Sealed Evil In A Can / Literature

• The Adversary Cycle: The Keep has Radu Molasar, advance man for The Otherness, sealed in a castle in Romania until Those Wacky Nazis accidentally let him out.
• The Afterward: The Old God was banished from the world for centuries before his followers at last got him back in. He was banished again after this by the seven companions.
• Alex Verus encounters two of these. One is a magician who sealed himself in an artifact. The other is a magician who is trying to live forever by killing others like the long dead vampires.
• Alice (2015): How the original Magician defeated the Jabberwocky. He sealed the monster under what later became The Asylum. When he escaped, Alice sealed him in a glass jar in her pocket, where he was eventually forgotten.
• The Black Company starts out with the can already having been opened but not all of the way in a bit of evil on evil backstabbery. Begin with the Dominator, his Lady, and the Ten Who Were Taken. After their empire fell to a great rebellion, they were sealed inside a magical barrow by the White Rose, as they were too powerful for her to kill outright. Centuries later, the wizard Bomanz accidentally released the Lady, who released the Taken but kept the Dominator from getting out so she could keep the power to herself. He's not very happy about this, and spends three books scheming to free himself. Given that he's an order of magnitude worse than the Lady, everyone agrees this would be a bad thing. The Dominator is ultimately defeated by a team-up between the Lady and a reincarnated White Rose, and has his soul sealed in a silver spike guarded by a baby Physical God, reducing him to ostensible Artifact of Doom and consummate MacGuffin that spawns a titular sequel chronicling the mad scramble to be the first wizard to obtain and unlock its secrets. Instead it gets pried out by a band of local scum, causing all kinds of trouble until the baby god's father drops it off in a Swirly Energy Thingy with assurances that the threat is vanquished forever, just like the even older Sealed Evil in a Can he himself guards.
• The Book of the Dun Cow: Wyrm, the enormous, snakelike Eldritch Abomination that is the main villain of the story, was sealed inside the earth during the creation of the world to stop him from destroying the universe. The aim of the main characters is to prevent his escape.
• Book of the New Sun: Parodied when Severian, while traveling through some ancient ruins, accidentally releases an Evil Overlord named Typhon from the stasis machine he was sealed away in... and casually gets him killed almost immediately after.
• Books of the Raksura: The "Guide" was trapped by the Raksura and Fell's Progenitors in suspended animation, in a containment field, in a sealed prison, beneath an abandoned Underwater City — and salt water is acidic to it. However, it's still able to telepathically draw servants to it and cause all sorts of trouble. Lampshaded when Moon observes that the whole nightmare happened because the Progenitors decided to punish it rather than just kill it when they had the chance.
• Chaos Gods: Rising Chaos, the most powerful and destructive of the nine gods, was overthrown by the others and imprisoned within the Rising Lands. At the beginning of the series, Genius Meoif's war against the gods threatens to release him again.
• Chillin' in Another World with Level 2 Cheat Powers: Hiya the Djinn of the Wellspring of Light and Dark and Damalynas, Grand Magus of Midnight are both powerful and dangerous beings from the annals of history, and when they were sealed away, they were used to seal each other. The Golden-Haired hero freeing one results in the other being freed.
• Chronicles of Chaos: Children being held hostage by Greek gods are nevertheless not sure that their own parents are entirely in the right; they find out, in due course, that they are hostage to prevent the forces of Chaos from moving against the universe and destroying it. They set up themselves to live safely and free in the universe until the gods could stand against the forces, without going home and so triggering such a war.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: The Creator sealed his Evil Counterpart Lord Foul the Despiser in The Land in order to keep the rest of the universe safe. Unfortunately, the Creator didn't really think it through very well, as Lord Foul can now wreak havoc within The Land freely, and if the Creator tries to interfere directly, it'll let Lord Foul out and destroy the Arch of Time (the universe).
• Conan the Barbarian:
  • "Black Colossus": Thugra Khotan was an evil undead sorcerer sealed inside a forgotten crypt somewhere in the desert. Until a graverobber broke the tomb open...
  • "The Devil in Iron": A fisherman takes a knife from the chest of a slumbering Humanoid Abomination and lets it loose alongside it's entire labyrintine, corrupted city. Turns out, the knife was made to slay the monster, but the shaman who crafted it preferred to seal the monster in eternal slumber to use his threat to rule over his tribe.
• The Cosmere: Several examples:
  • Mistborn: Ruin, the primal force of chaos and destruction was imprisoned by his "good" counterpart Preservation after they teamed up to create life. This is a bit more complicated than most examples because Preservation split Ruin apart to make his release more difficult. Ruin's mind was put in the Well of Ascension, while the bulk of his power was bound into the atium. The problem was, even an imprisoned Ruin still had some power, so he altered the prophecies regarding a messianic figure called the Hero of Ages to say that the Hero should go to the Well of Ascension and release its power to the being trapped there. Following the prophecy, the heroine of the trilogy does this. Oops.
  • The Stormlight Archive: Odium, divine hatred incarnate, has been bound to the Roshar system for millenia in an effort to end his Cosmere-wide spree of splintering the other fifteen Shards (of which Ruin and Preservation are two). The series details his attempts to free himself. Other examples exist, largely to do with his nine Unmade.
