- A Song of Ice and Fire: "Skinchangers" and "wargs" can do this to animals. A particularly powerful one can do it to a human, but most humans have the mental strength to resist their possession. When successful, the experience is extremely traumatic for the person.
- Robert Adams' Horseclans series has the Witchmen; twentieth-century scientists who transfer their minds into new bodies to stay alive After the End. At first, this requires mechanical help, but they later learn to do without that.
- In This Perfect Day, leader and programmer Li Wei Chun's head (and brain) have been put on the body of an athlete, who volunteered for the honor.
- In Greg Egan's sci-fi short story "Learning to Be Me", the main character wonders about the Jewel. The jewel is a small crystalline computer implanted within everyone's brains at birth. It mimics the brain's responses perfectly, since it is always being adjusted to match the brain's responses. Eventually, people's brains are scraped out, leaving the jewel to act as them, in their bodies. He worries through the entire story, if replacing the human brain is a huge, society-wide case of this, or no big deal.
- In Xanth, the ability to do this is the Sea Hag's magic talent; she's lived hundreds of years by stealing the bodies of young women. She can't do it if her target knows what she's doing, but she raises them herself to make sure they don't.
- In Foundation and Earth, R. Daneel Olivaw announces his plan to bodysnatch Fallom at the end.
- Happens to Zelda in the second book of Oksa Pollock
- Lois McMaster Bujold has some different versions in her works:
- In the Vorkosigan Saga, raising clones for brain-transplant purposes is a major industry in Jackson's Whole.
- In the World of the Five Gods novel The Hallowed Hunt, the 'offspring' version of this trope was used. Earl Horseriver, descendant of the last Hallowed King, is in fact the last Hallowed King. A spell to keep him going to fight the invasion five hundred years ago by transferring his consciousness sequentially into each of his male blood heirs is still in effect — and he can't stop it. Think about it.
- Doro of Octavia Butler's Patternist series has this power; his lack of limitations on it makes him a nigh-unstoppable force.
- Used by Orson Scott Card in Children of the Mind when Ender's soul is divided and housed in two other bodies, representing his brother and sister as teens, which he accidentally created when AI Jane took him into the sub-ether. Eventually, worn out by keeping track of three separate lives, his old body dies and his soul goes full time to the creation representing his brother as a teenager. Ender's friends deliberately drive his "sister" past the Despair Event Horizon (with her consent) so her body will be free for Jane to inhabit.
- In Axolotl by Julio Cortazar an axolotl
◊ switches minds with the protagonist. Before they switched the protagonist was drawn to the axolotl and was philosophizing on how fluid identity is and how he and the axolotl are the same. - In The Light of Other Days, one of the main characters is the son of an industrialist. Actually, he's a clone of the industrialist, and when he fails to grow up into a suitable heir, plan B is to overwrite his brain pattern with his father's. The attempt is foiled.
- The Adventure Of The Antiquarians Niece, a Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft-inspired short story by Barbara Hambly.
- Any magician in the The Bartimaeus Trilogy who summons a demon into his own head risks this, as Quentin Makepeace and his followers found out.
- In Edmond Hamilton's short story The Avenger from Atlantis (also titled The Vengeance of Ulios), the protagonist pursues his mortal enemy for thousands of years; both he and his quarry transfer their brains to numerous bodies to keep up the chase.
- In Fallen Dragon, the rulers of one planet take over the bodies of young criminals. They offer their technique to the leader of the corporation raiding their planet, but he is unimpressed because they don't do anything with their pseudo-immortality except maintain their power. The B7 council that secretly controls Earth in The Naked God does something similar by copying their memories to cloned bodies and instantly destroying the old one, unaware that those bodies also have souls that will pass on to The Beyond.
- In I Will Fear No Evil, an aging millionaire has his brain transferred into a young girl, but it's because she's the only person with the correct rare blood type and has recently died of head trauma (in a mugging). Furthermore, she was his friend, and he's shocked and grieves for her when he finds out whose body he's using. Luckily, she survives as a sort of Spirit Advisor (unless he's hallucinating it). This leads to some quite odd scenes, like where the main character is having sex with the former occupant of the body's former lover and his former friend and lawyer.(Oh, God, Eunice! Why didn't you tell me?) (Tell you what?) (That for a woman it's so much better!)
- The Dosadi Experiment: Wonderful way to prolong life indefinitely at the expense of others, for those who have enough power. In the end, shop is closed, but this little secret does not leak too far.
