- Visser Three in Animorphs had one of these several times a book."You Have Failed Me!!!" [body parts begin flying off]
- In The Book of the Dun Cow, John Wesley Weasel goes on a rampage when his friend the Wee Widow Mouse is killed by a Basilisk, killing hundreds of them even after heavy injuries and single-handedly turning the battle around in favor of the good guys.
- One Chicken Soup for the Soul story has a section where, when the girl tells her abusive boyfriend that their relationship is over, he's described as having "went psycho" and pushing her to the ground and kicking her several times. Nobody comes to help her. The next day, she discovers an eight-inch bruise on her leg.
- In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The Phoenix on the Sword", a Magical Eye attack by a sorcerously-summoned demon arouses this in Conan."But the horror that paralyzed and destroyed Ascalante roused in the Cimmerian a frenzied fury akin to madness."
- The Chronicles Of Alice: Hatcher flies into these of these often. That mixed with his preferred weapon it's how he got his name.
- Darkest Powers: Although Derek keeps his cool when he's the one in danger of being seriously hurt, possibly tortured, or killed, the same does not hold true when other people are at risk. Being a werewolf, Derek's rational mind will shut down and give way to pure "protect my pack" instinct when the tiny number of people he actually cares about are in danger. At least one person is already spending the rest of his life regretting having threatened Derek's brother.
- Deepgate Codex: Carnival is dangerous enough at the best of times, but when she gets sick of something she goes into god mode, at which point not even the laws of physics can stop her single-handedly slaughtering half an army using a regular everyday handheld gardening fork.
- Commander Vimes in the Discworld novels has occasional moments of unstoppable rage, most notably when fighting the dwarfs in Thud!, where "the Beast" that takes over at such moments is augmented by an evil psychic force. Being Samuel Vimes of the Night Watch, his sheer inner stubbornness to be a good guy and not let chaos and lawlessness win has created an inner Watchman in his psyche, to keep the Beast in check."You misunderstand me. I am not here to keep the darkness out. I am here to keep it in."note .
- In Dora Wilk Series, whenever Braga's worse side takes better of her, she falls into this, ruining everything around her within minutes.
- Drenai saga:
- Rek from Legend suffers from explicitly named berserker rage in combat to a degree that even makes him immune to usually game-breaking Psychic Powers.
- Decado II has blacked out and killed everything in sight when put under severe stress.
- The Dresden Files: Harry Dresden tends to cause a lot of property damage when he's pissed off, and has, at various points: killed an exponentially-more-skilled-and-experienced wizard, Justin DuMorne; redirected a lightning bolt at a demon that was chasing him; thrown a werewolf all the way through two buildings; burned down a building containing hundreds of vampires because they grabbed his girlfriend (despite having been drugged and had a large chunk of his powers stolen); brought out all the ghosts under the building at once, embodying them to take their revenge, and collapsing it; killed several incredibly powerful demon-possessed psychos; shredded a mob of vampires with an antipersonnel mine; blasted a huge torrent of fire straight into the literal heart of the Winter Court of the Sidhe... well, you get the idea.
- And all that pales in comparison to Ebenezar McCoy, who in a fit of rage over a threat to someone he cares about, yanks a old Soviet satellite out of orbit and drops it on a vampire nobleman's estate just to make a point. Or later, when defending his family and friends simply rips the life out of dozens of people. No fire, no explosions, he just points at them and they die. And yet later in the series, when he thinks (not without reason) that his grandson is under the thrall of an incubus, he goes berserk and flies onto the scene riding what Harry describes as a "baby mountain," before beating the snot out of Harry to make him try and see reason.
- This trope is an inherited characteristic of the Viking-descended Barnikel lineage in Edward Rutherfurd's multi-generation historical novels. Do not anger a member of this family, whether it's by threatening to expose their role in La Résistance or abusing a puppy in front of a 15-year-old Barnikel boy.
- In The Faerie Queene, Arthur reacts to his foot and hip getting stabbed by losing all composure and fighting off two opponents with incredible speed. The narrator even compares him to a raging bull or a starving lion desperate for food. The two knights can barely block all of his blows and they quickly fall to Arthur's fury.
