Anyone Can Die / Literature

As a Death Trope, contains many spoilers. Tread with care.

Times where Anyone Can Die in Literature.

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• Harry Turtledove's war-themed novels stress this element quite heavily. Many characters, including long-lived favorites, die, sometimes in completely random incidents. He seems to have a quota of "At least one death per book." In Colonization, he just uses it to clear out characters he Put on a Bus after the Time Skip.
• Michael Moorcock, indulges in this in at least a couple of the Eternal Champion series though in the Jerry Cornelius books death isn't (usually) all that permanent. Oh, and anyone close to Elric for a significant period of time is pretty much doomed.
• Unusually for children's books written in the 1960s, Lloyd Alexander had quite a few major, popular characters die in the final volumes of his The Chronicles of Prydain and Westmark series (but the protagonist and the leading female character were safe).
• If you are a Pretty Boy in a Dennis Cooper novel, you will most likely be kidnapped, raped, tortured, and/or murdered, and you will enjoy it. Especially if your name is George Miles.
• How many people die over the main plot of an R. L. Stine book generally depends on the series — usually, none for main Goosebumps, one for main Fear Street or Fear Street Seniors, and anywhere from a couple to a massacre for any other side series. However, it's almost impossible to predict which books will kill a random (and potentially likeable) character at the end, which will kill everyone, and which will leave everyone unscathed.
• Dale Brown is not afraid to have characters who have lasted multiple books, like Brad Elliott, Wendy and Paul McLanahan, face the reaper. A Time for Patriots is pretty bad about this; while there are some fellows killed who are only introduced in this book, namely Leo and Ron, Jon Masters also gets killed off unceremoniously.
• This trope appears in David Clement-Davies's Fire Bringer and The Sight.
• The work of Stephen King. Not even children are safe.
  • A notorious example is in The Stand where a number of prime protagonists die after almost a thousand pages of writing. Rumor has it that King himself didn't know where to take the story and realized only something this dramatic could kickstart it.
• Several Agatha Christie works, such as And Then There Were None and Death Comes as the End.
• No one is safe in Cormac McCarthy books, not men, women, animals, children, or even infants. The protagonists themselves will have a 50/50 chance of making it to the end, with the only one you can expect going in to remain alive being the son from The Road since he's based on one of the author's own children.
• In The Acts of Caine, many central characters have died. Several have died and come back. One character got killed, came back as a semi-god, got killed again, and then became a true God.
• Almost Night. Many characters die by the end of the book, and the rest of their fates are left unknown.
• Death of named characters is incredibly rare in Animorphs before the final arc begins, particularly if the character has appeared in more than one book, but quite a few of the supporting characters (Jara Hamee, Tom, Edriss, Arbron, and the Auxiliary Animorphs) and two of the main characters (Rachel and Ax) are dead by the series' end. Possibly more; the only main character confirmed to be alive after the ending is Cassie — everyone else was last seen ramming their space fighter into the Blade Ship. And it's unclear if Ax's consciousness is still alive inside The One.
• In the Aubrey-Maturin series, as the series nears the end of the historical timeline of the wars in The Hundred Days, some very major characters are killed off in essentially random and undramatic fashion: Diana and Mrs. Williams perish when Diana drives her coach too fast around a sharp corner, and Barret Bonden is killed by a long-range random shot from an Algerian galley.
• John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy is full of these, specifically Dan Black, who dies between the second and third books not in combat but when a plane he's on crashes during take-off. Also Julia Duffy's best friend, who is shot in the head by a Japanese officer just to prove he is serious about killing civilians. The earliest examples include Captain Daytona Anderson and Sub-Lieutenant Maseo Miyazaki, who appear to be key characters, only to be found washed up on the beach in the next chapter. Both are beaten to death, while Anderson is also raped.
• Battle Royale, set in a Deadly Game where middle school students are forced to kill or be killed, enforces this. The rules of the game necessitate that all but one student will die.
• The BattleTech Expanded Universe novels, set in a setting where War Is Hell, frequently has main characters dying pointless deaths. And since it's set within a timespan of about a century, if assassination attempts, combat, or accidents fails to kill someone, old age will.
• Bazil Broketail: People do. A lot. Of the unit that Bazil and Relkin serve in, the 109th Dragon Squadron of Marneri (for your info, a dragon squadron consists of ten dragons, ten dragonboys and a commanding officer), Bazil and Chektor are the only surviving members of its original roster. The unit is then replenished multiple times in the series as with each and every book more soldiers — dragons and humans alike — keep dying and getting replaced with newcomers. While most casualties are Red Shirts, there are also characters who get some proper development before getting killed in action — hammering home that nobody is safe on war.
• The Beginning After the End: Due to being Darker and Edgier than most Isekai works with much higher stakes, quite a few main and side characters bite the dust over the course of the story. This is especially apparent once the War Arc starts and the Cerebus Syndrome kicks in.
  • Volume 1: Sylvia sacrifices herself to protect Arthur from Cadell.
  • Volume 2: A Total Party Kill occurs to Arthur's party during the encounter with the Elderwood Guardian thanks to Lucas abandoning the party. The only other survivors are Arthur, Sylvie, Elijah, Jasmine, and Samantha (the latter of whom ends up in a coma).