- In War of the Dreaming, this happens to Kid Hero Galen Waylock by his ancestor Azrael de Gray. Different in that Azrael did not do so to keep himself alive, but to escape the Tailor-Made Prison he's locked in.
- Gyhard, the antagonist in Fifth Quarter, has been keeping himself alive this way for a couple of hundred years.
- H. P. Lovecraft's short stories:
- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward looks like a case of this, but [[spoiler:actually features an Identical Grandson compelled to resurrect his ancestor's corpse, who then kills him and takes his place.
- "The Thing on the Doorstep" is based on this concept: A man's wife is, in fact, his father-in-law, who now has designs to retake a male body.
- "The Shadow Out of Time" is about a human being who has his mind switched with an alien scientist and is forced to live in its world in its body for six years. Except that its world is ancient Earth, making it a Time Travelling Grand Theft Me.
- Crosses over into Inferred Holocaust territory when it becomes clear that the same aliens have apparently pulled this on entire species at least twice (once when coming to Earth in the first place, once jumping ahead into the distant future when their ancient enemies on Earth broke loose again) to escape their own extinction.
- In "The Challenge from Beyond", co-authored by a number of authors, Lovecraft finally gets the plot rolling by having the protagonist mind-swapped with an alien bent on conquest. Robert E. Howard then has the human in the alien body kick ass on the alien world, leaving the "victim" of the Grand Theft Me to commit a much more successful version than the original thief, who can't handle a human body's powerful urges and dies.
- The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches story "To Mars and Providence", which stars Lovecraft, has the Martians do this in a way similar to The Shadow Out of Time.
- In one of Larry Niven's Gil the Arm stories, a notorious gangster and organlegger kidnapped a rich family. Both parents were killed; the ordeal left one of the children mute and the other traumatized and never really back to his old self. It turned out that the latter was actually the organlegger's brain transplanted into the kidnap victim's body.
- Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates involves, among other complexities and weirdness, "Dogface Joe", who migrates from body to body, making sure to dose the one he's leaving with a lethal amount of poison in the process. He has to swap because the new body becomes extremely furry (a magical accident made him an avatar of a jackal-god). He can also, using his ability, supply someone with a new body (this requires two body-jumps, obviously). It becomes important to the overall plot.
- Tim Powers' Medusa's Web features a form of Mental Time Travel in which a person may temporarily occupy the body of another person in another time. There are ways an unscrupulous person can extend the period of occupancy for a few minutes — and ways a really unscrupulous person can make it a permanent arrangement, which is invariably bad for the person whose body it was.
- In the Discworld novels, an Igor whose body becomes too ruined to fix is broken down for spares and the brain preserved, where it can be transplanted into another body at a later point to effectively return the Igor to life again. The Igors do show consideration, however: The bodies they use for this are exclusively from people put in permanent vegetative states or killed by head injuries that are donated to the Igors by their next-of-kin.
- In the Expanded Universe of Star Wars:
- Palpatine cloned himself and uses the Force to transfer his soul into new bodies to live eternally. However, one of his underlings paid to have the Clonemaster damage the genetic material of the clones, causing them to decay within a few weeks. He attempted to possess Leia's newborn Anakin Solo, but a Jedi-in-hiding that was traveling with the gang intercepted his spirit, and died, taking Palpatine's soul with him to the afterlife.
- One of Palpatine's underlings, Cronal, planned to do the same thing to Luke in the novel Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor as part of a complex Batman Gambit — he would allow Luke to defeat his Card-Carrying Villain warlord persona, Lord Shadowspawn, and then claim his body as his own, using Luke's heroic reputation (which Cronal had been using his own propaganda machine to inflate on the side) to ultimately get himself installed emperor. After Luke escaped his clutches, he decided to try the same technique on the next best subject - Leia. Thankfully, Cronal was defeated before that could happen.
- Galaxy of Fear has a form of this done with a brutish wanted (male) criminal and almost-fourteen-year-old Tash Arranda, though Tash's brain is put into a droid jar. The criminal was supposed to go into an adult male's body, and while he's fine with being a pubescent girl briefly, he quickly starts to complain.
- Mercedes Lackey's works:
- The villain of Jinx High is a witch who's been stealing her daughters' bodies for several hundred years; this seriously throws the protagonist, who's not expecting the skilled magician she's looking for to be in high school.