- Mrs. Weasley shows a bit of this in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with her famous line "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" followed by the death of a certain loyal female Death Eater. That proves never to mess with one of Mrs. Weasley's children. (This includes Harry, who earlier in the series she outright declared was her own son in all but blood.)
- Hagrid may be a Gentle Giant, but if you do manage to get him into a real temper you'll find out that he's partially immune to spell damage and has more than enough strength to take down five armed attackers with his bare hands as he does in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
- For the villains' side, if you bring Voldemort bad news...he'll flip out and indiscriminately kill ANYONE who happens to just be hanging around.
- Harry himself shows traits of this. Despite being a fairly decent person, he too has moments where he loses control of his temper. One good example would be after Bellatrix murders Sirius, where Harry briefly uses the Cruciatus Curse to bring her down.
- Sirius Black is another one, despite being innocent of the crimes he's accused of. One major example of his rage is when he slashed the Fat Lady's portrait because she refused to let him in without a password.
- Honor Harrington goes on several during the course of the novels, usually when someone she cares about is set upon by goons. Additionally, the entire Grayson Navy goes on one when Haven attacks Basilisk station again, as they believe that their most beloved Steadholder has been murdered by the Peeps. "Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units," it said, and White Haven could almost hear the clangor of clashing swords in its depths. "The order is — Lady Harrington, and no mercy!"note
- In Mission of Honor this is what Mike Henke has Baroness Medusa and her staff do to Admiral Crandall.
- Older Than Feudalism. After Patroclus' death in The Iliad, Achilles cuts a bloody path through the Trojan forces and doesn't stop for a couple more books. It's implied he was able to do this before, but now he's really mad. Actually, the whole epic is dedicated to 'menin', wrath. The opening line and invocation is:"Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Peleus' son, Achilles, that destructive wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of heroes..."
- Similarly, Agamemnon! Even the Big Bad Hector was told by the King of the Gods, Zeus, to stay away!"Up go, swift Iris, and declare this word unto Hector: So long as he shall see Agamemnon, shepherd of the host, raging amid the fore-most fighters, laying waste the ranks of men, so long let him hold back, and bid the rest of the host fight with the foe in the fierce conflict."
- Oh, and if you think he might feel a shred of mercy for enemies begging for their lives...not if they (or their father in this case) threatened to kill his younger brother, Menelaus. His reaction is a bit...extreme."He spake, and thrust Peisander from his chariot to the ground, smiting him with his spear upon the breast, and backward was he hurled upon the earth. But Hippolochus leapt down, and him he slew upon the ground, and shearing off his arms with the sword, and striking off his head, sent him rolling, like a round stone, amid the throng."
- Similarly, Agamemnon! Even the Big Bad Hector was told by the King of the Gods, Zeus, to stay away!
- Daine, of The Immortals: "I thought you were dead. I lost my temper." By way of an explanation for having leveled the entire Imperial Palace with zombie dinosaur skeletons in book three.
- Keys to the Kingdom:
- Each of the villains in the series represents a deadly sin, with Sir Thursday representing wrath. He beats his subordinates for minor failures and deeply enjoys battle. At one point he kills children who have been enchanted into motionlessness just because they are not obeying his orders. They're not "following orders" BECAUSE THEY CAN'T MOVE. Thursday doesn't care.
- The part of the Will he guards, which symbolizes Justice, has anger issues as well, spitting in the face of someone during a parley.
- The rogue drow fighter/ranger Drizzt do'Urden from Salvatore's Forgotten Realms D&D novels is prone to falling into berserk rages when his self-defense reflex is triggered. Drizzt dubbed this mental state "the Hunter", as he becomes a merciless and calculating killing machine and virtually unstoppable.
- In the Lonely Werewolf Girl books, Kalix's unstoppable rage when she goes wolf has been the downfall of more than one werewolf hunter.
