Hunting the Most Dangerous Game in Literature.
By Author:
- A short story by Isaac Asimov features a man who traveled into the past and discovered how the dinosaurs died. Apparently, there was a race of sentient dinosaurs who first killed all the dinosaurs (the tiny mammals were spared). The trope should give a perfectly good explanation to the fact they didn't survive themselves.
- Robert Sheckley has a few examples:
- An unusual version in Immortality, Inc. In this novel, a rich guy, wishing to die in style, hires hunters to hunt and kill him. He can hunt and kill them back. The catch is, there's the scientific (and very expensive!) process to ensure that someone will have an afterlife - and without said process, to have one's soul survive death is almost a Million to One Chance. The rich guy has guaranteed afterlife and doesn't fear death, while the hunters mostly don't.
- The short story "The Prize of Peril". (Got filmed in Germany under "Das Millionenspiel".) A gameshow candidate has to survive contract killers, while the audience may help him.
- "The Seventh Victim" (made into the movie The Tenth Victim) and its sequels feature a world where this has been legalized, as long as the participants agree to take turns being hunter and victim.
- While not using it as the plot of any work, J. R. R. Tolkien mentions this in two stories to explain distrust between peoples:
- In The Silmarillion, the first Dwarves to come to Beleriand were disorganized exiles called the Petty-dwarves. The native Elves assumed that they were just particularly strange animals and hunted them the same as any other. When the Elves made contact with the main Dwarven kingdoms, they realised their mistake and ceased such activities, but by then the Petty-dwarves were on their way to extinction (and the ones remaining carried a pretty understandable grudge that would come to bite the Elves in the ass quite a bit later on).
- In The Lord of the Rings, Ghân-buri-Ghân, chief of the Woses, says that the Rohirrim have hunted his people like beasts. His only real demand for helping them in the War of the Ring is that they stop doing this.
By Work:
- Atrocity Week by Andrew McCoy. Rich foreigners travel to a camp in South Africa to hunt natives from helicopters. Those hunted are actually volunteers from a Proud Warrior Race, but it's still men with rifles in a helicopter vs spears. Things go badly when communist guerillas attack and the hunters turn against the mercenaries running the camp.
- In The Book of Lost Things, the Huntress surgically combines children with animals to heighten the thrill of the hunt.
- The Devil’s League has a monster hunter at its center, capturing and collecting all of the monsters from the previous stories. When confronted about his motivations, he performs a title drop and refers to his victims as “the greatest game in the world.”
- The Devils of Langenhagen, a short story by Australian sci-fi author Sean McMullen. In the last days of the Third Reich, an Me262 interceptor squadron is visited by some strange and elegant guests — a couple of high-ranking pilots (and their wives) flying the very latest aircraft (a Horten 229
and a Japanese Shinden canard fighter). It turns out that they're time-travellers, seeking to shoot down Allied fighters for thrills. - In the Dirk Pitt novel Dragon by Clive Cussler, Dirk makes a direct reference to the original "The Most Dangerous Game" and even uses the same method as the hero of that story in order to win. Genre Savvy indeed...
- In the Discworld novel The Fifth Elephant, it's stated that this was a tradition in one barony in Uberwald, which is ruled by a werewolf pack. In the good old days, anyone could volunteer to be the quarry in "The Game", as it was known (participation was strictly voluntary) and was released into the woods unarmed but with a head start and told to get to town without getting killed. If the quarry survived (the odds weren't particularly good, but if you were in good physical shape, could think on your feet and knew your way around the woods it was definitely doable) he/she would be presented with a meal at the castle and enough money to start a small business, and it's mentioned that well over half the workshops and stores in the nearby town were founded using prize money from The Game. By the time of the novel, the current heir, Wolfgang, decided to pervert the rules of The Game, primarily by "volunteering" people who he didn't need or want around and sending advance parties into the woods to lie in wait. Then he decided to hunt Sam Vimes, which was one of the last mistakes he ever made.
- Doctor Who Expanded Universe: In The Doctor Trap, the Doctor is taken to a planet where the galaxy's greatest hunters (the Endangered Dangerous Species Society) are in competition to kill him.
- The Dragonlance short story "Lord Toede's Disastrous Hunt" involves the eponymous hobgoblin going hunting for poachers.
- "Feral" humans in the ruins of what was once the USA are hunted for sport after The Final War between the Draka and the Alliance for Democracy in the Drakaverse. The rest of humanity is even worse off.
- Recycled In Space with Duel on Syrtis, by Poul Anderson. A Great White Hunter decides to hunt a Martian before it becomes illegal.
