Roaring Rampage Of Revenge / Literature

Examples of Roaring Rampage of Revenge in Literature.

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• The eponymous character of The Adventures of Samurai Cat, Miaowara Tomokato, is on this kind of journey to kill the men who murdered his master. In the process, he runs amok through parodies of just about everything, including Disneyland, Star Wars, and others.
• In The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling, a British officer rather gruesomely threatens a border raider that the British army will do this to his tribe if he is murdered during a parley.
• Bazil Broketail: Kepabar's death makes Bazil go berserk and separate from his unit in pursuit after fleeing enemies.
• The Belgariad: Silk goes on one of these in King of the Murgos when a prostitute he was quite friendly with is murdered. He calmly and methodically kills a dozen members of the family responsible in cold blood — even taking the time to make the first few deaths look like accidents — and shows absolutely no remorse when later questioned about it.
• In Below, Finch goes berserk in response to his best friend's death in a goblin temple. After destroying their idol completely, he leads a team of just two other men to ambush the goblin priest and its entourage that had dogged the party.
• Black Iris: Delaney Keating's revenge is a bit smaller-scale than Dresden's, but she rivals him in ferocity. The tagline sums it up pretty well:
  Karma's a bitch. But you can call her Laney.
• Book of the Dead (2006) sees Constance Greene pursuing Diogenes Pendergast all over the globe determined to kill him for his past actions.
• When the Wee Widow Mouse is killed by a basilisk during the first major battle in The Book of the Dun Cow, her friend John Wesley Weasel goes completely berserk, killing thousands of them to avenge her death, fuelled by pure rage. It is even suggested that he would have wiped them out completely if Cockatrice hadn't intervened.
• Buck from The Call of the Wild goes into one of these after local Indians kill John Thorton, and he slaughters almost every one of them in a rage.
• In all versions of Carrie, the telekinetic title character engages in this trope after a horrific prank at her senior prom ruins the happiest moment of her otherwise torturous life and kills her date. Her response is to use her powers to set the gym on fire and leave everyone inside to burn alive. And it doesn't end there, either. In the book and the 2002 film adaptation, she levels most of the town, too.
• In the fantasy novel The Conjurer Princess by Vivian Vande Velde, the title character sets off on one of these after her family is slaughtered at the wedding of her elder sister and her fiance who she loves, with the sole exception of her elder sister who was carried off. By the end, though, she finds out that her elder sister was in on it and the Big Bad actually her real lover...
• At the start of The Count of Monte Cristo, Danglars and Fernand frame Edmond Dantes as a Bonapartist so they can take his job and fiancee respectively, and when the magistrate Gerard de Villefort finds evidence that he's innocent, he has instead him thrown in the Chateau d'If because revealing his innocence would have exposed Villefort's father as a Bonapartist and ruined his career. Twenty three years later they have become rich and powerful... And that's when Dantes, who in the meantime has escaped prison, found an immense treasure, and made plans, returns as the Count of Montecristo to utterly ruin them alongside their families, sparing only the children. Or he tries, as his plans against Villefort accidentally get his nine-years-old child killed, something that horrifies him.
• Also calm is Kirth Gersen, the protagonist of The Demon Princes, who was raised by his grandfather to have no Goal in Life other than to find and kill the five so-called Demon Princes, pirates and criminal masterminds who were responsible for the destruction of the colony world from which Kirth and his grandfather were the sole survivors. The ending has Kirth lapsing into bleak, bleak depression upon the death of his last target — raised his entire life for only one purpose, now that he's completed it, he has no purpose at all... except Alice Wroke.
• In The Drawing of the Three, Eddie Dean goes utterly insane and dispatches several nasties with Roland's gun — naked, no less.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry Dresden has that surname for a reason, and God help you if you threaten anyone he cares about.
    • Harry is famous enough in universe for his curbstomp revenges that in Deadbeat, Mavra, a centuries old vampire threatens him with blackmailing a friend and is given a clear threat of how far Harry will go to get his revenge. That was Book 7 of the series. As of Book 15, we haven't seen her again.
