Not Quite Dead / Literature

• In Animorphs, after David leaves the barn, Jake sends Tobias to follow him. When Jake catches up, David says that he's killed Tobias, and Jake sees Tobias' mangled corpse. But as it turns out, that wasn't really Tobias, just an innocent red-tailed hawk that happened by. David had simply lost Tobias early in the evening, and the latter had spend a good couple hours trying to find him.
  • While the Helmacrons and the kids are inside Marco's body, he morphs into a cockroach. The Helmacrons shoot Marco's heart, rendering him ostensibly dead. But, as Cassie suddenly recalls, stopping a cockroach's heart doesn't kill it - they have a backup system.
  • Spoken word-for-word near the end of the final battle:
    Visser One: So. Still not dead.
    Jake: No, visser, not quite dead.
• Belle Praters Boy: When a bunch of kids are hanging out, Woodrow tells a story about the funeral of a family member he once attended. The woman had apparently died of a terminal disease, and the doctors believed her dead. When she was buried, her wedding ring (the nicest thing she owned) was on full display. Two of the funeral guests decided to steal her ring, and later that night dug up her grave. When they couldn't remove the ring from her finger, they chopped off her finger. Turns out, she wasn't dead but only in a deep sleep. When they dug her up they revived her, and when they cut off her finger she sprang up and screamed "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING TO ME?!?" She scared the sisters so bad that (even after they learned the truth about what happened) they were scared straight and became dedicated church-goers for the rest of their lives.
• Rose receives a letter from Dimitri at the end of Blood Promise, after she had staked him and considered him truly dead. The letter lets her know that he survived.
• Cunégonde and Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide: the former is raped and disemboweled; the latter is hanged in a Kangaroo Court. Both come back with a lampshade.
• John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos: In Fugitives of Chaos]], when Colin falls off a building while fighting an enemy, everyone concludes he's dead. Then this eagle shows up. None of them, including Colin, knew about his Voluntary Shapeshifting abilities until he was inspired to change.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Tasia is certain that Joslyn's dead after being (it seems) mortally wounded protecting her. It turns out she's only close to death, and saves herself by making (another) deal with some otherworldly being.
• Conan the Barbarian:
  • In "Iron Shadows in the Moon", Conan is, it turns out, Not Quite Dead after a head injury.
  • In "A Witch Shall Be Born", Taramis believes her sister dead.
• In the novel adaptation of The Death of Superman, the Technobabble used to explain Superman's revival is changed to a much more simpler reason: his battle with Doomsday drained his solar energy reserves so badly he was essentially in "Power Saver Mode" and all he needed to do was stay in the sun for a little while until he recovered. Professor Hamilton felt terrible about this because he realized too late that a lot of heartache (and millions of lives, coincidentally) would have been spared if he allowed him to just stay in the sun instead of trying to bury him.
• In The Divine Cities, it turns out that by the time the first book, City of Stairs, is set, three of the divinities who were thought to have died 75 years ago — Kolkan, Jukov, and Olvos — are actually still around, only the first two have been hidden away for a long time and the latter is voluntarily living in anonymity among mortals.
• In the Dragonlance War of Souls novels, Tasslehoff's death is retconned with the use of a magical time-travelling device given to him by a god. He's cheated death many other times also.
• Morjin in Ea Cycle survives decapitation.
• In Book II of The Faerie Queene, Arthur drives his sword right through Meleger's chest and is distracted by the lack of blood just enough for Meleger to get a cheap hit in. Figuring blades don't work, Arthur crushes the man and enjoys his victory... only for the man to get up and keep hitting him.
• Ferals Series:
  • The Spinning Man is seemingly destroyed at the end of The Crow Talker, but it is revealed in The White Widow's Revenge that his spirit continued to reside within one of his white spiders.
  • Mr. Silk seemingly drowns in The Swarm Descends, but turns up alive in The White Widow's Revenge, now serving the Spinning Man.
• In The Fifth Elephant, there's a downplayed example where the hero knows the villain is Not Quite Dead.
• In the Dale Brown novel Flight of the Old Dog, Dave Luger is left for dead after he covers the team's escape from a Soviet base. The events of Night of the Hawk are kicked off when it is learned that he is not dead, merely Brainwashed into helping the Soviets — and that the CIA wants him Killed Off for Real as an apparent traitor.
