Wham! Line/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Wham! Lines in Literature include:

Subpages

Other Examples

  • A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift starts out as a rather dull essay about the problem of widespread childhood poverty in Ireland (then a rather poorly treated possession of the United Kingdom). Then the speaker of the essay busts out the following:

"A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled...."

Joffrey: But they have the soft hearts of women. [...] Ser Ilyn, bring me his head!
Greatjon Umber: Why shouldn't we rule ourselves again? It was the dragons we married, and the dragons are all dead! There sits the only king I mean to bow my knee to, m'lords, the King in the North!
"...and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons."

    • A Storm of Swords:

Dany: A dragon is not a slave.

    • A Feast for Crows:

"The next day when she woke up she was blind."
"It was snow, drifting through the window."
High Septon: No.
Doran Martell: Vengeance. Justice. Fire and blood.

    • A Dance With Dragons

The North Remembers
For the Watch
Your false king is dead.[1]

"It was Hagrid, Ron. Hagrid opened the Chamber of Secrets fifty years ago."
"Haven't you guessed yet, Harry Potter?" said Riddle softly. "Ginny Weasley opened the Chamber of Secrets."
"Lord Voldemort is my past, present, and future."

"It was I who did that."
"Kill the spare."

"Nope", Emma said. "I just paid the caterer fifty bucks to dump the rest of the serum in the punch."

  • The Bible: "Tonight, one of you will betray me."
  • Changes, the first line is one for the series as a whole: "I picked up the phone and Susan Rodriguez said, 'They've got our daughter.'"
    • Changes is full of these. Chock full. Perhaps one of the whammiest, halfway through the book: "I can't feel my legs." This is then followed up a few chapters later with Harry calling on someone to help him: " Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, Queen of the Winter Court! I bid you come forth!"
    • A line whose whamminess resulted in fist-pumping: "It was the Grey Council. The Grey Council!"
    • Not only Changes. A chapter of Blood Rites ends with "Not yours, Harry. Our mother."
    • "Charity...how long has it been since you've used your magic?"
    • Small Favor: "Where is your blasting rod?"
    • Ghost Story: "They've been like this since they killed you."
  • L.A. Confidential has one of the whammiest of Wham Lines: "Captain Dudley Liam Smith for the Nite Owl." Notable for being whammy not because we didn't know who the villain was, but because Exley, Vincennes, and White putting it all together and saying it out loud is so powerful. As Ed says, they're crossing the only man on Earth more dangerous than Ed himself.
    • "Rolo Tomasi"
  • The Wheel of Time:
  • The Uncommon Reader, also the last line of the book: "Why do you think I called you all here?"
  • Falling Angels: The sole line in the last chapter from Ivy May's point of view: "Over his shoulder I saw a star fall. It was me." It is later revealed that she was raped and strangled by a man in the crowd after her sister loses track of her.
  • Friends Like These, a lighthearted retelling of Danny Wallace's quest to meet up with his childhood friends: "Daniel, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but Andy passed away." Read it in context here.
  • Many of John Wyndham's short stories end with a Wham Line.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, from Cryoburn: "Count Vorkosigan, sir?"
  • The Hunger Games: "Katniss, there is no District Twelve." Bam! End of the second book!
    • "Because she's here with me."
    • "Under the new rule, both tributes from the same district will be declared winers if they are the last two alive."
      • And then: "The earlier revision has been revoked."
    • Several unexpected deaths:
      • And then he drives the spear through her chest. Rue
      • Triggering the bomb that blows off his legs. Boggs
      • And then the second round of parachutes goes off. Prim
      • And President Coin drops from the balcony. Dead.
    • Suzanne Collins loves to end chapters on Wham Lines, which doubles as Cliffhangers.
  • Green-Sky Trilogy: Pomma pretty much collapses a whole society with, "I know there are no Pash-San...Because Teera is a Pash-San."
  • Sphere - "What happens if Jerry gets mad?"
    • Even bigger: MY NAME IS HARRY.
  • Philip Pullman loves these and will go for a wham line (even if occasionally he has to immediately retract it. E.g. 'They will never leave again. At least, not by that door.') From the chapter of Northern Lights where Lyra discovers Tony Makarios:
    • "That was intercision, and this was a severed child."
    • Also, the final line in The Subtle Knife.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four: "You are the dead."
    • "They got me a long time ago."
    • "He loved Big Brother."
  • On the more obscure side, cosmic horror author Thomas Ligotti, whose stories seem to culminate in Wham Paragraphs. A few notable single lines from his work:
    • "Nethescurial": I am not dying in a nightmare.
    • "The Chymist": Now, Rose of Madness...Bloom!
    • "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel": "It was an angel, did you know that?"
    • "The Troubles of Doctor Thoss": "My name is Thoss, I am a doctor."
  • Sophie's Choice: "You may keep one of your children."
  • Anathem: "In my world, we call it a Faraday cage." The first half reveals that Zh'vaern is an alien; the second reveals that the aliens are from Earth.
  • The Gaunt's Ghosts novel The Armour of Contempt has "Since I switched it on", while Blood Pact has "Then it is Rime".
  • Ravenor Returned has two right on top of each other. "That's Zygmunt bastard Molotch." Immediately followed by "In the name of darkness, that's Slyte!!"
  • The Adventures of the Princess And Mr. Whiffle: From the third ending (the one with teeth): "And so the Princess ate them."
  • The last line of Surface Detail, by Iain Banks; "Your table is ready, Mr. Zakalwe."
  • The Turn of the Screw: "We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped."
  • The Lord of the Rings: "We must join him, Gandalf".
    • "This fellow isn't dead!"
    • MASSIVE spoiler, for equally massive wham: "The Ring is mine!"
  • The Vampire Diaries Book 4: "Get away from my brother!"
  • From The Thief:

