Works that have their own page:
- Alex Rider:
- Despite being a kid's series, the series has had some very graphic and almost cringe-worthy deaths. Some of these include being stung to death by a Portugese man-o-war, being blown up in a helicopter by a flying snowmobile, being impaled by a set of underwater spikes, having their back broken by a large magnet because of all the metal in their body and then drowning because of the weight, being crushed in a giant bottle with FREAKING QUARTERS, getting sucked into the engine of Air Force One with the remains being described as a "cloud of red gas", being sent back to Earth from space after being hit with a giant fireball, being crushed by a falling hot air balloon platform, having a hole blown in their chest by a medallion made of caesium while showering, having the top half of their plane fall on them before it explodes, and the most out there death of them all, when Kaspar is suspended in zero gravity, helpless as he floats backwards into a zero-g floating knife which impales him through the back of his head. Anthony Horowitz is one sick individual.
- The main villain of Snakehead, meanwhile, is killed by having every bone in his body smashed to bits by the vibrations of a bomb going off underwater as he's riding a jetski. The result is described as still looking like a human for roughly half a second before collapsing into an unrecognizable heap of skin and gore.
- The first chapter for the next book, Crocodile Tears, is now on the site. In that alone, a devastating nuclear disaster is set off. We hear what happens to those in the room the first explosion is triggered. Graphically. The first chapter.
- The Big Bad of Scorpia Rising melts in a pile of salt.
- The Animal Ark books are pretty realistic when it comes to veterinary science, up to and including mortality rates. The very first book has a cat develop a brain tumor, and its owners deciding to have it euthanized. Many such deaths are shocking for kid's book standards; Dog at the Door has a puppy stillbirth, and its littermate, born alive but very weak, dying shortly after birth, and Fox in the Frost has the violent death of the male fox, who bleeds out both internally and externally after being shot. The narration even states, "Helpless, they [Mandy and her dad] had to stand by and watch the fox die.
- The fight scenes in Animorphs are quite graphic. Ripping out throats, hacking off limbs, stabbing, shooting, maiming, disemboweling - you name it, someone's done it.
- The Beach Dogs by Andy Jennings is full of these. And cute little doggies as well! The ones that stand out are the litter of puppies and their mother who are burned to death and the dog who gets trapped inside a deep freezer and slowly succumbs to the cold. As well as this, there are various shootings, one dog getting hit by a car (complete with descriptions later in the book of the body in various states of decay), and a puppy who dies of asthma.
- Bravelands: The first book goes into a sum of detail on the second Crownleaf being poisoned by eating dik-dik meat laced with scorpion stingers. He starts foaming at the mouth and suddenly dies mid-meeting.
- There's a lot of talk in the third Cat Pack book about kittens being killed in various ways. There's also Texas Jake mentioning that he's the Sole Survivor of his litter and that he narrowly avoided (unlike two of his siblings) being drowned by a man as a kitten.
- One chapter of Coraline has The Cat (who is a nameless cat) decapitating a rat. He hates rats, and the rats are involved with the Big Bad, but it's still graphic.
- Clare Bell doesn't shy away from brutality in her The Book of the Named series, but by far, the death that sticks in most readers' heads is Meoran's in Ratha's Creature. The description of him being burned alive after Ratha hits him with the burning branch she's carrying in her mouth is nightmare inducing, especially if one's first exposure to the story was the later CBS Story Break adaptation, in which she merely scares him into leaving the clan.
- In Dark Lord of Derkholm, Barnabas gets torn apart over the course of what feels like an eternity by a demon that burns like a powerful acid.
- Dear America:
- They may be aimed at elementary school kids and early teenagers, but the Dear America series is chock full of Family-Unfriendly Death accurate to the time period of each book. For example, the death of the protagonist's love interest in the Titanic diary, and, more traumatically, the multiple deaths that occur along the journey of a girl taking a wagon train out west (including one death from being swept away while crossing a river, and one brutal Death of a Child when the protagonist mistakes hemlock for an edible root and feeds a bit to another young girl while preparing dinner).
