Impaled With Extreme Prejudice / Literature

• In 1453, a historical novel that chronicles the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, several examples of Turkish impalement are described in gruesome detail.
• Anno Dracula: Both as a human warlord and a vampire, Dracula's MO is impaling his victims on metal spikes to demoralize his enemies, having killed thousands of people that way in both of his forms.
• Bazil Broketail: During the battle at Ossur Galan, Kepabar's throat is impaled with a dragon lance. He bleeds to death with the damn thing stuck in his neck.
• In the Belisarius Series, this is the Malwa Empire's favorite method of execution.
• Below: After battling a group of goblins, Finch impales their priest lengthwise with one of the metal spikes that was set as a trap in their temple, in retaliation for the trap killing his best friend Harry.
• Ben Snow: In "Ghost Town", the first of the Ten Little Murder Victims is impaled with a harpoon that leaves him Pinned to the Wall.
• The Bridge on the Drina features a slow, harrowing impalement, although in this case it's the Turks punishing a would-be saboteur.
  • Just to make this clear, they carefully inserted a long wooden spike trough the guy's rear end, while carefully avoiding all vital organs. He was then left dying in agony for days. The executioner's pay depended from the time the victim stayed alive. The longer, the better.
• In Tom Kratman's Caliphate, Rustam, one of the instructors of the janissary group that included young Hans, says he hates the Greeks and Serbs, thanks to many of his fellow soldiers having been staked, castrated, and eyes gouged out when fighting in the Balkans.
• In the Casca opening book our hero comments on this. He's immortal and a slave, and the punishment for an escaping slave or one who kills their master is impalement (specifically the classic version where the spear enters the rectum and the victim gradually slides down it). Casca knows how much worse it would be for him since he can't die.
• In The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the spear Gáe Bolga sprouts lots of long barbs when it enters the human body, thoroughly impaling whoever it strikes from the inside out. The victim has to be dissected for the weapon to be retrieved.
• Exploited in Book 4 of Codex Alera; Fade/Araris is locked in a duel with another Master Swordsman, and needs to tie her down long enough for Tavi and the others to escape the ship they're on. So he lets his opponent nail him to the hull with a sword before ripping himself off and escaping. The move almost kills him, but the heroes escape and Isana is able to heal him once they get back to their own ship.
  • To be clear, the plan was to have his opponent get her sword stuck in the hull without him being impaled, but, well, you make do with what you can get.
• Stuart Kaminski's novel A Cold Red Sunrise sees Inspector Rostnikov of the Moscow Police Force sent to Siberia to solve the murder of a Party Commissar. The deceased Party functionary has, in keeping with The Perfect Crime cliché, stabbed through the eye and deep into the brain with an icicle. Except that this is Siberia in winter and the murder weapon hasn't melted.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: This happens to Azriel. He gets better.
• The heroic demise of Oy the billy-bumbler in The Dark Tower.
• In The Demon Breed, one of the rare plants in Ticos Cay's laboratory is known as a Harpooneer. It's harmless for as long as it's kept in suspended animation — and not a second longer. Ticos keeps it next to the platform where his interrogators stand.
• In the Discworld, Sam Vimes has combined dodgy external pipework, loose bricks, unexpected sharp pointy things installed just where climbing fingers will go for purchase, and a judicious application of grease in strategic places, with extremely sharp pointy railings directly underneath, as a deterrent to any visiting Assassins looking to get into his home or Pseudopolis Yard. He has also let the Assassins' Guild know about this. in Night Watch Discworld, he deliberately places a board studded with lots of sharp and rusty upward-pointing nails just underneath a skylight where he expects nocturnal visitors will seek to gain access. A satisfying degree of perforation does indeed happen to an unwary secret policeman.
  • The Assassins' Guild, never ones to overlook a practical challenge, have in turn made Vimes' home and Pseudopolis Yard into training exercises. These exercises are in turn given to students who have grown dangerously overconfident.
• Any form of dissent against The Draka is likely to result in any survivors suffering this. Then they plant them along the road.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Changes: Harry kills Duchess Ortega by impaling her with a bunch of large sharp spikes made of ice, which he had just added to his arsenal by taking up Mab's standing "offer" to become the Winter Knight.
  • Battle Ground:
    • Mab gets impaled through the throat with rebar, it doesn't kill her since she's immortal but the iron content takes her out of the fight until it's torn out.
    • Hendricks gets skewered by Ethniu while protecting Marcone. His last act is to spit in defiance at his killer while still run through by her weapon.
• Duncton Quest: the evil moles of the Word cult subject innocent Stone believers to this fate, called "Snouting", which involves impaling their snouts through barb wire as a method of execution. It's as gruesome as it sounds...