Eddis: Oh. It's you, Eugenides.

  • Zombie Apocalypse! by Simon Jones is pretty much made of this trope (and others). For an example: the first segment is a letter from a man to his mother, which seems to show the beginning of the titular occurrence. Two-thirds of the way through, we discover what we thought was a pre-disaster segment is being written during the disaster; the mother he was writing to has been dead for years; and as soon as the letter is finished he's going to do down to his zombie wife and burn the house down around the two of them. The letter cuts out mid-sentence, and we are told by a coda that it was recovered from a laptop whose battery ran out, which itself was recovered from the ruins of a burnt-down house months after the fact.
  • In Jorge Luis Borges's The Immortal, a Roman soldier goes looking for the Fountain of Immortality. His journey - across hostile lands only inhabited by mindless and speechless troglodytes - is for naught: the City of Immortals he finds is an abandoned, incomprehensible labyrinth in the middle of nowhere. And just as the protagonist has lost all hopes, a troglodyte recites a line from The Odyssey. When asked how much more he knows of it, he answers "Not much - it's been more than eleven hundred years since I wrote it".
  • Thrall Twilight of the Aspects has a few.

Nozdormu:You asked me how I knew the infinite dragonflight was behind Blackmoore'sss creation and liberation. I know this because... I ssssent him after you.
"Thank you, my lord," Archbishop Benedictus said.

And with a cold shiver of dread, Fireheart realized that the new leader of ShadowClan was Tigerclaw.

    • Long Shadows: "You'll have to try harder than that. They're not my kits!"
  • In one short story, a boy named Laurie tells about a boy named Charles who often causes trouble, yet gets better over time. Laurie's parents then meet his teacher and ask about Charles, only to get this response.

"Charles? We don't have a Charles in this class."

  • Agatha Christie's Why Didn't They Ask Evans? A man falls off a cliff, and his last words are "Why Didn't they ask Evans?". Two amateur detectives, Bobby and Frankie, assume he's been murdered, and in the course of investigating, find themselves looking into the will of a man who'd committed suicide several months prior. Frankie wants to know why the man had the gardener called in to witness the will, when there was a parlormaid in the house who could have done just as well:

Frankie: Why didn't they ask the parlormaid?
Bobby: Funny you should ask that... The parlormaid's name was Evans.

  • A Thread of Grace: The war is over, there is celebrating in the streets of Italy. We just went through what was the trauma of the last days of shelling and the deaths of several major characters. Renzo, one of the leaders of the resistance and pilot during the war in Ethiopia, was undercover as a Nazi sympathizer. He goes into town during the last non epilogue chapter. Most everyone who knew he was actually part of the resistance and not actually a Nazi sympathizer, was already dead. The people in the streets quickly turn on him, hanging him for his "crimes." The last line:

"It's like flying, except you never come down."

"Dumkopf! Rotznase!"

  • The last line of J. D. Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish": "Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has "I never could see over your shoulders before". It's the one line you read, and understand that you haven't understood anything else in the book.
  • The final line of Frederick Forsyth's "The Shepherd".
Back to Wham! Line
  1. ↑ The person who wrote the letter containing the line is an Unreliable Expositor, but it still causes everything to go to hell immediately after.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Wham!_Line/Literature?oldid=2025773"