Tag Archives: Decapitation & Dismemberment

The Dangerous Kingdom of Love by Neil Blackmore

How have I, Francis Bacon, well-known as the cleverest man in England, been caught in this trap? For years I survived the brutal games of the English court, driven by the whims of the idiot King James I – and finally, I was winning. Forget what my friends Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare say about love. I had that which men truly crave above all else: power. But now, at the moment of my greatest success, a deadly alliance of my enemies has begun closing in on me. Led by the King’s beautiful and poisonous lover Carr, this new alliance threatens to turn our foolish King against me, so that I may rot in the Tower. I refuse to go with… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homomisia
  • Decapitation
  • Torture mentioned
  • Hanging
  • Blackmail
  • Animal hunting

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected. When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother’s identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Body dysmorphia
  • Rape
  • Graphic self-harm including burning and cutting
  • Dismemberment of hands and fingers, eye trauma, and mutilation like cutting out tongues
  • Murder
  • Torture including whipping, skinning and mentions of foot binding and boiling someone alive
  • Drowning

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal–including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world. Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want–but what Lyra doesn’t know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Smoking mentioned
  • Blood & gore depiction including mentions of a decapitation
  • Involuntary medical experimentation on children
  • Emesis mentioned
  • Kidnapping & captivity of children
  • Gun violence
  • Plane crash (airship explosion)
  • Fire
  • Battle scenes

Seven Devils by L. R. Lam and Elizabeth May

When Eris faked her death, she thought she had left her old life as the heir to the galaxy’s most ruthless empire behind. But her recruitment by the Novantaen Resistance, an organization opposed to the empire’s voracious expansion, throws her right back into the fray.

Eris has been assigned a new mission: to infiltrate a spaceship ferrying deadly cargo and return the intelligence gathered to the Resistance. But her partner for the mission, mechanic and hotshot pilot Cloelia, bears an old grudge against Eris… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Misogyny
  • Forced sex work recounted
  • Emotional & physical abuse
  • Death of a child
  • Dismemberment & loss of limb
  • Surgery
  • Death of a parent
  • Torture mentioned
  • Kidnapping
  • Loss of autonomy (mind control)

The Adventure Zone, Volume 2: Murder on the Rockport Limited! by Carey Pietsch, Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Travis McElroy, and Justin McElroy

In the second Adventure Zone graphic novel (adapted from the McElroy family’s wildly popular D&D podcast), we rejoin hero-adjacent sort-of-comrades-in-arms Taako, Magnus, and Merle on a wild careen through a D&D railroad murder mystery. This installment has a little of everything: a genius child detective, an axe-wielding professional wrestler, a surly wizard, cursed magical artifacts, and a pair of meat monsters. You know, the usual things you find on a train.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Dead bodies & body parts
  • Dismemberment
  • Beheading discussed
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Fire
  • Train crash
  • Loss of autonomy (mind control)
  • Animal attack

Teen Killers Club by Lily Sparks

Seventeen-year-old Signal Deere has raised eyebrows for years as an unhappy Goth misfit from the trailer park. When she’s convicted of her best friend Rose’s brutal murder, she’s designated a Class A–the most dangerous and manipulative criminal profile. To avoid prison, Signal signs on for a secret program for 18-and-under Class As and is whisked off to an abandoned sleep-away camp, where she and seven bunkmates will train as assassins. Yet even in the Teen Killers Club, Signal doesn’t fit in. She’s squeamish around blood. She’s kind and empathetic… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Paedophilia & grooming
  • Dead body
  • Decapitation
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Needles
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Murder
  • Death of a friend
  • Cult
  • Incarceration

The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor’s soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job.

Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away.

Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Attempted rape, on-page
  • Nonconsensual body modifications (tattoos)
  • Decapitation
  • Cannibalism
  • Murder
  • Torture

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.
At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Religious persecution
  • Sexual assault
  • Emotional abuse
  • Childbirth
  • Miscarriage
  • Decapitation
  • Physical assault

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

You may think you know how the fairytale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes.
On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three ‘saints’ who control them… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Miscarriage
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Body horror
  • Cannibalism
  • Dismemberment
  • Death of a child
  • Murder
  • Torture
  • Animal death

The Ballad of Never After by Stephanie Garber

After Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, betrays her, Evangeline Fox swears she’ll never trust him again. Now that she’s discovered her own magic, Evangeline believes she can use it to restore the chance at happily ever after that Jacks stole away.

But when a new terrifying curse is revealed, Evangeline finds herself entering into a tenuous partnership with the Prince of Hearts again. Only this time, the rules have changed. Jacks isn’t the only force Evangeline needs to be wary of… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption (on-page, protagonist)
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction, including mentions of decapitation, blood-drinking and death from a vampire bite
  • Murder by stabbing during a knife fight
  • Near-strangulation
  • Loss of autonomy (magical curse)