- Judgment Of Corruption: Loki invites Gallerian up on a snowy hunting trip with the intention of hunting the latter.
- Used as the plot of the Executioner novel Murder Island. The main villain is an elderly British man (who just so happens to share his last name with The Most Dangerous Game's protagonist), who arranges for men to be sent to his island so he can hunt them. He also has a room full of the skulls of people he killed, and even talks to one of them near the end.
- The Extinction Parade has a variation. For vampires, hunting humans comes naturally, so when they want to change it up, they hunt rich people, those who can't just "disappear" so easily without somebody noticing. (Normally, they just drink the blood of poor people, expecting society to chalk up their deaths to street crime.) The real "game" is in covering up their deaths, making them look like accidents, suicides, muggings gone wrong, or crimes of passion.
- One set of villains in Elizabeth Moon's Familias Regnant series is a cadre of senior military officers who abuse their positions to hunt people.
- Flashman and the Redskins. Flashman finds himself inadvertently joining a party of Bounty Hunters illegally hunting Apache raiding parties for their scalps at $300 each (more than beaver pelts are worth). Flashman mentions that he later submitted an article to The Field called "The Human Quarry as Big Game, and the case for and against Preserving", arguing that to the scalp-hunters it was no different than any other animal. Said article was (needless to say) not accepted.
- In the Forgotten Realms novel Elminster: The Making of a Mage, one member of the book's main group of antagonists — the Magelords of Athalantar — is introduced this way; he's a wizard who likes to enjoy the thrill of a hunt while using magic that lets him change shape into various creatures at will and certainly isn't above going after people he's imprisoned first for annoying him. Because he isn't aware at first that he is also being targeted rather less formally that night in one of the opening attacks against the Magelords as a group, he ends up as something of a one-chapter wonder.
- Fox Demon Cultivation Manual: Demons are captured and brought to Sihuang Mountain to be hunted during the Divine Hunt Meet. When he goes back in time Song Ci is one of the people captured.
- In the Friday the 13th novel The Jason Strain, Jason Voorhees is one of a dozen serial killers who are released onto an island as part of a twisted reality TV show where the killer who survives after eliminating the others will be allowed to go 'free'. Things go wrong when a scientific research team trying to analyse Jason's immortality accidentally turn him into Patient Zero of a zombie plague, forcing the remaining killers to join forces to try and escape Jason and find a cure for the plague.
- In Sergey Lukyanenko's Genome, the Blue Bloods on the planet Heraldica are shown to engage in an old-fashioned horse-mounted hunt, except they're hunting their genetically-engineered servants, who obey their every wish. When they catch up to a peasant girl, they stun her and then proceed to gang-rape her while the others cheer them on. After the act, she gets up, gets dressed, and walks back to the village as if nothing happened.
- Ghost Roads: The Halloween rites are a twisted version in which living humans hunt temporarily incarnated ghosts. If they kill a ghost, they get an extra year of life, and the ghost ceases to exist. However, ghosts can fight back (though they only have farm tools against guns), and if they kill one of the living, they get to stay alive for another year. However, they must repeat this the next year, or they will also cease to exist.
- This happens twice in The Hardy Boys: once in the Digest series ("The Search for the Snow Leopard"), where Frank and Joe are hunted with Chet and the Girl of the Week, and once in the Casefiles ("Deathgame"), where the brothers are hunted with Biff, the Girl of the Week, and another guy. Of course, due to Plot Armor, all the good guys make it out alive both times.
- In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, it is mentioned that Araminta Meliflua, a cousin of Sirius Black's mother, tried to have a Ministry bill passed that would make it legal to hunt Muggles.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley's Hunters of the Red Moon is The Most Dangerous Game - In Space! With a twist ending, no less.
- "Huntress", by Tamora Pierce, involves The Reveal that the group of popular kids that Corey has befriended regularly does this, usually to Disposable Vagrants or low-level criminals and thugs. They try to hunt her when she refuses to participate, only for the Goddess that Corey's family worships to appear and hunt them instead. The Goddess then comments that they made better prey than hunters.
- Hurog: In Dragon Bones, the protagonist's father took him bandit-hunting. While the bandits did raid the farms on their land, the motivation for hunting them down seems to have been sport rather than a sense of justice - the protagonist, Ward, later mentions that his father fought in the king's wars despite detesting the king - simply because he liked to kill people.
- A variation occurs in the Joe Pickett novel Blood Trail. Rather than capturing people and releasing them to hunt, the killer stalks and kills hunters while they are out hunting.
