Oubliettes and other Sealed Rooms in the Middle of Nowhere in Literature.
- Aladdin, in the Cave of Wonders, both in the original and the Disney version. Would have worked too if he didn't have a genie with him.
- In Animorphs, David is tricked into a Mode Lock as a rat both to remove him as a threat and because The Heart of the team believed it to be a better alternative than killing him. The process of mode locking was two hours cramped to be sure he couldn't change forms. This rather quickly and apparently becomes a Fate Worse than Death. The whole two hours, he's pleading, screaming, and threatening the "heroes" to free him through thought speak, now his only means of communication. To be completely sure he's out of the waynote , they have to maroon him on an island until his rat form dies. He's still screaming, and his thought speak can be heard by passing boats for years, haunting the island. But no one can do anything to help him, short of literal Deus ex Machina.
- In Bridge of Birds, Number Ten Ox relates the story of the Dragon's Pillow, a misplaced section of the Great Wall of China that ended up near his (entirely peaceful and interior) village. An Imperial soothsayer was bribed to have a poor peasant named Wu bricked up alive in the tower to serve as an eternal sentry. Unusually for the trope, the peasant's ghost was quite philosophic about his fate, and even helped pass on a vital clue for the protagonists to solve the mystery of the village's poisoned children, hundreds of years later. It's strongly implied that the whole thing was arranged by the King of Heaven.
- In The Canterville Ghost, the titular spectre was executed for murder by being chained up in a secret room of the castle with a plate of bread and a mug of water just out of his reach.
- Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. The narrator, in revenge for an insult, lures a drunken friend into the catacombs beneath his palace. With the promise of the titular cask of wine, he gets him to enter a niche in the wall, then chains him in place and bricks up the niche,
completely deaf toenjoying the pleas for mercy. - Crystal Rain starts with someone finally getting out of a sealed escape pod in interplanetary space; about as far in the middle of nowhere as there is.
- Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Room With No Doors.
- Duel on Syrtis, by Poul Anderson. A Hunting the Most Dangerous Game tale IN SPACE! ends with the Great White Hunter apparently killing the alien prey, but his spacesuit has been damaged so he takes a drug to immobilize his body and slow his metabolism until he's rescued. Turns out the alien is Not Quite Dead and drags the human to an isolated cave, then connects up some spare oxygen tanks so he'll live a very long time...
- Jack Vance's Dying Earth tales includes the Spell of Forlorn Encystment "which constricts the subject in a pore some 45 miles below the surface of the earth," and apparently keeps them alive indefinitely. Those few who are released are usually left irretrievably insane.
- In Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, it is revealed at the end of the fourth book that King Mendanbar, who no one has seen since the battle at the end of the third book and who Daystar ultimately rescues, has been stuck in the castle for 17-odd years inside a magical room of Zemenar's creation. He didn't need to eat but was most certainly conscious of time passing.
- A room, literally sealed, and literally in the middle of nowhere—the narrator in Dan Simmons' books Endymion and The Rise of Endymion is writing up his story while trapped in a box which is floating in space. Oh, and there's a "Schrodinger's Cat" mechanism, set to release poison gas into the chamber at a random moment.
- The Fablehaven series has the transdimensional backpack turned into this.
- The protagonist of Kevin O'Donnell's short story "Gift of Prometheus" literally ends up nowhere. He is trapped in a grey void by a malfunctioning time machine, with an agonizing wound, potentially for eternity.
- The Girl in the Box has the eponymous girl kidnapped and locked in a dark cellar for no apparent reason. The novel consists of her writing her story and pleas for help on an old typewriter in the cellar as she begins to run out of food and water. And we're not even given the benefit of a happy ending. The story ends with her final entry (in which she is still trapped) and the reader never learns what happens to her.
- In Gone Fishing by James H. Schmitz, the protagonist deduces that a harmless retired scientist has built a teleporter, and plans to learn his secret and then murder him. Then he is knocked out. When he wakes he finds that the scientist was onto him, and has kidnapped him and left him in a remote mountain cabin. He doesn't realize just how remote until he goes outside and sees the Alien Sky.
