Golem / Literature

• The Alchemy War: Golems feature prominently, where the Dutch and their Brasswork Throne rules most of the world on account of their Magitek developments from alchemy, with their control over "clakkers" (their version of golem) being a prominent part of their success.
• Anpanman: The titular character is an artificial person made out of bread filled with bean paste (his head is made of bread, anyway... the rest of him is never explicitly explained).
• Appear in Ash: A Secret History.
• "Bandits in Your Grocer's Freezer": The market holds a meeting to brainstorm how to get rid of the bandits encamping in the freezer section. David recommends speaking to a rabbi to have a golem made, but Pete shoots it down. Then at the end Rabbi Levine arrives, after Pete already killed the bandits, with a golem riding in the passenger seat of his car.
• The second installment in The Bartimaeus Trilogy, aptly named The Eye of the Golem, features golems being used against the setting's Magocracy.
• Bazil Broketail: Bad guys make multiple fighting golems in the series, from material such as mud or steel.
• The third Blood Sword book has the Seven-in-one as the main boss to fight. This is a wooden statue that's initially slow and lumbering, but when killed it has a smaller statue inside. While each additional statue gets smaller and easier to kill, it's also increasingly quicker and deals progressively more damage. It takes seven kills to deal with this god-touched statue.
• The Changeling trilogy by Sean Williams features creatures referred to as "golems". They're Energy Beings.
• Chronicles of the Emerged World: Two large stone golems guard the shrine of Tarephen. Nihal must destroy the central letter on their foreheads in order to beat them down.
• Discworld: Golems follow the classic Jewish model closely — they're made of clay, they're animated by a shem in their heads, and they tend to have Yiddish names like Dorfl, Dibbuk and Shmata. They're Lost Technology of a sort, relics from ancient civilizations that have been repurposed by modern cultures as laborers, since golems have an innate need to serve a purpose. They can be Absurdly Dedicated Workers, too — one literally did nothing but stand in the dark and work a water pump for 240 years, while another is a messenger who has been waiting thousands of years for history to repeat so he can deliver a missive. Golems are very strong, immortal unless destroyed, can repair themselves with new clay and a kiln, originally could not speak (some carried around little chalkboards to communicate), and have glowing fiery eyes that some people find disconcerting. Narratively they serve as fantasy stand-ins for robots, complete with a version of the Three Laws of Robotics and suffering Fantastic Racism from humans who find them creepy or competition, but golems are usually nonthreatening, and at most will cause problems by following orders to the letter, which might be a mild form of rebellion. As of Feet of Clay, the golems are slowly, steadily and nonviolently emancipating themselves - one golem was declared a free citizen, who worked and saved until he could afford to buy and free another golem, then the two of them worked and saved to buy a third, and so on. Going Postal reveals there is a Golem Trust run by sympathetic humans who help the golems manage their finances, get hired as fairly-paid laborers, and locate others of their kind to emancipate.
• The Faerie Queene: Talus, the "yron page". No points for guessing his names inspiration, though unlike that one, Talus is man sized, though still capable of pushing giants off cliffs and beating down an entire castle with his Epic Flail.
• Golems are a recurring foe in various Fighting Fantasy books, and they come in a variety of different flavors too.
  • The most common of the bunch are rock golems (who sometimes gets referred to as Boulder Beasts), appearing in The Citadel of Chaos, The Forest of Doom, Crypt of the Sorcerer and several others. While they're strong due to being made of stone, they are however really slow, hence usually having around eight points in SKILL.
  • Caverns of the Snow Witch has the Ice Demon, a golem made of ice, who is responsible for the titular witch being corrupted into a villainess. The player might get to battle this golem, but it's an optional fight they can avoid.
  • Sorcery! series has wood golems created from tables and chairs, which can obey their creator to attack anything on sight. A witch in the first book summons one of these on the players, while the fourth have the player themselves creating an illusion of a wood golem to attack the Archmage of Mampang.
  • Crypt of the Sorcerer has a compulsory battle with a clay golem that can cause the player's weapons to be stuck into its body; failure to defeat the clay golem before getting stuck leads to the player being killed on the spot.
