Complete Monster/Literature

""Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I'm suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child's life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It's so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child's would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy.""

- Patrick Bateman, American Psycho Before video games, movies, and television. Many short stories and novels are home of truly despicable, evil characters that are still remembered to this day. The following series, franchises, and author's bodies of work have their own pages:
 * A Song of Ice and Fire
 * Discworld
 * Harry Potter
 * Redwall
 * Star Wars Expanded Universe
 * Stephen King
 * The Dresden Files
 * The Bible


 * The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion have some examples of very, very evil beings. The first and foremost is Melkor, who later becomes known as Morgoth (The Enemy), who screws the world over twice, creates all the evil races just by twisting anything beautiful he gets his hands on. He begins by destroying the great lamps of Valinor and creating the pits of Utumno, where he takes as many races as he can and personally enacts hideous, unspeakable tortures upon them until all that remains are grotesque perversions that he can use as his servants, ruined terrible forms of life. After his first defeat, Morgoth repays mercy with treachery. He proceeds to destroy the world trees, betrays and murders the king of the Noldor elves and steals their treasures from petty greed, leading to the deaths of many thousands of elves when they pursue him. Once he sets up his base of operations in Middle-Earth, Morgoth gets back to his old business. He delights in corrupting men into darkness, manufacturing and playing off corruption in their hearts to set them against each other and their allies. His "crowning achievement" is tricking and beguiling the first men into swearing an oath of eternal fealty to him, meant to enslave the entire race forever in body and spirit, which is the reason why mortality is considered a gift for Man (souls of Men leave Arda and Morgoth's grasp). Morgoth launches brutal campaigns of slavery and genocide, with just one of the examples being the destruction of Gondolin, the most beautiful and proud elven city, with full orders to exterminate civilians, who are saved solely by the heroism of the city's warriors. Entire regions cease to exist with their inhabitants enslaved, wiped out or taken for horrible deaths. Morgoth also has a distinction of being an attempted rapist, trying to rape the elven princess Luthien out of nothing more than cruel lust. Morgoth ends with no redeeming features whatsoever. An evil god, genocidal conqueror, brutal overlord, corrupter, Morgoth fits it all. At one point, he condemns a man to horrible torture and then enacts a curse to see his children grow, suffer horribly and be rejected by both life and death, solely because the man dared to defy him. There is no act too evil or petty for Morgoth. He commits atrocities on the petty personal and the grand, worldly scale.
 * Morgoth's Bastard Understudy Sauron is a demonstration of how those who were once noble can fall to great evil. Sauron was once noble Maiar who was swayed to Morgoth's side. Over time, Sauron's noble intentions for the world were replaced with vanity and lust for power. In the First Age, Sauron convinced a man to betray his comrades, showing him a vision of his beloved wife...once the man did what Sauron asked, Sauron revealed she was already dead and had his hapless pawn tortured to death as he had promised to reunite them. Upon capturing the hero Beren and his companions, Sauron placed them in his dungeons where he allowed his werewolves to slowly pick the group off, one by one, to torment the survivors. After the defeat of his master, Sauron fled to Numenor, assuming the fair form of Annatar, the Bringer of Gifts and seduced Numenor towards darkness and evil until it was a Morgoth-worshiping theocracy that practiced human sacrifice. This was an act so unholy, Eru Illuvatar, the equivalent of God, stepped in to destroy Numenor. Even then, Sauron was not done, and tricked the other races with the Rings of Power, forging his master ring to enslave all that lived. In the Third age, he embarked on a genocidal war for conquest, seeking only to feed his lust for domination and megalomania.
 * Horrabin of The Anubis Gates is a servant of the Master and a chillingly evil Monster Clown who rules over the beggars and outcasts of London. Horrabin disfigures them so they'll bring in extra revenue from the begging. Those he mutilates too much, his 'mistakes,' he locks in his sewer lair, including his own father who he routinely torments and threatens to visit worse cruelties on. Horrabin uses his network to murder those who cross him or that he sees as a potential problem. Throughout the whole novel, Horrabin is a sadist and a fiend who is evil on a level none of his compatriots can match.
