Blood From The Mouth / Literature

• This is very common in Chinese literature, where characters are described as expelling blood through the mouth due to not only injuries or disease but also anger, sorrow, and annoyance.
  • After repeatedly being thwarted by the genius strategist Zhuge Liang in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zhou Yu expires from coughing up blood in rage.
• Amoridere:
  • From the Madgie, what did you do? series, we have this with Toki, in the 26th story, and she was continuous bleeding all throughout that story when said bleeding should have killed her or should have stopped. However, in this case, the fact that the bleeding didn't stop implied that she is Dead All Along.
  • This trope is played for silliness, as can be read in this poem, titled Blood Running From the Mouth, where observers are wondering why the person in question (noted to be angry) is bleeding from the mouth and isn't injured (i.e no broken teeth or internal wounds) or possessed.
  • However, in an unrelated poem titled, Beishang, this is played straight with the titular Delicate and Sickly girl as a precoming to her death of terminal illness (the which is implied to have been brought on/worsened by despair). In, another poem, Visceral Needs, it is unclear if this is literal or metaphorical, as the titular's feelings causes her to taste blood in her mouth and then it goes onto note how might as well be frothing it or bleeding to death, which leaves the question as to whether or not she's really bleeding or if she feels like she is. One could assume it to be the latter.
  • This happens to a weakened (later on dying) Nezumi in chapter 14 of Broken Gate, as she's sacrificing her strength and sorcery to keep the titular gate sealed as long as she can. As one may expect, it's taking a massive toll on her.
• In The Amulet, this is the ultimate fate of Dean after his wife feeds him baby food laced with lye.
• Spider, near the end of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, justified in that his tongue had been ripped out by the Lady Of Birds.
• Ben Snow: When Ben eventually meets the Dangerous Deserter he has been hunting in "Snow in Yucatan", he notes that he does not look well and is discreetly coughing up blood. This is actually a symptom of radiation poisoning he contracted from the 'medal' Professor Irreel gave him, which contains a sliver of radium. This kills him not long after Ben arrives.
• Another Star Wars example comes from Blade Squadron. After his starfighter takes severe damage, Commander Adon Fox tastes blood in his mouth from internal injuries he has suffered.
• The Spencer Dunmore novel Bomb Run is about the crew of an RAF Lancaster in WWII. One of the gunners is injured by flak and when the others attempt to contact him he tries to speak 'but his mouth was full of blood'.
• A dead man in A Brother's Price is found to have blood clotted in his nose and mouth. His tongue was cut out, but someone botched it and he either bled to death or choked on his own blood.
• In The Chronicles of Amber, Eric coughs up blood just before he dies due to multiple chest wounds.
• City of No End: In the final battle of book 1, Ywain dies this way when he is shot through the chest.
• In Dark Lord—The Rise of Darth Vader, after falling from a high position, Roan Shryne coughs blood after he "ruptured a vital organ from the fall."
• Played with in Darkness Visible - when putting his brain under extreme stress, Lewis bleeds from the nose and the eyes, but not actually from the mouth. The sense of this being a Bad Thing remains the same.
• In Dave Barry Slept Here, the Five Token Bands who fought World War II in movies "would learn, despite their differing backgrounds, how to trickle syrup from the corners of their mouths to indicate that they had been wounded. In the actual war, of course, real blood was used."
• A strange subversion happened in a Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel: Fitz smokes thirty a day, so it's no real surprise when he suddenly starts coughing up blood for no reason in particular. The weird thing is that it's never brought up again and whatever was the matter with him apparently clears itself up between books.
• In the novel Gone with the Wind, Scarlett is relieved when the injured Ashley does not have this, because she frequently saw this while she was a nurse during the Civil War and came to know it as a harbinger of death.
• This is one effect of the fictional disease Chimera in the novel Gravity by Tess Garritsen.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Ron is said to have blood trickling from his mouth and giggling uncontrollably after a Death Eater hits him with a strange curse that significantly reduces his cognitive abilities in the short run.