- So Far from Home, the one about Irish immigrant mill workers, includes the hair-caught-in-the-machinery scenario. It also has what may be an even darker touch than most of the onscreen deaths: after the diary itself ends (on the less-than-satisfying note of the protagonist going off to try to bail an unjustly accused friend out of jail with the money she'd been setting aside to bring her parents to America, until they died), there is, as usual, an epilogue telling what happened to the major characters. Usually this has the diary's author settling down with the hardest period of her life now behind her, having a family and living to a ripe old age, with a nice personalizing Call-Back or two to some plan for the future she'd mentioned or something. In this one, she's bluntly said to have died of cholera at seventeen, just a couple of years after the book takes place.
- The Fighting Fantasy book, Deathmoor, has a rather graphic description of Princess Telessa's kidnapping in the prologue; while on a hunting trip with her friends, the Princess is kidnapped by the minions of the Wizard Arachnos, who decides to leave a message... by having the Princess' friends killed, hacked into pieces, and their remains left at the corner of the titular moor, their limbs arranged into the letters "WAIT". Keeping in mind that the Princess is 15, and her friends are likely around her age.
- The first book of the Demonata has the protagonist walking in on his dead family. Yes, we don't see them dying, but the results... His mother has been bisected into front and back, his sister is currently a meat puppet for a demon with insects for hair. You can't blame the kid for going temporarily insane. The series goes From Bad to Worse from there.
- Similar to Redwall but much, much worse: the Deptford Mice series. For example, the scene in Thomas where the mice and rats are trapped in the hold of a ship during a storm and several are crushed by the improperly secured cargo, then when they finally escape there aren't enough lifebelts for them all. The series also features rampant cannibalism, necromancy, a villain becoming powerful enough to wipe out the sun and turn his victims into ice-powered zombies, and a poison which dissolves its victims into puddles of tar. Any children's book where the first chapter of the second book details what happens to the first Big Bad's corpse is...pushing it.
- Despite being aimed at little girls, the Disney Fairies books don't shy from death or injury. Never Say "Die" is not in use at all and, in fact, characters dying are either mentioned repeatedly or are outright shown on-screen. Fairies disappearing due to kids no longer believing in them is the most common death, but they can also die from drowning or other accidental ways. Even if they don't die, characters are shown in rather graphic pain, such as when Mother Dove broke her wings and was slowly dying after her magical egg (which is the reason why no one ages on Never Land) breaks.
- Listing all of the gory and creepy deaths in Fablehaven would take all night, but the big standout is probably Navarog's death. He gets bitten in half. His lifeless torso stump flops to the ground right in front of the teenage heroine.
- Fengshen Yanyi: being set in ancient China filled with cruel monarchs and powerful taoists, cruel and terrible deaths aren't uncommon, being cut down on the battlefield is still a rather tame way to go. Notable examples include:
- Li Nezha, in order to save his family from the wrath of the Dragon Kings he aroused, kills himself by pulling out his own innards, tearing his left arm from its socket and then proceed to beat himself until all his bones are broken. No wonder the Dragons were impressed and forgave his family.
- Consort Queen Jiang openly offends Daji when the latter is just a mere concubine. Due to her conspiring, she's accused of high treason, has her eye plucked out and molten brass poured on her hands to make her confess.
- Under the advise of the wicked Daji, King Zhou plans several cruel methods to execute anyone who dares to defy him, including scorching hot brass pillars against which the victim is pushed until only ashes are left and a pit full of ferocious snakes that slowly devours and envenom the victims.
- The Four Demon Clan Generals unleash a veritable supernatural massacre on the common soldiers of Xiqi: the hapless troops are grind into pieces by Razor Wind, burnt alive by pillars of flame and sudden lightnings and devoured whole by a giant magical marten.