- The evil sorcerer Ma'ar from the Heralds of Valdemar series manages to prolong his life for centuries by magically propelling his soul into a succession of bodies from his own bloodline (killing the original soul in the process). His failure to do this completely the last time forms the basis of his eventual defeat. When the Mage Storms begin to drive Firesong insane, one sign is his growing obsession with finding an "ethical" version of Ma'ar's technique.
- The Wizard of London. Lady Cordelia plans to take over David Alderscroft's body and identity. Her primary aim is to gain the political power she can't claim in a female body, but it's indicated that she will also use this technique to become immortal (by moving into new bodies on a regular basis).
- Dragonlance:
- In the Dragonlance Legends books, the evil archmage Fistandantilus has been doing this to his most skilled apprentices for centuries — he steals not only the bodies but also, it is implied, the arcane powers of his victims. He meets his downfall when Raistlin Majere turns the trick around and steals Fistandantilus's body, along with all the centuries of magical power he's accumulated. Curiously, this does not cause Raistlin to assume Fistandantilus's appearance. Instead, he reverts to the appearance he himself had before the Test. Why the spell works differently for Raistlin is unclear; perhaps because Fistandantilus dies as Raistlin completes the ritual.
- In 3 Wizards Too Many it turns out that at first Fistandantilus "hunted" in other worlds where he was not notorious (wider choice of victims, lesser risk that someone will track and thwart his plot), but eventually ran afoul of both Elminster, who used the Dragon Breath spell when they last met, and Mordenkainen, who too somehow "taught him the wisdom of staying closer to home" (all 3 lived in adjacent crystal spheres).
- In Dragonlance: The New Adventures, Asvoria takes over the dragon Raedon's body, using it to attack the village and his allies.
- In R.A. Salvatore's Demonwars series, Chezru Chieftan Yakim Douan takes advantage of a prophecy of rebirth to literally be reborn for centuries by taking over the bodies of unborn children.
- In King Pinch, lich snatched the living man's body, but failed to destroy lifeforce, so victim managed to take his own discarded body in turn.
- Cadavres Exquis, the first in a series of Darker and Edgier short-stories about obscure french proto-Super Hero/ Great Detective Fascinax, has Big Bad Numa Pergyll performing a Grand Theft Me on the titular hero's Love Interest.
- Jack Vance's novella Château d'If. The young hosts pay for a mysterious adventure, though the old customers pay a lot more. Their brains are swapped.
- In David Weber's Mutineer's Moon, the bad guys have very long lives already, due to biotechnical enhancement, but they use this method to stretch it out even more...to the especial horror of the good guys when they discover that the latest victim was the mother of heroine Jiltanith.
- In The Quickening trilogy, Wyl is (involuntarily) granted the power that if someone "kills" him, he lives on in the body of the killer, erasing their existing personalities (although retaining certain memories and learned abilities). He occupies a number of bodies over the series, including that of his sister, who doesn't know about the power - she stabs the person responsible killing Wyl's previous incarnation, not knowing that this person's body is now occupied by Wyl and that she herself will be overwritten. At the end of the series, Wyl attempts to arrange matters so that he dies at the hands of the Big Bad (who was the king, and who just married Wyl's love interest.)
- In the Magic: The Gathering novel Shattered Alliance, Mairsil the Pretender is revealed to have escaped death by storing his soul inside his ring and tries to take over the body of pyromancer Jaya Ballard, who had been wearing the ring since Mairsil was killed in an earlier book.
- In The Dresden Files, the necromancer Capiorcorpus, AKA Corpsetaker, specializes in doing this, swapping bodies with her target. Despite the name, we only actually seem her stealing living bodies. The literal Latin translation of "corpus" is "body," so the name makes perfect sense and it's likely Harry just mucked up the translation (his Latin isn't great, plus "Corpsetaker" is a much better Necromancer name than "Bodytaker"). In Ghost Story Capiocorpus' ghost tries to get the power to manifest in the real world. She could then use her abilities to take whatever body she wanted, effectively coming back to life. Harry speculates this is the same method her mentor Kemmler used to return to life six times.
- In Hopscotch anyone can swap bodies with anyone else. One of the protagonists rents his body out to people who want to avoid unpleasant experiences.