  • Volume 4: The attack on Xyrus Academy sees many students and faculty get killed, among which are Arthur's fellow Disciplinary Committee members Doradrea Oreguard and Theodore Maxwell (the latter's fate only being revealed in Volume 6). Averted by Claire Bladeheart, who is last seen having been Impaled with Extreme Prejudice but is later revealed to have survived in subsequent volumes (though at the cost of losing her mana core, rendering her unable to participate in the war). Meanwhile, Lucas Wykes finally has his Karma Houdini Warranty cashed in as Arthur gives him a Cruel and Unusual Death for his role in the attack.
  • Volume 5: Cynthia Goodsky gets put into a coma due the Geas preventing her from disclosing anything about the Vritra and Alacrya. At the end of the volume, in spite of it being ambiguous as to whether or not it was removed, she is found dead in her bed with her body having been impaled by the trademark black spikes of the Vritra, although it is not made clear who the assassin was. In addition, Dawsid and Glaudela Greysunder, who are in league with the Vritra, are killed by Aldir in order to remove the Vritra's hold over the Council.
  • Volume 6: Adam Krensch gets Killed Offscreen at the start of the volume as it turns out there were more mana beasts in the dungeon that Arthur had just been to as Adam had been forced to sacrifice himself to buy the Dicathians time to escape the carnage. In addition, Olfred Warend is revealed to be a traitor thanks to his Undying Loyalty to Rahdeas (who is a servant of the Vritra) and gets killed for his treachery by Aya Grephin.
  • Volume 7: The end of the volume is a major Trauma Conga Line for the protagonists, as not only does The Bad Guy Wins, but several major characters are killed off. Arthur's father Reynolds gets killed during the attack on the Wall. Then, thanks to a Sadistic Choice regarding their daughter Tessia's life, Agrona gets Alduin and Merial Eralith to let his forces into the Council Castle, which leads to the death of Buhnd as the Dicathians are forced to evacuate. Afterwards, Alduin and Merial, alongside Blaine and Priscilla Glayder, are executed and their bodies impaled on spikes to mark the end of Agrona's conquest. And on top of all of that, at the very end of the volume Sylvie is forced to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save Arthur's life, though following volumes would reveal she survived (with Arthur eventually being able to restore her at the end of Volume 10). On the villains' side, the traitorous Rahdeas and Uto are also killed while they are imprisoned to prevent the Dicathians from finding out more about their enemy.
  • Volume 9: During the Victoriad, Arthur finally manages to slay Cadell. However, his triumph there and return back to Dicathen is soured by Taci's rampage in the Djinn sanctuary causing a considerable amount of casualties among the Dicathians. Aya is forced to drain her mana core to trick Taci into thinking he killed the remaining Lances, which costs her her life. Meanwhile, Rinia, who had been forced to continuously tap into her Cast from Lifespan divination powers since the start of the war, is struck down by Taci and eventually expires once Arthur returns and slays Taci. The following volume reveals that Albold and Feyrith were among the casualties of his rampage.
  • Volume 10: In order to allow Arthur to restore Sylvie's physical form, a repentant Aldir performs his own Heroic Sacrifice. Not only is he successful in his gambit, but he also bequeaths Arthur his sword Silverlight as a trophy to gain favor with both Dicathen and Epheotus.
  • Volume 11: The climax of this volume has this in droves as Agrona initiates the final stages of his plan and launches attacks all over Dicathen. Angela Rose ends up being a casualty during the attack on the Wall. Not to mention Agrona forces Seris and her followers back into his service by remotely controlling them via his blood and making examples of the few who resisted, including Lauden Denoir, by igniting their runes. In terms of antagonists, Viessa is killed by Arthur during his mission to Nirmala.
• Glen Cook's gritty The Black Company has an appropriately gritty number of main characters drop off like flies from the titular mercenary group, occasionally brought back to life via deus ex machina so Cook can kill them in an even nastier way. It gets so that by the end of the series so far the company has been near-annihilated TWICE, and not a single character remains from the first book.
  • This is partially the point, seeing as a major message in the novels is that men may die but the Company lives on.
• The world as it exists in Bone Street Rumba is one in which there are ghosts after death. So people can die the mundane way, and ghosts can die the deeper death, in which case they're gone from the world altogether as far as anyone knows.
• Book of the Ancestor: at least one important character dies each book, or even between books. In the last book, Holy Sister, when the war comes to the capital, nearly half of all the nuns and novices we know by name die in defense of the city and their convent.
• In The Builders, specifically the fourth segment, several main characters are killed off in the span of just one or two chapters, and said chapters are only a few pages long. When the book ends, less than five named characters are still alive.
• Almost every named character in A Canticle for Leibowitz dies, whether of old age, disease, or nuclear disaster. Most notably, the first third of the book ends with the protagonist being killed by a random bandit.
• The Cat Who... Series: Being beloved by the readers will not save a character from dying. Sometimes they're murdered, but there are also fatal car accidents (Liz Hart in book #28, during a storm), heart attacks (Eddington Smith in book #23), and just plain old age (Homer Tibbet in book #28, who dies in his sleep).
• The characters in Tolkien's lesser-known novel The Children of Húrin fare far worse than those in The Lord of the Rings. By the end of the tale, Túrin (The Hero) is dead, in addition to his sister Niënor, mother Morwen, best friend Beleg, comrade Gwindor, rival Brandir, kinda-sorta love interest Finduilas, and a boatload of other minor characters. To add the tragedy, The Bad Guy Wins.
