar/familiar pluck Tenorio's eye out with his talons. The books then describes it landing in the dust, and a bloody, red, pulp. Despite the cruel punishment Tenorio deserves it.
  • A major theme in the Stuart MacBride novel Blind Eye. Numerous victims are very messily blinded off-screen, along with one unsympathetic minor character on-screen (not described in much detail); however, the worst bit is the pathologist describing how the perpetrator would have gone about it.
    "I'd say the eyes were gouged out of the head with a small hooked knife, cutting the muscles. Then the assailant takes the eye in the palm of his hand like this with the optic nerve between the middle two fingers, and yanks like he's trying to start a chainsaw."
  • In the additional Bourne books by Eric Van Lustbader, there seems to be an unusual fixation on the ruination of eyes (and BLT sandwiches, which is, thank God, separate). In The Bourne Legacy, one of the characters burns out someone's eye with a match, and Bourne jabs out the eye of an agent that has come to kill him, with his thumb. In The Bourne Betrayal, one of the characters Martin Lindros, the Deputy Director of the CIA, is kidnapped and tortured, and his eye is removed in a pretty atrocious display of pseudoscience because it still works on retinal scans even after being implanted into someone else. Finally, when he is freed, he finds the doctor who removed his eye and jams his thumbs into the eyes of the doctor, which is described in great detail as his eyes BURST, and then driving his thumbs so deep into the eye sockets that he actually kills the doctor.
  • In Bravelands, Swift was attacked and blinded by another jealous lioness. One eye is missing while the other is scarred beyond repair. Swift is in danger of being kicked out of the pride because she can't help hunt. It's only her exiled son Fearless returning home that persuades the dominant male Titan to let her stay.
  • In Brothers of the Snake, one of the Marines loses both of his eyes during an Ork attack. The impact was so powerful, his head has to be banded with metal ring so that his skull won't fall apart, and he has his hearing improved to compensate for loss of sight.
  • In The Candy Shop War, the heroes are stalked by a floating eye-like thing. So, John Dart tells them to shoot at it. They realize afterward, from the splatter of blood and the horrible shriek, that they shot out the Big Bad's actual eye. This causes some dissonance later when the Big Bad is rendered harmless as an amnesiac little girl. She's a cute little lass with a cute little eye patch.
  • The Carrera's Legions Lotus Eaters: In the course of escaping the men sent to capture Carrera, his wife tricks one of them into position to use a letter opener to kill him, stabbing the intruder through the eye.
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • Happens when the fact that some of Index's bites are apparently going for Touma's eye sockets.
    • Shiage gouges out Mugino's eye. She gets a cybernetic one later.
    • Othinus gave up her right eye for the power of Odin. She reveals that if her eye is returned to her, she will lose her powers and become human.
  • Rhine gets needles stuck through her eyes in Fever.
  • In Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber, King Eric has Corwin's eyes burned out as a punishment for opposing him, and to prevent him from escaping. They grow back.
  • The Chronicles Of Alice: Alice stabbed the White rabbit's eye in a brutal attack to get away from him in, leaving them both covered in blood, and draining the rabbit of magic.
  • In Chronicles of the Emerged World, Ido loses an eye to Deinoforo. Unlike other examples, he needs to train for several months in order to learn to fight properly with only one eye left.
  • In David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series, a man's eyes are removed, and the eyelids are sewn shut with living insects inside.
  • In Coraline, the Other Mother replaces children's eyes with buttons. This is a ''children's book''.
  • Madame Tarsa of The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids got one of her eyes shot out by Pessimist's Fog Ship's defensive laser bolt in her debut, although it regenerated within four minutes (and she expressed annoyance at how slow the process was).
  • Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing has a particularly gruesome scene involving the Mexican revolutionary. After mouthing off to the German mercenary Wirtz and spitting in his face, Wirtz proceeds to lick up the spittle, swallow it, smile, then sucks out the man's eyeballs with his mouth, leaving them to dangle down his face. The revolutionary talks about how, due to his eyes hanging from his face via a handful of nerves, the world seems to jostle as his eyes sway back and forth on his march back to camp.
  • In Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels, Col. Steve Austin's bionic eye had to be physically removed in order to obtain the microfilm stored inside (in the original novels, it was a camera; it didn't provide super-vision). In the first book, during a mission in which Austin's survival is uncertain, he gives a female agent rather squicky instructions on how to remove the eye without having access to the bionics lab. For some reason, this aspect of Austin's bionics was skipped when The Six Million Dollar Man came along.
  • Darth Bane: Rule of Two. Darth Zannah uses Sith sorcery on one of her kidnappers halfway through the book. The kidnapper goes insane and, among other things, claws her own eyes out before falling into a comatose state.
  • In the prequel novel to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, we learn how Koba the bonobo's left eye got blinded. One of his former human owners, a Jerkass TV producer named Tommy, slashed his face with a knife, leaving a long, jagged scar over Koba's left forehead, eye and cheek. However, the knife wounded failed to blind Koba's eye, so Tommy finished the job by sticking a lit cigarette into it.
  • The Death Gate Cycle: A species of giant, birdlike creatures native to the Labyrinth will relentlessly attempt to peck out their prey's eyes, before devouring their target once there are rendered blind and helpless.
  • In the Jin Yong wuxia novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, a selfish, spoiled Yandere becomes blind after being poisoned, but the Butt-Monkey harboring an unrequited romance for her donates his eyes to her. Eventually, she decides to give them back...by plucking them out and throwing them at him.
  • Keeps happening to demon victims, most notably Kernel Fleck, in Darren Shan's The Demonata series.
  • In an early installment of The Destroyer, this is how Remo disposes of one of the villains — by putting a chess piece through his eye.
  • In Deviant, the mercenary Havoc gouges out the eyes of her victims as a calling card.
  • Played for laughs in Discworld with Quoth, a talking raven (the man who named him thought he was being clever) and Blind Io. The former acts as a mount for the Death of Rats, and mentions he's in it "for the eyeballs". The latter is the local equivalent of Odin, Zeus, and any other convenient thunder god, who has no eyes in his head, but hundreds floating around his body. He used to employ ravens as his heralds (like Odin), until he got tired of them pecking at his floating eyes.
    • Also, in more of a Fridge Logic sort of way — if Jonathan Teatime's glass eye really is a scrying crystal of some sort... how did he get it? It's not exactly a standard accessory for victims of unfortunate but natural accidents. This has led many fans to believe that he purposely gouged out that eye himself to put the thing in. Possibly at a very young age. Not too bad compared to other examples here, but think about Teatime. It's entirely possible that that's how his judgement goes, even if it would do interesting things for one's depth perception. And, y'know, possibly sanity.