 * The Hunger Games
 * The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: From the prequel book before the trilogy, we have Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the Gamemaker who indirectly created the child-murdering spectacle of the title and introduced it into Panem's society. After doing so, she framed Casca Highbottom for creating the Hunger Games, despite the fact she was the one who orchestrated it in the first place. She commits horrific experiments on innocent people, even going as far as to injecting Clemensia with snake venom because she lied to her about a task she and Snow were assigned to work on. She also puts Snow into Peacekeeping duties to make him believe her twisted mindset, which would lead him into becoming the overseer of the corrupt Capitol government who runs the Hunger Games, and worse, she gets away with all of her atrocities. All in all, she is ultimately the Bigger Bad of the entire series.
 * Mockingjay: President Alma Coin from the trilogy itself is also worse than President Coriolanus Snow. Unlike Snow, who at least keeps his word if he makes a promise, she is perfectly willing to break promises and downright lie in a bid for power. A particularly notable example is proposing a new Hunger Games featuring Capitol children after the Capitol is taken over. Her actions also include ordering a terrorist bombing on the Capitol without warning, leading to the deaths of many innocent men, women, and children including Katniss' cherished little sister, which almost completely breaks Katniss emotionally. And there's a strong implication that Coin attempted to set Katniss up to be sacrificed on more than one occasion simply because she saw the girl as a liability and a threat to her power - she hates anyone and anything she cannot control. Only posing as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, Coin was ultimately a manipulative Hypocrite and every bit the type of power-hungry tyrant she fought against.
 * In The Fionavar Tapestry, Rakoth Maugrim, the Unraveler, is a deity from outside of Fionavar who loathes the world he had no part in making. Long ago, Maugrim arrived in Fionavar and began corrupting what he could with the intention of annihilating the world entirely. After freeing himself, Maugrim captures the heroine Jennifer and, vowing to take everything from her, rapes her, while taking the forms of her father and lovers to destroy all happiness she may have. Aware his rape has gotten her pregnant with his son, thus binding him to Fionavar, Maugrim gives Jennifer to a servant of his to rape and torture for a night as long as he kills her at the end of it. When Jennifer is saved, Maugrim later inflicts a brutal winter on Fionavar, killing many by freezing and starvation, while using his forces to ravage the land. When he meets his son Darien, Maugrim is gleeful about a chance to murder him, vowing to not only to kill him but to unmake him utterly as to regain his invulnerability.
 * Astaroth is the malevolent Big Bad of The Tapestry. He's an ancient and powerful demon ( actually a "spore" created by entities the Starving Gods) who wants the Book of Thoth so he can rule the world with it. While he masks himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, he's really a demon supremacist, punishing David Menlo for summoning demon by biting his hand off. His plan for world conquest involves bringing governments around the world close to collapse before descending on Rowan with his army to seize the Book, leveraging the lives of Max's friends to get it. Upon getting it, he uses its power over truenames to expunge all post-medieval human knowledge from existence and memory, killing the vast majority of the human race. He then sets up demons as the Earth's rulers under him, instituting a vicious regime where a single person being literate mandates mass slaughter. When he loses the demons' loyalty, his plans start slipping, and when Rowan finally gears up to stop him, he flips out and reveals his true motives: he just wants to play capital-G God, and cares no more for demons than for humans. To this end, he attempts to summon the Starving Gods in the hopes that they will devour the universe and give him scraps to live out his fantasies with. A narcissistic psychopath caring only about his fantasies of power, Astaroth exhibits unparalleled evil even amongst demons.
 * Debuting in Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, the second of the series, Opal Koboi is a sociopathic pixie. When she got her position at the head of her company, she drove the previous owner, her own father, to insanity. Along with Briar Cudgeon, she organized the Goblin rebellion, taking advantage of the violent nature of the Goblins and planning to betray them to take over. When Holly and Artemis beat her, she plotted her revenge, and unleashed a complex gambit in the fourth book The Opal Deception. She escaped from prison using a clone duplicate (cloning is considered one of the most immoral things to faeries, as one creates new life which dies easily and cannot think for itself) had Julius Root killed, framing Holly, and then she attacked and Mind Raped a very prominent humanitarian, and had him send a probe down into the earth, to reveal the Faerie people. Doing so she expected to cause a war between the two races, and seize power. In, The Last Guardian the eighth and Final Book, her past self-came to break her out of prison, and Present!Opal hypnotizes two other pixies to hold her past self hostagem and murder her, while she pleads for her to stop. Having killed her past self, all things she has made or influenced in her tech-corp. explode. Communications go down, cars explode, cell-phones and various guns explode, and the humans have their planes go down in mid air, and global communications stop. She then manipulates a number of Faerie ghosts who have been trapped on earth and want to be released. She has unleashed chaos and a global scale, and wishes to kill off all the Humans and take power.