    • Ba-Ado-Mishram, most powerful of the Unmade, was sealed 2000 years before the series began, at the end of the False Desolation. Her sealing was the cause of the Parshmens transformation into mindless slaves, and somehow affected the Pure Tones of Roshar, cutting the Sibling off from Towerlight.
    • Re-Shephir was sealed in Urithiru before it was abandoned. She managed to free herself though, and hung around the can for reasons unknown until Shallan drives her off in Oathbringer.
    • Nergaoul otherwise known as the Thrill is sealed into a "perfect gemstone" at the end of the Battle of Thaylen Field. The gemstone is then placed inside an aluminum box and dropped into the ocean so none can ever find it.
• Deptford Mice: In The Oaken Throne, the protagonist, Ysabelle, manages to imprison the evil rat god Hobb in an acorn. The acorn is subsequently planted and grows into an oak tree. As long as a twig or leaf of that tree remains, the world is safe.
• A literal case in The Devils Of D Day by Graham Masterton, where a demon has been welded up inside a derelict Sherman tank from World War 2. Unfortunately it's a Leaking Can of Evil, so the protagonist decides to break open the tank to free the village of its influence. This doesn't go well, of course.
• The Black Spider: The titular black spider is created when a ruthless knight baron forces the peasants of a remote valley in the Alps to work themselves nearly to death. The devil in the form of a wild huntsman offers the desperate peasants his help, in exchange for a yet unborn unchristened child. The only person who is willing to strike such a pact is a farmer's wife. The devil kisses her cheek; from this kiss grows an evil tumor in the form of a black spider. Twice, when the devil comes to collect a newborn, the local priest baptizes the child in the nick of time, but as punishment, the monstrous spider, now adult, births thousands of tiny spiders that start killing livestock and people, and finally breaks free from the face of the farmer's wife (who dies) and kills the priest and baby. The spider is finally sealed away when a brave mother, to protect her own newborn, grabs it and, dying, imprisons it in a hole in a wooden beam of her house, into which she hammers a peg to seal away the spider forever. Generations later, when people have stopped believing in the tale and become sinful, a bragging servant pulls out the peg on a drunken bet and releases the devil spider, until it can again be sealed away by a pious woman who remembers the old tales and sacrifices her life for her child.
• Christopher Moore:
  • Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff: Baltazaar keeps Catch, a demon from another Moore novel, in a magically-sealed room which he tells Biff to stay away from.
  • Practical Demonkeeping: Catch, the titular demon, is actually sealed away in a jar.
• Cthulhu Mythos:
  • Cthulhu. Indeed, most Cosmic Horror uses a can of some sort to explain why the super-powerful beings haven't already destroyed humanity. In this case, however, nobody appears to have done the actual sealing or unsealing; the elder gods are just "sleeping", and will awaken "when the stars are right". He almost gets out in The Call of Cthulhu, only to be run down by a steamship stuffed back in the can.
  • However, the Great Old Ones are not evil per se (save perhaps Nyarlathotep, and he is not always classed as one, and is properly an Outer God, ) but uncaring - they are simply far too powerful for us to matter to them, rather like a human stepping on ants (or for a better example, but purely Scots, the midge) and/or simply mindless - Azathoth for example, could (and apparently will) destroy everything, but he is blind, deaf, mute and completely unintelligent,and is no more evil than a hurricane.
  • Another example in Lovecraft's work is The Haunter of the Dark, an avatar of the god Nyarlatotep who is sealed inside the shining trapezohedron and can be summoned by gazing into it. Unlike the Great Old Ones, summoning him doesn't result in the end of the world, but he most likely wants some human sacrifices in exchange for secret knowledge or wants to possess you in order to get mankind to blow itself up.
• Digitesque: Five hundred years ago, "ghosts" nearly destroyed humanity until the coders sealed them away. Now they're back. No one has any idea how to handle them, and Ada dismisses the possibility of asking the coders again, since their way ultimately failed. As it turns out, the ghosts really are the spirits of the dead, invading from the artificial afterlife humans created. Alien code somehow corrupted Elysium, allowing the mind uploads to possess living humans. The coders and some aliens living on Earth worked together to fix it, but in the process they corrupted Elysium, turning an artificial Heaven into an artificial Hell.
• Discworld:
  • Hogfather: Parodied when Archchancellor Ridcully decides to unseal the door to a special bathtub invented by Bergoldt Stuttley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson, simply because it was barred shut. When asked why he wanted it opened, he replied, "To see why they wanted it shut, of course!" Terry Pratchett added the following footnote:
    This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are not under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.
  • Reaper Man: In a time when Death is non-existent, Evil returns in the form of dinky little snow-globes that people want to love and cherish, since as you pick them up and shake them, snow appears to fall around models of city landmarks, and look, they'e even labelled A Present From Ankh-Morpork, how cool is that? But the globes are seeds of a potent and cruel ancestral evil that preys upon and kills cities....
• The Divine Cities:
  • While the Divinities aren't evil per se, the Bulikovian restorationists in City of Stairs plot to release Kolkan and Jukov from where they have been held in order to help in their fight against Saypur. Since the gods Came Back Wrong, it doesn't end well for anyone involved.
  • The entirety of Voortya's afterlife in City of Blades is filled to the brim with undead warriors waiting to return to the living world to enact the revenge that their god promised them, and certain forces in Voortyashtan work to unseal it and bring on The End of the World as We Know It.