    • In Skin Game, Michael points Harry's history of taking extreme revenge during the events of Changes is a pretty strong deterrent to other supernatural predators:
      Michael: Harry, I'm not sure if you noticed this. But things did not turn out well for the last monster who raised his hand against your child. Or any of his friends. Or associates. Or anyone who worked for him. Or for most of the people he knew.
  • Ebenezar McCoy is Harry's mentor, and during Death Masks, a Red Court Vampire cheats in a duel against Harry, McCoy responds by dropping a satellite on the vampire's stronghold after he had fled back to it.

• The Executioner: Mack Bolan seems to have trouble keeping innocent bystanders alive, but since he's like the black ops version of The Punisher (and in fact was the inspiration for the original Punisher), he is pretty much on a Roaring Marathon.
• In The First Law spin-off book Best Served Cold, the main character Monzcarro Murcatto gets... a tad carried away. One of the people on the list literally gets their head smashed in by her bare hands.
• One short story from Full Dark, No Stars, "Big Driver", is about Tess, a rape victim who goes on a rampage against those who harmed her.
• Gentleman Bastard:
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora gives us the Gray King, whose family was killed by the other nobles of Camorr because they wouldn't go along with the Secret Peace with the city's criminal elements, headed by Capa Barsavi. When he returns to town, he starts killing the heads of every gang that works for Barsavi, drowns his daughter in a barrel of horse urine, sets up Barsavi's best thief as a fall guy, and, when the Gray King is believed dead, kills him (with a magically-controlled shark) and his sons at the party. And this is all a lead-up to his revenge on the nobles, which would involve magically lobotomizing all of them and their children.
  • The Bondmagi would find the Gray King's idea of revenge quaint. The Tel Therin Imperial army attacked a group of them and managed to kill 7 of them. Not only was the army killed to the last man, the Bondmagi took a vote on whether they needed to make an example of the Imperials or not. That's right, massacring an entire army wasn't considered a strong enough message. They then proceeded to burn the Tel Therin Capital city to the ground, citizens and all, merely to prove they were serious. And to add insult to injury they made sure to leave the Imperial throne untouched and completely intact. Not to mention they fact that if you just so happen to kill one not only do they drop everything they're doing so they can murder they everloving shit out of you. They will also burn down your house, where you work, your friends, your family, the family dog, and everyone who had the distinct misfortune of making your acquaintance all to make it absolutely clear that messing with a Bondsmage will simply not be tolerated for any reason.
  • Locke himself goes on a smaller one after some of his friends are killed. He and Jean kill several of the Gray King's followers, the Bondmage's hawk, and the Gray King himself. They also cut out the Bondmage's tongue and cut off his hands and feet. They only left him alive at all for the reasons above.
• Goblins in the Castle: Once freed, the goblins plan to do this in retaliation for being sealed away for a hundred and twenty-one years. When William restores their king and he regains his sanity, he calls it off.
• In The Godfather, Luca Brasi goes on one of these after Vito is shot, and one to such a reckless extent that it takes Vito to call him off.
• Halo:
  • Invoked in Halo: Ghosts of Onyx; the Spartan-IIIs are recruited from children who have been orphaned by the Covenant and wish to get back at the aliens.
  • The Forerunner Saga reveals that the Forerunners were at the receiving end of one from the Precursors, in retaliation for the Forerunners wiping them out millions of years before. It's hard to say it was unsuccessful...
• Hard to Be a God follows an agent from an advanced civilization embedded undercover in a medieval society. As such, he refrains from ever killing anybody throughout the story, despite numerous confrontations. The story proper ends as an attack on his house leaves his girlfriend fatally shot with a crossbow; he calmly picks up his weapons and waits for the attackers to break down the door. The epilogue takes place after he was extracted. At first the extraction team did not know where to look for him after he left the ruins of the house, but then... they saw the trail in his wake.