 * Staff Sergeant Sam Croft from Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead. The Commander of a Recon Platoon in World War Two, he is a cold-blooded killing machine who loves combat and killing. His first kill was not even in the war, but when he was serving in the Texas National Guard, and he killed a man in a riot just to see what it was like. He rules the platoon with an iron fist, but at first comes across a more of a martinet Jerkass. The audience is first introduced to his sadistic side when When Ensign Newbie Lt. Hearn is assigned to the platoon, he resents being placed at second-in-command.  He is also a Karma Houdini.
 * In the same novel, General Cummings. He is an intelligent man who puts up an affable front for the enlisted men, but is, in reality, a tyrant who desires to break down their morale into total obedience by making them feel inferior to the officers. Like Croft, he is a Karma Houdini.
 * Mitsuru of Brave Story. He is generally psychopathic and leaves a trail of blood and tears behind him. His complete monstrosity is finally confirmed when he
 * Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is a perfect example. A complete list of all his horrendous atrocities - especially his crimes against children - would fill up several pages, but the scariest thing about him is his intelligence. The other mercenaries are barbaric killers, but the intellectual Judge is so terrifying because he has an inner peace. He understands what is happening and knows how wrong it is, but For the Evulz, he still is the driving force behind the gang's destruction of everything in their path. Another way showcasing how well-written and chilling a villain he is: Holden'd find rare or undiscovered plants, take a note and immediately destroy them just to satisfy some sick desire to remove things from existence.

"Holden: Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."


 * Cormac McCarthy uses this one a lot: guess who penned the original novel No Country for Old Men?
 * Rasheed from Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Nasty, violent-tempered, smug, and thoroughly heartless, he spends the entire book ruining the lives of the protagonists in a myriad of ways, such as . What little sympathy the author tries to create for him by letting us know his first son died is quickly dashed away when it's implied that.
 * And when his wives try to run away, he tells the younger that if she ever tries it again, he will kill his other wife (her only friend) and her daughter in front of her. And she knows he's not joking, because he's just put them all in sensory deprivation rooms in the blistering heat with no water for three days.
 * Also worth mentioning is Assef from Hosseini's other novel, The Kite Runner. He, and on top of all that, he actually admires Adolf Hitler. He's more or less crossed the line by that point.
 * Villain Protagonist Patrick Bateman of American Psycho may be one of these, but Your Mileage May Vary as to whether or not the crimes he commits are true. If they are, then that means he 1) horribly tortured a homeless man for no reason, 2) ordered a pair of prostitutes, skinned one alive, then tortured the other with a drill, cut her head off, then fucked it in the mouth, 3) slit a child's throat to see what it felt like (he didn't like it, but not because of guilt - strangely, he felt it wasn't evil enough), 4) stuffed a live rat up a girl's vagina, and 5) killed many other people just for fun. However, due to the ambiguous nature of the novel and Word of God, these may either be the traits of a monster or the thoughts and imaginations of an incredibly fucked up individual who wants to be one.
 * On the topic of Bret Easton Ellis, it would make sense to include Clay Shaw from Imperial Bedrooms. After being completely repulsed by everyone's (especially Rip and Trent's) behaviour in Less Than Zero, he just casually comes back to LA, watches a bunch of snuff movies like he doesn't care, helps murder, then 'buys' two teenagers. Sexual depravity ensues.
 * Kingdom Rattus: King Marrow I. Assumed control of Vinjia by He proceeds to
 * In Murder on the Ballarat Train, there is a gang that supplies young orphans to brothels. The worst one is the man who rapes the kids to help break them, considering it all part of his compensation for leaving his previous legitimate job.
 * In Murder in the Dark, the sociopathic killer-for-hire (and Self-Made Orphan, as it turns out) who trades under the name "the Joker" (no, not that one). A sociopathic Master of Disguise who sent a coral snake to warn someone to stay away from the scene of his next job, then locked a little girl into a disused outbuilding to die slowly of starvation.