• A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book takes its characters through WWI. All of the younger male characters enlist, and several of them die; the ones who survive do not return in the best of physical or mental health (and, to make matters worse, there are ominous rumblings of WWII ahead).
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has more and more as the series goes on, until the Last Chronicles, where a so-called "major" character can be expected to die in nearly every fight scene. As the Second Chronicles prove, not even Covenant himself is off-limits.
• In the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove, leaders on both sides of the revolution have a tendency to die.
• Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan. Almost everyone dies, even Darren Shan himself, although he does reverse time and start over at the end.
• The Cold Moons starts with nearly 400 badgers. By the end, over 100 have died and only roughly 260 are left. All of the old Cadre were killed during the journey and the main badger antagonists all died as well.
• In Dead Six, having a name just means the character is a target rather than collateral damage. Around half of the cast is killed in various gruesome ways, and very few of them are heroic deaths.
• In Simon Green's Deathstalker series, after 1.2 million words, Owen is cut down in a simple street fight — and when he's dead they even steal his boots. He does get better in the sequel series, but a lot of other and protagonists don't.
• Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series has many of the original destroyermen die a few at a time each book. This also includes several important Lemurians, such as Nakja-Mur, the High Chief of Baalkpan, who's killed during the climactic battle in the third book. Each new ship, though, is named after a fallen main (or secondary) character. However, Word of God is that several characters, such as Captain Matthew Reddy and Chack Sab-At cannot die for plot reasons, and the fifth book opens with a quote from Courtney Bradford's book, which he is supposed to publish twelve years later, making his survival a Foregone Conclusion. The fifteenth and final book has many important characters dying, sometimes with barely a mention.
• The Divergent trilogy kills off major characters in every book, and the last book Allegiant, kills off Tris the main character.
• Each trilogy in the Dragons of Requiem series usually kills off at least two or three main characters. Sometimes nearly half the POV characters are dead before each trilogy ends, along with many Mauve Shirts.
• Frank Herbert's Dune features the death of the entire cast through several generations. Some are killed off, some die of natural causes. Some even die more than once.
  • The original book features the death of Paul's first son by Sardaukar as well as a large portion of the Atreides household.
  • Dune Messiah is even worse with the death of Chani and seeming death of Paul after being blinded.
  • Children of Dune has Paul really die, completely broken and without his prescient vision, Alia also succumbs after becoming abomination.
  • Probably among the saddest is Leto II in God-Emperor of Dune. Spending 3,500 years as a worm hybrid, hating what he had become both physically and by his actions. He and his bride to be die just as he's found love in a way he's never experienced before. Because of how deep his transformation was, his death was also excrutiatingly painful.
  • The Bene Gesserit Mother Superior dies in both Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune (Taraza and Odrade respectively). Miles Teg, shortly after being setup as a powerful super-being, also dies in the former.
  • In the last books, planet Arrakis has been annihilated and cannot support life any more.
• In The Edge Chronicles it doesn't matter if you're a named character — you're probably going to die before the end of the book. Oh, you're still alive at the end of the book? Well here comes the prologue of the next book explaining how things have gone to hell, dumping you in a bad situation with events that're most likely going to result in your death in this book. Heck, even the main character of each sequence dies in the sequence after theirs!
• By the end of The Empirium Trilogy, several named, plot important characters are dead and the fate of many, many others is left ambiguous.
• In Endgame Trilogy it doesn't matter if you are minor character with two lines or one of the characters with the most attention and screentime. James Frey slaughters more main characters than a special popular medieval themed tv show.
• The Enemy series by Charlie Higson pulls no punches and basically slaughters the cast in each book.
• Everland: Death is a very real threat throughout the series. Few of the characters introduced in Everland survive to the end of the series.
• The Faith does this quite suddenly and frequently as you get deeper into the series, especially surprising considering that the book is a Romance Novel. Although, Amanda Tilbrook, the author, is a fan of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and A Song of Ice and Fire.
• A Father's Wrath has the main character Jon Barton ambushed by church templars and an inquisitor, all fanatics that think themselves the epitome of righteousness for claiming they work in the name of goddess Metia. When Jon starts winning the fight, against all odds, the Inquisitor sets off a Fantastic Nuke, at extreme point-blank range. Jon himself may have died from the blast as he sees himself, in the same kind of white room he was in when he was first brought to Ipra as a disembodied soul, but woke back up in the dungeon having lost a lot of mass, the woman who would later become his legal wife survives only because she luckily happened to be behind him. His tour guide survived the blast because she hid down a side-tunnel before the fight began, at Jon's orders, and Jon's first slave just barely survived by the skin of her teeth, and Jon's summons had to put her body back together with spare parts from the attacking church army. The rest of his Hero's Slave Harem was vaporized, and the only soul he could save, a traitor.
• Fate of the Forty Sixth. Of the characters who survive, two are guaranteed to have gotten to the end by being in the present storyline. Every other character aside from Lieutenant Colonel Harris on the heroes' side dies.
• FEED, by Mira Grant, is brutal with this. From beloved family members to main characters, nobody is safe. Which is as it should be in a world post zombie apocalypse, really.
• Several major characters die in Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry series.