- The Ten Deadly Formations/Traps built by the Ten Heavenly Lords of Jinao boast about how their deadly creations can give an atrocious death to all those who dare venture inside them, using natural elements and the forces of Yin and Yang. During the course of the novel, pretty much all of them, save for the Blazing Flames Formation (the intended victim, Lu Ya, No-Sell flames) claim a victim.
- Several Immortals, such as Cihang Daoren and Yuanshi Tianzun, have magic treasures capable of melting their opponents alive, turning them into red goo.
- Zhao Gongming is cursed to death by Lu Ya and Jiang Ziya, slowly losing his health and vigor day by day, becoming a suffering, lethargic shell of his former shell until he's eventually slain by them, leaving behind a pitiful corpse with bleeding eyes and mouth.
- Wen Zhong, caught in a trap, tries to escape, only to bash his skull against an impregnable treasure and falling down in a roaring inferno which consumes his body.
- The Fire-Us Trilogy kills off all the adults with a horrible, organ-boiling fever. This leaves their children to starve, be eaten by wild animals, drown in swimming pools... if that's not enough for you, desperate children put all these bodies to use. Then in the last book, the protagonists find out that the Path of Inspiration has been burning alive all children born since the virus in their quest to find the new Messiah.
- The Gashleycrumb Tinies... that's all that needs to be said. It is filled from A to Z with children finding a premature and rather graphic end through a variety of ways ranging from the mundane (falling down the stairs) to the downright bizzare (sucked dry by a single leech!).
- Guardians of Ga'Hoole: And how! Deaths by dismemberment, decapitation, impalement, burnings...
- Harry Potter:
- One surprisingly lighthearted Cut Song from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets details Nearly Headless Nick's botched execution with a blunt axe.
- In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Wormtail's silver hand (which is loyal to Voldemort) strangles him as punishment for hesitating to kill Harry. Apparently, the movie considered it too disturbing to show.
- His Dark Materials has a couple. In the first book, one armored bear defeats another in single combat by ripping his jaw off, then tearing his throat open, slicing his ribcage in half, pulling out his still-steaming heart and devouring it before shouting "BEARS! WHO IS YOUR KING?". It's pretty intense. (The film adaptation toned this down quite a bit, but it was still surprisingly gruesome for a kids' movie.) The same armored bear, later on, discovers the corpse of his (human) friend, and eats it as a sign of respect.
- The Hunger Games:
- The Hunger Games is ripe with this. Not surprising considering how many children have died in Panem for entertainment over the past 75 years. How about being caught in a net and speared by a trident courtesy of a fourteen year-old? Or having an axe essentially boomeranged into your head? Or having a nest of vicious, highly venomous genetically engineered wasps dropped on you while you were sleeping? This happening with the whole world watching you doesn't make it better.
- The pods in Mockingjay crank this trope up to eleven.
- President Snow tries to inflict one of these on Katniss. By brainwashing the boy who loves her, and she's fallen love with in return, into wanting to kill her because he fears she will kill him. Imagine finally being reunited with someone you love and thinking your reunion is going to be super happy only to find that person's hands around your throat trying to strangle you.
- I Want My Hat Back is a normal picture book for preschoolers until the end. The bear eats the rabbit for stealing his hat and lying about seeing it. It's played for laughs at that.
- In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a worker falling into a rendering vat and being rendered into lard and fertilizer.
- Land of Oz:
- In the later Land of Oz books, no one can die. This information comes after characters in the books have been chopped into pieces, beheaded, melted, and so forth and it's mentioned that you could be transformed into an inanimate object, turned into sand, and buried. Even so, you'd still be alive and presumably conscious forever. Note also the spell which caused this also prevented aging, and took effect on everyone in Oz at the same time; this means that any babies in Oz are eternally babies, and that anyone who was at the moment of death is permanently caught there, and so on... Oz suffers from a ghastly Continuity Snarl, so it is possible that one book stated that the characters age until a certain age then stop, somewhere. But there were definitely books in which it was stated that babies would be babies forever.
