Spoiler for like, any book existing.
I think mine has to be the villain in Mirror Man. Idk, he wasn’t intimidating, he wasn’t interesting. He was meh.
Also the villains from The Chain. Dear God they weren’t sympathetic in the slightest. The book tries to act like they were atleast pitiful but FROM THEIR INCEPTION, they were just evil assholes who enjoyed causing pain. The book itself wasn’t all that great anyways.
Goofus. It’s like he does the most evil shit on purpose. Gallant is right there, just copy him!
pretty sure Randall Flagg fits the stereotype- desires no more than to bring terror and misery. cold, calculating, superficial. charming yet something is palpably amiss about him. utterly devoid of humanity. (and he is literally the Devil incarnate)
He did have about two lines of backstory that were mentioned right before his death.
Isn’t he quite literally a personification of evil? The opposite of the black woman (forgot her name). Hard to beat that at any rate.
He’s all over the Stephen King universe.
Patrick Bateman. If you’ve only seen the film, he is way worse in the book.
Him killing the kid in the zoo made me have to quit the book for a while. It was all horrible and disgusting, but the way he’s so casual about it. I had to stop again when he meets a girl, and revels in the fact that he has raped her with a can of hairspray and she was afraid of him. Still terrifies me
SPOILERS FOR PARABLE OF A SOWER AND TALENTS
Marcus from Parable of the Talents.
He’s the worst kind of monster, someone who takes morale high ground while turning a blind eye to any evil his people do. Also stealing someone’s child is the lowest of the low and my biggest beef with the book is that I don’t get any real comeuppance for his actions.
Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
???
Laying in bed mooching off the work of his impoverished children and grandchild, only to hop up and dance around when Charlie found the golden ticket. He left his family in soul-grindingly poverty, waiting on him hand and foot, just so he could be lazy… and he lied for years about having a disability to get this treatment.
I never looked at it that way. Interesting point.
Yep, and it even takes until we see Charlie offer to buy his tobacco that he says he’ll quit. As in…he was perfectly fine letting the mom buy his tobacco when she worked in the laundry all day and they only had cabbage stew to eat. He had regular tobacco and Charlie thought it was big treat to get one chocolate bar per year. Smh. Then she doesn’t even get to go on the exclusive chocolate factory tour…Charlie takes his deadbeat grandpa, who can suddenly and conveniently walk when there’s something fun to do. I feel so sorry for her. The woman who had been keeping the family of 5 afloat single handedly relegated to background character.
Family of 7 I think? 2 sets of grandparents, mum, dad, Charlie?
The dad is not in the picture. And I wasnt counting her, even though yes, she does support herself as well but I was indicating the others she supported.
Yes, he is. He got made redundant from his job screwing on toothpaste caps.
Ok
Erebus from the Horus Heresy.
Within the 40k fan base, nothing unites us more than “fuck Erebus”.
Blue Duck in Lonesome Dove
God in the old testament
He kinda turns it around when he makes that Jesus guy tho
When he sends his own child as a human sacrifice to somehow make up for a flaw he instilled in humanity? Yeah, real nice
I felt pretty devastated after reading about what God does to disobedient followers in Leviticus. I believe it was Leviticus 26:14-39. One of the most terrifying things I’ve read.
That motherfucker sure does love to smite.
Cpt Blicero - Gravity’s Rainbow
Brady Hartsfield from Mr. Mercedes and End of Watch. Totally hated this guy for his way of thinking
Atlas au Raa from the later Red Rising books.
He’s pretty much space Vlad the Impaler but worse.
The Fear Knight made me mad, for sure, but fucking Lysander. He’s my answer to this question.
I came here to say this. Pretty much every atrocity that occurs since the Rising was his doing.
Every time the fear knight shows up on page you know something absolutely fucked up is gonna happen, like >!taking Tharsus, chopping his hands and feet off in zero g, crushing his bones, putting a bowl over his head to preserve it as a trophy, then throwing him, alive, into a cage to be eaten by a manticore. All without hesitating one second, like it is second nature for him.!< (spoilers Light Bringer)
Brother Luke from A Little Life.
O’Brein from 1984 comes to mind. He purposely puts Winston Smith further down the path of resistamce by giving him illegal, anti-authoritarian literature, wins his trust, then betrays and tortures him. Then, only when Winston’s spirit is broken and fully remolded into the most perfectly obedient, Big Brother-loving citizen, he grants Winston the mercy of death.
An absolute piece of shit, but a great and complex villian as well.
An interesting take. It’s one of my favourite books but I’d always considered OBrian as just doing his job. Yes, his job is to be a piece of shit, but there’s no, like, malice to it.
Have you read Julia btw? It came out last month, 1984 as told from her POV. I really enjoyed some of the world expansion and thought the exploration of Winston’s character was really imaginative
I haven’t read it but the blurb seemed interesting.
Difficult to be worse than many of the characters mentioned so far, but I’ll go with Francis Begbie from Trainspotting novels as he hasn’t been mentioned yet. He’s a psychopath prone to spontaneous violence and manipulating his ‘friends’ to his will. Ghastly fellow.
Dickens created some world-class villains. Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist), Uriah Heep (David Copperfield), Mr Tulkinghorn (Bleak House), and Ralph Nickleby and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) come to mind. I think “evil asshole” as a descriptor fits any or all of these characters quite well.