 * In Queen of the Flowers, Rose Weston's grandfather, who makes pre-reformation Scrooge look like the Ghost of Christmas Present. Scrooge at least paid his employees' wages, if not generously—Weston was always late in paying wages and prone to not pay at all when servants quit, and topped it off with bad food and terrible working and living conditions, both for the staff and his own family.
 * In The Divine Comedy, Dis/Satan was once "the highest of all creatures", above every angel and man gifted by the Highest Joy with immortality, invincibility, super intelligence, and perfect happiness. However, Dis came to love his superiority to the lower angels and only that superiority, making the supremacy of his Father unbearable. In acting on this pride, he convinced his fellow angels and the first humans to rebel against the Love known as God. With his rebellion, the Devil introduced all the evil, suffering, and death that would ever be into the world while condemning any who followed him to Inferno, a realm where beings built for eternal Paradise have been corrupted into murderers drowning in the fiery blood of their victims and cannibals biting into the corpses of their children. With his angelic intelligence, Dis knew all of this would happen if he carried out his "arrogant rape", yet brought all of the tortures and crimes described in Inferno into existence without any remorse.
 * Mike Carey's Felix Castor series includes a number of demon villains (notably Asmodeus and Moloch) who could easily qualify, but more frightening are the human villains, notably Satanist Church founder Anton Fanke and human-trafficking pimp Lukas Damjohn, who deliberately and voluntarily head in this direction every chance they get. While we don't get much background on either and so aren't in the best position to judge their culpability, they do actively, knowingly, voluntarily, and not least happily inflict a level of damage on others that appears to bear no particular relation to anything they themselves may have been through. (And Damjohn, in a psychic flashback by the main character touching him, appears to have positively welcomed his first chance to make others suffer, ultimately gratuitously, in his early childhood, so that he himself could get ahead, during the Balkan conflicts.)
 * Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Scene by scene, these guys are demonstrably more despicable and terrifying. To put that in perspective, in their first scene, Vandemar eats a rat. Alive. This is minor. One notable example among many is
 * The Marquis's reminder that is there for a reason. To wit, he watched Atlantis sink. His response? "They deserved it." This coming from  After he got imprisoned, he hired Croup and Vandemar to get Door to open his prison. His plan? To storm Heaven and become God and.
 * Another one of Gaiman's books, Coraline, has the Beldam, or the Other Mother. She is a wicked temptress who lures children into her otherworldly lair with the promise of a better life. The Other Mother spoils them and subtly draws them more and more into the world, eventually convincing them to sew buttons onto their eyes to stay in her realm forever. Once they do, however, she murders them and locks away their souls so as to replenish her energy. She has repeated the process with three children (in the movie, this includes the sister of the owner of the apartment the gateway between worlds is in), and tries to do the same to the titular Coraline. Upon her defiance, the Other Mother kidnaps her parents and forces her into a horrifying game of finding the dead children's eyes. She also casually disfigures her own servants when they resist her, turning the Other Father into an abominated slug. The Other Mother also claims she killed her own mother, as well. Once Coraline wins the eyes, the Other Mother still attempts to catch her, and sends her severed hand into the real world to pursue Coraline once she escapes her clutches. In the film, she also forces the Other Father into attacking his "daughter," and she murders the Other Wybie after he had helped Coraline escape. The Other Mother is one of the most twisted villains in children's literature and stands as a prime example of being careful what you wish for.
 * Darken Rahl from Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series buries a kid up to his neck in sand, starves him, kills him by pouring molten lead down his throat, and then turns him into a hellbeast mount to ride into the underworld. And that's only the first thing we see him do, since Wizard's First Rule is a Doorstopper, and part of a long series of the same. To top it all off, his chief henchman is a prolific rapist and murderer of young boys; it was only at Rahl's insistence that the boy in the above example was brought to him undefiled.