• Albert from the Gone series gets shot in the head by Lance, yet manages to survive nearly bleeding out.
  • Played with with Drake. He gets (presumably) killed by Caine in Hunger, but returns in Lies sharing a body with Brittney. Who is also a case, as she gets both legs broken and shot in the chest, yet can't be killed.
• In Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams, one character, Reno, is killed when his home is the target of a missile attack. He later makes a series of telephone calls to the hero. Turns out that he was a wirehead and was "jacked into the net" when the missiles struck. He spends the rest of the book as a disembodied mind, wandering around the equivalent of the Internet, looking at everyone's most secret files.
• Harry Potter:
  • Voldemort, the main antagonist, blew himself up by accident a decade before the story begins, and only survived as a soul because of Horcruxes .
  • Harry himself, who everyone believed dead for a time.
• In Book One of Heralds Of Rhimn, after Navaeli seemingly kills Knight Jeidhe with Silamir’s magic in Stonehold, he comes back with some cauterized wounds and a hankering for revenge once the trio are on their way to the World’s Wound. He isn’t so lucky after Silamir collapses her temple on him.
• Honor Harrington was once taken prisoner, but escaped, creating a lot of problems for her captors in progress. Havenites, believing that she was dead too, concocted the story of her trial and execution, more for their own masses than anyone else. Naturally, she was not amused. Many of her friends were though.
  • That was not the only time in the series that someone was declared to be dead and then turn up alive later. There are at least three other examples.
• In Hurog, Oreg is not quite dead after Ward killed his body in a Mercy Killing, respectively, Heroic Sacrifice. Though Oreg had tried to commit suicide-by-proxy hundreds of years ago, as he didn't like his life in slavery, the reason why he asked Ward to kill him was to make castle Hurog collapse and kill the villains in the process. Turns out that body was not his actual body, thus he is able to return by regenerating his actual body, that was in a magic-induced coma for a long time.
• Jane, Unlimited: In the final story, it's revealed that Aunt Magnolia is alive in another world.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: Mordak survived the previous book's purification and has lain dormant for ten years in Kalak's mind.
• In The Machineries of Empire, this happens to Kel Cheris near the end of the first book, despite her being heavily wounded, as the Kel Command blows everyone up and leaves under the assumption that No-One Could Have Survived That.
• During the course of The Lord of the Rings, several of the major characters are thought to be dead at one point or another — and some come a lot closer than others. But the Big Bad of the series, Sauron, actually does get killed off, several thousand years before the series begins. But he doesn't stay dead, because he has the One Ring as his Soul Jar. However, even after the Ring's destruction, he's still around: as a Maiar, he's immortal, and literally cannot die. However, the Ring's destruction resulted in him losing all of his power, so while he still exists, it's as a powerless little spirit, unable to affect anything of the world around him.
• Bailey in Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens) is thrown from a crashing coach and left insensible. His death is later reported to other characters. Guess who reappears at the denouement, with a bandage round his head, reeling about with comic concussion?
• Matador Series: At the end of The Man Who Never Missed, Emile Khadaji has zapped 2388 Confederation soldiers (with paralyzing darts) before they found out who he was and imploded his hideout. And then they found he'd used exactly 2388 darts. The commanding officer is not pleased, because he knows this one-shot-one-paralyzed soldier legend will be a headache for the Confederation, but at least they've killed him. And then the narrative finishes:
  And, of course, Over-Befalhavare Venture didn't know the half of it.
• Mistborn: In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, Kelsier dies near the climax of the first book, however it is later revealed in Mistborn: Secret History that they managed to stick around in the Cognitive Realm instead of moving on as most people do. The end of the book implies they're working on a way back to the Physical Realm, and the stinger of The Bands of Mourning reveals that he's back in the Physical Realm, and considerably more powerful than ever before.
• In More Than This, the Driver comes back to life even though he is rammed by a van and burnt in a fire, as Seth predicts.
• The Mortal Instruments: In City of Fallen Angels , it turns out that he isn't exactly dead because of Clary's wish at the end of City of Glass to bring Jace back to life, which screwed up the balance of life and death. This allowed Lilith to fully resurrect him.
