Follow TV Tropes

Following

Super Scream / Literature

Go To


  • The Howlers from Animorphs have a scream that plays havoc with their prey's nervous systems (the more so the more complex the nervous system).
  • Chrysalis (RinoZ): Various monsters, including Tiny the ape, can produce a shout/scream powerful enough to rattle brains. Anthony even meets a carnivorous flower that can do it.
  • In The Court Of The Air, warrior-grade steammen can modulate their voices to shatter glass, ceramic, or even rock. They don't advertise this ability, preferring to retain it as a surprise attack.
  • The Dinosaur Lords: The favoured mount of many dinosaur knights is a hadrosaurus, or a duck-bill, largely because it can generate a powerful infrasound "scream", which can be downright crippling to people and beasts caught in the blast.
  • Discworld's Agnes Nitt, AKA Perdita X Dream. She once threatened a man of screaming so hard that his brains will came out of his nose. And yes, she can do that.
  • In Gelsomino in the Land of Liars by Gianni Rodari, the main character has a voice that makes fruit fall off trees, breaks windows etc. Eventually he learns to control it somewhat, since after the book's events he becomes an opera singer.
  • The Mandrakes of mythology and, among others, Harry Potter, have screams of instant death.
  • Journey to Chaos: Eric describes Retis' voice as a physical thing that can knock people over.
  • In The King of Katoren, the birds populating the city of Decibel have had this ability for so long that the city's inhabitants have gotten used to it by constantly using earplugs and shielding their walls and windows; Stach, the main character, notes that due to the ensuing loss of interpersonal communication across the years, the two people in town who actually more thoroughly studied the problem have never been able to share their plans and combine them into the actual solution to the problem.
  • Musician of the Forest, Cranberry, has sound control as her magic in Magical Girl Raising Project. She mostly uses it for super hearing and vocal projection, but weaponizes it in her fight against Swim Swim.
  • Magnus has the 'Sword of the Lord', a sonic scream powerful enough to trigger earthquakes.
  • Manifestation: A character in one key scene has the ability to generate sonic pulses with his voice.
  • In Catherine Webb's book Mirror Dreams, Laenan Kite weaves a spell into his scream, manipulating the pressure of the air so that glass shatters and the guards are killed.
  • In the Percy Jackson and the Olympians novel Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth Pan gives his panic-causing cry to Grover, who uses it to help win the battle.
  • In The Trials of Apollo series, this is one of the few cases of the otherwise mortal Apollo getting his power back, screaming so loud at Commodus he is evaporated.
  • In the Rainbow Magic series, Jack Frost does this by accident with the magical megaphone in Keira the Film/Movie Star Fairy's book. The day is saved with earplugs for everyone, including the goblins.
  • The Great Shout in The Riddle Master Trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip can start avalanches (if you're not careful), knock down towers, and complete the year's nut harvest remarkably quickly if you do it right. Everybody is a potential Shouter — you just have to be sufficiently moved. Among the famous Shouts is that vented by Queen Cyone of An on her wedding day. Neither she nor the King ever told anybody just what inspired it.
  • Zhang Fei in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms during his stand at Chang Ban bridge, shouted so loudly it halts the advance of Cao Cao's army. Also rumoredly, one peon DIES at the mere shout of it.
  • In The Runelords books the big bad Raj Ahtan gets enough voice augments that he goes from having a compelling voice to a sonic weapon capable of bringing down castle walls.
  • In The Samurai’s Wife, the victim is killed by a shout so violent that it shatters his bones and ruptures his organs. Detective Sano Ichiro identifies it as a weaponized kiai from a second-hand description of the body, though the other investigators dismiss the idea as superstitious nonsense until they witness its power firsthand.
  • Helva, The Ship Who... Sang is as a shellperson unable to breathe or open her mouth, but learned how to develop a Beautiful Singing Voice between vocal control and speakers. These can be quite loud but aren't usually on the level of a weapon - in Dramatic Mission she tries shouting at a passenger to keep her from murdering someone, and only manages to stagger her. However, when she's kidnapped in The Ship Who Dissembled and forced to perform, she pretends she wasn't given enough volume to sing properly and so is given more power. Starting low and quiet, she gets the kidnappers to lean close and subjects them to a Last Note Nightmare that, because of the drugs they were on accentuating the shock, actually kills some of them.
  • In The Paths of the Perambulator, the fifth Spellsinger book, Jon-Tom is briefly turned into a howler monkey. He's understandably pretty irritated by this, so when he starts trying to sing a counterspell, his voice, augmented by his magic and his anger, comes out as a hurricane-force sonic blast that knocks down trees for a hundred yards in front of him.
  • The "divine wind" ability of Celestial dragons in the Temeraire series, which is demonstrated to be powerful enough to cause a mini-tsunami in the case of skilled users. That can sink an entire fleet of warships in one shot. Described as "not so much sound as force" the first time it occurs onstage.
  • In James H. Schmitz's The Witches of Karres, the Leewit (do not call her just "Leewit") can whistle at, and thereby break, almost anything. Glass, crystal, eardrums...


Top