As a Death Trope, this naturally involves spoilers.
Times where no body is left behind after death in Literature.
- Standard for mages in The Black Magician Trilogy: any magical power they have at death is unleashed, disintegrating the body at minimum and sometimes making a mess of the surrounding area. If a mage does leave a body, it's cause for great concern, since it means they were either completely exhausted or had their power forcibly drained.
- In Bloodsucking Fiends and its sequels, victims of vampires who haven't ingested vampire blood disintegrate. This includes Barry in Bite Me.
- In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society, when Phantom dies, she dissolves into shadow.
- In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Queen of the Black Coast", the hyenas transform back into men before crumbling.
- In The Dark Tower series, we meet Father Callahan from Salem's Lot who finds that, when vampires die, they helpfully follow this trope.
- In Dracula, Dracula and his Brides are said to crumble into dust on death. Justified in text as a side effect of their unnatural preservation being removed and centuries of decay catching up with them. Subverted with Lucy, whose body remains intact, as her mortal death had occurred only a few days before her Vampiric one. This opens a plot hole that dozens of stories by other authors are built on: turning into a dust cloud or mist and traveling in that form is explicitly one of Dracula's powers.
- Draconians in Dragonlance self-destruct in various ways when they die, with the exact manner depending on their sub-species.
- In Dragon Weather, a slain dragon rots extremely fast. Lord Obsidian notes that this is useful for making sure that a dragon is not faking.
- The Dresden Files is a fairly realistic urban fantasy, and, as such, most things do indeed leave the expected corpses. However, some things, such as demons and various Eldritch Abominations, manifest a body when they come into the real world, and when defeated, this body turns to ectoplasm which slowly evaporates. In other words, a thoroughly Justified Trope, used selectively for effect.
- Subverted in the TV adaptation. When Harry kills a vampire, he comments that he always expects them to turn to ashes, at which Murphy tells him he watches too much TV.
- In Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World, whenever a monster is slain, it dissolves into smoke and leaves loot behind. Nobody understands how this happens, nor cares to try and find out, not even Michio, the protagonist. When this happens to antagonists, or others inside a labyrinth, it's justified by the fact that labyrinths are actually living things and eat whoever dies inside them.
- Harry Potter:
- In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Sirius' body falls into the Veil when Bellatrix kills him and therefore cannot be recovered.
- Inverted with the Big Bad Lord Voldemort. When he tried to murder Harry in his infancy, his body was destroyed by his own rebounding spell, but his spirit is kept alive by his Soul Jars. When he's finally defeated and left Deader than Dead in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, his body drops in a heap — just another casualty of the Final Battle, the ultimate indignity for a man obsessed with claiming immortality.
- Justified in His Dark Materials, where daemon bodies flash out of existence as soon as they or their owners die.
- An interesting variation occurs in The Iron King. When fey of any kind are killed, their bodies disappear and leave something else behind (be it a thornbush, needles, ice, branches, etc.). This, however, does not always happen instantly, the time it takes can vary.
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: The Light Novel and the anime adaptation differ on this. In the original LN, and the manga adaptation, the bodies of monsters don't dissolve until their crystal is removed. The anime changing this to making a monster dissolve instantly leaves a slight Plot Hole because the reason Lili and Bell are able to make so much more money working together is that Lili carves up the bodies while Bell focuses on fighting, meaning he doesn't have to waste time carving them himself. Ironically, the anime does show a scene where Bell defeats a monster just by destroying its crystal.
- This is mermaids' usual fate, according to Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. They turn into ocean foam when they die.
- In the October Daye series, the night-haunts eat faerie corpses and replace them with humanised versions of the corpses, as faerie flesh does not rot. This becomes a problem in A Local Habitation, as the dead aren't being replaced, and Toby has to find out why.
- Almost every monster in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books. Sometimes a piece of the monster will remain if it was cut off before the monster died (such as the Minotaur's horn), or if severing it causes the monster to die (such as Medusa's head).
- This also apparently happens to monsters in The Kane Chronicles, which Word of God confirms takes place in the same universe as Percy Jackson.
- In Dean Koontz's Phantoms, a small California town is wiped out by an Eldritch Abomination, but most of the residents are never actually found, having been eaten. The few bodies they do find suggest it's better that way.
- The demons in The Shadowhunter Chronicles dissolve within a few seconds or minutes when killed. Because their dead bodies are returning to their home dimensions.
- In the TV series, killed vampires also dissolve in this way, in contrast to the books.
- The Silmarillion: "Then [Fëanor] died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke [...]"
- Star Wars Expanded Universe:
- In The Last Command, Joruus C'baoth's body is consumed by blue energy, presumably based on what appears to befall the Emperor's body in Return of the Jedi (especially considering the entire final battle draws heavily from the climax of that film).
- During Galaxy of Fear, people attacked by Eppon can be turned to jelly and absorbed/eaten by it, leaving Empty Piles of Clothing. Unaware of what's happened, some characters speculate Imperials got them, but Imperials wouldn't leave the clothes.
- Likewise justified when embodied Auditors die in Thief of Time, because they build their human bodies out of molecules from dust and random debris, and can only keep them intact and functional by actively exerting their willpower.
- In Warrior Cats, if a cat dreams their way into The Dark Forest and is killed while there, their spirit ceases to exist altogether and their body disappears in the living world. This happens to Beetlewhisker in The Last Hope and Bristlefrost in A Light in the Mist.