  • Actually, GGK has a thing about leaving nobody alive. Someone major, often several someones, are killed off in almost every one of his books. Of especial note is Tigana, in which there simply IS no happy ending.
• In The First Law trilogy, Joe Abercrombie makes it fairly clear early on anyone can die. In fact, by the end of the series the (initially) most identifiable main character winds up leaping off a cliff, whilst his band of followers have been slowly picked off across the trilogy.
• The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey has this in an alphabetical form of 26 children meeting an each different fate.
• Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series of novels, set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, are filled with plenty of fallen heroes. While the first few novels in the series don't feature many important character deaths beyond a few named soldiers and minor officers, by the later books the major Ghosts are being killed left and right as fast as new characters are introduced. Abnett proudly refers to himself as an "equal fatalities employer."
  • Similarly, by the end of Abnett's Eisenhorn series for WH40k, the eponymous character is the only one that survives all the way from the start. The rest are all dead or severely incapacitated.
  • The Warhammer Fantasy Battles novel Inheritance ends up with every single character seen in person in the first half of the book dead or, in the case of minor side-characters, probably dead. Although two of them are still undead, as opposed to dead-dead. Both of them having started out alive.
  • The Word Bearers trilogy does this remarkably well. While most of the main characters amongst the Word Bearers themselves are safe until the very end of book 3, every book manages to introduce characters, fleshed-out characters, and then at one point just kills them and never goes back at them. Of note is the character Varnus, an ordinary enforcer in the middle of the invasion. Roughly a third of the book is seen from his point of view, and then as an establishing moment for the series, he is killed off while one would expect him to join the main character. Aside from that (and this being 40k), there are many point of view switches with characters that you just know will die.
• The Locked Tomb: By the end of Gideon the Ninth, only Harrow and Ianthe are confirmed to still be alive, out of the many characters at Canaan House, with even protagonist Gideon dead by Heroic Suicide.
• The GONE series by Michael Grant is a excellent example. It had around a 40% mortality rate, and many beloved characters died, including two cuties.
• King Osbert grent is the main character of Grent's Fall. Take a guess what happens.
• Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame novels abide by this, including a major character dying within the first fifty pages of the first book, the all-time fan favorite secondary character dying in the third, and the central character dying horribly in the fourth book. Justified, though, the world may seem like a simple D&D pastiche, but every decision made has real consequences, people choose wrong on a regular basis, and no one is sanctified.
• In the Warhammer 40,000 Grey Knights novels, survival is not guaranteed even if you've been part of the cast since book one, as Haulvarn proves.
• Mercedes Lackey, author of several series of novels, most notably, the Heralds of Valdemar series, makes use of this trope. It is lampshaded several times throughout the series, with characters noting that it's rare for the titular heralds to die of old age, as they most often die in service to king(or queen) and country. Also, given that the series lasts for over two thousand years (from The Black Gryphon to Owlknight), anyone who doesn't die in action will die of old age anyway.
• His Dark Materials displays this trope more and more in each book, to the point where characters start dropping like flies in the third book the second they have finished furthering whatever minor plot points they had to serve.
• David Weber's Honor Harrington series doesn't kill off memorable characters very often, but it is always a possibility. This can extend to characters who were present for several books of the long, ongoing series, such as Alistair McKeon, and to a lesser extent Jamie Candless. It can also extend to ongoing characters from the other side, whom Weber has gone to considerable pain to make you like — just before killing them off in brutal and heartbreaking fashion.
  • The Author's Note in the beginning of Storm from the Shadows explicitly states that Weber planned to kill Honor off at the end of At All Costs and restart the series with her children as the main characters. Fortunately, the series plot has advanced faster than planned, and now they won't be old enough during the upcoming action.
  • Weber's said the only character that's really safe is Honor's steward MacGuinness because his wife is fond of the character.
  • From one interview, when asked about the subject:
    "Military fiction in which only bad people—the ones the readers want to die—die and the heroes don't suffer agonizing personal losses isn't military fiction: it's military pornography. Someone who write [sic] military fiction has a responsibility to show the human cost, particular [sic] because so few of his readers may have any personal experience with that cost.
• Apart from the title character (who retires to his country estate after rising to the rank of Admiral), nobody in Horatio Hornblower is safe. Forester is a fan of showing that War Is Hell and also inverting Death Is Dramatic, so a number of important and likable characters die entirely off-screen. Several of Hornblower's proteges die horribly and his best friend Bush, who accompanies him through most of the series, is killed in an explosion with absolutely no foreshadowing whatsoever.
• The Hunger Games trilogy is actually an interesting example. Many of the characters are guaranteed to die, due to the format of the Games; however, as with most other works, main characters are very rarely if ever killed (depending on who you'd be willing to count as a main character), and only in major events. Katniss, as the first person narrator, inevitably survives the entire series. Everyone else, however, is fair game, especially in Mockingjay, where the country goes into a full-scale rebellion with heavy losses on both sides. And that does mean everyone.
  • For the "guaranteed to die" since both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire feature a year of the Hunger Games, they feature the deaths of most of the tributes. The majority of these are Red Shirts, but the most notable are probably Rue, Thresh, Mags, and Wiress.
  • A couple of series mainstays who die in Catching Fire (though their deaths aren't confirmed until Mockingjay) include Madge Undersee, Cinna, and the entire rest of the Mellark family besides Peeta himself.