      • And the fact that Teatime was willing to put notoriously unreliable discworld magic INTO HIS OWN HEAD.
    • At the end of Unseen Academicals Pepe attacks Andy. Serious eye injury is heavily implied.
    • Narrowly averted in Night Watch Discworld, in which Vimes suffers a facial injury that forces him to wear an eye patch for the duration of his sojourn in the past. Luckily his vision isn't permanently impaired.
  • In Divergent, Edward is on the receiving end of one via a butter knife because he ended up first on the initiate ranking. Peter does not like being in second place.
  • The Divine Comedy:
    • Traitors to their guests are encased in the frozen lake Cocytus, with only their faces coming out. The intense cold freezes their tears, encrusting their eyes in ice. Any further tears cannot get out and increase pressure on the eyes.
    • In Purgatory, those who committed Envy have their eyes sewn shut. Because in life they envied what they saw, so to purge their sins they see nothing.
  • In The Dragon Waiting, Peredur loses an eye as part of his initiation into wizardry. The event is described in sufficiently unsettling detail.
  • In The Dresden Files novel Small Favor, Mab compels Harry Dresden to do her a favor by freezing the water in his eyes. Not only that, Mab tells him that if he questions her word again, she'll finish the job.
    "Mab's frozen-berry lips lifted in a silent snarl, and the world turned into a curtain of white agony that centered on my eyes. Nothing had ever hurt so much. I fell down, but I wasn't lucky enough to hit my head and knock myself unconscious. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream."
    • Later, in the novel Changes, Harry pulls it off himself, turning his right hand into an icy claw and stabbing it into the eyes of the Red King. And then, for good measure, blasting soulfire through it straight into the inside of his head. This is not enough to kill him.
    • At the very end of the novel Grave Peril, The Nightmare, also known as the ghost of Leonid Kravos, loses his eye by Dresden's thumb in the final encounter. Squick factor slightly lessened in that The Nightmare is a ghost.
  • In Drugstore in Another World, Reiji Kirio ends up inventing the magical equivalent of pepper spray bombs. Due to ignorance on the part of his client, the Red Cat Brigade, and an accident on his part, they all end up experiencing its ability to cause debilitating burning sensations in the eyes and nose.
  • In Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah, Paul Atreides' eyes are burned out of his face by looking directly at the explosion of a stone-burner nuke. It's stated that this is a common use for the stone-burner.
    • And "looking" is not mandatory. Just being in the vicinity of a stone-burner explosion will melt your eyes out.
    • Much later, in Heretics of Dune... a minor character's death immediately preceding a major character's capture is described in five words: "Tormsa's eyes exploded in blood." We get a repeat of this scene when said major character reflects upon this last thing he saw before being rendered unconscious. The weapon used is not further described.
  • Durarara!!:
    • Erika and Walker are depicted torturing a man by imitating a scene from Black Butler, by branding his eye. It's a very disturbing reveal of just how devoted they are to their anime and manga — although they're also quick to note that if it wasn't anime and manga, it would be something else that they would take their inspiration from. In the anime, it's Played for Laughs, by just seeing comical struggling from outside the van, just barely skimming over how twisted these kids are.
    • Durarara!! also features an Eye Scream moment when Awakusu executive Mizuki Akabayashi rips his own right eye out with his fingers after his eye is slashed with Saika. Somehow, he not only doesn't die, he remains standing and continues talking to Sayaka Sonohara –- the person who slashed him -– as if it were nothing.
  • Chun the Unavoidable from Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories and his cape made out of eyeballs.
  • Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn, where the Inquisition remove Urisel Glaw's eyelids as part of the Ninth Action Torture. As a Slaaneshi cultist, he seems to enjoy it.
  • In Emerald Star by Jacqueline Wilson, Hetty's foster brother Gideon is discharged from the army after an incident where he loses an eye (and most of the vision in his remaining eye.) He is so traumatised that he can't or won't explain what happened to him, so we never find out how he lost his eye.
  • Everland: Hook had his eye clawed out by Katherina on his thirteenth birthday when he offered her a green apple from the Forbidden Garden, unaware that it contained the Horologia virus. He returns the favor at the end of Ozland.
  • The Fionavar Tapestry: The Dalrei tribes Invoke the Blind Seer trope when they appoint a new shaman, throwing them a fantastic feast and then putting out their eyes. The old shaman Gereint struggles with the memory even decades later.
  • Forest Kingdom: Used in both the original series and the spinoff.
    • Prince Rupert loses an eye in battle in book 1 (Blue Moon Rising). It gets restored in book 4 (Beyond the Blue Moon).
    • In Book 3 (Down Among the Dead Men), this is how the Beast dies. Duncan MacNeil dives into the only part of the creature he can see — a single massive eye — with Wolfsbane, which proceeds to rot its way through the creature.
    • In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 2 (Winner Takes All), after the sorcerer Wulf (an ally of Hardcastle) gets possessed by the Lord of the Gulfs, its power begins to consume him. When he eventually takes off his hood, it reveals that the Transient Being has consumed nearly all of its host's tissues, eyeballs included.
    • In Hawk & Fisher #3: The God Killer, one of the priesthoods interrogated by Hawk and Fisher sews its members' eyelids together because the sight of their patron Being would burn out their eyesight. Another, creepier cult's priests have no eyes, only empty sockets, but still open their eyelids and "look" at the Guards as they walk past.
  • Gaunt's Ghosts:
    • In "Ghostmaker", While on a completely frozen world, with temperatures well below zero, a trooper puts his eye up to the glass of a scope. It froze in place and the other Ghosts had to pull the gun away from his face. Okay, ouch.
    • At the end of "Only In Death," it is discovered that the Blood Pact's torture of Gaunt included burning out his eyes with a heated iron. The short story "The Iron Star" takes its title from the incident.
  • Kagura's backstory in Girls Kingdom involves a golf ball to the eye. What happened was Kagura, a skilled golfer who was seen as being easily able to rise to the top echelons of women's golf when she grew up, decided to train so she could hit the ball accurately from any lie. She started by trying to hit the ball from the rough between two trees. She ended up hitting the ball into the branches, followed by a ricochet into her left eye. She had to give up golfing after that, due to the loss of depth perception, and to this day wears her hair over her left eye.
  • Rich Jacobs from Girls on Film casually gouges out one of his minions' eyes simply because he spoke out of place.
  • In Glory in the Thunder, the God of Sight Rashk can permanently blind people at will. But he never does this, because he considers it the worst thing you can do to someone.