  • One of the various MacGuffin Guardian enemies in Legend of Zagor is a plant golem made of overgrown vegetation in the cursed castle's underground dungeon.
  • Masks of Mayhem has the Evil Sorceress Morgana trying to awaken an army of invincible Golems, and the player hero, the King of Arion, must prevent the awakening from even happening.
  • Bloodbones takes it to the extreme with the Treasure Golem, an animated pile of gold, silver and diamonds which comes to life and attack players in a cavern. Whatever happens, after the battle, DO NOT attempt to collect said treasure — you will turn into a pile of living treasure yourself if you do.
  • Night Dragon has the usual rock golems and other stronger, tougher golems made of granite and marble.
  • Knights of Doom has the strongest of the lot, an Iron Golem serving the forces of Chaos, which is a borderline Hopeless Boss Fight because of its extremely high skill and life stat. Thankfully the battle can be avoided with an item collected earlier in the adventure.
• The legend of the Golem is at the background of The Golem (Novel), although the golem that appears in the story is something much, much weirder.
• The Golem and the Jinni: Chava is a golem crafted in Poland and migrates to turn of the century New York where she befriends the djinn Ahmad.
• The Hellboy short story "Of Blood, Of Clay" by James A. Moore (published in Hellboy: Odder Jobs) features a golem created by Jewish refugees during World War II that is rampaging around modern Germany. Either it doesn't know that the Nazis were defeated decades ago, or it simply doesn't care.
• How to Sell a Haunted House: In the climax, the Big Bad causes the various dolls and puppets that make up the collection in the Haunted House of the book to come to life and combine into a living, screaming golem monster.
• Iron Council explores a magical discipline called "golemcrafting", wherein magicians channel power into anything that isn't living. Most of the Golems created are fairly standard (blade, flesh, metal, clay, wood), However the main character of Iron Council creates increasingly more fantastic golems some of the more memorable ones being: poison, light, dark, and time.
• Kiln People: The essential premise is that technology has advanced to the point of allowing the creation of golems, giving life to clay models holding copies of the minds of those they are modeled after.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In The Last Olympian, it's revealed that most of the statues in New York and quite a few elsewhere are actually golems built by Daedalus, requiring only a codephrase to turn them into an instant army.
• In the Prose Edda, to assist their champion Hrungnir in his appointed duel with Thor, the giants of Jotunheim form an artificial giant from clay and bring him to life by putting a mare's heart into his chest (as this is the largest heart they can find). Unfortunately, the titanic creature, which is called Mökkurkalfi, is also a coward, and is dispatched by Thor's servant Thjalfi with relative ease.
• In The Real Boy, Caleb discovers how to carve children out of wood from the wizard tree and magic them to life. When Oscar finds out, he thinks that his undiagnosed autism is because he's a golem. He's not, but the sick kids from Asteri are. Caleb sold over fifty golem children to rich parents, with the pitch that they would never get sick and never suffer. Unfortunately, the spells he used start to wear off and conflict with each other, causing the children to suffer a number of bizarre ailments, including blindness and deafness, the inability to eat, and Identity Amnesia. Oscar treats the children with a concoction that will help the spells work better with each other, but he doesn't know if it will eventually stop working.
• The Reluctant King: A tale narrated by Jorian features a king in dire need of a general being gifted a Golem general by a witch who wants to be acknowledged for her powers. Then the other army shows up with a Golem general, but both are such huge perfectionists that they stop their armies every five steps to make sure they're perfectly in order, and by the time they're about to engage in combat a sudden downpour melts the clay golems.
• In the Cory Doctorow story "Return to Pleasure Island", golems (although the actual word is never used) are a sentient race of clay giants who reproduce by breaking off parts of themselves, usually the thumb, that then grow. A right thumb child is strong, even for a golem. A left thumb child is smarter. A child of the tongue is... a mistake.
• Slayers: Zelgadis is considered part-golem due to a curse. This is a bit odd, since Naga (the Serpent) makes and discards golems with impunity. They are occasionally implied to have free will to a degree (one of them even falls in love with the magical construct it was supposed to be fighting), which only increases the oddness.