  • Amidst the deaths of several notable supporting characters in Mockingjay who were introduced in earlier books, including Portia, Lavinia, Darius, Finnick Odair and President Coriolanus Snow, Katniss has to witness firsthand the death of her younger sister Prim, whom she was trying to protect by entering the Games in the first place.
  • Mockingjay itself also introduces quite a few significant new characters who die off by the end, including Boggs; Messalla and Castor from Katniss's camera crew; Jackson, Mitchell, Homes, and the Leegs all from Squad 451; Lyme; and President Alma Coin.
• In Then by Morris Gleitzman, the sequel to Once, Zelda, one of the main protagonists of the series, is killed by the Nazis near the end of the book. She sort of reappears in Now but it's actually the granddaughter of Felix, the other main protagonist.
• The Invisible Line series. Hell, in the first novella, both the protagonist and antagonist end up dead. They do end up getting better, but only under extremely rare circumstances.
• The Kate Shugak series does not shy away from killing off regular and recurring characters, either through natural causes (e.g. Ekaterina, Old Sam) or murder (e.g. Jack Morgan, Mac Devlin).
• The Last Black Cat, by Eugene Trivizas, is a story about how the humans hunted down black cats because they were convinced they brought bad luck, told by the point of view of the titular black cat. By the end of the book, only four of the many (named) cats are alive, with several off-screen deaths. And there are no 'nice' deaths in this book.
• The Last Dragon Chronicles: Taken to extremes in The Fire Ascending. Liz... Seriously!
• The norm in the Left Behind series, where cast members are constantly dying and replaced. And to rub salt in the many wounds, most of them die completely random and pointless deaths. By the climax of the series, not one of the original cast introduced in book one is still alive. But they all got better in the end.
• Legacy of the Aldenata: Few of the characters from the first book with any development at all survive to the current book of the series, and sometimes they die or are believed to be dead several times.
• In The Legend of Drizzt, almost every member of the Companions of the Hall dies.
• While the Lensman series is mostly archetypical pulp sci-fi in which the heroes are ultimately able to overcome any obstacle, the first half of Triplanetary, the first book, is surprisingly full of this. Covering several time periods before the "present" of the rest of the series, it's not yet time for the apparently absent Precursor's plan to go forward so each part chronicles the sabotage of civilisation by the main antagonist and the deaths of both the protagonists and pretty much all other named characters. Unusually for a plan involving a Super Breeding Program, it's specifically important that the apparent romantic leads in each case die without ever actually becoming romantically involved.
• Les Misérables. Both the main protagonist and antagonist are killed, along with almost everyone else.
• Proven rather quickly in Limit (not the Frank Schätzing book), where almost all of the cast die in a bus crash within the first two chapters.
• Lonesome Dove has this trope in spades. Diabolus ex Machina is working against everyone, and in the end, the body count is high. Even the main character is dead at the end of this story. All that is left is a few of the named ranch-hands, the Mexican cook, Woodrow Call, and Call's son Newt.
  • And Newt dies in the first chapter of the sequel, The Streets of Laredo.
• Subverted in The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf, the second-most important character in the story, bites it halfway through the first volume, which is a huge caesura in the plot. Next, Boromir, another member of the Fellowship, dies in the first chapter of the second volume. Then, however, Gandalf comes back halfway through the second volume, and in the end the Fellowship and the other major characters on the good side — though they may experience various life-threatening situations, and side characters drop right and left — come out of a cataclysmic world war pretty unscathed; only old guys like Theóden and Denethor die. Interestingly, Tolkien at one time considered having Pippin and/or Sam die, as well as letting the Witch-King kill Éowyn, but he never had the heart to make it real.
• A Lullaby Sinister. Main character status means nothing. If you notice that someone is inside the Surrogate School, chances are high that they will be killed in an extremely brutal way regardless of how prominent they are.
• Magical Girl Raising Project ends its arcs with almost the entire active cast dying. POV characters, young children, innocents unfairly caught up in the events, magical girls with seemingly invincible powers, and even the fairy mascots aren't safe.
  • The first arc features sixteen magical girls that get caught up in a Deadly Game. Only two of them manage to survive.
  • Restart introduces another sixteen magical girls, this time in a different type of deadly game. The Decoy Protagonist dies quickly, and only three of the sixteen end up living to see another day.
  • Limited has seventeen main characters in the cast. A mere five of them live through the night.
  • JOKERS continues the slaughter, with only six out of sixteen characters surviving.
  • In the two part Aces and Queens arc, ten out of the new cast wind up dying, along with one of the previous survivors,
  • Thus far, the Colors trilogy has been light on the deaths, with only one of the new cast members dying along with two previous survivors.
• The Malazan Book of the Fallen, with its many characters, sees a lot of them killed off, be they second or third tier characters or major, plot-changing point of view characters. More often than not, the deaths are sudden and pointless.
• Maximum Ride ends with every single character who's not a member of the Flock dead primarily thanks to The End of the World as We Know It, and major character Fang has had the dubious honor of not-actually-dying twice.
• No one is safe in the The Maze Runner series, not even the main characters that the readers would expect have Plot Armor to go with. The first book kills off the Tagalong Kid and the youngest Glader, Chuck, and the third book — The Death Cure kills off one of the main sidekicks, Newt, and a Love Interest, Teresa. Then there's the first prequel, The Kill Order, which sees the deaths of the entire main cast (Mark, Alec, Trina, and Lana), with the only surviving major character (Deedee/Teresa) being only introduced 2/3 way to the novel.