  • The GONE series has a boy who claws out his own eyes (and veins) in FEAR. And then there's whatever is left of Cigar's eyes after Lana tries to regrow them.
  • In The Grace Year, Helen, one of the girls banished to the wilderness to purge out her magic, is convinced her magic power is being able to turn herself invisible. As she tells Tierney, the protagonist, she turned so invisible that she could not see herself anymore, so the other girls had to take out her entire eye.
  • Robert Reed's short story, "Great Ship", has the protagonist carve out their own artificial eyes with a knife. Earlier, their original eyes were cut out for the artificial ones.
  • Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria: Chin wears an eyepatch because a bird, or more specifically Cicero in the form of a bird, tore out one of his eyes.
  • In Robin Jarvis' Hagwood trilogy:
    • Rhiannon had her provost owl eat Prince Tammedor's eyes as punishment for his rejection of her in favour of her sister. She replaced them with painful wooden pegs that are enchanted and so impossible to remove.
    • At the beginning of Dark Waters of Hagwood, Rhiannon has one of her scholars searching for information about the werlings. When he finds nothing and tries to excuse his failure by stating that his eyes cannot see something that isn't there, she punishes him by tearing them out with her fingernails.
  • In Hardboiled Wonderland the narrator is not allowed into The Town until the gatekeeper is allowed to push a knife into each of his eyes for no apparent reason. The action doesn't harm him, instead the creepy factor comes from his agreeing without hesitation.
  • A heroic example happens in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when Neville, unable to use spells since his nose has been broken and therefore can't pronounce them properly, resorts to sticking his wand in a Death Eater's eye.
    • In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry eventually has to fight a basilisk. Luckily Fawkes the phoenix blinds the snake before Harry has to worry about the basilisk's deadly gaze. And earlier in the same book, Harry asks Ron how a book could possibly be dangerous. One of the examples Ron brings up as a response is a book the Ministry of Magic confiscated: It burns its reader's eyes.
    • Played for Laughs in, of all places, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Harry, on his 17th birthday, casts some spells in celebration to his adulthood status. One of the spells he casts is the Summoning Charm, which he uses to fetch his glasses, only for said glasses to accidentally poke him in his eye when flying towards him. Oops.
  • During the climactic battle in Hawksmaid, Matty's merlin Marigold attacks the Abbess and rips her eyes out.
  • In Edmondo D'amici's Heart, main character Enrico and his classmates begin a snowball fight. Unfortunately, one of them (Garoffi) throws a 'ball carelessly and hits an old man in the eye, crashing his glasses as well and causing him a serious injury. This also marks Garoffi's Character Development: he is emotionally broken due to his careless actions and works hard to earn his inner peace, despite having been forgiven by the old man and his family.
  • Eyes, eyes, what eyes? Acheri, from Hell's Children.
  • In Book Two of Heralds Of Rhimn, when Crislie claims that her ax was a fair “prize of battle” from her fight with Knight Jeidhe, Regent Ilaina muses on whether or not she should cut out one of Crislie’s eyes as her own prize of battle. She does exactly as she promised once she wins.
  • Used with tons of Fridge Logic in the Italian fantasy novel Heroes Of The Twilight (think of a more grammatically correct The Eye of Argon in Italian): one of the good guys take out a giant ogre by wounding his eye. Later, as he's about to be discovered and killed by some demons he stabs again deeper his blade in the Ogre's eye, causing him to awaken in a berserk rage (rather than, you know, die because of the pierced brains).
  • Honor Harrington:
    • Honor loses an eye in Honor of the Queen when defending the Protector from goons sent by The Mole, to later be replaced by a prosthetic. Which was then damaged beyond repair a few books later by State Sec. She got better.
    • Don't mess with Treecats, they have a lot of very sharp claws and they go for the eyes
  • In Jonathan Coe's The House Of Sleep, the main antagonist has a bizarre and sinister fetish for resting his fingers on his partner's eyelids and applying steadily increasing pressure.
  • In Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series, Alaspinian miniature dragons spit a potent and highly corrosive neurotoxin as their primary weapon, and their preferred target is the eyes. This is every bit as horrifying and painful as it sounds, and, courtesy of Pip, we get treated to its effects many, many times throughout the novels. Although her empathic ability allows her to discriminate fairly effectively between good and bad people, it's still a nasty way to die, and those who don't are permanently scarred. The threat of death by minidrag venom also makes a very handy interrogation technique.
  • When Katniss is hunting squirrels and rabbits in The Hunger Games, she always nails her target in the eye. Ouch. Justified in this case, despite the gruesomeness of it: Traders in the Seam consider this good hunting practice. Animals with weapon marks in their hides aren't worth as much, and puncturing the bowels can contaminate precious meat.
    • Discussed in another instance where the repeated references to this suggested a possible Chekov's Gun scenario where Katniss might shoot a human in the eye during the game. This doesn't appear to actually happen — except possibly with Cato. Katniss describes shooting him in the skull, but given the likelihood of an arrow deflecting off bone, the most surefire way for Katniss to nail him in the skull is... you guessed it. In Catching Fire, she mentions the possibility of shooting someone in the eye.
    • In the second book, during Haymitch's games, it is mentioned that the last remaining tribute besides him has a gaping hole where one of her eyes used to be.
  • From The Iliad, book sixteen, describing the death of Kebriones, Hektor's charioter: "The sharp stone hit him in the forehead and smashed both brows in on each other, nor could the bone hold the rock, but the eyes fell out into the dust before him there at his feet, so that he valted to the earth like a diver from the carefully wrought chariot, and the life left his bones."
  • In the final scene of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Fackelmann's eyes are sewn open after he has been given an anti-narcotic, so he will be able to feel and see his gruesome demise.
  • In Inheritance by Christopher Paolini, Arya kills Shruikan by impaling him through the eye with a magic-nullifying lance.
  • In Clark Ashton Smith's short story "The Island of the Torturers", the hero sees the corpses of other victims of the torturers, with their eyelids cut out.
  • In Louisa May Alcott's Jack And Jill A Village Story, Jill tells Jack about a guy who threw his fork at his brother's face during a fight and accidentally tore said bro's eye out. The brother ultimately forgave him.
    • Similarly, in Eight Cousins Mackenzie aka Mac subjects himself to this via carelessly reading for long hours in the sun among other things, which heavily damages his eyesight. Rose has to help him go through his treatment.
  • Jaine Austen Mysteries:
    • Clyde Wilkins catches a ping-pong ball to the eye courtesy of Hank Austen in "The Dangers of Gingerbread Cookies" and gets a nasty black eye from it. Jaine exploits this to save herself from him trying to kill her by throwing one of the prop cookies into his bad eye.