• Heralds of Valdemar:
  • Tarma from the Vows and Honor series is the last survivor of Clan Tale'sedrin after bandits ambushed them while they celebrated. Her entire family, including the man she loved, is dead. She has been gang-raped and left for dead. What, then, does she do? She declares blood feud against the bandits, an act which is one of the most drastic possible for one of the Shin'a'in (it requires her to swear herself as one of her Goddess's servants and a Celibate Heroine, for a start). Then she rides to a town that the bandits have taken over as their base, and kills them all, one by one.
  • In the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy book Magic's Price, Herald Vanyel is kidnapped, tortured, and raped after having been given a drug that not only blocks his formidable magic but also messes with his physical coordination so that he can't even defend himself using his equally formidable fighting skills. His captors are under strict orders to keep him alive, and when they realize that they've gone too far and he's about to die, they bring in a healer, whose remedy is the antidote to the drug. As soon as the drug wears off... BOOM!
• Her Crown of Fire: Kaya and the Halvers launch an attack on the Academy and the town near the end of the book. The headmasters and the Lotherian government definitely deserve it; the townspeople of Fairhaven that get caught in the crossfire, not so much.

• In the Honor Harrington novel Field of Dishonor, Honor goes on a brief rampage after her boyfriend is essentially legally murdered (tricked into a duel by a professional shootist) by challenging each person responsible to a duel and gunning them down. Additionally, in In Enemy Hands, she goes on sort of a pre-Roaring Rampage when Ransom orders Nimitz to be killed attempting to take down as many soldiers as possible before she's beaten down.
• The Howling (1977): In the 1583 prologue, a mob wiped out the village of Dradja to eliminate the Evil that dwelled there and avenge a murdered shepherd and his family, as well as countless others who had been killed by the Evil over the years. The mob tortured to death every man, woman and child in Dradja they could find, piled up and burned their bodies, slaughtered all the animals and then burnt down the village itself, just for good measure.

• In her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou relates how her uncles likely killed a man for raping her. Though the act was on her behalf, she was horrified by it, feeling that because she had set the chain of events in motion by reporting the rape, she was responsible for the murder.
  I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone.
• Daine from The Immortals does the whole roaring rampage of revenge thing, taking down an entire city in the process with an army of zombie dinosaurs.
• Imperial Radch: The plot of Ancillary Justice revolves around Breq getting the resources and opportunity to assassinate The Emperor who killed her crew... some of the emperor, anyway.
• In JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World, the main character is accidentally summoned to another world with a boy she knows. He's The Chosen One with Limit Break powers, while she ends up working as a prostitute, which she's surprisingly okay with (she had done escort work in our world) until another prostitute she's befriended is killed by a platoon of abusive soldiers. She also has Limit Break powers, but hers are better, if way creepier. She wipes out the entire platoon in the middle of monster-infested woods in less time than it takes to tell about it.

• Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Julian, upon discovering that Yang Wen-li was assassinated by Terraists who infiltrated into Yang's cruiser, went on a roaring rampage and killing any Terraists he encountered within the cruiser (with a battleaxe, no less) and had to be stopped by Louis Machungo. He slipped again when he encountered Archbishop De Villiers, the mastermind of the assassination, and ended up blasting him with more shots than necessary to kill him.
• In the Lensman series, the reptilian Velantians have suffered for centuries at the hands of the Overlords of Delgon, a species with mind-control abilities who take pleasure in the torture and killing of their victims. Even the Velantian space program was a result of the Overlords, with them having created a compulsion for Velantians to go into space so their astronauts could be lured to Delgon. When the Galactic Patrol stumbles on the species and the Velantians gain not only advanced technology and weapons but access to the Lens, giving the wearer the ability to mentally resist Overlord control, Worsel becomes their first Lensman and swears to utterly eradicate the Overlords from the universe, with the blessing of the Patrol. He succeeds.
• The Lord of the Rings: There's a mass-combat version in The Return of the King when the army of Rohan rallies behind Éomer son of Éomund to avenge Théoden and Éowyn on the Pelennor Fields.