  • Bracken also gets impaled on a spike-trap in Duncton Wood, but survives.
• Egil's Saga: In the Battle of Vinheid, Thorolf Skallagrimsson skewers the English defector Earl Hring through his chest with a spear, then raises him up and plants the spear shaft on the ground so both armies can see the earl dying. Not long after, the terrified Scots break into a general flight.
• Completely expected on Fate/Apocrypha, since the Lancer of Black is Vlad III. One of his Noble Phantasms is a field of spears that rise from the ground to impale foes.
• In Fate/Zero this is how Rider meets his end. Charging straight into curtain fire from Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon he's skewered numerous times. The moment he's close enough to strike and brings down his sword he's captured by Enkidu with his blade barely an inch from Gilgamesh's head. Gilgamesh impales him through the chest with Ea shortly after.
• Fox Demon Cultivation Manual: Rong Sang was impaled and stuck to a tree by her own husband.
• In the Goosebumps book Go Eat Worms!, this trope is heavily implied to occur at the end of the book in a bizarre yet frightening manner. Main character Todd used to have a hobby of torturing worms, which caused him to one day get attacked by a giant worm, only he managed to barely escape. After that, he decided that he should instead try a different hobby, so he started chloroforming and pinning butterflies. Then one night, he was down in the basement working, and is shocked to see a fearsome visitor approach him. It was a giant butterfly (which was as big as a bedsheet) holding a giant silver pin (which was as big as a spear). The book ends right there, but the most likely outcome was that Todd was savagely stabbed with this giant pin, similar to how he pinned all those dead butterflies to his bulletin board.
• This is constantly referred to in John Norman's Gor where impalement is described as the prominent method of execution in almost all Gorean cities. Despite this, very little impalement is actually showed on screen, though.
• In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, this is how Harry kills the basilisk that has been taking up residence in the titular Chamber of Secrets, by driving the Sword of Gryffindor up through the roof of its mouth and into its brain.
• In Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos the Shrike^note  (see "Real Life" below for the origin of that name) impales its victims on a vast tree of metal spikes — where they all remain indefinitely, incapable of escaping the pain. Mega ouch. It's hinted in a later scene that the tree of spikes is actually a virtual reality construct, but their agony is no less intense for being artificially induced. Oh and it's doing this because a group of A.I.s are using those people's brains for processing power to run an enormous interplanetary Portal Network.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: Patti Devane of Killing Bridezilla was killed by being impaled through the heart on a statue of Cupid when the railing on the balcony she was reciting her wedding vows from gave way and made her fall.
• John Nike from Jennifer Government ends up impaled on the sharp end of a Nike store's swoosh-shaped door handle.
• In the Joe Pickett novel Winterkill, the first murder victim is nailed to a tree by several broad-headed hunting arrows.
• In Knights of the Borrowed Dark, the Opening Boy drives both clawed hands through Grey's stomach after an I Surrender, Suckers moment. Grey's response is to grab both its wrists and jam the claws further in, allow the Cost to turn his torso to iron and trap them there, then use his Dying Walk to force them both off a cliff. He survives.
• In the backstory of A Land Fit for Heroes, the Heteronormative Crusader government of Trelayne inflicts the Cruel and Unusual Death version on Ringil Eskiath's lover. In the first novel, one of the alternate selves whose memories Gil lives through while traveling with the Dwenda is also killed in this manner.
• In The Last Dragon Chronicles, an ice spike through the chest is what does in David, the protagonist himself. Yes, it is gut-wrenching.
  • And let's not forget Hannah, a minor character in Dark Fire, who got impaled by Gawaine's claws.
• In Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, the Lord Ruler gets this in a gory-poetic callback to the earlier incident when the same was done to finish off Kelsier. Impaling criminals through the neck with a hook and leaving them to hang somewhere visible is also the Steel Ministry's favourite method of execution. In the sequel, Well of Ascension, Lord Venture could be said to get this, except the sword in question is so big he may have been bisected.
• In Le Morte d'Arthur, Thomas Malory's definitive rendition of Arthurian Legend, Arthur runs Sir Mordred through with Sir Lucas the Butler's spear. Unfortunately, with his last bit of strength, Mordred manages to cut Arthur in the head before collapsing dead.
• Nick Velvet: In "The Theft of the Blue-Ribbon Bass", Nick finds Razor Fitch - a bow fisherman Nick had employed to help him in his latest theft - nailed to the wall of his loft with an arrow from one of his own bows.
• According to Non Campus Mentis,^note i.e. American students
  An angry Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theocrats to a church door. The Pope's response was to declare Luther hereditary.
• Old Scores:
  • Hans stabs Rachel through the chest and out the back with a knife.