    • When she's trying to fight off Peter Connor in Death of a Neighborhood Witch, Jaine jabs him in the eye with the sharp end of his broken Buddha figurine.
  • James Bond
    • In High Time to Kill, Bond uses his car's laser flash gadget to blind one of his motorcycle pursuers, which burns the guy's retinas.
    • Bond's ally Mathis in Never Dream of Dying is subjected to a form of torture where his eyes are gradually subjected to an eye laser (normally used for corrective surgeries), which eventually makes him blind. Bond also has to endure the treatment for a hwile before he manages to come up with a plan for an escape.
    • In Solo, Bond takes revenge on a villain for the death of his lover by first dropping a stone on the guy (which leaves him a pile broken bones), and then by continuously spraying his eyes with pepper spray.
    • In the Young Bond novel Double or Die, Ludwig Smith kills a Cambridge professor by stabbing him in the eye with one of his Apache revolvers. Later, he tries to give Bond the same fate.
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: Mr. Rochester loses one eye and the second one is wounded in a fire caused by the Madwoman in the Attic. He gets blind, but later his eye starts to heal.
  • In Jurassic Park, the Dilophosaurus spits venom in Dennis Nedry's eyes, blinding him before it chows down.
  • Menshikov from The Kane Chronicles had his eyes burned when he tried and failed to awaken Ra.
  • In the first Keys to the Kingdom book, the Old One's eyes are destroyed and regrown once every day by a pair of clockwork monsters as part of a punishment inflicted on him by The Architect.
  • Stephen King is very fond of this trope.
    • In IT, Patrick Hocksetter has the fluid in one of his eyes (along with most of his blood) sucked out by winged leeches.
    • In Under the Dome, a teenage boy attempts to shoot a bullet through the Dome to pop it. The bullet ricochets back and destroys his eye, entering his brain and blinding him in the other eye.
    • In Cycle of the Werewolf, the boy who survived an attack in July recognizes the werewolf in human shape because he'd shot out one of the werewolf's eyes during the attack, an injury which carried over to the werewolf's human form.
    • In The Dark Half during the main character's childhood his foetal twin begins to regrow in his brain including an eyeball and several teeth. A surgeon lances the eyeball and extracts it. Cut to the future where the main character is an author writing crime fiction about a character who — you guessed it — lances someone's eyeball with a paperclip.
    • In "In the Deathroom", a guard's eye is attacked with a cigarette, and a scientist has both his eyes blown out of his skull when he is electrocuted by his own torture device.
    • In Dreamcatcher: a telepathic alien murders a truck driver by taking control of his body and forcing him to drive a pencil through his eye and into his brain.
    • The Green Mile goes into great detail about how Delacroix's eyes ooze out of his sockets after his botched electrocution.
    • In the Skeleton Crew short story The Jaunt, a boy who stays awake during a teleport claws his own eyes out with madness upon his arrival.
    • In "The Raft", a man is squeezed through a one-inch space by an acidic monster, crushing his eyes and shoving gouts of blood through the sockets.
    • The Stand features a scene where an arrested criminal tries to avenge himself by grinding out a protagonist's eyes with his thumbs. This protagonist, Nick Andros, effectively loses one of his eyes to this: the cornea is so scratched that the world resembles a colorful blur through it.
      • It's a very cringe-worthy scene, since Nick is a deaf-mute who experiences a moment of terror that he is about to be deaf, mute, and blind.
      • Randall Flagg casually threatens to gouge out Kit Bradenton's eyes with his double-jointed thumbs if Kit doesn't hurry up and tell him where Randall's new car is. (Kit in this scene is dying of superflu and can barely breathe.)
    • The Dark Tower includes a threat of this in The Drawing of the Three, when Roland, who is possessing the body of the man who killed Jake and crippled Odetta, threatens to gouge said killer's eye out with his thumb to keep him quiet, even to the extent of pressing against his eye.
    • The Waste Lands features an old woman, who was blinded with a branding-iron by bandits.
    • In the short story "Sneakers", the ghost haunting the men's room is the spirit of a drug dealer who was killed by one of his customers "making a pencil disappear."
    • The Academy Head in Cell is killed when Harvard telekentically forces him to stab a fountain pen through his right eye and into his brain. Stephen King seems disturbingly fond of psychic bad guys forcing people to take out their own visual organs.
    • In Firestarter a man goes insane from the Psycho Serum given to him, and claws out his own eyes.
    • In Cujo, in which the death blow comes to the titular canine by way of the broken handle of a baseball bat through the eye socket. King does a careful job of detailing the "grotesque" wiggling of the bat handle and the running eye jelly.
    • In Rose Madder, a fleeing character trips and smacks into the back of a door. Which has a coat hook on it. Ouch.
    • The Running Man includes a scene in which one of Ben Richards' allies is captured and tortured, including having both eyes pierced with needles. It turns out to be All Just a Dream by Richards.
  • In William Shakespeare's King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester finds himself on the receiving end of this trope, his attackers exclaiming, 'Out, vile jelly!' A more reserved production might skimp on the horror and make Nightmare Retardant of it.
  • In Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, one of the antagonists is threatened with the loss of an eye early in the book. Years later, the son of the man who made the threat carries it out.
  • Wesley Harrod, from Knifepoint Horror, removes both his eyes with a broken vodka bottle.
  • Dean Koontz examples:
    • Dark Rivers Of The Heart: One of the serial killers in the book fantasizes about removing the eyes of another character.
    • Dragon Tears: The villain's mother gouged out her own eyes when he was born. After he grew up to be a Serial Killer, he collected his victims' eyes in jars.
    • False Memory: The villain, who among other things is a Serial Killer, keeps his father's eyes in a jar.
    • From The Corner Of His Eye: one of the main characters had a form of cancer as a child that meant that his eyes had to be surgically removed.
    • In the title novella from the collection Strange Highways, the Serial Killer's first victim has had her eyes gouged out and (you may have guessed this) put in a jar.
    • Watchers: the Outsider not only gouges out the eyes of victims but removes the eyes from all pictures, e.g. magazine illustrations.
  • In Barbara Hambly's novel The Ladies of Mandrigyn, there is an Eldritch Abomination that burrows into the brain of its victim by way of the eye, then transforms said victim into a mindless, ravening ghoul. The hero survives the attack of this entity by gouging out his own eyeball.
  • In Tim Powers's Last Call:
    • One of Scott Crane's eyes was destroyed by being hit edge-on with a playing card when he was a child. As an adult, he has to worry about infection.