• Dragoneyes: The sealed evil is actually a Precursor named Ochekol'kan. She was locked up by the other precursors behind five doors (of Stone, Water, Air, Fire, and Lightning) after single-handedly killing all the elves. Because she lost a beauty contest, no less.
• Dragonlance: Takhisis was essentially a sealed evil in a can from the end of the Third Dragonwar, when Huma Dragonbane forced her to swear to leave Krynn and never return, and the Cataclysm, when she found a way to get around that oath. In an interesting variation on this trope, it was when Berem stole the emerald from the pillar of Takhisis' temple, killing his sister Jasla in the process, that Takhisis was partially resealed. She was actually able to get around her oath because of the Cataclysm — its precise wording was that she would never return "while the world was whole". With half the main continent blown up, the world was no longer whole so she was able to return. It's a bit of a stretch, but Takhisis is the Queen of Darkness.
• Dragontales, a collection of Dungeons & Dragons-related stories.
  • In "The Wizards Are Dying", the godling lich Xanthak is released from imprisonment when a group of adventurers takes a jeweled cross called the Nga from the door that seals his cell. Another group of adventurers has to put him back in his cell and seal it again.
  • "Out of the Eons", one of Gardner F. Fox's "Niall of the Far Travels" short stories. Adonair is an evil deity from another universe trapped in a brick-lined cubicle eons ago by the deities of Niall's universe. During the course of the story Niall accidentally releases him and he and the gods must find a way to destroy him.
• The Dresden Files: Demonreach is the can for thousands of major-league evils, and Skinwalkers are among the least dangerous. Unlike most examples, the creator of the prison — the real Arthurian Merlin, incidentally — had the forethought to build in a failsafe in case the occupants ever escaped — one that will vaporize most of the continent just to slow the prisoners down, because that's actually the lesser of two evils. In Turn Coat, Harry inadvertently becomes its Warden, which not only makes him the prison's chief guardian but also gives him the authority to release its prisoners. If Demonreach is a giant can of the greatest evils in the universe, then Harry has the can opener. Harry is extremely unhappy when he discovers what he accidentally signed up for.
• The Elric Saga: The blade Stormbringer straddles the border between this and Evil Weapon as it is both the form of an Eldritch Abomination that it takes on the mortal plane, and is the trap it is bound into. At the end of the saga, it finally breaks free as it is forced to consume a truly indestructible soul, Elric's, and is finally free to race through the universe, the last bit of Chaos left to supply growth and change in a universe of Law — supposedly this one.
• Empire of the East does this in an interesting way: the Demon-Prince Orcus, who founded the titular Empire, was imprisoned under the earth by his own lieutenants, John Ominor and Wood, in a coup. Eventually, Wood convinces Ominor that they should release Orcus, believing that only Orcus has the power to match Ardneh, and believing that they can keep Orcus controlled. They were right about the first point, barely. About the second, they were wrong. Also, Ardneh tricked them into releasing Orcus so that he could destroy Orcus and the Empire in a single stroke.
• The Empirium Trilogy: The Gate is made of a giant, powerful barrier that keeps the angels from reentering Avitas. On a smaller scale are blightblades, arrows made with cruciata blood that can absorb and conceal wraiths. Wraiths are trapped inside until the blightblade is broken.
• The Executioner and Her Way of Life has the Four Major Human Errors, who were imprisoned a thousand years ago after nearly destroying the world. Their prisons lasted a long time before the start of the series, but have recently begun leaking as an unintended side-effect of protagonist Akari's World Regression ability.
• Fablehaven:
  • The most notable example is Zzyzx, a pocket dimension where the majority of all demons were imprisoned long ago. At the end of the series, they break free and are tricked into invading the fairies' world after it's evacuated, which is sealed behind them to imprison them again while the fairies move into the now-abandoned — but substantially larger — former prison.
  • The witch Muriel is another example, who's tied in place by a magic rope in the forest. This rope has several knots, and by another undoing one for her she'll gain enough magical power to grant a boon to them—and get that much closer to being free. Her master, the demon Bahumat, is also sealed on Fablehaven.
  • Quiet boxes are a kind of magical prison cells that hold their inmates in a state of suspended animation. The sanctuaries use them to imprison very powerful, dangerous beings.
• Fengshen Yanyi:
  • After Shen Gongbao makes a sneak attack on Jiang Ziya and murders him (he gets better immediately after), Yuanshi Tianzun order his servant to bury him under a mountain where he'll wait for the end of the war. Shen Gongbao manages to talk him into reconsider the punishment, swearing on the pain of death that he won't interfere again. He breaks the oath and is drowned for it.
  • During the siege of Xiqi, the heroes capture the evil general Ma Shan, who seems impervious to all blades and even divine flames and weapons. Turns out he's the humanoid form of the ever-burning lampwick of Rendang Daoren and is defeated when the sage imprison him within his Glass Lamp, turning him back into a lampwick.
  • Attempted on the taoist Immortal Yu Yuan, who seems to be able to resist to all execution attempts. Jiuliusun suggest they just lock him in an iron box and throw it into the ocean, but Yu Yuan has mastered the arts of Metal and Water and is thus able to easily escape from both confinements.
• The Fog (1975): An earthquake ruptures a buried canister, releasing an insubstantial, misty organism called a mycoplasm. Otherwise respectable people do decidedly hideous things when they come into contact with it.