  • In a flashback, Simon stabs Salem so hard the blade not only comes out the other side, but pins Salem to a boxing ring.
  • Simon pulls off another "all the way through" stab (with the same weapon, no less) against Shafax.
• Note that most vampires die this way. The most famous one, however, was actually killed with knives.
  • Averted in J R Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood as the vampires kill their enemies, the Lessening Society, by stabbing them back to The Omega by staking the area where their heart used to be.
  • Averted in Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter series, where the Dark Hunters destroy the Daimons that prey on human souls. When they are stabbed in the black spot on their chest, they explode into gold powder.
• Parker: The Seventh opens with Parker arriving back at the apartment he is using as a hideout to find the girl he was sharing it with stabbed with a sword that has gone through her and the headboard of the bed to pin her to the wall.
• Both Nightrise chairmen in The Power of Five. The CEO, however, just gets normal-impaled.
• In Joe Hill's novella Rain, from Strange Weather, anyone who is caught in the rains of crystalline nails and can't get to shelter in time is turned into a human pincushion or worse. One city is devastated by a rain with spikes the size of carrots, and another receives a rain with spikes described as being like broadswords, killing 3 million people.
• In The Saga of Darren Shan, the Vampires' method of execution involves putting you in a cage and dropping you onto a pit of upright stakes until dead. The Big Bad also sets up a pit similar to that for a battle, intending to fight on a high platform above it, and a main character is killed by falling onto it.
• In Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, Jimmy is killed when he falls into a basement onto an array of knife-blades driven through pieces of plywood, which are laid at the bottom of a wooden staircase with most of the stairs sawn away.
• Count Olaf gets impaled by a harpoon in the last book of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Dewey died the same way in the preceding book as a heroic variant.
• Shadow of the Conqueror.
  • Captain Blackheart, ala Vlad the Impaler. Shortly after, Daylen does the same to another ship's captain for smuggling sex slaves.
  • Daylen himself later gets skewered all the way through by four swords at once, courtesy of Ahrek.
• This was the over-the-top cause of death in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of Black Peter", in which the retired sea captain is found pinned to the wall with a sealer's spear. Notably, at the beginning of the story, Holmes tried to do the same with a pig carcass (a century before the MythBusters did similar testing in their show), but despite being much stronger than he looked, he was unable to himself.
• The Silmarillion: Finduilas, a princess of the Noldor, is killed when the orcs holding her captive nail her to a tree with a spear.
• Solar Pons: In "The Adventure of the Perplexed Photographer", the murder victim is found pinned to the floor of his study by a steel-tipped javelin through his chest.
• Somewhither: Happens to Ilya, courtesy of a spear-wielding soldier, soon after he gets aboard the Dark Tower's invasion ship. This is how Ilya finds out he's in fact immortal.
• A Sorrow Fierce and Falling: At the end of the book, when R'hlem tries to order The Kindly Emperor back through the portal into the Ancients' realm, it responds by shooting out a quill from its body, fatally impaling him on it.
• Space Glass: Nicora is stabbed through by the Marauder twice, the first time paralyzing her and knocking her out of commission for awhile, and the second time nearly killing her.
• The Sword of Saint Ferdinand: Pero Miguel attempts to murder García Vargas by pinning him to the wall, but he gets killed before discovering that García ducked just in time and dodged his spear.
• A character in The Lost World finds skeletons of victims who were obviously thrown onto bamboo trees from the plateau.
• A favored tactic of Thibbledorf Pwent in Transitions. He has a spike on his helmet that is almost as tall as he is himself. He attacks foes by lowering his head like a bull and charging them, in one case leaving about half of a dead orc stuck on his head after a fight in The Orc King.
• Universal Monsters: In book 6, during the final battle, Nina snatches up Imhotep's sacrificial dagger and uses it to run Dracula through. It's enough to disable him, though it takes a minute or so for him to react, mainly doing so when he notices it's impaled him all the way through.
• A very unfortunate man in one of Simon Scarrow's Eagle series gets impaled in a most brutal fashion in Where the Eagle Hunts. For clarification it was via the rectum piercing method.
• Reversed in The Virgin Suicides, when the first daughter is impaled on the fence.
• Warrior Cats: Feathertail kills Sharptooth by impaling him with a stalactite, by leaping at it and knocking it loose from the cave roof.
  • Brambleclaw kills Hawkfrost by stabbing him with a metal spike from a fox trap.
• Welkin Weasels: In the first book, Sylver is caught in a snare by Magellan, and attempts to attack him one last time before he dies. He manages to charge with enough momentum that the stake the snare is attached to is yanked out of the ground and spears Magellan, killing him.
• Worm contains this with Shielder. A building does the impaling. Leviathan helps.

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