 * While Napoleon of Animal Farm is a direct allegory to Josef Stalin, he is actually WORSE than Stalin within the literal story. Since Animal Farm is far smaller in scale than the Soviet Union and with more literal roles, and the author removed any positive traits Stalin might have had in life from Napoleon's character, all of Napoleon's atrocities are directly and knowingly ordered by the pig himself and ALL of his justifications are flat-out lies. The worst part, though, is that he does all this after being specifically told to never alter the principles of Animalism. By the end of the book, he has COMPLETELY abolished everything it stands for and still blatantly denies it. His atrocities include: training a dog's puppies to be his personal killing machines, and, worst of all, . To top all that off, he is a Karma Houdini.
 * On the subject of Josef Stalin, in Twilight Of The Red Tsar, Stalin, surviving the stroke that killed him in Real Life, becomes far worse than ever before, launching massive purges of Soviet society that wantonly kills hundreds of thousands, either through direct or indirect means such as labor camps. Stalin orders a purge of Jews from Soviet society, persecuting them badly enough to have his actions labeled as the "Soviet Holocaust". Stalin launches a needless war of aggression with China, using chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons that kill well over ten million people. As part of a counter-insurgency policy, Stalin orders much of occupied Chinese territory to be moved into prison camps, with those who resist being murdered and their towns destroyed. Out of prejudice and paranoia, Stalin orders an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Caucasus region and the Baltic states, deporting almost all of the indigenous people into prison camps in Siberia, killing hundreds of thousands. A brutal and megalomaniac dictator, Stalin kills millions of people on a whim.
 * The Emergents from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in The Sky are led by one Tomas Nau. As part of their defeat of the rival Qeng Ho, Nau rapes and murders their fleet commander in front of her daughter. He then has her mind-wiped and charms her into falling for him. Every so often, because the mind-wipe is imperfect, Qiwi remembers what happened and tries to kill Nau. He then has her scrubbed and starts the process again. This continues for decades.
 * Flenser from A Fire Upon The Deep also really, really qualifies. First of all, he does his best to insert "Evil" in Evilutionary Biologist. The vivisection experiments which earned him his name? Downright merciful compared to other things he routinely did to his subjects (his own second-in-command hated him more than anything in the world, but was too mentally scarred to resist). But wait, there is more! Flenser is a heartless sociopath, who demands absolute loyalty from his underlings, but has none to them, seeing everyone as tools, murdering followers and discarding even his trusted bodyguards without a second thought. He also strives to Take Over the World, but compared to everything else about him, this is almost not worth mentioning. The book gives a lot of glimpses into Flenser's mind and about the only non-horrible thing there is his ability to enjoy the beauty of nature.
 * Francis Begbie from Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting kicked his pregnant girlfriend in the groin repeatedly when she questions him. No regret, nada. The chapter "The Glass" depicts Begbie casually throwing his pint glass off a balcony and splitting open a woman's head, only so he can start a bar brawl. The book then goes on to deconstruct this. In Renton's words: "Begbie wisnae the main hard cunt in those days, jist one contender. He wis a lot mair easy-going before he began believing his own - and it must be said, our - propaganda aboot him being a total psychopath".
 * Johnny Wulgaru, alias Johnny Dark, alias John Dread, alias John More Dread, from Tad Williams' Otherland series is a rapist, Serial Killer, Psycho for Hire Misanthrope Supreme who was raised by his drug-addled prostitute mother for the precise purpose of being a weapon against the society she wanted revenge on. The Big Bad, Corrupt Corporate Executive Felix Jongleur, views him as an attack dog: vicious, but useful when directed appropriately. However, he severely underestimates Dread's cunning and ambition, and when he sees the opportunity, Dread uses his Technopath psychic power to wrest control of the Otherland operating system away from his boss. He then launches an orgy of virtual destruction that makes Jongleur's dreams of world domination look positively tame by comparison. Meanwhile, the police team investigating Dread's trail of real world murders interviews a psychologist who describes him as one of the purest examples of a sociopathic personality that he'd ever seen -- no empathy, no remorse, only a fierce intelligence and the skill to manipulate others.
 * Pryrates in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn fills this role admirably. His very first appearance to the protagonist has him crush a puppy to death beneath his boot, and it only gets worse from there. He engineers wars and betrayals, gleefully tortures innocents, and sells his king's soul for power. Even the Big Bad is painted as sympathetic to a certain extent, but not Pryrates.

"Camaris: What manner of creature are you? Pryrates: Creature? I am what a man who accepts no limits can become..."