• Godspeaker Trilogy: While not a single character, the Mijaki were confined to the borders of their lands because they made the world evil. Hekat then decides to change things.
• The Golgotha Series: Golgotha contains an abundance of ancient sealed evils:
  • The Darkling, also known as Uktena, Chilong, or Nyarlathotep, is imprisoned beneath the silver mines in Mount Argent.
  • The town cemetery contains a powerful evil sealed within one of the graves, which must be kept surrounded by a salt circle lest it break free.
  • A cave in Mt. Argent contains the Skull of the First Murderer, which imprisons a powerful manitou that could cause a humanity-ending Hate Plague if freed.
  • The town well connects to an underground river that runs through a buried temple where Typhon, Father of Monsters, is imprisoned.
• Harry Potter:
  • All the Horcruxes are technically this, being the containers of pieces of Voldemort's warped, twisted soul. All the Horcruxes exhibit malevolent powers, from the diary, that hypnotized Ginny into opening the Chamber of Secrets, to the locket, that actually tried to kill Harry by drowning him in a frozen lake while he was wearing it.
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The titular chamber contains Slytherin's monster, an enormous basilisk.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: It's implied that Voldemort's final fate is to remain in a sort of limbo (specifically, the netherworld where Harry met Dumbledore after he died) forever, incapable of harming anyone ever again.
• Hekla's Children has the afaugh imprisoned by a prehistoric British tribe using a ritual sacrifice of a hero to create a demigod who keeps the afaugh at bay inside a cave and away from people to feed on.
• Hell's Children: The Damned are sealed evil in a can, who spend the entire book trying to get out.
• "The Howling Man": An abbey in Germany was able to capture the devil himself in a cell to protect the world from him. Unfortunately a man who ends up there helps him get loose again.
• Hurog: The villain of Dragon Bones finds a Basilisk that had been turned to stone and, of course, decides to use it, after using blood magic to set it free. While it is too stupid to be actually evil, it still is a dangerous big predator. The heroes eventually manage to turn it back to stone.
• Illuminatus!: One of the foullest and most vicious Shoggoths was in antiquity sealed in a pentagonal prison somewhere on the eastern North American plain, appeased with the blood and souls of those who died un-natural deaths. The secret of the pentagon was passed down through a series of custodians, the last of whom built a five-sided building complex around it from which the leaders of that continent's strongest power organised escalating wars, so as to appease the beast and keep it in souls. Hiding the secret in plain sight, they even called their prison building complex The Pentagon.
• The Immortals: In ancient times, mages locked the Immortals up in the Realms of the Gods. It didn't stick. Many of them are benign and decide to adapt to living with humans, but some are persistently vicious. Particularly giant human-headed spiders called spidrens, and a species of predatory flying horse called hurroks.
• John Connolly:
  • Quite a few short stories involve Sealed Evil in a Can: the Daemon buried under the church in "Mr Pettinger's Daemon"; the Fairies trapped inside their fort in "The New Daughter"; the monster chained up at the bottom of the lake in "Deep Dark Green"; the nest of hibernating giant spiders in "The Wakeford Abyss"...
  • The Black Angel: The fallen angel Immael is plunged into a vat of molten silver during the Back Story and the resulting statue becomes the angel's prison for several centuries. Naturally, the novel itself is all about Immael's twin brother and his followers attempting to free him.
• Killdozer: The construction crew on a Pacific island accidentally releases a being that can possess any metal object and only wishes to kill. The being got sealed in a neutronium sphere by accident and survived while its relatives and their accidental creators destroyed each other (killing all life on Earth in the process too).
• Japan Summons: Demon King Nosgorath, one of the bioweapons engineered by the Ancient Sorcerous Empire (Ravernal) as magical shock troopers. A hundred years after the Ravernal Empire teleported themselves to the future, one Nosgorath unit managed to gather a vast army and invaded humanity. However, his army was decimated by the Emissaries of the Sun God and was forced to retreat, sealed by the Four Heroes in an unsuccessful attempt to permanently eliminate him. Fast forward into the future, the seal was weakened by Annonrial Empire's agents which allows him to invade humanity once again.
• Journey to the West: Sun Wukong's rebellion against Heaven is cut short when Buddha shows up and submits him in the famous hand scene. Before the simian rogue can escape him, the Enlightened One conjures a mountain made of five elements to imprison him tightly until the day his services to the Tang Monk will be required. In the meantime, he's sealed in the mountain, fed only lead pill as food and molten bronze as beverage. He stays there for 500 years until he is freed by Xuanzang Sanzang.
• The Known Space story World of Ptavvs has a scientific team accidentally releasing a Slaver, an ancient alien with large-scale mind-control powers and an intense attitude problem, from the stasis field it has been trapped in for a billion years.
• The Jules de Grandin stories by Seabury Quinn sometimes feature something sinister being locked away. One story has a young man recount to Jules how his grandfather learnt from an atoning ex-pirate that they had sealed away their cruel captain and treasure inside a cave that only opens on Christmas Eve. The captain had long since become an angry undead, so no one dared go for the treasure. Unfortunately for the captain, Jules de Grandin is the world's foremost Occult Detective and he and his friends felt an urge for a bit of adventure and loot. A single bullet made of mandrake root was all that was needed for a really big payday.