- Animorphs. The primary antagonists of the series, the Yeerks, are basically sentient space-faring parasites whose only major power is to take over the body of another organism. Or, at least one with an ear canal and a brain. Making matters worse, many of the Yeerks are torn between being forced to crush another creature's free will beneath their pseudopod, or spending the rest of their life as a wretched fish-sized slug deprived of sight, hearing, and...well, just about everything. Made worse once a Yeerk has a taste of how parasitic good life can be, and the fact that their leaders are quite crazy.
- In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Master Mind of Mars, the Mad Scientist Ras Thavas sells this. When Ulysses Paxton gets two victims restored to their own bodies, they briefly pretend to those who usurped them so as to abdicate; then Ulysses makes it appear to be a miraculous reversal.
- In Anne Rice's aptly-titled novel The Vampire Chronicles: The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is tired of being a vampire and is contacted by a human who has this power and offers him a Freaky Friday-like adventure. Only it is a setup by the Body Thief to keep his immortal body.
- Happens a couple of times in T.A. Pratt's Marla Mason series. First, with the sorcerer and his young apprentice in San Francisco's Chinatown in the first book, and then also in book 4 when Rondeau inadvertently steals B's body.
- Though it isn't the focus of the story, this does factor in to the plot of Harlan Ellison's novella Mefisto In Onyx.
- In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space, the captain has done this to Sajaki some time prior to the events in the book, requesting that the alien Pattern Jugglers overwrite his victim's mind with his own. A fanatical cult in the novella Turquoise Days hopes to use the same technique to sacrifice themselves voluntarily to allow their leader's personality to replace their own. There's also a case of Temporarily Borrow Me; Dan Sylveste is drugged up so that his father's Beta-level simulation can control his body, which turns out to be possible only because he's his father's clone, not his father's son.
- George R. R. Martin's short story "The Pear-Shaped Man".
- James H. Schmitz does the "heir" version in the Trigger Argee story "The Symbiotes".
- "Beyond lies the Wub", a short story by Philip K. Dick. An Earthbound rocketship stops on Mars to take on food animals, including a wub — a large, slovenly Martian pig. It turns out the wub is a sentient telepathic alien interested mainly in eating and philosophical discussion. The captain is determined to kill and eat the wub regardless, believing it to be a threat, and blows the wub's brains out despite the objections of his crew. The story ends with the captain enthusiastically tucking into cooked wub, watched glumly by the crew, who are further shocked when their 'captain' continues the philosophical discussion the wub was having "before we were interrupted".
- In books two and three of Thorarinn Gunnarsson's "Skateboard Dragons" trilogy, this is how the rulers of the evil Alasheran Empire have survived for thousands of years.
- In "When True Night Falls", book two of C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy, the Undying Prince survives this way.
- Two Christopher Pike books, The Immortal and The Blind Mirror, use this as a twist- without the transferred soul initially remembering their true identity.
- In C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine Cycle, the qhal (and their predecessors) could use the Gates to transfer their minds into new hosts. This tended to leave the two personalities struggling for control.
- Morgaine herself seriously considers doing this sometime in her future, despite knowing how evil it is, because otherwise she won't live long enough to close all the Gates, and leaving even a single Gate standing simply isn't an option.
- The more modern version is done in House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, where Matt turns out to be a clone raised only for his organs.
- In Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer struggling writer Declan Gunn's body is possessed by none other than Lucifer himself, so that old Luce can sample the mortal life and a chance for redemption.
- Necroscope:
- In book 5 of the saga Faethor Ferenczy tries this on Harry. It does not end well.
- The climax of book two has a twist on this. One of the heroes' has had his mind and soul destroyed leaving him basically a still breathing corpse. Harry, at this point, is a disembodied soul in search of a body and moves right in.
- There was an entire series based around this trope, with titles such as "Help, I'm trapped in my dog's body!" and "Help, I'm trapped in my gym teacher's body!".
- In Darkship Thieves, Nat is convinced his lover Max has been possessed by the recently deceased father's ghost. He's right: Max was a clone of the father created specifically so that the elder could discard his old body and transplant his brain into a younger, healthier one. The father had achieved near immortality by murdering his sons over and over. But he screwed up in this generation by not realizing Max had a secret, gay relationship with Nat and thus acting out of character to him. The protagonists learn that the entire society is founded on this. The ruling oligarchs are the men who figured out how to do this and have been ruling the planet together for centuries.