    • Scott Crane locates two people who once used their Psychic Powers for the Big Bad. The one who read Tarot cards had put out his own eyes.
  • The Last Dragon Chronicles: In The Fire Ascending. When Hilde orders a raven to peck an eye from a dead man's socket so as to bring vengeance to his murderer. And again, only pages later, the same bird shows up with BOTH eyes gouged out as a warning from Voss. What a charming guy, right?
  • Laughing Jack:
    • In the first story, some of the disfigured children that appear in James' mother's nightmare are missing eyes and other limbs. Later, she finds her son nailed to the bedroom wall with several of his organs displaced, including missing eyeballs.
    • In the origin story, Isaac kills an old blind woman with an ice pick to the eye socket. Laughing Jack does worse to Isaac's eyes; he forces his eyelids to stay open with fish hooks so that he "wouldn't miss the show", he injects an adrenaline needle into Isaac's retina and fiddles it around to keep him from drifting off, and finally he pulls the needle out along with the eyeball. Yikes.
  • Laura Caxton:
    • As the most obvious example, series antagonist Justinia Malvern killed herself to become a vampire by shooting herself in the head, simultaneously destroying her left eye so that she is left with a blank socket for as long as she exists.
    • In Vampire Zero, Caxton is able to hurt her former mentor and new vampire Arkley by shining her gun's laser targeting beam in his eyes, his vampiric vision so vulnerable to bright light that what would blind a human for a few moments basically destroys her enemy's eyes long enough for Caxton to lure him into a trap.
  • Subverted in The Legacy, one of the later sequels to the The Icewind Dale Trilogy penned by R.A. Salvatore. Drizzt's friend Bruenor is suffering from Unstoppable Rage when he attacks a pair of the dark elves that kidnapped Drizzt and he thinks killed Wulfgar. When the dark elves fight back, one of them slashes Bruenor across the face and gouges out his eye. It doesn't even faze the grieving dwarf, who proceeds to brutally pay the drow back in spades for what they did to his friends.
  • In Little House on the Prairie, the Farm Boy novel tells the story of Laura Ingalls Wilder's husband Almanzo's childhood, Almanzo is roasting potatoes in a fire when one of the potatoes explodes. The scalding-hot contents hit him directly in the face. Fortunately he closes his eyes in the nick of time and ends up with only some nasty blistering on his eyelid and cheek.
  • The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton by Larry Niven. The protagonist Gil has a party trick where he smokes a cigarette while holding it in a psychic hand. He's captured by an organlegger who's fascinated by Gil's Psychic Powers and asks for a demonstration from the physically-bound Gil before he's cut up for body parts. So Gil takes the lit cigarette and jams it into his own eye destroying the valuable cornea (he figures that the eye doesn't have pain receptors, but forgets that the eyelids do). The organlegger rushes over to stop him whereupon Gil then uses his psychic hand to crush the man's heart. Later Gil gets a cornea transplant, presumably from a legitimate donor.
  • The Lotterys More or Less: Early in the book, Catalpa and her friends have the Lotterys' Brazilian guest, Luiz, go sledding in the ice with them without a helmet. When he comes back, he starts complaining about a bad eye and seeing fireworks. When he's stated as being sluggish, he's rushed to the hospital, where it's revealed that he suffered a crash that tore the upper part of the retina in one of his eyes. He has to have an air bubble injected into his eye to hold his retina in place so it can heal properly, and spends a good portion of the book having to keep his head face down to keep the bubble positioned in his eye properly.
  • In the Lovejoy novel The Judas Pair, Lovejoy is forced into a duel with Dr Legrange, using a legendary (and priceless) pair of pistols. Having worked out that they fire backwards, he points the gun at his own head — firing straight into Legrange's eye and killing him, with a gory description of the eye exploding. The same previously happened to the last owner of the pistols (whom Legrange stole them from), who did not realize how the guns work.
  • In the "Culhwch and Olwen" part of Mabinogion, Ysbaddaden the giant throws a poisoned javelin at the protagonist. Culhwch catches the javelin and throws it back through the giant's eye. It goes all the way through his head and winds up jutting out the nape of his neck. This does not kill him and his only reaction is to yell a bit about how much it hurts.
  • The Machine Gunners: the dead rear-gunner in the downed Heinkel bomber took a bullet in the eye. When Chas finds the corpse, the socket's full of blood and flies.
  • In The Machineries of Empire:
    • The signature effect of a treshold winnower is melting the eyes of everyone within its proximity.
    • One of Vidona torture methods involves scooping the victim's eyes out with a sharp spoon.
  • In the Magic: The Gathering novel Rath and Storm, the treacherous and self-serving Starke joins the Weatherlight crew to attack Volrath's fortress and rescue the captive Sisay, on the condition that they free his daughter Takara as well. Near the end of the adventure-slash-disaster, they find Sisay and Takara wandering around and Starke rushes over to embrace his daughter. However, both women are under a strong mind-control spell and Takara (who is actually the shapeshifter Volrath in disguise) slashes out both of Starke's eyes with her sword.
  • In the Mass Effect Expanded Universe novel, Ascension, a quarian is tortured brutally. In addition to various cuts and bruises, the torturer cut his eyelids off, so he couldn't blink, dehydrating the eye to a prune. Now that's sadism.
  • Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv is a Creepypasta about a haunted video of a man staring with no audio. The video caused viewers to somehow rip out their eyes and mail them to YouTube's headquarters in California.
  • Merkabah Rider: In "The Blood Libel", the Rider fires his enchanted derringer in the eye of the demon Moloch at point blank range.
  • The Mermaid Chronicles: In Secrets of the Deep, Zale, who is in shark form, bites down on Dylan's shoulder. Cordelia digs her thumb into his eye, causing blood to spurt into the water. Zale screams, releasing Dylan.
  • Mermaid's Song: While fighting with Kagor and his sharks, Elan puts one shark's eyes out.
  • In Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar by Jules Verne the title character gets a heat treatment to destroy his eyes by the enemies of the czar. It turns out the treatment was a failure, because the hero cried like a little boy. "Heat treatment" doesn't do the passage justice. What the Tartars do is they jab a cavalry saber in a fire pit until it's white hot, then put it right next to his eyes to burn them. And it doesn't work because Michael's tears instantly boil, thus forming a sort of insulating gas barrier. Either way...!
  • In Midnight's Children, one of Saleem's neighbors decides to bully Shiva, who responds by hurling a sharp stone that blinds him in one eye. He is forever after known as "Eyeslice".
  • Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books feature the Steel Inquisitors, a religious sect of super-powered enforcers. The most visible feature of a Steel Inquisitor is the steel spikes. Two of them, big, thick ones, pounded into each eye so far that the points come out the back of the Inquisitor's skull. The real scary part is that despite their eyes obviously having been destroyed by having really big pieces of metal driven into them, they see better than most Allomancers, who can already get super-acute vision through their powers. In the 2nd book, Vin stabs out a man's eye with her finger.
  • Lauchlan of Mix Beer With Liquor And You Will Get Sicker lost his right eye very early in his adolescence and never quite got over the trauma that stemmed from the accident. Later on it's revealed that Lauchlan's scotomaphobia has got less to do with the accident itself and more to do with the fact that a surgeon cut out his wounded eye without any form of anesthetic, while he was conscious and couldn't understand why the surgeon was doing it to him.
  • In Mount Dragon, a scientist suddenly stabs himself in the eye with a fork — the first sign of artificially-induced insanity, which the other scientists at Mount Dragon soon start showing symptoms of.
  • My Name Is Red: Famed Islamic miniaturists would rather blind themselves than paint in the European style at the behest of their masters. Master Osman does the same on-page, for much the same reasons, and we get a description of how the vision of his pierced eyes dims slowly.
  • In Nevermore, Angel (and the readers) are shown a video of an attempt at improving night vision years ago. The test subject is Iggy. In case you were wondering, he was awake the entire time. And then the scientists do it on Angel.
  • In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith finally betrays Julia when O'Brien locks his face in a cage with rats and tells him that they've been known to chew out people's eyes.
  • In Old Scores, Heidi escapes recapture by Hans Richtein by gouging his eye with a broken bottle.
  • Oliver Twisted: Bullseye was born blind so his mother plucked an eyeball out of Bill Sikes, his infant brother, to sew it into the former's head. The brother's eye is replaced with a Glass Eye.
  • The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski contains the very graphic and detailed scene in which drunken farmer blinds his farmhand. With a spoon.
  • In the Paladin of Shadows series, Katya talks about gouging out several "bad guy" eyes and injecting the poison weapon she's given in Choosers of the Slain into them, but doesn't actually get to do it until near the end of A Deeper Blue, to the drug smuggler who was working with Islamic terrorists to sneak VX into the US.
  • In The Pale King, Revenue Agent Fechner lost an eye in a war. He has a Glass Eye, but he apparently likes to use his empty eye socket as a bottle opener.
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
    • Ethan Nakamura, a demigod who fights for Kronos, had one of his eyes torn out as a promise to his mother Nemesis that he would make a place for her on Olympus. He's clearly trained to fight without it, as Percy tries to take advantage without success.
    • In The Last Olympian, Percy stabs the Lydian Drakon in the eye with Riptide. Gory, no? It gets better. Clarisse puts out the Drakon's other eye with her enchanted electric spear. That not only puts out its other eye, but shatters the spear completely, outputting a huge amount of lightning that ends up electrocuting the beast, killing it in the process!
  • Amyrst in Phenomena is this as a character! To shorten the story look at the book part sketch here. Worse still Phenomena is a book series rated 9+...
  • Robert R. McCammon's "Pin". The title says it all.
  • Invoked in the Psych tie-in novel Mind Over Magic (the "she" in question is a performer whose biggest trick is sticking knives in her eyes):
    Gus: "She didn't even blink."
    Shawn: "Exactly. You mention something about eyeball injury, and that's exactly what people do. They blink. It's like a guy crossing his legs when you mention the concept of castration."
  • Polly in Quicksand House gets one eye punctured and pulled from its socket when Nanny attacks her. The fact that she even survived is declared a "miracle" by her brother Tick, but later credited to her being a Half-Human Hybrid who is Made of Iron.
  • In Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon and both its film adaptations, the titular Serial Killer puts mirror shards in the eyes of his victims. (Luckily, this is after he kills them.) In a later Harris novel, the Asshole Victim is not so fortunate: under the hypnotic suggestion of Dr. Lecter, Mason Verger removes his own eye (and much of his face) with a shard of broken mirror. The remaining eye survives, albeit lidless.
  • The Redwall book The Long Patrol: Damug Warfang stabs and hacks away at Cregga's face as she kills him, damaging her eyes so badly she's left blind.
  • Prior, from The Regeneration Trilogy, has a breakdown after his trench gets hit by a shell, and he picks up one of his men's disembodied eyeballs while cleaning up the debris.
  • Matthew Reilly novels:
    • Ice Station: Shane Schofield had his eyes cut open with a razor blade for being caught flying recon. He had his eyes repaired, but still has the scars and a new callsign "Scarecrow".
      • Fox used the arrow sticking out of her helmet to stab the eye of the French soldier who shot her with it. Described in infrared.
    • From Five Greatest Warriors: Pooh Bear has his left eyeball (along with his face) cut in half during a fight with his older brother. No word yet on whether he'll get an Eyepatch of Power.
    • In Seven Deadly Wonders Judah got his eye torn out by Horus (the falcon). Optic nerve included. He deserved it, but still, ouch.
    • Among the many unpleasant ways to die in "Scarecrow Returns", the relevant ones involve acid spray/grenade to the face, melting down to the bone including the eyes, and (spoilered for people who want to sleep tonight) rats. Goddamn RATS locked in a box along with the victim's head, that eat through the eyes, into the brain.
    • The Great Zoo of China has an eye surgery scene is described in quite nauseating detail.
  • On the Eastern side of things, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has Xiahou Dun, who ends up taking an arrow in the eye — then plucking it out and swallowing it. "Essence of my father, blood of my mother, I cannot throw this away." So badass.
  • Roys Bedoys: Discussed in “It’s a Blackout, Roys Bedoys!”, where Loys gets the terms “blackout” and “black eye” confused.
  • In Christopher Fowler's Rune, Mrs. Nahree presses a soldering iron into her eyes, trying to blind herself.
  • The Saga Of Billy: Atella, goddess of Peace and War, willingly ripped out her eyes so that Zarkan could forge them on her shield and sword, creating their children Otos and Itos.
  • The Sandman: The Dream Hunters: As part of her revenge plot, the kitsune bites out the onmyōji's eye.
  • The Scream : The Screamers take the eyes of their followers.
  • In Kevin G. Bufton's short story "Sentinels" the call-girl Sarah has her eyes gouged out by Michael (with his thumbs no less!).
  • Shadow Police: In The Severed Streets, the Keel brothers cut the eyes out of their barmaid as punishment for refusing to accept payments in cash.