• A Land Fit for Heroes: The Illwrack Changeling, Dark Lord and champion of the dwenda, had his soul imprisoned within a sword. The dwenda plan to resurrect him by recovering the sword and transferring his soul into a new body.
• Daniel Keys Moran's The Last Dancer has a scientific team releasing an ancient human, whose physical conditioning and skills approach Badass Normal from the other side and who has a major attitude problem. He proceeds to spend the rest of the book mainly kicking the other Big Bad's ass, making him not so much Evil, just Sealed Badass in a Can.
• The Laundry Files: Something Bad is waiting. The series is full of various eldritch abominations sealed in cans of various shapes and colors with different opening protocols. You have the Sleeper in the Pyramid, the Infovore, the Deep One in The Jennifer Morgue, the Eater of Souls, ... And the Laundry and its sister agencies' job is to make sure that everyone remains in his can.
• The League of Peoples 'Verse: In Hunted, the Mandasars have queens who are very smart, very large, very strong, can persuade other Mandasars to do anything by emitting the right pheromones, and are physiologically hardwired so that each queen believes that she is the most competent person around and should be in charge. Having more than about four of them on the planet tends to mean endless power struggles; having that few risks having them all die. The solution implemented is to have a bunch of queens in cryonic storage. While they aren't evil per se, waking them all up at once is still really, really bad.
• Left Behind: This is what happens at the end of Kingdom Come, with the Other Light faction serving as Satan's Final Battle army. In fact, the Other Light subsect the Only Light believes that Satan purposely sealed himself away so that he could be powerful enough to defeat God (whom the Only Light believes doesn't exist despite visible evidence to the contrary) and all those who follow Him when Satan is released. Which, unfortunately for them, didn't turn out as they expected.
• The Licanius Trilogy: Shammaeloth was sealed into the Darklands by El at the beginning of time. Two thousand years before the story started, it made an attempt to escape the Darklands and enter this world, but was sealed again behind the Boundary by Caeden.
• The Magician's Nephew: Jadis the White Witch put herself into suspended animation after destroying her world, and left a way for any visitors to wake her up, so that they’d take her to a new world.
• Magic Ex Libris features one prominently. Meridiana, an evil sorceress whose power is so great, her binding in an amillary sphere changed the way magic worked and gave rise to the Devourers/Army of Ghosts.
• M. R. James' stories often have an unpleasant being imprisoned in a tomb, grave, or ruin, inevitably later disturbed. Stories in this pattern include "Count Magnus" (the count's sarcophagus has three padlocks on it), "An Episode of Cathedral History", and "The Rose Garden".
• Lone Wolf: A ridiculous number of these show up as non-Darklord threats.
  • In a slight subversion, one of these sealed evils, namely Darklord Vashna, the most powerful Darklord of them all, who even tried to play The Starscream to Big Bad Naar in the Back Story, is already dead. Not sealed alive in a prison somewhere, but dead. The goal of two of the books in the series (The Chasm of Doom and The Legacy of Vashna) is to prevent him from coming back.
  • Lord Zahda in Castle Death is another interesting example: he's definitely a powerful evil who had been sealed away, but not so much in a can as in a castle on an island which he ruled over, where he had subjects of his own. So a much larger, more comfortable can, at least.
  • At the end of book 3, The Caverns of Kalte, you are the one doing the sealing, when you exile Vonotar the Traitor to the Daziarn Plane by pushing him through a shadow gate. The Daziarn is a whole dimension of its own, not really a can, and you would eventually see Vonotar again.
  • The Deathlord of Ixia was a more conventional example, since the title villain really was sealed in the proverbial can, and then escaped.
  • Agarash the Damned, Naar's most powerful champion of evil, was sealed in another dimension by the Elder Magi millennia ago. In the Grey Star books he is the Greater-Scope Villain goading the Big Bad Shasarak into freeing him. Grey Star has to prevent this.
• Malazan Book of the Fallen:
  • The T'lan Imass are notable offenders for this. During their genocidal war against the Jaghut and, off-and-on, the Forkrul Assail, they developed a ritual for binding enemies when they lacked the strength to directly kill them. Either pinned under massive stone slabs or buried in barrows, it's not uncommon for their ancient enemies to be unearthed.
  • The Azath Houses seal away both good and evil in the name of balance, the theory being that too powerful beings are bad for the world and need to be restricted. The Azath Houses cannot differentiate between good and evil, as they lack sentience, so anyone powerful enough who walks onto the Houses' grounds is quickly caught and buried alive. Scabandari Bloodeye has used that to his advantage by having his perceived rival Silchas Ruin disappear from history for a couple millennia.
  • It's not entirely clear who was doing the sealing, but there have also been cases of bound K'Chain Che'Malle who predate even the T'lan Imass.
• Marla Mason has the Outsider, a god-eating eldritch abomination which was long ago imprisoned beneath Death Valley. Marla accidentally releases it in Bride of Death and has to deal with it in Lady of Misrule.
• Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn: The Big Bad, Ineluki, is a Sithi sorcerer who went mad trying to protect his people from the onslaught of mankind. He cast a forbidden spell in an attempt to destroy the conquering army, but killed himself instead. Even in death, however, his hatred burned so strongly that his spirit refused to leave the world, lingering instead in the realms beyond death for five hundred years, until the circumstances become right for him to be freed via a complex ritual involving Demonic Possession. It is stated outright that if he succeeds he will destroy all living things in his longing for Unbeing.