- A book of a series popular only in Poland does that in its seventh part. The main antagonists of the story, if they can be called that, are three sisters. The story itself is set in modern times, yet the sisters were already non-young adults around the times of the Second World War, and don't look older than sixty in the story itself. How did they do it? This trope. They took over the bodies of another set of triplet sisters, in a pharmaceutical way. The last chapter of the book itself is all about saving the protagonist girl, since one of the sisters' bodies has some sort of a spinal disease and she's looking for a replacement, finding the protagonist a replacement. A matter-warping, intelligent huge mass of rock controlled by the sisters is also involved.
- One very strange no-sex "Sex Story" Of One Flesh (still very NSFW, however) involves an oddly non-villainous version of this in which a man and a little girl take turns controlling her body until she lets him take full control and swap his body, which is magically stored in the form of a doll, with hers. A bit of backstory indicates that this arrangement arose from a very strange Cursed with Awesome situation involving a kind of mutual theft that left them both forced to inhabit one body at the same time; judging by their attitudes toward each other, they've managed to work out some kind of understanding with each other and turn this situation to their mutual advantage.
- In The Wish List, Belch eventually takes over the body of Meg's father Franco.
- The Edgar Allan Poe Story, Ligeia, which has a twist. Not only does the old wife steal the new wife's body, she also transforms the new wife back into her old form.
- The Wheel of Time:
- Attempted — the character Mordeth was a Knight Templar Evil Chancellor who lived roughly 2000 years before the main plot of the series, and he tried to fight the Dark One using his own methods. The result unleashed an Eldritch Abomination which consumed the city that was Mordeth's power base and left him immortal but trapped there. However, if Mordeth could convince a living person to accompany him beyond the city, he could steal their body and escape. In the first book, he tries this on Punch-Clock Villain Padan Fain- but since Fain had been altered already by the Dark One to become a Scarily Competent Tracker, the result was less a possession and more a merge. Mordeth/Fain became a major recurring villain in the series, has all sorts of weird superpowers, and as a result of the imperfect combination (and the Dark One's original taint on Fain) he's completely freakin' nuts.
- A rare heroic example occurs in the final book. Rand switches bodies with Moridin. Moridin ends up dying in Rand's body, thanks to the unhealable wounds that Moridin himself inflicted on Rand.
- Flight: The main character Zits is shot in the head and has a flashback where he is transformed into many historical characters.
- A rare positive variation appears in the Ghostly Companions collection of stories by Vivien Alcock. In "A Change of Aunts", a horrifying revenant (that used to be a nursemaid who drowned herself in a pond after she let the children in her care die when she visited her lover) attacks Meg and William's abusive Aunt Gertrude when it catches her beating the children. The undead nursemaid steals Gertrude's body for herself and leaves Gertrude trapped in her old rotting immobile corpse in the pond. "Gertrude" treats the children with great care and kindness. When Meg realizes what happened, she understandably decides to leave her abusive aunt to her Fate Worse than Death.
- In John Wyndham's short story "Pillar To Post", the protagonist is a paraplegic who frequently takes drugs to cope with the pain, and who suddenly finds himself in a healthy body very far in the future. People of the future society live virtually forever by swapping bodies with the "feeble minded" of whom there are very many in the future. But then the original owner of the body, who engaged in mental time travel, takes back his body and the protagonist is back in the original, paralyzed and pain-wracked body - but he finds a way to return. Thereby, the two of them change places again and again, each trying to leave a "booby trap" which would destroy the paralyzed body while it is inhabited by his rival. The contest is finally resolved in a rather immoral way, by letting a present-time mental patient be moved into into the paralyzed body and be burned to death, leaving the two contestants in possession of two healthy bodies...
- Bob Shaw's story "Waltz of the Bodysnatchers" takes place in a future society in which a murderer is sentenced to change places with his or her victim, who is thus brought back to life and inherits the murderer's body. The story's cast of cynical and scheming characters abuse this legal provision by finding creative ways of manipulating a younger and healthier person into murdering them and getting caught...
- The Transformers Trans Tech story "I, Lowtech" involves the main character being convinced he's somehow been swapped into a different body while someone else is parading around with his, even though there's no tangible evidence that actually happened. Eventually turns out he's right, and it happened courtesy of a Decepticon with the ability to seamlessly manipulate other people's sparks, but by then his quest to prove he's right has already driven him to insanity.
- In Hush, Hush, fallen angels spend all their time tracking down nephilim and forcing them to submit to possession for two weeks out of every year. The nephilim all hate this, but are targeted because they won't die from it, unlike humans. At the end of the story, Patch possesses Nora without her permission, and without warning. It's to fight off someone threatening her, but she still finds it terrifying.