• The Sorcerer King of Destruction and the Golem of the Barbarian Queen: Golems are regularly used in-universe as weapons of warfare or guardians, and they typically come in two varieties: Heavy-Class Golems, which are massive stone giants, and Light-Class Golems, which resemble slender humanoids. The protagonist kicks off the story by creating a Light-Class Golem for a companion, and she quickly begins to display an unusual level of strength and durability for her class of golem.
• The Stormlight Archive: The thunderclasts are giant dog-like stone monsters, created by a Voidspren possessing part of the ground and just pulling itself out of the surrounding rock.
• Sweep: The Story of a Girl and her Monster: Nan's char, a palm-sized clump of soot that always stays warm, and also serves as her last momento of the Sweep, comes to life and saves her from being burned alive in a chimney. Nan deduces that the char is a golem made of soot, after reading about it in a bestiary she finds in the House of a Hundred Chimney's library.
• Tales of MU: One of the main characters is a golem named Two. She was created from clay that was transmuted into flesh, and is indistinguishable from a human except for the three runes on her forehead. Two was declared free when her creator died, except she was created with no desire other than to do as she's told... which led to some horrific abuses before she was befriended by the rest of the cast. Part of her Character Development has been to develop her own interests and desires.
• Tales of the Ketty Jay: Bess is a superhumanly strong golem made from a suit of armour. Originally Bess was an 11 year old, aristocrat girl who was murdered by her uncle Crake (a demonologist who had been possessed). Horrified by what he had done, Crake bound Bess's soul to the closest viable thing at hand, which was the suit of armour. Now Bess is little more than a toddler mentally and spends her days as the team muscle when not kept in storage. At the end of the series, it turns out that the ruler of the land has an army of similar but more powerful golems at his beck and call.
• There's Magic in Bread: Ruth the baker inadvertently builds a golem out of leftover bread and cookie dough, having shaped the dough into a humanoid form and baked it as a way to express her grief when her father is murdered at the hands of the violently anti-Semitic Polizia. She's shocked that the creature is alive (or at least animate), considering she's not a rabbi and the existence of golems is supposedly a folktale.
• Threadbare: The Living Toy protagonist is technically a golem.
• Way of the Tiger: One of your enemies is Everyman. This is the implacable golem bodyguard of the Usurper that's been sent to hunt you down. Everyman requires being killed 100 times to finally be put down.
• Whateley Universe:
  • The superpowered Charmer has several already-prepared charms she carries with her; one is a 'golem charm' that she has apparently used in self-defense class.
  • Eldritch (Caitlin Bardue, formerly Erik Mahren) is a former member of the academy's weapon range crew turned into something called an 'artificer', essentially a (still largely human-looking) golem with the potential to become the perfect magic-item crafting Emotionless Girl slave for whoever manages to get the proper tattoos on her body. Much of her story revolves around either stopping someone who was trying to enslave her, or trying to figure out how to do the job herself and thereby retain her independence, which no other Artificer had ever done. She managed to do it just before Christmas Break for 2006 (in-story); how she did it was a mystery until the story "Ashes and Steel" was published in 2016.
• The Wheel of Time has the gholam, essentially vampiric T-1000s with invulnerability to magic and pretty much everything else. Yeah. They unnerved the Dark Side so much that only six were ever made, and only one is known to still exist in the present day.
• The Wolfhound Empire novels by Peter Higgins has the mudjhik. The stories are set in a fantasy analogue to the early Soviet Union, where native supernatural beings are on the wane as dead "Angels" — alien humanoids that are 1000 feet tall and made of living stone — crash to earth. It was the influence of these Angels that started the nation, the Vlast, and the Angels's stone flesh is a versatile material. Among the usage, is the creation of the mudjhik. These are large statues often the color of rust and clotted blood with the spine and brain of an animal implanted inside. Mudhjik's are untiring, as strong as giants and far more damage resistant - needing at least a mortar shell to injure. To control a mudhjik, a handler with a head implant of angel flesh establishes a telepathic rapport with its animal brain.
• Xanth: Golems are made from various things. They have different talents, and can become real. Grundy Golem is rude and Silicia can alter a bit of reality. Also Grundy had a child, Surprise.

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