• Mother of Learning: The protagonist eventually learns that the invasion of Cyoria is centred on a cult's attempts to free a primordial from its prison in hopes of mind-controlling it and exploiting its power. Apparently the primordials were so powerful, and their deaths so destructive, that the gods decided it was better to just lock them away. Interestingly enough, the direct threat to the protagonists is not so much the primordial itself, but the fallout of what the gods and angels would do to stop it.
  Tree Angel: The Highest Ones had placed a great many… triggers… into the core that governs this world. If conditions satisfying a trigger are detected, automatic countermeasures are initiated. A primordial gaining access to the material plane would activate several of them. You do not want that to happen. No one wants that to happen. Much of our duties involve making sure none of the triggers can be activated, for the sake of both the spirit world and the material one. Most of the triggers look out for things the Highest Ones had considered existential threats… and they had a very 'scorched earth' policy when dealing with existential threats.
• Mythic Misadventures is loosely based on the Pandora myth. Pandora opens the can in the first book and spends the rest of the series trying to reseal it.
• Neuromancer: The Tessier-Ashpools repeatedly freeze themselves to maintain the dynasty. They're arguably more selfish and prideful than evil, but they do also keep a ninja on ice.
• Neverwhere: The angel Islington is situated in the center of a labyrinth deep, deep underground. It turns out that this is for a very good reason: He was trapped there as punishment for destroying Atlantis.
• No Gods for Drowning: The goddesses Aeda and Medes were sealed in pieces of rock called Coralstones by the other gods. Aeda and Medes were sealed because they were planning to remove humanity's souls and effectively turn them into immortal conquerors to war with their ancient enemies, the Glories, which was considered to be terrible.
• Old Kingdom: The latter two books lead up to the release of Orannis the Destroyer, the Big Bad, from his "can".
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Initially, Kronos' remains are just in a particularly creepy sarcophagus that gets stronger every time a demigod forsakes the Olympians and joins his side. Later, Luke graduates to being his Soul Jar.
• Peter F. Hamilton:
  • The Night's Dawn Trilogy: A wandering alien accidentally opens a portal to the afterlife.
  • Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained: An alien menace is released by its hidden enemy (who has arranged a long-term "Let's You and Him Fight" situation between the menace and humanity).
• Pilgrennon's Children: Pilgrennon's Beacon ends with the protagonists putting the evil supercomputer Cerberus in a Faraday cage and dropping it into the ocean.
• The Pilo Family Circus is built on the prison for a race of gigantic reptiles — all of whom possess godlike power and all of whom are hungry for tender human flesh. The circus' managers, Kurt and George Pilo, do their bidding by causing as much havoc on Earth as possible — in the hope that whoever jailed them will be forced to negotiate their sentence. However, their attempts at escape are temporarily foiled when the circus is closed down and most of its staff killed at the end of the novel — though the main character's dreams suggest that it will return one day.
  Gonko: You come get your chuckles whenever you're ready, 'cause if they ain't lettin' me go, they ain't lettin' you go. Best believe that. Show's down but not out, mark my words. We'll be back in town, my pretty, and I don't recall offering you a severance package.
• The Plucker: The titular monster is sealed within a voodoo spirit doll. It's up to regular dolls to stop it when it is accidentally freed.
• The Radiant Dawn: Tyadrig was a demon lord sealed by Jehovah to prevent him from existing on the material plane. Along come his worshipers in modern times Aaron and Stacie to release him. It becomes the task of the heroes to stop him from being released.
• The Riftwar Cycle: The initial premise is that the God of Evil was imprisoned by the other surviving gods, but is now reaching out to influence things. Later books introduce successive complications, but those drift rapidly away from this trope.
• The Rising and City Of The Dead: The obots were sealed by God in another dimension, known as the Void. An experiment Gone Horribly Wrong cracked it open.
• The Saltwater Chronicles: The main villain is a telepathic fungus monster that fell from the sky; it was created to destroy all lifeforms on the surface of the earth (but not, as it is painfully aware, the fish). Its heart was previously sealed under an ancient volcano by Mother.
• Sanctuary: In 1708, Isobel trapped the ghost eater in a pendant, which she put in a glass bottle which she stoppered shut. She sent it and all the ghost bottles to her brother with strict instructions not to open any of them. The ghost eater remains trapped until Morgan opens the bottle over three centuries later.
• Septimus Heap: Etheldredda, the Big Bad of Physik, has spent 500 years trapped in a painting before being released.
• Serwa Boateng: The powerful obayifo Nana Bekoe is imprisoned in the Midnight Drum. Her daughter Boahinmaa is on a mission to release her.
• Shadows of the Apt: Millennia ago, the Inapt faced a mysterious enemy known only as "the Worm". Unable to destroy it, they were able to force it underground and then banish those caverns to Another Dimension, warded away from the living world by a series of magical seals. To keep the central seal strong enough, Argastos, who lead the Inapt army, was bound into it -0 and since he wasn't exactly a nice guy himself, that means it was a case of a Sealed Evil being used to shore up the prison of another Sealed Evil. However, it worked... until the Wasp Empress Seda tried to bind Argastos' power for herself, and her rival Cheerwell Maker tried to stop her. The result was that the now lich-like Argastos was destroyed and the Seal of the Worm popped open. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero (and villain) indeed.
