Poisoned queens. Stabbed emperors. Heroes undone by one heel. 303 deaths across three ebooks — the legends, the rulers, and the slow ones history doesn't like to talk about. Every painful ending, in one collection.
"You know how it ends. You don't know how much it hurt."
— The Painful HistorianThe full archive behind every "How Every X Died" video — and a lot that never made it to video.
Look. A video gets me maybe twenty deaths before you need to go eat dinner. History has way more than twenty. So I wrote down the rest — every hero, every ruler, and every slow, miserable way people got taken out across a few thousand years — and split it into three books.
How Every Hero Died covers 101 legends — Greek myth, Norse saga, Arthurian romance, fairy tales, and modern fiction — and the painful truth of how each one actually went out. Yes, the heel. Yes, the wax wings.
How Every Royal Died marches through 101 kings, queens, and emperors and exactly how their time on the throne ended: poison, daggers, battlefields, betrayal — and the occasional ruler who somehow died in bed.
The Pain Archive is the dark one. 101 ways history killed people slowly — plagues, famines, sieges, the longest executions ever devised, and modern slow killers that are still happening right now.
Together they're the Painful Endings Collection. Binge it like the channel. Just don't read it while eating.
1,765 pages across three ebooks. Here's a taste of each.
The actual deaths of mythological, literary, and legendary heroes — from Achilles' heel to Harry Potter's near-death — across Greek myth, Norse legend, Arthurian romance, fairy tales, and modern fiction.
A reign-by-reign march through history's rulers and exactly how their time in power ended — poison, assassination, battle, betrayal, and the occasional quiet death in bed.
The drawn-out side of history — diseases, famines, sieges, and slow forms of execution and suffering across centuries, right up to modern crises like the opioid epidemic and climate-driven heat deaths.
(Mostly "why did I read this before bed.")
"I've watched every How Every X Died video twice. How Every Royal Died is that but 632 pages and no ads. Read the whole Constantine XI chapter on my lunch break."
"The Pain Archive is genuinely haunting. The Radium Girls entry stuck with me for days. Not light reading, but I couldn't stop."
"Bought it for my son who's obsessed with Greek myths. Now we both argue about whose death in How Every Hero Died was worst. (Icarus. Obviously.)"
I'm The Painful Historian. I draw stick figures and tell you exactly how famous people died — Greek heroes, Viking leaders, Roman emperors, medieval royals, crusaders, and everyone in between.
Not the cleaned-up version. The real one: the poison, the betrayal, the battlefield, the weeks it took. Because the most interesting part of anyone's story is usually the very last page — and history has a lot of last pages.
These three books are every ending I could fit, organized so you can binge them like a playlist.
Both — and the books keep them apart. How Every Royal Died and The Pain Archive cover real historical events, told from the historical record; where accounts disagree, the books say so. How Every Hero Died is about mythological, legendary, and fictional heroes, and tells their deaths as their stories tell them.
A video covers maybe twenty deaths. This is 303 of them across 1,765 pages — including plenty that never made it into a video — organized by book so you can binge it in order or jump straight to the one person you're curious about.
Because I'd rather a lot of you read it than a few of you. Each ebook is $17 on its own, so the bundle gets you all three for less than two.
All three — How Every Hero Died, How Every Royal Died, and The Pain Archive — delivered together in one download.
All three books are PDFs. They open on any phone, tablet, computer, or e-reader that reads PDF. You get the download link right after checkout.
About as graphic as the channel — it describes violent and painful deaths honestly, without going out of its way to be gory. If the videos don't bother you, the books won't either.
303 painful endings. 1,765 pages. $27 for the whole collection — instead of $17 each.
Get the Painful Endings Collection Bundle — $51 $27