• In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, Brandon Sanderson has no qualms about killing plenty of unnamed commoners and noblemen, the occasional minor character, and at least one main character per book. He's killed off quite a few Mauve Shirts in The Stormlight Archive as well, and has hinted repeatedly that the main characters are not guaranteed to survive the series, and given that the end of the first book sets up an impending conflict between several main characters....
  • At this point in the series, either book 4 or book 5 are going to focus on Eshonai. Eshonai is dead. From what we've heard, it's likely that the main character in the main parts of the book will be Venli, switching to Eshonai during the flashback sequences.
• The Nameless War sees a mix of both character deaths and maimings.
• Never Wipe Tears Without Gloves uses this trope to heavy effect. The story is about a group of gay men at the time when AIDS began to spread. The main characters are painfully aware of this trope at work which makes their Dwindling Party even more tragic.
• The Nexus Series: As of "Crux", Wats, Ted Prang, Mai, Warren Becker, Ilya, Dr. Holtzman, Jake, and Shiva are all dead, with things only to get worse with the looming war between humans and posthumans.
• The rare romantic novel to embrace this trope, One Day kills off one of its protagonists about 2/3rds of the way through the book, completely changing the entire story.
  • Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, which also revisits the two main characters at intervals throughout their lives, also does this — as well as the protagonists getting a divorce about halfway through the book. However, the marriage has changed the course of the surviving partner's life, so the rest of the book deals with that.
• In Overlord (2012), as long as you are not from Nazarick or you are not declared as being protected by Nazarick (hence excluding the oddballs like Tsuare and Neia), you will die. And it usually happens because a Nazarick NPC or Ainz himself killed them.
• In the Parker novels, Parker himself obviously always makes it out. The series is not shy about bumping off anybody else, though.
• In Connie Willis's Passage the protagonist dies in the middle of the story.
• In Fiona McIntosh's trilogy Percheron, being a named character is little protection. Along with a host of minor character deaths, only a couple of main characters survive the series.
• Perry Rhodan had up to 23 immortality devices preventing aging and disease, but people could still be killed. Between issues 1399 and 1504(out of over 2500), the number of immortals went from 17 to 10. In the aftermath of that, 6 new devices were given to new holders. The 10 old immortals still live (some had near death experiences, one was repeatedly killed and revived), while of the 6 new ones 2 aliens laid them down due to not needing anymore, 3 humans were killed before their normal life expectancy was up, and one female alien was almost tortured to death by an insane space pirate, remaining sane only due to sheer willpower. Even ascended beings are not safe.
• In Pretty Little Liars, most of the people suspected to be A (all of which were main characters) end up dying and maybe 2 of the people who actually were A. By the end of the last book in the series, the dead include Ali (maybe), Toby and Jenna Cavanaugh, Mona Vanderwaal, Ian, and Courtney.
• The Prince Roger series has several characters that are upgraded to Mauve Shirt in the first book and promptly killed at the beginning of the second.
• The four POV characters of The Priory of the Orange Tree make it through the final battle. Nobody around them is particularly safe. It starts when Kit is killed in a random rockslide, demonstrating not only that people are going to die, but that they aren't entitled to a death with meaning. Truyde and her lover Sulyard are executed separately, their efforts to avert the Nameless One on their own a total failure, Susa dies just because she gets caught up in it, and the Prioress has her heart removed for getting in Kalyba's way.
• Project NRI. Everyone would very much like to leave Niege Research Institute, thus everyone would pretty much have to kill someone, anyone at some point.
  Owlfred flew out of the room. She was in a place very far away from home, in a meeting room filled with potential murderers, including herself. Her name was Noriko Yamagi. She was 19 years old, and she wanted to get out of here.
• In Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, absolutely everyone except for the main characters dies by being devoured by the black ooze, and then Jinana and Lupa pull a Heroic Sacrifice to stop it and buy time for the Embryon.
• In the Red Mars Trilogy, the series ends with only two or three of the characters still alive. The main protagonist of Red Mars was killed off, The Lancer was killed off, and then everyone slowly started to die of old age. By the time of the later stories in the The Martians story collection, all the characters are dead.
• The Redwall series has it lose several Mauve Shirts and at least one major character in every book. When asked about this, Jacques responded with "that's life".
• Apparently, a body count of six-billion-plus in book one wasn't enough for Remnants — characters continue to die in every book following. By the series' end, fewer than ten Mayflower passengers were still alive.
• In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy, the main character of Revelation Space is killed off in the second book, and pretty much everyone else introduced in the series prior to the last book dies. Only two of the characters survives the trilogy.
• The Reynard Cycle: Each book in the series has a fairly high body count, and anyone other than Reynard himself seems to be fair game. Being a Mauve Shirt or a Tagalong Kid seems to be an almost certain death sentence.
  • Gods help you if you are a horse.
• As a mystery series, Sano Ichiro has had regular and semi-regular characters be among the casualties and culprits of the mysteries, or be victims of their own failed plots in the shogun's Decadent Court. Ones that grow quickly in power often get killed off to symbolize how fast they can lose the shogun's favor, or when fate cruelly intervenes to show even the most powerful become prey to death. Seppuku, as a common way to regain honor for a shamed samurai, is also a common death.
• Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly. Just prior to the climax of the book, Gant, the main character's love interest that has been part of the team for three books is suddenly and gruesomely killed off. Not to mention that 90% of the cast in each and every one of his books dies.
  • He also does this when Wizard is killed quite suddenly in Five Greatest Warriors.
  • Just don't get attached to a character in his books. Ever.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events: Pretty much everyone dies, usually in horrible ways. The narrator is pretty vague about the fate of the orphans and their lost friends, pretty much only hinting that Sunny and Violet survive in obscure areas, the end and in The Beatrice Letters.
• In Seven Men of Gascony by R. F. Delderfield, everyone died except the soldier Gabriel and the camp-follower Nicholette whom he marries and retires into civilian life.
• Shannara loves this. Even if you survive your original series you will die in the sequel.
• Shuuen No Shiori Project: And everyone does, in fact, die.
• In The Silmarillion most of the main characters get killed at various stages during the war against Morgoth. Fëanor, the greatest Noldo (Deep-Elf) who ever lived dies in the first battle against the Balrogs (after accidentally killing one of his own sons in a fire, according to a very late story published in "The Peoples of Middle-Earth"). Of his half-brothers and nephews, who are the main protagonists of the Exile, the only two to survive are Finarfin, who regrets the campaign and returns back to Aman, and his daughter Galadriel, the future ruler of the Galadhrim. Only one out of the seven Sons of Fëanor might have been able to stay alive by the end of the First Age (his fate is actually unknown).
  • And those are elves. The Men die like flies.
• The second volume of A Simple Survey, A Simple Monitoring. The first half consists of short stories, all but one of which include at least one death (and the sole exception has the protagonist murdering someone in the backstory). In some stories, only one person is left alive by the end. The protagonist(s) of each story aren't exempt from this.
• Not quite literally so in the Slingshot series: while one of the main characters dies early on, and his death would have been avoidable, for the rest of the cast, the plot armor works pretty well.
• The Snuff Network kills off minor and recurring characters throughout the series casually, sometimes with little warning. Even some of the main characters like Russell Wheeler bite it before the end.
• Be careful about who you get attached to in Someone Else's War. Then again, it's a story about Child Soldiers, so this makes it a sad case of Truth in Television.
• A Song of Ice and Fire plays this trope to the point of the many main character deaths having become an internet meme — contrasting JK Rowling's quote, that "It's hard killing off so many characters" with a picture of George R. R. Martin, responding "You're adorable." Who initially seems to be the main hero doesn't even survive the first book. Parts of his family, their pets, their friends, their extended family, even some of their enemies, as well as beloved main characters (and their fairly fleshed-out rivals) from different story arcs bite it within the first book. Valar morghulis.
  • Martin explains in this interview that he employs this trope because he believes that if you're going to write about war you should treat war honestly.
• In Space Marine Battles, unless you have an in-game miniature, your chances of survival are low indeed. Perhaps 5% of character roster survives to the end of every novel.
• Spectral Shadows has this. In fact all three of the main characters, Christine, Sir Jon and Rael, either have already died, or will die. And then there's plenty of death when it comes to the secondary characters as well.
• The Squire's Tales becomes this towards the end, especially in the last book, beginning with the murder of kindly old Sir Bedivere. By the end of the series, almost every one of the dozens of named characters is dead, including most of the protagonists of previous books and the eponymous squire, Terence. The only survivors are Dinadan, Brangienne, Palomides, Luneta, Rhience, Guinglain, Guinevere and Lancelot, of whom only Dinadan and Luneta were protagonists.
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe, more and more lately. There's a rule for the EU that Luke, Leia, and Han can't be killed. Everyone else is fair game.
  • In the X-Wing Series, a number of Rogues and other characters in the Stackpole books are lost, but since he never managed to get the reader to make an emotional investment there's not much impact. When Aaron Allston writes the Wraiths, each character is individual and interesting, and their deaths are more shocking and saddening. Jesmin Ackbar, Falynn Sandskimmer, Eurssk "Grinder" Tri'ag, Ton Phanan, Castin Donn.
  • There are some apparent deaths in Stackpole's mains, but they rapidly get better, usually by the end of the book (Looking at you, Lieutenant Horn).
  • Chewbacca's death in Vector Prime is nearly the epitome of this trope in the Star Wars EU.
  • The death of Anakin Solo in Star by Star was easily the biggest at that point, especially as Anakin had been set up as the protagonist.
  • Characters first introduced in The Thrawn Trilogy are dying left and right. Zahn mentions that he's told that this is more realistic, and he admits that it is, but this is Star Wars, and he prefers entertaining to realistic. He's a bit higher on the "idealistic" side of the scale.
    "While some authors (and readers) like the tension of wondering who will live and who will die, I prefer the tension of seeing how the heroes are going to think or work their ways out of each difficult or impossible situation they find themselves in."
• In Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, 99% of the human population dies in the Georgia Flu pandemic. Even 20 years later, characters can die suddenly and terribly.
• In Strange Eons, almost all of the protagonists die and so do several other characters.
• In Robert McCammon's Swan Song, practically everyone dies, and since he starts out with so many characters, that's a lot of death. The book is about nuclear holocaust, though, so it makes sense.