• The Space Vampires has a space mission to find a derelict ship drifting in the solar system. The astronauts board it and retrieve what they believe to be several human-like alien bodies. It turns out they're possessed by evil energy beings that live off the life energies of others. The very pulpy movie adaptation (called Lifeforce) has a similar initial situation, though it diverges pretty massively after that (the aliens turn their victims into zombies).
• Star Shards Chronicles: In Thief of Souls, the eponymous soul-eater begins the book immobilized on a cliff face. In the prologue, he's unsealed by an earthquake.
• Star Trek Novel 'Verse sees this happen several times:
  • There's the Dithparu (essentially evil spirits), who are trapped by magnetic fields in an Ancient Tomb, Malkus the Mighty, an immortal tyrant whose consciousness was sealed in a box, and The Eight, who got loose in the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch, setting up a Sequel Hook.
  • The TOS novel "Demons" featured a textbook example left behind by Neglectful Precursors: Puppeteer Parasite Energy Beings that feed off violence and sadism trapped in beautifully crafted Schmuck Bait containers. When some are brought back to Vulcan for study, Demonic Possession and mass slaughter ensues.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The insane Eldritch Abomination Abeloth was sealed in a massive cluster of black holes, with a gravity-generating space station acting as a lock keeping her trapped there and unable to influence things on the physical place, and the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force doing an Enemy Mine every few thousand years to renew the lock whenever it started to break. This took the heroes over half a century to break; Anakin Skywalker killed the locksmiths, later protagonists broke the space station (they thought it was just a superweapon and didn't want it falling into the wrong hands), and then they used the black hole cluster where the ethereal monster was kept as a fortress. It still managed to keep her for about a decade.
  • Galaxy of Fear: Four hundred years before the books' events, Ithorians tinkered with gene splicing and created something horrible. It took the Jedi to contain it. The Ithorians' Actual Pacifist beliefs make them averse to driving anything to extinction, so they isolated a sample and buried it in a tunnel in an asteroid. It was harmless sealed in a pod in the vacuum of space. Unfortunately they didn't bother with keeping a guard on it, so when someone Dug Too Deep...
  • The Thrawn Trilogy:
    • The insane clone Dark Jedi Master Joruus C'baoth more or less sealed himself, ending up on the planet that The Emperor used as a personal museum/storehouse. C'baoth had no interest in the storehouse facility even after killing its guardian, and inhabitants of the planet had roughly feudal levels of technology. So he stayed there and ruled them, using his raw Force abilities and sort of mass mind-control to keep them cowed and obedient. Then Grand Admiral Thrawn showed up and recruited C'baoth with promises of new Force-sensitives to train and mold, both because C'baoth's Battle Meditation could allow great synchronization and increased efficiency in the fleet, and because he wanted the cloning technology in the facility. Thrawn's second in command really did not want to rely at all on someone so unreliable, but he was overruled. C'baoth's inevitable attempt at seizing power involved taking control of the entire Imperial fleet; when Thrawn talked him down and sent him back to that planet, C'baoth's next plan started with brainwashing an officer to the point where he had no will or mind anymore and died shortly after being taken away from the insane Master.
    • An insane Bpfasshi Dark Jedi had been killed by a member of Yoda's species on Dagobah, and his essence infused the tree and cave where Luke had his pivotal vision during The Empire Strikes Back.
  • Jedi Academy Trilogy: It turns out that the base on Yavin IV housed the essence of the ancient Dark Jedi Exar Kun. About 4,000 years before A New Hope Kun's body was destroyed and his spirit trapped by ancient Jedi who had banded together against him in the network of temples Kun forced the Massassi to build for him. Unable to manipulate non-Force sensitives, the presence of Force sensitives whose strength was increasing allowed him to directly influence some of the students and briefly incapacitate Luke Skywalker.
• Stephen King:
  • "The Crate", later adapted as one of the segments of Creepshow, has a crate containing a terrible monster be opened by a janitor.
  • Duma Key: The villain, Perse, is an evil doll/creature who is sealed in a keg which was dropped down a well. Unfortunately, the keg had been leaking for some time and by the time the main character finds it, it's almost empty. He eventually ends up sealing Perse in a flashlight filled with water (her weakness) and eventually creates a tight, silver container to hold that it and throws it into a lake.
• Tempest (2011): Five hundred years ago, the mermaid Cecily imprisoned Tiamat in a hole at the bottom of the Marianas Trench that she closed off with molten metal. It took her until recently to break free.
• Thirsty: Subverted. A group of vampires are trying to free the Sealed Evil, the god of vampires, and one character pretends to be trying to kill the vampire god in order to protect humanity, but in reality is assisting the god in committing suicide.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Silmarillion ends with the sealing of Evil Overlord Morgoth in the void beyond the boundaries of the world. He never escapes, though it is implied that Sauron was trying to find some way to release him during the Second Age.
  • Morgoth also spends 3,000 years in a can as punishment by the Valar. Eventually, because Good Cannot Comprehend Evil, they let him out for good behaviour, thinking he's repented. He hasn't.
  • Tolkien's Unfinished Tales mentions a battle called Dagor Dagorath (the Battle of Battles) that will take place at the end of time, in which Morgoth will be set free and finally be defeated by Túrin Turambar.
  • When Ar-Pharazôn, the last King of Numenor, and his army attacked Valinor, they were imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten, somewhere in Valinor, until Dagor Dagorath.