  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.
• In the Magic: The Gathering novel Prophecy, Barrin goes on one (that also turns the big showdown into a complete Curb-Stomp Battle) after his wife is murdered and mutilated by a psychotic enemy mage. His rampage single-handedly wins the war against the Keldons, which raises the question of why he didn't employ those kinds of tactics to begin with.
• The Most Extreme Crueltie and Revenge of Shylock of Venice is a book which all but admits to being a Revenge Fic sequel to The Merchant of Venice. Shylock makes a Deal with the Devil (who turns out to be an Author Avatar), wrecks Venice, kills a whole bunch of characters (ending with Antonio), then has an attack of My God, What Have I Done? and reverses time so that he can chose a death sentence at the end of the court scene.
• In Nibelungenlied, Kriemhild's husband Siegfried is murdered by Hagen at the behest of her brother's wife, which is condoned by her three brothers. A few years later she marries King Etzel the Hun, which provides her with the necessary muscle for revenge, and about ten years later she invites her brothers, Hagen and the other retainers to her new place. However, the brothers were fought back like madmen all night, resulting in a seven-chapter-long bloodbath. At the same time, Kriemhild turns into a complete psycho, sending more and more men into the hall and ordering the feasting hall to be burned down, and finally has her revenge as she decapitates her husband's killer personally. By the end, Etzel (who is based on Attila the Hun, no less) is completely terrified of her.
• In Papillon, three convicts come up with a stupid revenge plot, which Papillon refuses to take part in. Having arranged a revolt, they plan to raid the armory and kill every non-prisoner on the island, the families of the guards included. Papillon points out that escape is impossible as there is only boat capacity for forty, a hundred armed men wanting that space, and the massacre will turn all neighboring countries against sheltering them. They don't care as all they want is their bloody revenge and only want to escape to the mainland to go guerrilla against the prison authority. In the end the heads of the revolt are shipped to another island and attempt the uprising on their own, nobody else joins in and their revenge ends with their deaths.
• The first of the Parker novels, The Hunter, is about Parker going after his wife and partner who double-crossed him and left him for dead.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Clarisse goes on one in The Last Olympian after Silena is killed by the drakon.
  "I am CLARISSE, DRAKON-SLAYER! I will kill you ALL!"

• In the prologue of Renegades, Ace Anarchy comes home to find everyone in his family but his niece dead, with her telling him that they were killed by a hitman sent by a rival gang. Some time later, he goes to their quarters and murders each and every single one of them.
• In The Running Man, after Ben discovers that the Games Company had his wife murdered, he destroys their primary government building, killing the higher-ups of the company, everyone inside, and everyone within a large radius (its stated debris was falling 20 blocks out, not to mention that most things in the novel are nuclear-powered, and the dust clouds of 9/11 blasted quite far).
• When Safehold's Merlin Athrawes initially dons the identity of Dialydd Mab, which is Welsh for "Avenging Son", he does so in retaliation against the Inquisition's arrest and imprisonment of a significant number of a town's population in the paranoid belief that an explosive accident was caused by their willing sabotage. We see him attack a barge with the Inquisitors who actually gave the order aboard and kill everyone, using his abilities as a Ridiculously Human Robot to full advantage. Only later do we learn that he also went to the town's garrison and killed its commanding officer, his second-in-command, his third-in-command, all commanders of the infantry companies assigned to cleanse Sarkyn and escorting prisoners to concentration camps, and any and all lower soldiers who "distinguished" themselves during Sarkyn's cleansing. He continues such strikes against the most heinous Inquisitors and quickly becomes The Dreaded, prompting them to treat their prisoners like something resembling human beings or else be the target of Dialydd Mab's next bullet.
• Sandman Slim is basically the old story of "hitter from the outfit gets sent up, goes upstate, gets out, seeks revenge on the bastards who turned him in." Only substitute "hitter" for "sorcerer," the outfit for "his cabal," and "upstate" for "Hell."