- Those more familiar with adaptations such as MGM film might be shocked by how violent the first book is. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz contains a scene where the Tin Woodman cuts off the heads of various wolves and the Scarecrow breaks a bunch of crows necks. A bunch of bees also die, but they just die after breaking their stingers off of the Woodman's body.
- Any death in The Last Black Cat by Eugene Trivizas. Let's see, we have cats being drowned in hot tar, cats having their tongues stuck to the pavement, and then have a stemaroller rolling towards them, cats being burnt alive, having their heads smashed in with clubs, being drowned in quicklime, and one is even stabbed with a knitting needle. A children's book, my arse! Not holding any punches whatsoever is to be expected from a book truly aimed at adults, that examines to a painful degree racism, dehumanisation and propaganda and how they lead to the horrors of genocide.
- The Last Dragon Chronicles:
- Minor character Hannah in Dark Fire gets torn apart in an incredibly vicious way due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time—she is impaled through the chest on a dragon's talon, with visceral descriptions of her blood oozing down and her organs popping through her skin speared on the dragon's claws. This series is targeted at the 8-12 age bracket, of course.
- Hell, Ms. Gee's death too, which occurs shortly after Hannah's. She has her flesh stripped away by being drenched in gallons of dragon urine from the awakening Gawaine, to the point where there's nothing left but her skeleton - which then disintegrates.
- The Magic School Bus book where the class travels to the dinosaur times had a rather graphic illustration of a carnivorous dinosaur tearing apart another dinosaur (while the kids are watching this, their only reactions are to spout out incredibly lame puns).
- In children's book The Marvellous Land of Snergs, Mother Meldrum's body gets blown apart by a hailstorm of musket bullets.
- Mermaids: It's downplayed as it occurred off-page in the backstory and it's not described in detail, but the part where a mermaid poisoned a sick baby to frame Morva out of romantic jealousy is pretty dark for a children’s book, and definitely one of the darkest things in the trilogy.
- Out of the Dust is a story aimed towards elementary school kids about a girl growing up in the dustbowl. The first third is pretty tame, albeit a tad mellow. This changes, however, when the protagonist, who herself is about nine or ten, watches her mother burn herself on kerosene after confusing it with water for Dad's coffee. Not only that, but the mother is pregnant, the daughter's hands are mutilated, AND THE MOTHER STILL GIVES BIRTH TO A WRITHING, HORRIFICALLY BURNED CHILD!!! All of this is described in graphic, visceral detail. The two don't die from the burn injuries or smoke inhalation, but rather from infection over the course of several days/weeks. Oh, and this is during the Dust Bowl, so it's very likely some of the dust swirling around them might have snuck its way underneath the mother and child's folds of charred, seared flesh!. The rest of the book focuses on the protagonist's grief and guilt regarding the death, so the book never once lets you forget just how horrific that one moment of insanity was.
- Philip Reeve has a habit of featuring these:
- Mortal Engines has a lot of this trope. About a hundred named characters die over the course of the four books, and millions more in the background. Apart from several dozen shootings and stabbings, characters are also crushed underneath mobile cities, ripped apart by robotic birds, incinerated in burning airships... Basically, death tends to be extremely brutal, but mostly very quick. One poor mook got his head bashed in with a typewriter. By one of the protagonists..
- Railhead is mostly Lighter and Softer but not without its moments — the Big Bad of the first book is suddenly Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by a sky-ray and bleeds out with a gaping wound in his chest, but the worst comes in the finale, Station Zero, where Threnody Noon, one of the main protagonists no less, stabs her own sister with a knife and allows her to be Eaten Alive by Kraitt warriors. Even Threnody herself is disturbed with what she did.
- The Power of Five:
- Mrs. Deverill. Her skin is eaten away by acid.
- Sir Michael Marsh is crushed to death by the King of the Old Ones.