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry is described as wiping a trickle of blood from Dumbledore's mouth after the latter is hit with a Killing Curse and blasted off the Astronomy Tower.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the death of Severus Snape is preceded by both blood and the silver fluid of a memory bubbling out of his mouth.
• Homage to Catalonia: Unsurprisingly happens to Orwell himself when he's shot in the throat by a sniper.
• In The House of Night series, if a fledgling vampyre is rejecting the Change, they will start coughing up blood, then they will die.
• The Hunger Games:
  • Subverted by President Snow in that it's neither overt nor a sign of his impeding death. His mouth is constantly bleeding as a side effect of the numerous poisons he's had to ingest while inducing the poisoning of political rivals (antidotes having only been able to do so much). It tends not to seep out, but it smells so strongly that he constantly wears the genetically modified roses in order to cover it up. When he's first revealed to be bleeding from his mouth, Katniss only realizes it when he's close enough for her to smell it, and he's nowhere near death at the time. Instead, the blood is used for symbolism of his crimes and his attempts to cover them up. Played straight later, when he starts coughing up visible blood toward the end of the series and dies shortly afterward.
  • The first tribute Katniss sees die suddenly sprays blood onto her face while fighting with her over supplies, due to a sudden and terminal case of throwing-knife-in-back. Katniss herself narrowly avoids succumbing to the malady a few seconds later.
• Jem in The Infernal Devices due to his 'illness' coughs up blood when weak.
• In Keith Roberts' short story "Monkey and Pru and Sal", the title characters are mentally-retarded (and possibly deformed) human scavengers in a post-nuclear holocaust landscape. When Monkey goes off foraging alone he gets too close to a contaminated city, and a short time after his return he doubles up in agony and starts coughing up blood. It's not the radiation sickness that kills him, though: it's Pru and Sal, who no longer recognize his contorted, bloody face and beat him to death. On balance, this is probably more merciful.
• Happens to First Mate Cox in Nation after he takes an axe to the chest, accompanied by a Slasher Smile and sharks.
• Subverted in 9 Dragons. Detective Harry Bosch notices that the blood on John Li's mouth was smeared, not just coughed up. He figures out that Li swallowed a bullet casing before he died.
• In Dan Abnett's Ravenor novels, Enuncia is so horrifically chaos-warped that using it often causes bleeding at the mouth.
  • In Bequin, Enuncia is used to test Beta — she doesn't bleed, being a pariah, but someone who listens has a nosebleed.
• The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong:
  • Liu Qingge coughs up blood during his qi deviation, surviving what would have been his death in the original Proud Immortal Demon Way with Shen Qingqiu's help. He coughs up blood afterwards too, having jostled his badly injured internal organs by sitting up too abruptly.
  • Shen Qingqiu spits out blood after self-detonating his golden core, dying moments later.
  • After having extremely violent sex with Luo Binghe at Maigu Ridge and taking his demonic qi into himself to save him from Xin Mo, Shen Qingqiu coughs up blood, frightening them both. He survives through the System's interference.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, blood constantly seeps from the mouth and eyes of lesser Shade, a sign of one that was only turned recently.
• Subverted in one Shadowrun short story: after the main character gets shot in the back, on of the other members of his gang tells him, using Ye Olde Butchered English since they're the Ancients, that he's bleeding from the mouth and therefore going to die soon. The main character tells him with annoyance that no, he's just fine because he was wearing body armor. He's bleeding because he tripped when he was shot and cut his lip on his teeth.
• The Song of Roland has the titular character blow a horn so hard he gives himself an aneurysm. A stream of blood flies out through the horn, and his brains start leaking from his ears. Roland wanders around a bit more, pays his respects to his fallen, climbs a hill, tries to destroy his sword, fails and destroys a very large rock instead, kills one more stray bad guy by bashing him with the horn, and symbolically faces the land yet to be conquered before the cranial hemorrhaging and displaced brains catch up with him.