- In The Lord of the Rings Éomer holds himself together rather well when his uncle, King Théoden, is slain in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, but when he unexpectedly learns that his sister Éowyn died (or so he believes) too, he quite loses it. His troops take heed:"Then, without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: 'Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world's ending!' And with that the host began to move. But the Rohirrim sang no more. 'Death,' they cried with one voice loud and terrible, and, gathering speed like a great tide, their battle swept about their fallen king and passed, roaring away southwards."
- Also the Ents, considering how docile they are and how long they generally take to deliberate upon matters. Saruman's treachery invokes such a fury in them that Isengard and all its orcs could do nothing to stop the raging ents.
- In The Silmarillion, we have several characters succumbing to Unstoppable Rage, most notably Fëanor and Túrin.
- Magic by the Numbers: Sorcery can be used to incite this, as it's Mind Manipulation.
- A particularly extreme example of this is Icarium from Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen. Icarium, normally a gentle and creative fellow verging on pacifism, has a tendency to go into a berserker mode that's downright genocidal when provoked, usually followed by an inability to remember what just happened. In milder cases, this means he wakes up confused among the gutted bodies of whatever ferocious pack of creatures just attacked him. In a few more extreme cases, he woke up among the shattered ruins and dead citizens of entire civilizations, completely unaware of what had just transpired.
- In the Mr. Midshipman Hornblower story "The Spanish Galleys," Hornblower manages to capture one of the galleys with just a boat's crew. Partly this is because the galleys' effective crew (that is, those who aren't actually chained to the oars) is rather small, but even so it wouldn't have worked if Hornblower and his men weren't so enraged over the inhumane conditions the rowers are kept in.
- In The Mouse Watch, Bernie Skampersky becomes "far more animal than intelligent mouse" during the climactic fight, savagely attacking Big Bad Dr. Thornpaw when he admits that he killed her brother. It doesn't do any good, because Thornpaw is bigger and stronger than she is.
- Touchstone in the Old Kingdom series. In the first book, Sabriel is shot with an arrow and he runs very, very fast. Later, a Noodle Incident is mentioned in which a fake ambassador (a 2-meter-tall barbarian) tried to kill Sabriel with a toasting fork; Touchstone grabbed him and threw him down the table while roaring with rage. He then tried to throw the throne after him.
- The title character of the prequel Clariel also has this trait; apparently it's fairly common among the royal family, but sometimes turns up among the Abhorsens (like Clariel and her mother) and even the Clayr, owing to the fact that the three bloodlines often intermarry. However, while Touchstone usually has a pretty good lid on his berserker nature, generally only bringing it out deliberately when his loved ones are threatened, Clariel... doesn't. And it turns out that a berserker's naturally passionate, destructive nature also gives them a real affinity for Free Magic, which ultimately leads Clariel to become Chlorr of the Mask.
- Both Sam and Hailey in Only Revolutions.
- Orlando Furioso has the eponymous character get into this state when he finds out the girl he saved and protected has eloped with an enemy soldier. The next books are all about him ravaging all around, from tearing apart any living thing he encounters to defeating an army of mercenaries throwing boulders and trees at them. To get him back to normal, his allies have to literally get his sanity back from where it fled to (the Moon).
- Swedish writer Simona Ahrnstedt gives us many horrible scenes in her debut novel Överenskommelser, but the following is among the worst: You would think that after he had raped his (much younger) bride at their wedding night, the heinous villain Rosenschiöld would at least not be able to stoop any lower. But he obviously still had the nerve to go into a rage when he found out that his bride wasn't a virgin. Let's just say that poor Beatrice was lucky to survive that wedding night. And yeah, Rosenschiöld also kept taking out his anger on innocent prostitutes until he suddenly got ill and died at the brothel a couple of days afterwards.
- In The Pendragon Adventure, Saint Dane has a habit of confronting Bobby in order to smack him around for the hell of it. For the most part, though, he's just egging Bobby on as part of his Mind Screw technique. This changes in Rivers of Zadaa when Bobby — in the midst of being smacked around — stands up to Saint Dane and claims that the villain is getting desperate because he is losing the overall war. Saint Dane utterly snaps and proceeds to beat the living shit out of Bobby, to the point where Bobby spends a month in a hospital before he can walk again.