• In the tenth and final book of The Pendragon Adventure series, every character who has died in or before the other books (including the main character who died at the end of the ninth) are resurrected in the exact condition (age, etc.) they were in at the time of death, minus the cause of death, and they all band together to fight the Big Bad.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, "The Titan's Curse", the main antagonist Luke falls off a high cliff onto the rocks below. Percy is sure he's dead, after all No One Could Survive That! but alas, Luke is still alive.
• This happens in Necropolis, the fourth book of the The Power of Five series. Following a fight in a temple in Hong Kong, the good guys think they've killed all the Big Bad's henchmen ... But there's one still alive, hiding under the altar. He's dying, but goshdarn, he's going to take one of the Five down with him. He sets his sights on Jamie, the closest, and is aiming his gun when Scott comes bounding into the picture, and telepathically aware of the danger to his twin, bulldozes Jamie out of harm's way ... Thus letting the bullet continue on into Scarlet's head instead.
• In Renegades, the ending of the first book reveals that Ace Anarchy survived the Battle of Gatlon, contrary to popular belief.
• Sandman Slim teaches us that when you die in Hell you end up in Tartarus. The main character is virtually unkillable.
• Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future inverts this in much the same way as the Phantom example. As one of his supporters cackles, after Santiago is quickly murdered by a bounty hunter — whom Santiago then guns down — "Everybody knows that Santiago can't die!"
• In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Final Problem", Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has Holmes commit a Heroic Sacrifice by throwing himself and the Big Bad Moriarty off Reichenbach Falls, but as we discover in "The Adventure of the Empty House", he didn't actually die.
  • This is also done to a lesser extent in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective", wherein Holmes pretends he's dying of an obscure disease used by the murder suspect in the Mystery of the Week. Luckily we only have to wait a few more paragraphs afterwards to find out he was just faking it.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Galaxy of Fear:
    • In City of the Dead, Doctor Evazam is shot and killed by Boba Fett, then almost immediately buried by the locals. End of this villain? No. He's been creating zombies, had found that fresher zombies retained more of their faculties, and so injected himself before Boba Fett killed him. When he comes back, he has all the benefits of being this kind of zombie, but still looks fine and retains his mind and memories.
    • At the end of Ghost of the Jedi, Big Bad Borborygmus Gog slips and falls to his apparent death in a air shaft, only for the final scene to reveal he's still alive. He's Killed Off for Real in the following book.
  • Jedi K'Kruhk has managed to be almost killed several times over. He goes into some form of hibernation if seriously wounded, leading to people assuming that he's dead. But no, he's still got a loooong time ahead of him.
• Prince Andrei in War and Peace. He's left in a village with other hopeless wounded after the Battle of Austerlitz, and the way the chapter ends suggests that he dies there, but he doesn't.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Dark Adeptus, Magos Antigonus survives getting his head pulped through the use of Lost Technology to Body Surf through servitors.
  • In James Swallow's Warhammer 40,000 novel Deus Sanguinius, Rafen is in an exploding factory. He is thrown into a channel of water and ends up thoroughly banged about but alive. He sneaks onto the spaceship and when Arkio and Mephiston are deciding on single combat, Rafen calls from Arkio's forces that he will fight him. He walks out and takes off his helmet, and for the first time, Arkio shows shock.
  • In Dan Abnett's Horus Heresy novel Horus Rising, Maloghurst's unexpected survival makes him a hero in the fleet.
  • In Graham McNeill's False Gods, when Horus is felled by his injuries, the word on the ship is that he died; Mersadie and Karkasy go to see the arrival, and Karkasy notices that apothecaries are still tending him, so he must be alive.
  • A footnote in one of the Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!! books reveals that Cain has been listed as "killed in action" so many times that the Munitorum eventually gave up trying to keep track and decided to keep him on the payroll regardless — even long past his confirmed death and burial with full military honors.
• The final chapter of The Wild Ones: Moonlight Brigade reveals that Kit's mother wasn't killed by Titus' dogs. She was kidnapped by humans and taken to a zoo.
• The novelization of X-Men: The Last Stand confirms that Psylocke survived Phoenix's attack by transporting through the shadows in the hallway.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: Thirty years before the story takes place, a team of hero wizards and witches from Knightcharm Academy attacked the evil magic school known as the Scholomance and did so much damage that they thought they destroyed it. However, the Scholomance managed to survive, and by the time of the story, it's back to churning out evil magicians that go on to cause problems for the world.

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