- In Timothy Zahn's "Soulminder" stories, a technology is developed that can draw a person's essence from their body and store it elsewhere before returning it. It's meant to assist in lifesaving procedures, but naturally it doesn't take long for somebody to catch on that it also enables Grand Theft Me. Unfortunately for the first person who tries it, an aging, amoral, atheist crime boss, it turns out that placing your soul in someone else's body causes you to start taking on aspects of their personality. He is caught by the FBI while going to mass, and seems relieved that he was caught.
- Stranger With My Face is a teen novel by Lois Duncan in which identical twin sisters Laurie and Lia are separated in infancy when Laurie is adopted and Lia is not. Lia learns astral projection and uses it to visit Laurie when the girls are seventeen, and teaches Laurie to do it too - in order to trick Laurie into this trope.
- In the John Carter of Mars series, the mad scientist Ras Thavas does this through brain transplantation in the book "Master Mind of Mars", and makes a living out of it. Early on, the story's Big Bad, an ugly queen, pays him to have her body switched with that of a very beautiful young woman, setting in motion the main plot of the book.
- Legacy of the Dragokin: Mordak makes his return about midway by taking over Kalak's body. This begins the the second phase of the plot; two enemy camps.
- It is heavily implied that, unlike the four TV/film adaptations to date, the mother was responsible for swapping bodies with her daughter in the original book version of Freaky Friday.
- In Gardens of the Moon, the first book in Malazan Book of the Fallen, the Patron of Assassins, Cotillion, possesses a young fisher girl. He takes on her identity, renames her Sorry and through her spies on the Bridgeburners, an elite company of soldiers. It is heavily implied that the possession is so complete that had not Riggalai the Seer intervened and shielded the girl's spirit with her own, it would have been annihilated.
- In Andre Norton's Forerunner Foray, the artifact throws Zianth and the other sensitive back in time to take over bodies. Dead ones, to be sure — they stage a great Back from the Dead.
- Occurs in the The Saga of the Noble Dead book The Dog in the Dark. Chap uses his power as a Fay to temporarily take over a human body.
- In Pact, the Faerie exile Padraic does this to Maggie Holt by stealing her name and taking her form with Glamour, so that her own parents don't recognize her and he can take her role. Maggie is unable to reclaim her name from him, instead taking the name "Mags" for herself in order to reclaim what's left of her human relationships.
- A Mage's Power: After the shaman of Kyraa gives Eric the spirit of Dengel, she warns him to never give Dengel full control of his body, because if he does, then this could be the result. At the climax, he crosses the Godzilla Threshold and does it anyway.
- This is more or less the premise of the novel Skinjumper by Lincoln Crisler. A failed necromantic ritual gives Terry Miller the power to switch bodies but only if he murders the person first. Terry attempts to use the power to improve his life but his stupidity and bad luck make it a Black Comedy of epic proportions.
- In the Towers Trilogy, Xhea's closest-kept secret is that she once assisted in one. She aided the spirit of Addis Edren in taking over the body of his younger brother Lorn Edren.
- In the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, someone who has used Brain Uploading to digitize their memories can convert their mind into a "daemon seed" and implant it into the nanomachine colony of another body. The daemon seed will then reprogram the nanites to erase the mind of the body's original owner and install the digitized mind in its place. This technique is used in Grail by Ariane Conn, who tries to take over the bodies of Oliver Conn and Chelsea Conn. She is purged from the former, but succeeds in stealing the latter.
- Dragonvarld: This is the practice of the Mistress of Dragons, who never actually dies, instead living on in the form of a carefully chosen successor. The real people are still alive, but wish that they weren't.
- In The Nekropolis Archives, a werewolf named Honani kills a prostitute. The protagonist, Matthew Richter, exacts justice by extracting Honani's soul and transferring the murdered woman's soul into his body.
- In A Land Fit for Heroes, the dwenda plan to resurrect the Illwrack Changeling, their Dark Lord and general who is currently stuck as Sealed Evil in a Can, by transferring his soul into the protagonist's body.
- The works of Stephen King:
- In End of Watch, the villain gains the ability to project his consciousness into people who are in hypnotic trances, eventually becoming able to overwrite their minds and take complete control of them. It's implied that part of this is being used as a guinea pig by an unscrupulous doctor for testing an experimental drug for repairing brain damage.