  • From The Lord of the Rings, the Balrog of Moria, which hid there following Morgoth's defeat and was later unleashed when the Dwarves Dug Too Deep.
  • The One Ring itself is Sealed Evil In A Can, as it has Sauron's malice forged within it. Anyone who tries to use the Ring's power will be corrupted by it.
• The Traveler's Gate: The Hanging Trees of Ragnarus seal the Incarnations of the Territories, preventing them from rampaging across the world. The seal is maintained by feeding the trees nine sacrifices per year, and it's been weakening for the past quarter-century because the King was forced to seal a tenth Incarnation into a prison built for nine.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Brothers of the Snake: The Requisite Royal Regalia were keeping a Chaos force in check. When they were removed for a coronation, Weather Dissonance broke out, to be followed by more serious Chaos monstrosities, and an Inquisitor and a squad of space marines had to return the regalia to stop it.
  • Horus Heresy: In Descent of Angels, Lion (with Luther's help) unites Caliban to exterminate its horrific monsters, despite warnings that this might ruin Caliban. In Mike Lee's Fallen Angels, it is revealed that the monsters stemmed from Chaos taint, and so kept the people untainted, since they would avoid the monsters; killing them unleashed the taint.
• Wars of the Realm: An interesting example of the evil being sealed on-screen and never being released during the story. In Rise of the Fallen, the Great Purge ends with only four angels and four demons surviving the final battle. The four demons are chained at the bottom of the Euphrates River, to be released during the last judgment (based on the events described in Revelation 9:13-15 in The Bible).
• The Wheel of Time:
  • The Dark One was sealed away by the Creator at the beginning, in a pocket of reality completely separate from the rest of the world. In the Age of Legends, humanity accidentally breached this prison and uneashed the Dark One. After beating him back, they managed to patch the hole and seal his 13 highest-ranking disciples along with him. By the time the series proper takes place, the Dark One is eroding the makeshift seal and his lieutenants, who weren't sealed as deeply, are being freed to pave the way for his return. It's generally accepted that, as the God of Evil, destroying the Dark One isn't possible, hence the need to seal him. This turns out to be not quite correct. The Dark One can be destroyed, but it's a really bad idea, because without the Dark One tempting people to do evil, there would be no free will. The Dark One even says that he would consider being destroyed Worth It for the Phyrric Victory the world would endure.
  • Stasis Boxes fit this trope when used for preserving the Gholams, not-quite-undead super assassins from the War of Power, beyond time and space.
  • Mierin's experiment in the Age of Legends let the Dark One out in the first place. Even better because back then, nobody knew the Dark One existed, and her experiment was intended to tap a greater source of magical power able to be used by men and women (as opposed to the separate halfs of the one power). She later became Lanfear, one of the Forsaken, the most powerful servants of the dark one, though judging by a bit of Aiel ancestral memory that is tapped into, she was not evil to begin with, ie at the time of her experiment (as part of a team).
  • Mordeth/Mashadar is/are unable to leave Shadar Logoth after the fall of Aridhol (why is never really explained, but perhaps it was sealed intentionally). Mat Cauthon (or Padan Fain, or both) release it into the world at large after Mat removes the dagger. The can later is completely obliterated while cleansing sai'din.
• "With Friends Like These..." by Alan Dean Foster: Humanity was sealed under a forcefield a long time ago because we scared the aliens that badly. When aliens later release the humans in exchange for helping them against a bigger menace, one of the aliens has the sense to worry, "What happens when we run out of enemies?".
• Who Censored Roger Rabbit?: It turns out that the titular murderer is a genie imprisoned in a Persian teapot that can only be released by a bonafide toon, who is sick of taking orders from self-centered people and starts deliberately spoiling the toons' wishes, until finally he just flat-out starts murdering them.
• The Wizard Of Forth Street: The Dark Ones were sealed with the accumulated Life Energy of a massive Heroic Sacrifice.
• World War Z: One day, in the early stages of the Zombie War, the entire country of North Korea simply disappeared — DIA spy satellites stopped picking up any activity or indeed signs of life within the Democratic People's Republic. The best bet is that the entire population relocated to massive underground bunkers. Nothing has been heard since, which means one of two things: either one of them was infected, or none of them were. In the former case, that means one of two things: either they controlled the outbreak, or they did not. If the didn't, then twenty-four million Zombies are waiting beneath the surface, trapped in the tunnel system, and North Korean architecture — well, it ain't all that good. If no-one was infected and/or they managed to control the outbreak, then twenty-four million fanatical, nuclear-armed fascists are waiting on one side of the Korean DMZ, and when they find out how weak the rest of humanity is...
• Young Wizards: In Deep Wizardry, the second novel, the seal on the Lone Power's can is weakening and needs to be recharged. However, what is sealed is only one aspect out of many that the Lone Power possesses, so It can be safely sealed away in one place while simultaneously being an active menace somewhere else. In A Wizard's Holiday, the protagonists have to, among other things, open the seal and let the Lone Power out.
• Zeus Is Dead uses this one quite literally. Apparently after the first Titan War, Zeus and his siblings sealed the nine most dangerous Titans in actual cans.
• Zones of Thought: In A Fire Upon the Deep, a cosmic menace called the Blight is woken by insufficiently paranoid humans.

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