• Sandokan: The main character's reason for being a pirate is to take revenge on those who financed the murderer of his father. The second part of The King of the Sea is one such rampage against the British trade in revenge for the British unprovoked attack and conquest of Mompracem, and Sandokan Fights Back actually has Sandokan returning to his ancestral home to kill his father's murderer and take back his throne.
• Semiosis: Once the Orphan aliens start torturing and murdering Pacifist children, Stevland the benevolent Plant Alien suspends his philosophy of non-violence, enlists his fellow plants to help, lures in a pack of ground eagles, and lays a trap to kill as many Orphans as he can.
• Shadow of the Conqueror:
  • Dayless the Conqueror's Start of Darkness was one of these, overthrowing and slaughtering the aristocracy of his nation after they killed his family.
  • Lyrah lets loose on the Dawnists and Shade after she finds the bodies of several of her comrades in arms on Hamenday Island.
    Lyrah: I'm going to kill them all!
• Sisterhood Series: Played with. The Vigilantes obey a Thou Shalt Not Kill code. However, they will give the sucker a Fate Worse than Death. The first seven books have each of the 7 members strike back against the people who wronged them without getting caught. Also, they wait very patiently for a few months to a year before striking each target.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Arya Stark eventually develops a to-kill list when bit by little bit, her father is murdered in front of her, friends killed and/or tortured and beaten bloody time and time again as a servant in Harrenhal, and has already managed to fill a portion of her kill quota. The worst part? She's nine.
  • Catelyn Stark after her resurrection. Spending nearly three books losing everything and everyone she held dear, culminating in watching her son get slaughtered in front of her would probably make anyone a vengeance crazy mad lady regardless of zombification.
  • During Aegon the Conqueror's conquest, Aegon's sister-wife Rhaenys was shot down alongside her dragon when she attempted to capture Dorne by force. In response, Aegon and his other sister-wife, Visenya, launched the so-called "Dragons' Wroth", where they sacked and burned every Dornish settlement they could find with their dragons.
• Star Trek:
  • In Spock's World, a Vulcan matriarch tries to keep a young woman with the ability to kill with her mind under control by holding her husband hostage. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the husband is accidentally killed, and the woman telepathically murders every person in the matriarch's household before throwing herself out a window.
  • In the novel Vendetta, Delcara mixes it up with the 1701-D crew because she wants revenge on the Borg, and her weapon of choice will take out a lot of innocents along the way.
• Sword of Truth:
  • Kahlan's Con Dar (Blood Rage), in which she gains the power to throw lightning bolts in addition to her normal domination power and can only be used to defend or avenge Richard, definitely qualifies.
  • In the end of the second book, Richard had a rampage of his own. And long before that, Zedd had his rampage during the D'Hara/Midlands war when his wife was killed; one so bad both sides were scared shitless of him.
• Takeshi Kovacs tends to do these at least once per novel:
  • In Altered Carbon, he returns to a shady medical lab where he had been loaded into a virtual reality and tortured over the course of several subjective days. He kills the pimp who sold him out, everyone who worked at the brothel the pimp ran, and everyone at the medical lab, sparing only the boss's stack for later "interrogation".
  • In Broken Angels, he ends up killing each and every single member of the mercenary company he was working with, even though he was severely injured and a few days away from death by radiation poisoning.
  • In Woken Furies, his former girlfriend falls afoul of a patriarchal cult who remove her cortical stack and toss it in the ocean, effectively killing her. When he finds out, he goes to the village and kills every single person who was an adult at the time, in his words, "Every single person who could have done something and instead chose to not." Then he goes on a global crusade, killing every single priest of the religion, cutting their stacks out, downloading their minds into swamp panthers, and forcing them to fight to the death over and over again. When we meet him, it's implied that he's been doing it for several years. When asked at what point he's planning to stop, he says something along the lines of "they can't give her back to me, so why should I stop?"
• In Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan goes on one of these after his home is burned down by invading German troops, and, as he believes, his wife Jane is killed.