• Don't get too attached to characters in Ian Irvine's Three Worlds cycle. Mauve Shirts on the verge of getting character upgrades? Fan favourite cameos? Plot-important characters? Main characters? It's one of the most brutal examples of Earn Your Happy Ending ever seen.
• The Tomorrow Series. As if it wasn't bad enough that two of the main protagonists are comatose or dead by the third book, The Night Is For Hunting sees a raid on the group of children they've been keeping an eye out for; all but five of the children are killed, and one of those remaining dies of exposure not long afterwards.
  • It's not so much the number of deaths but the nature of each one. Corrie is shot in the back in Book 1, falls into a coma in Book 2, and dies at some unknown time between then and Book 6. Chris dies in a car accident offscreen. Robin goes out heroically, but her death may or may not have been pointless and demoralises the rest of them. And then there's the aforementioned children's deaths …
• Miles Cameron's The Traitor Son Cycle has characters who are well-established after several books be suddenly killed in a short sentence in a random battle, half the time they're not even mentioned afterwards.
• Unda Vosari kills off at least two characters before the final chapter.
• This trope is present in Suzanne Collins' other series, The Underland Chronicles.
• The Unknown Soldier. About half of the cast is killed, and most of the surviving characters are side characters. Out of the four most central main characters, only one survives the war alive — and he too is wounded and exits the story before the book ends.
• The Unwomanly Face of War: The war didn't spare anyone it could get its hands on. Children, women, elderly people could and had died. Many people lost their children who were soldiers to war, or saw them permanently maimed if they ever made it back home.
• Utopia 58: By the end of the story, every single major character, except for the villains and Kay's wife, is dead.
• All four protagonists die in The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard, among at least four others.
• Probably an average of three cats, usually major characters, are guaranteed to die in any one volume of Erin Hunter's Warriors series.
  • However, this stops completely in Series 3, when except for one or two deaths of minor characters before the first book began, NO ONE DIES. Not even in Book 4, where despite containing the biggest battle since the First Series, NO ONE dies. They had two near-deaths. Then Book 5 came...
    • Counting the deaths seen in Jayfeather's visions, the third series only killed off 6 characters (one of them an unnamed elder) and a whole bunch of Tribe Cats, which is pretty minor considering the first two series each have body counts in the twenties. And of course, Hollyleaf might not actually be dead...
  • Counting unnamed characters, kits, deaths that are only mentioned and not seen, deaths by famine and sickness, and the four cats that were left behind to die in Dawn, the actual average number of deaths in the first two series is around 4.75 per book. (Until the Power of Three series, which brings the number down. But then of course, no one knows how many Tribe cats were killed in Outcast.)
  • And then there's Bluestar's Prophecy, a prequel with a large cast of characters, most of which are never seen in the first book. Guess what happens to them (although, a fair number of them did get killed off in between chapters).
  • So far, the fourth series seems to be working on some form of subversion of Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: If you are a minor character who has been alive since the first series, you will be arbitrarily killed off without warning. Meanwhile, The Last Hope features multiple cases of The Hero Dies, and a total of 32 cats died in the Dark Forest Battle, making the fourth series the arc with the highest kill count.
  • Not even the dead can escape death—spirits can be killed a second time, with no chance of coming back. They are lost to oblivion.
  • The fifth series (the prequel arc) brings this back full force, killing off more than 15 characters in the first three books alone. The last three books generally have one major death per book, however.
  • The sixth arc has killed off several major characters so far, the death of Needletail being an especially jarring example. Not to mention, more than half of SkyClan died or defected in the backstory, major and minor characters alike.
  • The seventh arc seems to be toning down on this, with a kind-of death in Book 1 and one death in Book 2. However, in Book 3, a total of 10 cats were killed, supporting and minor characters alike.
  • In the final book of the seventh arc, not only does [Bristlefrost die, she dies in her own POV, and her spirit is killed PERMANENTLY. She doesn’t go to StarClan, she’s gone forever.
  • The novella Mapleshade's Vengeance kills off 7 characters, including 3 kits and the titular character herself.
• Wars of the Realm has a lot of angel characters dying—Ral, Persimus, Sason, and Jayt being perhaps the most heart-wrenching to readers.
  • For the humans, however, this trope is largely subverted, with the main characters narrowly avoiding death many times and only one notable human character (Ross) being killed off.
• Watership Down is known for its atmosphere of pervasive dread, but the author turns out to be much too kind-hearted to pull the plug on his favorite characters, and settles for simple maiming instead.
  • He had planned to kill off Bigwig at the end though, and only spared him at the behest of his young daughters. The mentality was definitely there.
• Wearing the Cape begins with a terrorist attack that leaves bodies all over, the Sentinels are shown to have lost several members before the story begins, the murder of a street-level hero is casually alluded to, and finally, in the attack on Whittier Base no fewer than three Sentinels die — including two main characters.
• In the final volume of The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan killed off characters left and right, including, but not limited to, Siuan Sanche, Gareth Bryne, Davram Bashere, Rhuarc, Hurin, Alanna, Gawyn, Birgitte, and even Egwene. Also the Memetic Badass horse Bela, though that was unplanned and due to Brandon Sanderson writing her into a situation the editor thought she couldn't survive.
• Worlds of Shadow: Many of the starting characters don't make it through to the end of the series.
• The Zone World War III action novels by James Rouch.

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