  • Shatter the Sky: Sev stabs Rafael in the eye with a shard of glass during their fight.
  • Averted in Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear, in which a blindfolded man who is undergoing a corrupt secret society's initiation-rite feels hard points set against both his eyes, and is ordered to walk forward. The points are withdrawn as soon as he begins to take a step, as it's a ritual test of courage rather than an assault.
  • A. Merritt's novel The Ship Of Ishtar has a fight scene in which John Kenton does this to one of his opponents, remembering something he saw in another unequal fight on a World War I battlefield.
  • Huor in The Silmarillion is killed by a poisoned arrow to the eye. Also, Gwindor's brother Gelmir is blinded by his captors.
  • In the Song Of Albion book The Silver Hand, Tegid has his eyes slashed out after saying that he'll never see Meldron as king.
    "So be it."
  • Solar Pons: In "The Adventure of the Fatal Glance", the Victim of the Week is killed by a gimmicked set of binoculars which drives a pair of needles into his eyes when he adjusts the focus knob.
  • The transsexual drug dealer Coco in Jo Nesbø's The Son is known for her use of ice pick, and she attempts use it to pry out an eye of one her clients who hasn't paid his debts. Luckily for the client, the title character pays his debts for him.
  • In George R. R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire, there's a Wildling tribe in the Mountains of the Moon called the Burned Men, who ritually maim themselves upon achieving adulthood. Understandably, this unnerves most of the other tribes. It's considered normal to cut off a finger, and rather crazy to cut off an ear. One of the members of this tribe, Timmett, Son of Timmett, ends up serving as one of Tyrion's retinue. He chose to put out his own eye with a hot knife. His own tribe was impressed and creeped out enough to make him a war leader on the spot despite his youth.
    • The Weeper is a Wildling raider known for his own eyes constantly watering, and putting out as many other people's eyes as he can. He puts eyeless heads on stakes outside the wall, and when he raids villages any women he leaves behind are not left their eyes.
    • Gregor Clegane volunteers this piece of wisdom to Tywin when his outriders are failing to find people: cut out their eyes and give them to next batch of outriders with the warning that four eyes should see better than two, or the next group will have six. He also put out Beric Dondarrion's eye with a dagger, and gouges out Oberyn Martell's with his gauntleted fingers.
    • In "The Princess and the Queen" when Rhaenyra Targaryen took King's Landing, she had the Master of Coin Tyland Lannister tortured to recover the treasury, one of the tortures was blinding him.
    • Brynden “Lord Bloodraven” Rivers lost one of his eyes during the First Blackfyre Rebellion, fighting his half brother Aegor “Bittersteel” Rivers. Afterwards, he refused to use a patch or cover the socket up. He was noted to be an excellent marksman with a bow despite losing his eye. note 
  • Damien very nearly loses an eye in Spider Circus, while paralysed and conscious.
  • Star Wars Legends:
  • A Stranger Came Ashore concludes with Robbie Henderson luring Finn Learson- the Great Selkie currently in human form- into a trap so that Yarl Corbie can attack Learson as a raven and tear out one of Finn's eyes. This will allow Finn to continue to hunt in his natural form, but he will no longer be able to seduce human women as he did in the past now that he won't be as handsome as he was before.
  • The Stone Dance of the Chameleon takes place in a world where blinding people is a routine operation. Conjoined Twins have one of the siblings blinded at birth, people of the Kharon caste have one eye plucked out at birth, and common people who see a Master unmasked face blinding — in those cases that they aren't killed outright.
  • In The Stormlight Archive, if a Shardblade passes through a vital part of your body, your eyes shrivel up as if burned and you instantly die. Also, it turns out that in Shadesmar the spren of 'dead' shardblades look like mostly-normal spren with the eyes scratched out. The other spren call these "deadeyes" Near the end of Words of Radiance Adolin kills Highprince Sadeas with a knife shoved into his eye.
  • The Strange Matter book Fly the Unfriendly Skies involved an evil alien race of hovering balls of black water called Cepheids. Late at night they would enter the homes of people and release drops of themselves into their eyes. These people would over the course of a day slowly transform into Cepheids.
  • Stray:
    • While at an Animal Testing lab, Pufftail routinely has untested shampoo shoved into his eyes. Pufftail describes the pain as so awful that it takes all the remaining joy out of his already miserable life.
    • While saving animals from the animal testing facility, a cat without eyelids is rescued. He had his eyelids removed by testers trying to research how a lack of sleep effects beings. The cat, who Pufftail believes was the former cult leader Tom-Cat, was then forced onto a treadmill while tested.
  • In Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard:
    • Josephine puts one of her own eyes out when she catches up with Crawford. When they meet again in Rome, it turns out that she uses her glass eye to ensure that she always has a supply of garlic to ward off nephilim.
    • The Graiae have only one eye between them, which they pass back and forth.
  • J.F. Gonzalez's Literature/2004Survivor opens with a bondage-themed lesbian tryst between a 1950s housewife and a cheerleader. Once the cheerleader's naked and tied up, the housewife sucks her eye out with her mouth and eats it.
  • In an infamously disturbing scene from Sword Art Online, the HERO Kirito does this to the VILLAIN, Oberon AKA Nobuyuki Sugou. In response to Sugou’s DISGUSTING treatment of Asuna, Kirito uses his newly acquired Admin Privileges to strip Sugou of his cheating GM abilities, offer him THE STRONGEST WEAPON IN THE GAME, knowing it won’t save him, hack off one of his hands, slice his body in half, and finally tosses him up and impales him THROUGH HIS EYE SOCKET! The final nail in the coffin was turning off the pain absorber, ensuring his real body felt every second of it without dying. In their final confrontation in the real world, the eye injury was revealed to be so painful that he went half blind from the phantom pain.
  • In Chapter 13 of Tails of Fame, Seamus has an eye gouged out with a spoon and Rast's claws.
  • In some versions of "Tam Lin", after Janet rescues Tam Lin the Faerie Queen says that if she'd known what he was doing, she would have plucked out his eyes and put wooden ones in their place.
  • Tempest (2011): In Tempest Revealed, the octopus monster Turisas grabs Tempest's dad, but he manages to stab it in the eye with his knife. Turisas thrashes around, trying to get him to let go, but only succeeds in injuring himself more. Finally he drops him into the ocean. Tempest stuns Turisas with a blast of electricity.
  • Thebe and the Angry Red Eye is about an ill-fated space voyage. While Mallory the pilot is repairing a hull breach, one of the rocks from the rings of Jupiter smashes into the ship, enters her body through her right eye socket, and lands inside her brain, bouncing around like a deadly pinball and killing her instantly. As Character Narrator Thomas remembers how he and his shipmates prepared Mallory for burial, he reflects that "I was almost sure I could hear the stone rattle around inside her skull."