• In Thud!, Sam Vimes has a bit of a delayed one after some dwarves threaten his son. (They tried to threaten his wife. She was with her dragons. It didn't end well — for the dwarves, that is.) Near the end of the book, after all that's happened to him, the straw breaks the cow's back when Vimes realises that he's going to miss his son's nightly bedtime story because of said dwarves, and he goes — not to put too fine a point on it — completely off his nut. After slaughtering his way through the entire dwarven army, screaming bloody murder all the way, he barely stops himself (with some help) from killing their leaders... so that he can arrest them, which just makes him that much more badass.
  Vimes: THAT! IS! NOT! MY! COW!
• Quoth Alessan from Tigana: "I want Brandin. I want Brandin of Ygrath dead more than I want my soul's immortality beyond the last portal of Morian."
• In The Twilight Saga, we find out that Rosalie's record is almost as clean as Carlisle's (he's never killed a human). She went on one of these after being turned into a vampire, against the guys who raped and murdered her in the first place. Among them was her fiance, whom she saved for last, and then wore a wedding dress to kill. Especially considering her normal characterization.
• Utopian Massacres lives up to its title, as Rob Botnic vents his spleen on an entire class of people he blames for the murder of his family.
• David Valentine of The Vampire Earth series has a few. When his love interest in the first book gets kidnapped, he butchers the man who did it and his bodyguard, then proceeds to head into one of the most dangerous cities in the world. He gets the girl out, too, taking quite a few people (and Reapers). In fact, the entire series seems to be mini-Roaring Rampages of Revenge focused on an individual level contained within the papa-daddy of them all, his goal of exterminating every fucking vampire on Earth.

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In the Gaunt's Ghosts novel Only in Death, Eszrah goes on one. Believing himself dishonored by living after Gaunt's death, he does the only thing he can — a rampage in which he kills as many as he can with Gaunt's sword before he dies. That is, until he finds Gaunt alive.
  • In Sons of Dorn, Captain Taelos wants to atone for his failure by a "Warrior's Pilgrimage". He is refused the honor (for now) and sent to collect aspirants. At the end, he adds the dead from his last mission to his tally to atone for, subtracts those whose lives he has saved, and feels honored by the duty of collecting aspirants.
  • In the Space Marine Battles novel Fall of Damnos, the Ultramarines' battle prowess goes into overdrive and their The Stoic hat flies out of the window when they think that the Necrons have killed captain Sicarius.
• Warrior Cats: Power of Three: In the last book, Sunrise, Hollyleaf freaks out at learning her true parentage and exposes her mother's greatest secret. Then she attempts to kill her mother, before running away into some tunnels.

• The Wheel of Time has lots of these:
  • In the first book, Lews Therin takes revenge on himself for killing his entire family when he was insane by drawing on the Power until he eventually kills himself and reshapes the earth he's standing on for miles.
  • The second is after Aviendha's temporary death in The Fires of Heaven — Rand sees her body and proceeds to rip open a path to the World of Dreams, kill anything in his path without care for who or what they are, and when he finally finds Rahvin, the man responsible for Aviendha's death, uses balefire, a technique not even used by the Forsaken, to erase him from the pattern and turn back time, remarking that he doesn't care if he's unraveled the world as long as Aviendha is alive. Yeah, you don't mess with Rand's girls.
  • There's also the incident of Egwene being captured by the Seanchan, who take control of her power and spend several months training her to be a weapon and attempting to break her will. When she finally regains free access to her own power it turns out the training to be a weapon thing was pretty successful but the breaking her will thing has thus far only instilled her with a frantic, almost mindless fear and hatred of the Seanchan.
• Without Remorse is a prequel showing how John Clark got to be the badass that he is in the present-day Jack Ryan novels. After his girlfriend, a recovering prostitute/drug addict, is killed by the pushers she once worked for, he begins picking them off one by one, Punisher-style, but not before torturing them to find out more information about their gang.

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