- Claire Deverill is burnt to death by radiation.
- Diego Salamanda has his neck broken when he falls over and his oversized head hits the ground wrong.
- Both Nightrise chairmen get pretty brutally impaled - one by a boat and one by a falling stactite.
- Real-Life Monsters in Walt Disney's Fun to Learn Library has an illustration of an Albertosaurus biting and clawing the neck of a Brontosaurus. Worst of all, blood is shown, despite the target audience being young children.
- Redwall:
- Many, many villains in the Redwall series. Deaths—shown "onscreen"—include being crushed under a giant bell, being pulled into a sinkhole and drowning, being devoured by a giant eagle, pierced through the heart by a huge crossbow bolt, and being slowly driven insane and to suicide by the heroes.
- Those were just the first two books in the series (out of twenty-something), by the way. Others include getting ripped apart by three snakes at once, sucked into a whirlpool, force drowned, and, also from the second book, being tossed into the air to land impaled on some upward-pointing javelins.
- A fox got stabbed through the brain by the fangs of the wolf skull he wore as a helmet when he was picked up and slammed headfirst into a tree. Then Ungatt Trunn got possibly the most horrible death of the lot; he's left for dead on the seashore with a broken back, but he's still alive, and the tide is coming in veeeeeeerrrrrry slowly ...
- There are also some undoubtedly painful deaths on the red shirts of either side. In one book, a shrew is shot in the eye with an arrow, in another a book has his head and paw chopped off, and there are also many others.
- In the first book was one villain murdered another by stepping on his throat, and holding his foot there until death.
- Brian Jacques really doesn't sugarcoat death, despite the series being categorized as children's literature.
- Darren Shan's writing, as well. The Saga of Darren Shan isn't too bad, the most unfriendly death is probably Darren's second death. Committing suicide by impaling himself with a knife, and then spending the next 20,000 years screaming in a lake full of other dead souls.
- The Secret Life of Bees has two examples, on top of the Family-Unfriendly Violence involving Lily's abusive father:
- The protagonist accidentally shot her mother in the face as a young child.
- While not shown on-screen, May was Driven to Suicide. The book doesn't spare many details about how her body looked when she was found lying in a river
- Septimus Heap employs some decidedly family-unfriendly ways to die, of which DomDaniel melting down in a pool of slime or Merrin Meredith being reduced to a hollow skin are probably the worst.
- Shows up regularly in A Series of Unfortunate Events, due to the books' general tone
- In The Wide Window, Aunt Josephine is shoved into a lake full of leeches that strip people to the bone.
- In The Miserable Mill, Dr. Orwell is startled and steps backwards... right into the running lumbermill saw she was trying to have someone else shoved into.
- In The Carnivorous Carnival, Madame Lulu and Count Olaf's bald henchman fall into a pit full of starving lions.
- The Shapeshifter (a book series for young people) has Catherine Reader being incinerated while screaming "Not me! Not like this!" She was incinerated by Mia. That's right, Mia.
- The Skulduggery Pleasant series revels in this. Everything from people just sort of coming apart in water, to being ground to mush by Cthulhu Expys, to graphic descriptions of being eaten alive by zombies after slipping in the gore they left behind... for the record, the books mostly aim at the 9-13 age group.
- The death of Toklo's brother Tobi in Seeker Bears is graphic and goes into detail about how glossed over his eyes are and how ill he smells. What makes it even more unnerving is Toklo caring more about being able to see how bears spirits go into rivers than the fact his brother is dying in front of him.
- Survivor Dogs:
- In The Broken Path, the dogs come across the decomposing corpses of several humans who were trapped during the earthquakes. They've been lying around for weeks to the point where some are almost just bones. Several of the corpses are missing their eyes (presumably due to birds) and others have been mawled by animals.
- Lick (who isn't even an adult yet) tears off Terror's lower jaw in The Broken Path. He doesn't instantly die from the injury. Instead, he slowly bleeds out.