- Honoré de Balzac's "La Grande Breteche." A creepy variation on the theme of hiding your secret liaison in your clothes closet when your husband unexpectedly comes home. In this story, a nobleman comes to suspect his wife of hiding a man in her closet. Rather than insult his wife by opening the door and having a look for himself, the husband simply has the servants brick up the wall in front of the closet door.
- An Alternate Universe story by Harry Turtledove explores a situation where the first atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin rather than Hiroshima. Here, the Fuhrerbunker is well enough protected to just about survive the blast. But Adolf Hitler is trapped a long way underground, alone in a room damaged badly enough for him not to be able to open the door, surrounded by corpses and with Berlin above him being a blasted sea of rubble. with no way out, he ends up shooting himself...
- The entire cast of Chuck Palahniuk's book Haunted is trapped in a particularly dangerous version. And it's stated that they're not the first to have been trapped there either...
- Trapped yes, but the room is not all that dangerous (aside from the moldy upholstery). All the danger comes from the deranged psyches of the trapped individuals who convince themselves that when(if) they are rescued, they'll get more attention if they're in the worst possible situation. They proceed to torture themselves and destroy all of their food supplies so as to have the best story.
- Her Acres of Pastoral Playground by Mike Allen. The Sole Survivor of a Cosmic Horror that has swallowed the entire Earth has sealed himself and his farm off via a spell; but while time flows normally inside the protected area, outside he can hear his future self screaming mindlessly for all eternity as the spell will eventually fail.
- In Issola, Morrolan and Aliera are magically abducted by the Jenonine and chained up in a room with no doors or windows, that turns out to be on another world which the Jenonine are using to steal amorphia from theirs.
- In King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard, the protagonists find themselves locked in the treasure chamber, which is complete with a slowly-sealing door they don't manage to squeeze through. (Neither does the traitor who activates the door, who tries but gets out too late and gets crushed by it; this could make a trope by itself.) Fortunately, our heroes eventually find another way out.
- Played with in the Known Space story The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton. Gil is abducted by an Organ Theft gang and wakes up in an anonymous apartment (memory-form technology is used to extrude furniture from the walls when needed, so in a neutral state it's almost a White Void Room). Gil has arranged for a police psychic to read his mind at regular intervals to ensure he's OK, but without knowing where he is that's no help. Fortunately he's able to make an accurate guess as to his location, but with no visible clock he still has no idea how long he's got before the psychic checks on him.
- At the end of the The Milkweed Triptych, the sociopathic seer Gretel is imprisoned on a tiny wind-swept island off the Scottish coast, with her food being supplied once every six months.
- In the Nameless Detective novel Shackles, Nameless is kidnapped and transported to a remote cabin where he is shackled to the wall. He is left with food and water to keep him alive for a certain number of days, after which he will start to dehydrate and starve.
- In The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in order for the titular town to remain a Utopia, one child must be locked away in a dark basement room.
- In Matthew Reilly's Six Sacred Stones, Jack and Zoe were sealed in an ancient shrine by their supposed allies. 2 minutes later, they were out to save the day. How? Well, the crocodiles got in...
- Lloyd from The Stand is left in his jail cell and forgotten after The Virus kills everyone who remembers that he's there. Randall Flagg waits until he is half-crazy from solitude and forced to cannibalism before rescuing him.
- King also did this in a short story, called (appropriately) A Very Tight Place. The room? A steel-plated, overturned, and uncleaned port-a-toilet located on a long-abandoned construction site.
- Jorge Luis Borges's "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths" deconstructs this trope: The Prideful King of Babylon mocks the King of Arabia by forcing him to enter his Big Labyrinthine Building. The King of Arabia asks for God's help, and gets out. He tells the King of Babylon he knows a simpler, better version of this, and some day he will show it to him. Years later, The Arabian King wars on and dethrones the King of Babylon, then crosses the Arabian desert with him and abandons the King of Babylon there, where he died from thirst and hunger.
- This is what happens if a Vacuole splits off from the Pattern in The Wheel of Time — or at least, it is one of the possible outcomes.