- Two short stories, "Gramma" and the more recent "Willie the Weirdo", feature a dying grandparent forcibly switching bodies with a grandson.
- In The Drawing of the Three, Roland initially "draws" the members of his new ka-tet in this fashion - Eddie even has a feeling "of being possessed, like the little girl in The Exorcist." It's played with, as the drawing itself is just an intermediary step to transport the ka-tet to his world: Roland is initially tempted to leave his dying body behind and permanently control Eddie, but decides against it on moral grounds. He has no such compunctions about taking control of Jack Mort, though, because the latter is an unrepentant serial killer and Jake's first murderer.
- At the end of Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have a Nemesis, Penny's robotic duplicate attempts to foil her plan by switching bodies with her. It's then foiled by Penny's invention power, who is now in Penny's organic body while she inhabits the robot body.
- Demons in The Divine Comedy can kick a person's soul out of their body into Hell and then take the body as their own. Fortunately, they can only pull this on the worst of the traitors, namely those who betray those under their hospitality.
- The plot of Dutch author Tais Teng's book Dead Eyes revolves around an ancient Chinese Emperor who made a pact with an immortal Evil Sorcerer for eternal life, which he granted him by periodically casting the Emperor into new host bodies. However, during the most recent transference, something messed up the ritual, and the Emperor becomes trapped inside the mind of the main character. The sorcerer then tracks him down while intending to use him as the new host.
- Darkness Weaves has Efrel who has been so badly mutilated and crippled that only being an Eldritch Abomination has allowed her to stay alive. Since she is skilled in dark magic, she plans to transfer her soul in the body of a young woman daughter of the man who mutilated her, both to regain beauty and get her Revenge, since she aims to let the girl live in her former, ruined body.
- In Malediction Trilogy Anushka the witch has survived for five hundred years by repeteadly transfering her soul into the body of a female descendant.
- I Sit Behind The Eyes: This is the MO of the titular Eldritch Abomination. It usurps the soul of a chosen victim and gains their memories and characteristics. However, it instantly forgets its previous memories, resulting in a Tomato in the Mirror scenario. This is a rare heroic example, as it only possesses people who threaten the lives of others.
- Titan's Forest: Kirrik can transfer her soul into others' bodies to avoid death or to replace a failing, aging body, forcing their own souls out and into whatever afterlife may exist. She plans to do this to Ular, but when she tries to do this in the climax her victim's god-bone amulet keeps her safe, so Kirrik steals the body of the rain goddess Ekhis instead. Unfortunately for her, however, a god's power resides strictly in their soul and she is left with a regular mortal body.
- In the seventh Warrior Cats arc, The Broken Code, a malevolent spirit tricks Shadowpaw into giving Bramblestar a "treatment" to his illness that actually results in him losing a life. While Bramblestar is dead, the spirit jumps into his body and takes over, pretending to be him and causing chaos in the Clans.
- In Sanctuary, Araminta starts wearing the pendant that contains the ghost eater, allowing him to possess her and force her to destroy her studio to leave a message. Then he steals her corporeality, leaving her as a ghost while he becomes almost solid. Morgan is eventually able to restore her corporeality.
- Bruce Coville's Book of... Aliens: Splortch and Miglick from Brian and the Aliens do this with Brian and his dog, switching bodies so they can go look around and determine if Earth's residents are really people. Then Brian and Lucky accidentally do the same thing to a couple of police.
- Quarters: There's a "Freaky Friday" Flip where Gyhard steals Bannon's body, running off in it.
- The Elemental Trilogy: The Bane has been forced to resort to this due to his original body having long become too mangled to be used. He has anyone who bears a close resemblance to him kidnapped and uses their bodies as spares; if one body gets killed, he can simply fall back on another.
- The Chronicles of Dorsa: Beastwalkers take control over animals' minds, to use them as familiars for spying. Skinwalkers can do the same thing with humans to read their minds as well.
- Dragonvarld: This is the practice of the Mistress of Dragons, who never actually dies, instead living on in the form of a carefully chosen successor. The real person is still alive, but wishes that they weren't, being entombed alive in agony for many years.
- In The Unorthodox Chronicles, a Strygga in the second book conducted a ritual decades ago to try and steal the magic ability of a little girl. The ritual succeeded, though not the way she had initially planned, and the result is that her consciousness has been living dormant inside of the young witch the entire time, only recently breaking loose. The Strygga's current plan is to take over the body entirely.