- Erik in The Phantom of the Opera is prone to these, especially when you hit his Berserk Button and ask him to remove his mask.
- The badgers in the Redwall series are prone to a "bloodwrath", in which they become unstoppable berserkers who are blind to all but their target.
- Occasionally, other creatures will go into a similar state as well, particularly Redwall Warriors if their loved ones are threatened.
- The Major from High Rhulain. Especially during his Heroic Sacrifice.
- Second Apocalypse: Cnaiur urs Skiotha, the barbarian berserker and serious lunatic, is very prone to flying into an unstoppable rage in battle, during which he rants challenges and Badass Boasts while slaying anyone foolhardy enough to get within sword reach. During one battle, he starts single-handedly slaughtering a detachment of Nansurian soldiers, to the point that he seems to temporarily become an avatar of the god of war.
- Seven Years Awesome Luck: The first time that Kester ever kills someone with magic is when he's just been kidnapped, and he levels the building in outrage.
- Shadow of the Conqueror:
- Daylen, when he finds out about a certain ship smuggling sex slaves. It doesn't end well for the captain.
- After Ahrek helps Daylen escape arrest, Lyrah's sheer outrage is a thing to behold, her entire body twitching and her eyes shaking with fury.
- Daylen tries his hardest to convince Ahrek and Lyrah to forget about trying to kill him and focus on stopping the Dawnists from destroying the city, but he might as well be trying to reason with the wave of an oncoming tsunami for all the results he gets.
- Lyrah, when she fights the Shade on Hamenday Island. The death of a number of Archknights there also makes it into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- The Andorians in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch:
- In one novel, Unity, protagonist Andorian Shar enters a state of Unstoppable Rage when battling a Kurlan-possessed woman aboard Deep Space Nine.
- In an earlier book, Twilight, he enters one while incapacitated by injury and so takes it out on the ground by slamming his fist against it repeatedly (causing himself further injury).
- Gregor and Ripred from The Underland Chronicles, as a result of being ragers.
- Whateley Universe: "Ragers", as they are called in-universe, are common enough that they actually classify them into three groups: Class One ragers are basically the equivalent of a person with Intermittent Explosive Disorder, and tend to forget to use their powers; Class Two ragers use their powers while raging, and can cause considerable damage; Class Three ragers actually grow more powerful the angrier they get (similar to the Hulk, except affecting all their powers), with their powers buffed higher and higher as they continue to rampage.
- Whateley Academy requires ragers and similarly dangerous students to wear warning armbands so that everyone knows not to antagonize them (the fact that some still do is an ongoing problem). At the time of the original stories, the best known class-3 rager on campus is Razorback, who has the appearance of a Velociraptor and communicates through sign language. While he is a nice guy most of the time, anything that sets him off is likely to result in a drawn-out fight, as he has both Super-Speed and a Healing Factor. For their combat finals, the teachers pitted him against Jimmy T.; the fighting went on until they were both too exhausted to continue, with the match being decided by a coin toss.
- In Wizard's First Rule, the first book of the Sword of Truth series, when Kahlan is told Richard has died, which he hasn't, she goes into a "blood rage", killing the men who had her held down against the ground and ready to be raped without breaking a sweat.
- She doesn't just kill them...
- The entire Hradani race of the Bahzell series. The race was originally more Elf like, being taller and having fox like characteristics along with a longer life than humans (at a cost at not being able to use magic as direct as humans). Then Wizards start experimenting with the Rage a few had. During the last war they were converted into an evil force of berserkers. Until the few with natural unstoppable rage were able to rebel. It's to the point that if you give yourself to the rage you're immune to nearly all magic. The main character nearly kills the only good wizard left on the planet when he hears the word "wizard," triggering his rage.
- Hradani didn't start with the Rage — it was forced into their species by dark wizards serving the evil pantheon of that world. Even twelve hundred years later, you wouldn't want to face one of them — Hradani come in two sizes: large and ginormous. Bahzel falls in the ginormous category himself — he's nearly eight feet tall, weighs nearly four hundred and fifty pounds, and he moves like a cat. And that's when he isn't using the Rage.
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