- The Thief of Always is the closest thing to a children's book Clive Barker has written, (the protagonist is ten, there isn't any sexual content) but that doesn't stop the four minions of the Big Bad from having fairly graphic death scenes: while Mr Hood just gets sucked into a whirlpool, Marr melts into nothingness Wicked Witch of the West style, Carna... shatters into shards of bone (the book wasn't too clear), and Rictus gets decapitated rather brutally. Jive's is the worst, though- disintegrating into ashes doesn't sound much worse than the rest, but it appears that he is doing so from the inside (he starts by just coughing them up) and it takes up almost an entire chapter. He's alive and conscious until his body has completely turned into dust, so that right before he's totally finished he pleads for Mr Hood to help him.
- Dying because your baby has broken your spine as it tries to get out of you is a bloody gruesome way to die. Of course, this being Twilight, Bella gets "better", but still!
- In Varjak Paw, stray cats are taken off the streets and turned into unsettling stuffed wind-up toys with blank glass eyes. It's even creepier for cats as their meow's come out as unnerving gibberish to them. The humans that buy them apparently don't realize that they're actual cats.
- Watership Down:
- Cute, wide-eyed rabbits getting savaged by a dog. The fate of the Sandleford Warren. Especially in the movie.
- The rabbits being gassed and buried alive in the flashback where Holly's warren is destroyed.
- It was disturbing enough in prose, but Captain Holly's illustration of it... Not to mention the sight of one of the most likeable characters almost suffering one on some wire.
- In the movie, there's Blackavar. He doesn't die in the book, but he tries to kill Woundwort himself and gets his throat ripped out absurdly quickly. The gagging noises he makes as Woundwort kills him doesn't help. The blood coming from their mouths doesn't help.
- And that poor cat in "The Terrible Hay-Making" (in the sequel.) It wasn't even interested in the rabbits!
- Man oh MAN. You have no idea how gruesome and dark Richard Adams can be in his books. Many consider Watership Down to be among his more tame stories.
- Where the Red Fern Grows is a popular book with fifth graders and early middle schoolers. Some places even require you to read it. The book goes into graphic detail about hunting animals, a young human character dying, and later the two dogs dying. Old Dan's death is especially graphic. He fights off a mountain lion but ends up with, amongst other injuries, a gash in his side. His entrails end up coming out of the wound and get stuck in a bush. The protagonist tries his best to clean him up and put his insides in place, but Old Dan still dies not long after he's brought back home.
- Many of Hans Christian Andersen's tales are less than child-friendly, as most of them feature heartbreaking things happening to likeable/tragic/etc. characters (even with some of them being objects, as the case may be). "The Little Match Girl", anyone? Or the original "The Little Mermaid"? And then there's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier". The story "The Fir Tree", while marketed as a children's story in modern times. A fir tree is disgruntled with its happy life in the woods, is jealous of the trees that get cut down as Christmas trees, until it eventually is cut down and decorated for a rich family. After the holidays the tree is promptly thrown into the attic to turn brown and die, is dragged out of the house and stripped of the ornaments, and is then chopped up and fed to the fire (complete with sound effects of the tree being chopped and burning up in a 1950s era recording of the story!). Hans Christian Andersen is the king of the insane Downer Ending.
- The Choose Your Own Adventure books were well known for the many grisly endings which depicted you getting shot or stabbed to death, disembowelled, eaten by monsters, or decapitated. These were lovingly illustrated for good measure and the corpse of your character was shown. The fact that in most of the CYOA books, you were playing a kid, not an adult, is worth mentioning. Were these books to be written today, it is certain that if these books were written today, the majority of these bad endings would either be toned down or simply not allowed. Indeed, they went out of vogue during The '90s, for the most part. Also of note, the major CYOA imitators (such as Find Your Fate) tended to avoid bad endings that resulted in violent death of your character. They preferred bad endings that were simply unsatisfying but left you alive.
