Unexplained Recoveries in literature.
- In an Artemis Fowl book, a character remarks to Battle Butler Butler (yes, that's his name) that he'd heard Butler was dead. The readers actually know what happened, but the only explanation we see Butler offering is "I was, but I'm better now."
- Nearly everyone in Candide. Pangloss is hanged, Cunégonde is raped and stabbed by Bulgarian soldiers, Cunégonde's brother the Jesuit priest is slashed in the side by Candide himself...yet everyone, miraculously, survives to the end.
- Doctor Malady, who died during a previous encounter with Connie, suddenly shows up at Connie and Byron's housewarming party in Constance Verity Saves the World.Connie: I saw you die, Doctor.
Malady: Oh, that. I got better. - Cryptonomicon: Enoch Root is specifically outright declared to be dead by a professional doctor. He shows up alive shortly thereafter, with no explanation whatsoever and nobody commenting on it. (In The Baroque Cycle, it turns out he's an immortal alchemist.)
- In Galaxy of Fear: Planet Of Terror, the Cool Ship The Shroud crashes spectacularly. It's been damaged several times before, but this time it's worse and characters actually believe it can't be repaired, and they sadly salvage bits of it. In the next book they're flying about in it with no comment. Addressed several years later in the Interquel Death in the Slave Pits of Lorrd, where Han Solo tows it to a mechanic he knows who'll fix it, and Tash says she's not sure why her uncle thought the ship was done - after all, her brother Zak's come Back from the Dead twice now.
- In the Highroad Trilogy, Heredes dies twice. His response is the same afterwards: "It's terribly boring being dead."
- Lampshaded in the first book of The Kane Chronicles, The Red Pyramid. Sadie is appalled to learn that the god her brother is hosting cut off the head of the goddess Sadie is hosting. When Sadie expresses her shock, the goddess reassures her, "I got better." This is despite the fact that killing a god or goddess can cause them to be stuck in the Duat (a kind of limbo) for thousands of years, if not forever. Also, in the graphic novel adaptation of the final story, The Serpent's Shadow when Carter Kane faces off against face of Horror, he says that he killed him, to which Face of Horror replies that "I got better. My master [Apophis] heals all wounds."
- The last time we see Capt. Alan Barnes in The Atrocity Archive, he's on a hospital bed being treated for 500 rems of radiation poisoning. Then in The Jennifer Morgue, he shows up with The Cavalry like nothing happened. Bob lampshades it in the RPG by wondering what the Laundry had to promise to whom to get this effect.
- Bruenor Battlehammer loses an eye in the first book of the Legacy of the Drow Series. The dwarven clerics try to heal him, to no avail. As it turns out, their spells have a delayed effect and he regains the vision in his bad eye after some years have passed, by the time of the fourth book.
- Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1995), the sequel to Jurassic Park (1990), is a prime example of this trope. In the book (although not in the movie), Ian Malcolm suffers from septicemia from a T. rex bite, and is said to be dead during a conversation near the end of the novel. At the beginning of The Lost World, however, he is shown giving a lecture at a university, with no explanation other than that he was "only slightly dead".note
- Inspector Torrence is prominently killed in the first Maigret novel "Pietr the Latvian", but remains a reappearing character. Pointed out and explained in "Maigret's Memoirs" through the fact, that he is a Composite Character.
- A squirrel in Moominland Midwinter after getting frozen to death by The Lady of the Cold.
- In Mercedes Lackey's The Obsidian Trilogy, it seems like the best way to assure you'll live is to accept a mageprice costing your life. This applies to almost every mage character on the allied side at some point, especially in the third book.
- Professor Moriarty Series: The Spanish kingpin who is Thrown from the Zeppelin near the end of The Revenge of Moriarty returns alive and well to attend a criminal summit in the third book, without a word of explanation.
- Henry Stamper in Sometimes A Great Notion. What happens when you are trapped on a log, running down a river in Oregon towards an Inevitable Waterfall? "I died, of course! A man can't survive a fall like that!"
- Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He gets mauled fighting with a werewolf, but later appears uninjured. Bill Weasley is a worse example as he is bitten by a werewolf (the same one who infected Remus Lupin) and never transforms. All he has is a couple of scars and a new preference for rare steak. It's indicated that this was because he was bitten by an untransformed werewolf, and the curse only spreads when the werewolf is... well, a wolf.
- Randall Flagg in Stephen King's The Stand is standing right next to a nuclear bomb when it goes off, and is presumably incinerated instantaneously. He gets better in time to appear in The Dark Tower series. In a scene added to the end of the extended version of The Stand, after the bomb goes off, he finds himself walking out of the ocean on the coast of western Africa with no idea how he got there.
- However, Flagg does in fact vanish the instant before the bomb detonates; his clothes are seen standing up with no one in them, and then they collapse. This appears to be Flagg's signature "get out of jail free" card. Why he does not use this ability to escape from Mordred in the Dark Tower books is not clear.
- Perhaps it was a not conscious decision on Flagg's part to teleport away from Las Vegas as he did. It wasn't his ka to die then.
- We have a term for that. In King's fantasy novel The Eyes Of The Dragon, he also appears, again as the main antagonist. At the end of the book he is shot in the eye with an arrow, and he does his usual disappearing-out-of-his-clothes schtick. The epilogue of that book mentions that one of the main characters has a hunch he's still alive somewhere, and he and another guy go after him. The narrator hints that they probably fought him again later on. This is pretty well-justified, because he's basically the King's-connected-universe equivalent of Satan (except in the Dark Tower books, where the Red King takes that role and Flagg is more The Dragon).
- Skywarp and Ramjet in Transformers Retribution. They were last seen being eaten alive by the Sharkticons and clearly stated to be dead, but showed up near the end assisting Megatron in a possible editor mistake.
- In The Twelve Chairs, the hero Ostap Bender is assassinated by his partner to avoid sharing the (actually nonexistent) loot. However, he returns alive in The Little Golden Calf. He has a scar on his neck from the attempted assassination, but never explains how exactly he managed to survive.
- Played for Laughs and exaggerated with Ciaphas Cain. He kept apparently dying in completely unambiguous manners only to turn up again from God knows where. He did this so many times that eventually the Imperium's Administratum got fed up with having to do paperwork every time he "died" and came back, so they just left him permanently listed on active battle duty. After his apparent actual death, they buried him in a massive state funeral attended by thousands and the Administratum still lists him as alive, simply out of a paranoid belief that Cain will somehow show up again one day.
- The Eye of Argon; Prince Agaphim is perfectly healthy when we first see him in chapter 2, despite Carthena's later claim that a few days ago she left him with "a dagger thrust his ribs". In the same chapter, the advisor Agafnd "found a sword blade permeating the length of his ribs", and in the final chapter reappears unharmed and gets his entire head bisected.
- In 1919, the author Johnston McCulley wrote the novel The Curse of Capistrano, the very first adventure of Zorro. At the conclusion of the book, Zorro has a climactic sword fight with his arch enemy, Captain Ramon, and kills him. The novel unequivocally describes Zorro running the Captain through and spilling his life's blood. The Curse of Capistrano proved to be popular, and a few years later McCulley decided to write a sequel. In this second novel, astonishingly, Captain Ramon is alive and well and continuing to wreak his villainy with absolutely no explanation offered as to how he survived his fatal wounding in the earlier story.