  • In the horror novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, it is implied at the end that Agnes kills herself by gouging out her eyes with the apple peeler she was trying to sell at the beginning of the story.
  • In the Thousand Sons novel Ahriman: Exile, the Chaos sorcerer Maroth plucks out one eye from each of several captive Space Marines, and later confides to Ahriman that he ate the eyes in an attempt to gain power. The captive Space Marines return the favour once Ahriman frees them, and while they get fancy bionic lenses to replace their missing eyes, Maroth has no such luck.
  • In The Tide Child trilogy by R.J Barker, the Guillaume are race enslaved by humans. Since females of that species have the power to control wind, they are rendered dependent on humans by having their eyes put out at birth.
  • Towards the end of T.O.T., Maximus Slade gets stabbed in the eye with a silver knife.
  • Jürgen and his friends in The Traitor's Emblem attack Paul for the death of his brother Eduard, and in the scuffle loses his right eye when it is accidentally stabbed with a knife. Years later, Paul has to have his own right eye stabbed out so that he can impersonate Jürgen.
  • The Traitor Son Cycle: when attacked, the Odine worms respond by burrowing through their victim's eyes into the brain.
  • Nathan Ausubel's A Treasury of Jewish Folklore includes a seventeenth-century tale about a pious and virginal young woman who's captured by a prince who fell in love with her and refuses to take no for an answer. When she asks what attracted him to her he says that she has "the eyes of a dove, which have taken me captive." She pretends to accept his advances and asks for time to primp a bit. Once alone in her room she gouges out her eyes and then hands them to him, saying that since he likes them so much he can do whatever he wants with them. Horrified, he lets her go and she remains a virgin for the rest of her life.
  • Denis Johnson's Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke features a scene in which a soldier tortures a captured Viet Cong by popping out his eyeballs with a spoon (while leaving the optic nerves attached), and then re-inserting the eyeballs into their sockets in reverse, so that the victim can "take a look at himself."
  • The Tribe: In "Homeroom Headhunters", Spencer decides to spend a class flinging pencils at the ceiling. One gets stuck in the tile at an odd angle, and comes loose just as his teacher comes over to him and looks up. The pencil hits the teacher in the eye.
  • In the Underdogs novel Acceleration, Pearce cuts Jack's left eye out with a knife during a fight.
  • Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles: In The Queen of the Damned Maharet tells of how Akasha commanded that her eyes be cut out and her twin sister's tongue be cut out before sealing them into coffins that she abandoned to drift in the ocean. Later, Maharet learned that she could see by stealing the eyes of her victims and sewing them into her eye sockets...
  • In Vampire Hunter D when D breaks into Count Magnus Lee's hideout he tosses a knife into his eye, Magnus casually takes out the knife, pulls his eye out of his socket, and places it back in after healing it.
  • Eva has her eyes plucked out in fairly graphic detail in Void Domain.
  • In War of the Spider Queen Gromph Baenre took out the eyes of captive drow and transplanted to replace his own damaged eyes when he had no access to adequate magical healing. And then compelled rat to eat out his own eyes. Both without any anesthesia.
  • Warrior Cats:
    • Both Brokenstar and Longtail had their eyes clawed, blinding them permanently.
    • Worst of all, Brightheart had her right eye ripped out by a dog.
    • Also Percy in SkyClan's Destiny when his eye gets ripped out.
  • We Need to Talk About Kevin: Poor little Celia lost an eye and has to live with having a prosthetic glass eye for the rest of her life ( both remaining years of it) after Kevin "accidentally" spilled drain cleaner in it.
  • While it doesn't get mentioned in the more-famous film version, in the original novel of What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Arnie has a glass eye due to a childhood accident: he burst into a bedroom at the wrong moment while his drunken older siblings were tossing darts at a board on the back of the door.
  • The Wheel of Time:
    • The Shadow Rising: An Aiel chief Goes Mad from the Revelation and eats his own eyeballs when Magitek-induced visions reveal the Awful Truth that his Proud Warrior Race were originally pacifists who broke their Intrinsic Vow.
    • The Fires of Heaven: When the legendary archer Birgitte cuts her way through a riot, she makes a point of shooting people through the eye every time — only a minor demonstration of her Improbable Aiming Skills.
    • Towers of Midnight:
      • One Darkfriend has so bad a case of Good Hurts Evil when he witnesses the true power of The Chosen One that he puts out his own eyes with a quill.
      • One would-be assassin gets a knife in each eye.
      • Mat Cauthon gets his left eye torn out by the Eelfinn in exchange for releasing Moiraine from captivity. He's resigned to it happening, thanks to a prophecy he receives earlier, but is still astonished by how much it hurts.
  • In Wings of Fire, Starflight gets blinded forever by a fireball blast from an erupting volcano. One of the last things he ever sees is Morrowseer telling him and the other dragonets that the prophecy was a fake.
  • In The Wolf Den, a prostitute named Drauca loses her eye when the bar where she works is attacked. The protagonist Amara is later threatened with a similar fate, though she is rescued before she can come to harm.
  • In Wolf Hall, Harry Norris (accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn) when Norris claims that as a gentleman, Henry would never permit his torture. Thomas Cromwell says that he doesn't have to go through official channels; he could just stick his thumbs in Norris' eyes and Norris would say anything. Eustache Chapuys also says he's heard that Mark Smeaton was tortured, in part, by tying knotted rope around his eyes to mutilate them. (Cromwell denies this, and in this narrative the question of whether he did torture Smeaton is answered no.)
  • On several occasions in the Web Serial Novel Worm:
    • At the end of Skitter's second fight against the massively-regenerating supervillain Lung, she methodically cuts out his eyes to stop him from escaping before the police arrive.
    • When Imp stabs Bonesaw in the eye, she reacts relatively calmly, talking enthusiastically about maybe switching to a different colour, or perhaps heterochromia.
    • Skitter defeats Valefor, a villain whose power works via his gaze, by filling his eyeballs with maggots.
    • In general, when Skitter is actively looking to hurt/kill, she takes to doing things like directing bees, wasps and other stinging insects into people's eyes.
    • Implied: when they learn Shatterbird is in town, people take off their glasses.
  • Young Sherlock Holmes: When Sherlock and Gilfilan are fighting in Red Leech, Sherlock brings the fight to an end by jamming the barrel of Gilfilian's rifle into his eye; causing Gilfilian to scream and pass out.

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