Heads blowing up in Literature.
By Author:
- Any time someone gets shot in the head in a Matthew Reilly book, their head will explode. Always.
By Title:
- The big concert scene in Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard features Spinal Tap, who were all on Drac during their set, trying out the shape-shifting capabilities conferred by the drug; the drummer tried to generate horns on his head, but only succeeded in blowing his head apart. The stage manager laments that there is nothing but a big mess to clean up, while if he'd done it onstage it would have made a brilliant ending to their performance.
- In Battle Royale, students are outfitted with explosive collars, which go off if they try to escape the island or try to remove it, to enforce their compliance with the government's "game". One student dies when his collar goes off while he's stuck in a forbidden area.
- In his book Brain Droppings, George Carlin wondered about the possibility of a world where the only cause of death was people's heads exploding, totally without warning.Carlin: You know what? I bet people would get used to it.
- Discworld:
- In Moving Pictures, we learn of the existence of Tshlup-Ashlapeth, the Infernal Star goat with a Million young, whose preferred and only way of slaughtering a victim is to hold them down and show it pictures of its children until they can take no more and their brain explodes.
- Used metaphorically in Feet of Clay, when a dreaming Vimes sees a murder victim's head burst open and spill out words. Then again, non-metaphorically, when the Golem King's head is smashed to pieces, with countless shreds of paper containing the king golem's Words flying out.
- Used even less metaphorically in The Fifth Elephant, when a werewolf reflexively catches Vimes' high-powered flare in his teeth.
- According to Snuff, an overdose of the troll drug Crystal Slam can cause the victim's head to explode.
- In Human Nature, one of the school children who is defending the school from a group of attacking aliens turns to say something to John Smith and gets hit in the back of the head with a dart from one of the alien's weapons. A moment passes then this trope splatters blood and brain matter all over the room, leading to a Heroic BSoD from John Smith.
- In the Hyperion Cantos:
- Kassad makes a religious fundamentalist's head asplode on television, using careful timing and satellites with tightly focused invisible laser beams to boil their brains. He plays this up as the wrath of Allah, backed by the wrath of the galactic military police.
- The A.I.s make a human hacker's head asplode when he tries to penetrate their systems.
- In Fengshen Yanyi, many Immortals during the course of the novel are often killed by head blows powerful enough to smash their heads to pieces, such as Lady Bixiao (head smashed by Yuanshi Tianzun's curved scepter), Sacred Mother Jinguang (head splattered by Guangchengzi's Heaven Turning Seal) and Luo Xuan (Li Jing drops an entire golden pagoda on his cranium).
- In Hammerjack, pretty much everyone has communications implants in their brains. One of the deadliest hammerjack techniques involves hacking someone's implant and causing it to overload, making the victim's head explode. This is done by both Vortex and Heretic to dispatch enemy soldiers.
- A self-inflicted version in Infinite Jest where James O. Incandenza drills a hole into a microwave, puts his head into it and well, the aftermath makes the Boston PD pathologist faint.
- Journey to the West: Sun Wukong's cudgel weights nearly 6 tons and can wound gods: just touching the still staff makes one's body shake, it takes a slight blow to make a poor sop's cranium explode in a firework of skull fragments, blood and brain fragments.
- In Nightflyers, Thale's head explodes when Agatha injects him with esperon in an attempt to boost his psychic abilities.
- In Shadow of the Conqueror, after Daylen finds out what Jena and the other Dawnists are planning, he hits her straight in the head with every ounce of his considerable Super-Strength. The results are ... messy, to say the least.
- Skulduggery Pleasant briefly mentions a colleague who 'ruptured' after receiving a Death Glare from Baron Vengeous.
- The Skylark of Space: Seaton advises Bay-Lay Boyn to enter the room "Slowly, if you don't want your brains to decorate the ceiling," since he's carrying a magnum pistol and knows very well how to use it. Bay-Lay's secretary, who was already fed up with him, encourages Seaton to go ahead; she'd love to see her boss' brains go everywhere.
- Star Wars Expanded Universe:
- A heartwarming Defusing The Tykebomb situation in Galaxy of Fear is interrupted by this; the Big Bad anticipated that it might happen, so installed a tiny bomb in his weapon's skull.
- Attempted in The Approaching Storm. Soergg the Hutt controls a pair of Ansionians by planting explosive charges in their necks. Barriss Offee manages to disarm and remove them, and the Ansionians pull a MookâFace Turn and become native guides to Offee and three other Jedi.
- The Stranger Times: When one of the antagonist's stooges is being pumped for information, his magical necklace makes his head burst before he can say anything useful.
- The first time the protagonist uses the eponymous blade from the Sword of Truth series, the powerful magic in the sword makes his enemy's head explode — in slow motion, no less.
- Virtually any headshot scored in Warhammer 40,000 novels results in this, given that the primary weapon of three different factions is a fully automatic miniature RPG. Invoked in Space Wolf: Grey Hunter when the Wolves specifically go for headshots against a sanctuary of Chaos cultists because the cultists have runes painted on their heads that Thousand Sons Chaos Space Marines are using to possess them and resurrect themselves.
- The magic-wielding Asha'man from The Wheel of Time series learn to do this as a standard attack. Later we see them exploding not just heads, but entire bodies, sometimes of whole ranks of soldiers at once. They are very good at their jobs. The meat-grinder carnage that results naturally makes other characters ill.
- The Witch of Knightcharm: This is Janet Ghebremariam's fate after she tries to call someone to help her escape the evil Wizarding School that she's stuck in. Unfortunately, the phones were trapped, and as soon as she pressed the 'call' button a curse spell fired and obliterates her head.
- Averted in World War Z, where a military research proposal to remote-control thousands of bullet-sized cruise missiles into the skulls of zombies and detonate them never accomplished squat, except to use up a huge amount of funding and resources.