• Survivor Dogs: Right before he dies of radiation poisoning, Fiery coughs up blood.
• In There Is a Happy Land by Keith Waterhouse, the unidentified narrator finds Marian's body in this condition. It's implied that she had an extremely brutal and horrifying death, but the very young narrator doesn't realise this.
• Happens to Corrie in The Tomorrow Series when she gets shot.
• Waltharius: Ekivrid gets his lung pierced by Walther's javelin and "spits out a stream of blood" before he dies.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Ghostmaker, when the Ghosts run across a particularly bad patch of Chaos, they start bleeding at the mouth.
  • Also used straight in the same novel, when a wounded trooper dies while Gaunt is calling for a medic.
  • In Sabbat Martyr, while Kolea is lugging Mkvenner to the Saint, Mkvenner's coughs splatter blood. Justified because he suffed from severe internal damage.
  • And Rawne coughs up some when a Chaos sorcerer is trying to control him.
  • In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Brothers of the Snake, the seriousness of Inquisitor Mabuse's injuries shown by having him bleed at the mouth, though he lives long enough to provide the Marines with evidence that they were working for him.
  • In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novel The Warriors of Ultramar, the Blood Magic used by the Mortifactors causes Blood From the Mouth for a seer — revolting the Ultramarines who witness it.
  • In Dead Sky Black Sun, Leonid coughs up blood. While he fights on, it is not much later when he persuades Uriel to leave him, because he will only slow them and die.
  • In William King's Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf novel Wolfblade, the invasion of the house begins with The Mole shooting a guard, who bleeds from the mouth.
  • In Lee Lightner's Sons of Fenris, when Jeremiah fights Cadmus, blood from Cadmus's mouth is the sign that he got in a telling blow — though he is actually killed by the next blow.
  • In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 Horus Heresy novel Legion, questioning a wounded Nurthene ends when he bleeds from the mouth and dies.
  • In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000 novel Storm of Iron, the Chaos sorcerer Kelmaur bleeds from not just the mouth but from every orifice in his head when his scrying leads to a psychic attack.
  • In James Swallow's Warhammer 40,000 Blood Angels novel Red Fury, Corvus dies with blood forming a pink froth at his mouth — his throat had been cut.
  • In James Swallow's Warhammer 40,000 novel Faith & Fire, when Vaun is hit with a psycannon, he coughs a red mist.
• Warrior Cats: Blood from a character's mouth is nearly as bad of news as the sentence "Their eyes closed, and their breathing became quick and shallow."
  • Hawkfrost coughs up clots of blood shortly before he dies at the end of Sunset.
  • Tigerstar at the end of the Rise of Scourge manga.
  • Non-fatal example: At one point in Forest of Secrets, Graystripe has blood bubbling from his mouth.
  • After he is hit by a car, blood trickles out of Whitethroat's mouth as he tries to speak.
  • In Moonrise a doomed Tribe cat has blood coming out of its mouth after being slammed against a wall.
  • Snowfur, when she's hit by a car.
  • In the short story "The Clans Decide", blood comes out of an injured she-cat's mouth as she tries to speak. She gets better, but she is near death at this point.
  • Several characters (such as Badgerpaw) will have a drop of blood run from the corner of their lip when they're dying but have time for some final words.
  • Cats use the term "redcough" to refer to this phenomenon (in contrast to, for example, "greencough", which is pneumonia).
• Phase, in "Ayla and the Grinch", in the Whateley Universe. After she tries to stop a demon who wants to force its way into their world, she's so badly injured she's bleeding from her mouth, nose, and eye. And elsewhere. Lots of elsewhere. It turns out she was dying from her injuries, but she gets saved in the nick of time by a mutant healer.
• Where the Red Fern Grows: Blood bubbles from Rubin's mouth right before he dies after falling on his own axe.
• In Andre Norton's The Zero Stone, Vondar has blood on his mouth before Jern starts to flee the fight.

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