- Kitty Norville: Kitty's House of Horrors contains several plot elements from a common version of this trope (targets lured to a remote location under false pretenses, elaborate traps, film as trophies, etc). The fact that most of the targets were not normal humans in the strictest sensenote was the hunters' motivation.
- Known Space: The bandersnachi of the planet Jinx are hunted by humans, with very specific and rigidly enforced limitations on allowed equipment (which includes what amounts to a tank, as the environment is unsurvivable to humans and bandersnachi take a LOT of killing). The Bandersnatchi do this for two reasons: they need the money, and they're BORED. The humans get a trophy about 60% of the time. The rest...well, there are a LOT of squashed tanks down near the ocean.
- The Trope Namer is The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell. The story's main villain, General Zaroff, has spent his life hunting every kind of animal imaginable and has grown bored of his hobby. To keep his interest in hunting, Zaroff resorts to hunting the most dangerous game of all — humans.
- In Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris, the villains hunt humans for a hobby. The protagonists, who have infiltrated them, are asked to take part in the hunt.
- In Poison Study, the protagonist, Boxed Crook Yelena, is the subject of one of these; however it's a non-lethal variant, designed as a training exercise for a military squad (and Break the Haughty for the upper-class trainees, that a commoner woman can leave them all chasing their tails). When Yelena stays un-captured for the whole day, she gets extra privileges.
- Shadowplay in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe; in the post-Melding Plague Chasm City, the effectively immortal residents of the Canopy arrange for "contracts" on their life as a way to break up the monotony of life, with specific restrictions (such as a killing weapon) and time restriction. The assassins are followed by the media, who record the events. Most contracts are set up to allow a high survival rate, but someone has to die every once in a while to keep people coming.
- The hero of Rogue Male is a big game hunter whose stalking of an unnamed Great Man (implied to be Hitler) is presented as an exercise in stealth; he wasn't actually going to shoot. Only later is it revealed that he had a motive (revenge for the execution of a lover) and would have shot if he'd had a moment longer.
- One of the short stories in the Shadowrun inspired novel Wolf & Raven features a woman from a bunch of jaded upper-crust hunters, who play out this trope on the streets of the Sprawl rather than in the wilderness. With cybernetic dogs to flush the game, no less. It's notable in that the protagonist Wolf turns the tables on the hunt club, pointing out that if they don't cut it out and pay reparations to their victims' families, he'll tell every street-dweller in the Sprawl what they look like and what they've been doing and start passing out hunting licenses so the riffraff can hunt them. Needless to say, everybody who survives at all on the Shadowrun streets tends to be well-armed, so the hunters back off rather than confront prey that shoot back.
- In A Song of Ice and Fire, Ramsay Bolton likes to kidnap women, release them naked and unarmed into the forest, give them a head start, and then come after them on horseback with a pack of hounds. When he catches them, he rapes them, kills them, and skins them (in that order, if they have given him good sport. If they haven't...). It is worth noting that, unlike some of the other examples on this page, Ramsay has no sense of pride, honour, or good sportsmanship in his hunts, and his victims have no chance whatsoever of winning. Though the term is never used (since it's a Medieval Stasis fantasy setting), it is clear that the readers are meant to see him as a Serial Killer with a particularly horrific M.O. Occasionally women do escape, meaning Ramsay has a reputation as The Dreaded in the North.
- The obscure novel The Sound of His Horn features the hero being captured by a sadistic Nazi Nobleman who hunts human beings for sport.
- The Stormlight Archive: A non-murderous variety. Adolin finds hunts against beasts positively boring, due to how the prey has little chance of countering the elaborate hunting methods humans can come up with. He much prefers one on one duels, where warriors can pit their wits against an opponent of equal intelligence and strength.
- In Supreme Commander (loosely based on the original XCOM, the Alien Invasion is eventually revealed to be little more than an alien safari (the hunting kind), with the aliens enjoying the taste of human blood. When the humans finally take out the hidden alien base in the Arctic (originally built as a Nazi sub pen), they seem to decide that Earth is simply not worth the effort and stop coming.
- Played with in "Novice", the first Telzey Amberdon story. While humans were hunting the creatures known as "Crest Cats" without realizing they were sapient, it turns out that the Crest Cats were hunting the humans right back, and having considerable fun doing it.
- One of the Terran Trade Authority books has a short story about a bunch of bored rich guys who decide to get their thrills by hunting each other.
- Warhammer 40,000: One of the short stories reveals that Ravenor took Patience Kys into his retinue after rescuing her from one of these hunts.
- In the Women of the Otherworld novel Stolen, Elena and other supernaturals are kidnapped to be experimented on and the major funder of this project is a millionaire video game designer who likes to hunt them when they've outlived their usefulness.
