Spoilers for Looper…
…but I think Old Joe probably fits, when he decided to go all “are you Sarah Connor?” on three young children. You could argue that by killing Cid would have saved millions, but the other two were targeted for being born in the wrong hospital
Just noticed the literature only caveat in the OP. I meant Looper : the novelisation, obviously
This happens in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved.
Sorry, but I’m apparently not doing the spoiler setting correctly, so I can’t be more specific than that.
Old Yeller.
You can type [ spoiler ] Text here [/ spoiler ] (minus the extra spaces) around the text to be hidden. I’ll add it here:
Spoiler for Beloved:
One of the main characters of the book reveals the reason for the haunting of her home and why she is an outcast in that town. She had escaped from slavery with her children, and when her old master found her and wanted to take them back, she tried to kill her children to save them from slavery, managing to kill one daughter. The ghost that haunts the home is believed to be her daughter’s spirit.
You’ve answered this in the spirit of the thread, I think. Sadly my comment about Lot is NOT in the spirit of the thread.
Reality’s just a crutch for peoplewho cannot handle smack.
Hell no.
Phil Rickman’s novel The Man in the Moss.
An ancient bog body has to be replaced in its marsh to avert disaster. Failing that: Somebody else has to be sacrificed by the Celtic triple death and put in the mud..
The Lot story is one of the most fucked-up in all literature, no doubt.
The definition of “innocent” is crucial here.
In Robert B. Parker’s*** A Catskill Eagle,*** private eye Spenser murders a pimp he’d never seen before, and who had never done anything to Spenser.
Spenser told himself he had to do it because he feared the pimp would hurt two of the hookers who worked for him, and who had been helping Spenser out.
It’s not the Lot story itself I have a problem with. I don’t have any trouble believing that a cowardly Bronze Age jackass might give up his daughters to be gangraped rather than two beings he believed her angels. I don’t even have a problem believing that the same jackass, after being widowed, fucked his daughters, knocked them both up, and was able to sell the story that they were the initiators of said fucking/impregnation. It’s St. Peter calling Lot a righteous man, instead of noting that he was obviously a fuckwit.
I know that story well; Catskill was my introduction to Spenser. I wouldn’t say it QUITE qualifies, since Spenser had good reason to believe that the pimp would torture and kill the two prostitutes for their (unwilling) role in the matter. So the pimp and his bodyguard (murdered by Hawk) weren’t exactly innocent. It was the cold-blooded nature of the act that bothered Spenser, along with the fact that he had created the prostitutes’ problem in the first place.
Now if he’d killed the hookers as part of his quest to sort-of rescue Susan, it’d be a clear example. But that’d be farther than Spenser could make himself go.
One short story springs to mind, 2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut:
Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. In order to lure and destroy the slakemoths, Isaac`s crisis engine requires
a homeless man dying of cancer
to be plugged into it. They duly kidnap one and drag him to the trap, trussed and at gunpoint, but Mieville doesnt let you off easily: they are deliberately sacrificing an innocent, terrified old man with a nasty, protracted death, and it aint a nice thing.
If Lord Asriel is considered a hero (and he seems to be treated as one), then his actions at the end of “Northern Lights”/“The Golden Compass” count. Man, how I hoped that “The Amber Spyglass” would feature Lyra and her allies repudiate both Asriel and the Authority.
An example that doesn’t really qualify:
In Crown of Slaves, by Eric Flint and David Weber, special agent Victor Cachat begins a time-critical interrogation of a group of prisoners by shooting one of them in the head, just to unambiguously prove that yes, he was willing to kill them if they didn’t cooperate.
It doesn’t qualify for two reasons, though. First, none of the prisoners was exactly “innocent”: They were mercenaries working for an absolutely reprehensible employer, and knew it. More importantly, though, Cachat isn’t exactly a heroic figure, either: He’s a monster, and just happens to be a monster on the same side as the heroes.
I go back and forth about mentioning one of the Poirot books where this arguably happens: Curtain, in which our hero grudgingly admits that the guy in question “did not actively take part in these crimes” – indeed, “that he could never be convicted of crime” and could not be touched by the law."
Poirot shoots him in the head anyway.
Sorry, you are incorrect about this.
She was not an innocent. She had just murdered her partner in cold blood, completing her transformation into a Red Court vampire. That was why the curse worked to destroy the Red Court. It killed everyone in earlier generations and she was the youngest Red Court vampire in existence, literally less than a minute or so.
I have two problems with this one.
First, I would argue the victim is not an innocent in any way. Second, he never actually died, although he did come very close.
I would agree with this one. And you missed one that is even better I think. When the Inquisition went to capture the Wylsynn brothers in their quarters, one pulls his sword and kills his brother in cold blood to prevent the brother’s capture and torture.
[quote=“Lok, post:59, topic:645313”]
Sorry, you are incorrect about this.
She was not an innocent. She had just murdered her partner in cold blood, completing her transformation into a Red Court vampire. That was why the curse worked to destroy the Red Court. It killed everyone in earlier generations and she was the youngest Red Court vampire in existence, literally less than a minute or so.
No, I stand by my example.
She had just killed her partner, but that partner had in fact betrayed them all to the vampires just moments ago. It was hardly murder. She had begun a transformation into a vampire, but she was not guilty.
To Noodles Fellicini: *Changes *does represent a lot of, well, changes in the formula, but I would still recommend it. Ghost Story continues the move away from the old formula, and a lot of people did not seem to like it. Cold Day is back to what we expect, to my mind.