 * The Warrior Cats series has had three complete monsters thus far: Brokenstar, Tigerstar, and Scourge. It says something about the other two when the series' Big Bad can arguably be described as the tamest example of the three.
 * Scourge is especially monstrous, being a mass-murderer who wears the teeth of his victims as trophies and reinforces his claws with sharpened dog's teeth, and leads a massive gang of stray cats calling themselves BloodClan, who, as a group, also have a reputation for extreme violence. Scourge leaves his Clan's kits to fend for themselves; they either advance to the position of warriors, or die in the streets of starvation and predation. Scourge's viciousness is best demonstrated when uses his reinforced claws to injure Tigerstar, the original Big Bad, so terribly that he dies thrashing and gurgling in agony nine times in a row, all the while watching as if the moment was as mundane as grooming his fur. Scourge also ordered Barley's brothers to murder their own sister, Violet, in cold blood just because Barley and Violet were taking care of each other. Barley offered to take his sister's place, but Scourge thought that it would be more sadistic if Barley watched Violet die. Fortunately, she lived, and both of them fled BloodClan.
 * Don't feel too bad for Tigerstar though. A power-hungry traitor who killed his Clan's previous deputy in the hopes of gaining his position, Tigerstar (then Tigerclaw) took his place and began plotting against his leader, Bluestar, planning to murder her as well. Driven out of his Clan when his treachery is exposed, he first leads a band of rogues who prey on all the Clans, before becoming chief of Shadowclan. Taking control of Riverclan, Tigerstar sets up a Naziesque regime, killing halfblood cats, running Windclan out of their home, and plotting to bring the entire forest under his domination. To that end, he invites Scourge into their territory in his worst and final mistake.
 * Brokenstar is established as the books' first Big Bad when, early on, it is shown he sends kits under 6 months old against full grown warriors, tries to kidnap kits from other Clans when his own all die from his harsh training, and forces a Clan out of their territory. When he is blinded by ThunderClan and given shelter as their prisoner, he still, even though the same clan protected him from WindClan and ShadowClan when they tried to kill him. He is eventually killed by his , for the safety of The Clan.
 * The Markhagir from Kushiel's Avatar fits this trope chillingly well. He practices sexual torture, mutilation and degradation of all kinds and is just overall a master at tormenting people psychologically as well as physically. He has a priesthood to back him up, too. The author makes it clear, though, that while he may have supernatural evil on his side, the Markhagir is the product of human atrocity.
 * Falcone from the Warchild Series is a perfect example. In the books' setting, piracy is already a pretty explicitly evil tactic—preying on innocent merchant ships just trying to get from point A to point B. Falcone takes it to another level by slaughtering everyone on the ships he boards, then blowing the ships to pieces to ensure no survivors... except, for the children he captures to then sell as slaves, as it would happen. Except for the ones he keeps for himself and abuses in every way your mind can possibly think up. Even after, he excels in being an unbridled champion of bastardry in flashbacks. This is in a series where everyone is a little edgy.
 * in The Millennium Trilogy.
 * There are at least three other villains from the series who are just as monstrous as
 * Dostoyevsky's Devils (AKA Demons or The Posessed) has two evil villains with no humanizing qualities. The first one is Pyotr Verkhovensky. His ambition is to become the Evil Overlord of a utopia of slavery and wants his circle of revolutionaries to join him. Shigalyov, written as the antithesis of Christian values, is horrified by Pyotr's hijacking of his political philosophy. Pyotr also has a bit of an Omnicidal Maniac in him, demonstrated when he decides to incite rioting in his town, defaces an icon (which gets him chewed out by murderous ex-con Fedka) and humiliates the old writer Karamzinov at a party. He always plays himself as a simple, curious fool, able to worm his way into people's trust. His most magnificently villainous and outstanding moment is his twisting of Calling the Old Man Out. His father, Stepan Trofimovich, is a tutor for the rich Varvara Stavrogina and also carries a little torch for her, having written and hidden some love letters. So Pyotr reads the love letters in front of his father and Varvara, making it seem as if Stepan only sought a job with her to marry her and have her money, which gets Stepan fired and kicked out of the house. The second one may seem tamer compared to Verkhovensky yet is still worth a mention: Stavrogin, according to a deleted chapter, confesses to, afterwards surprised to have felt no emotion.
 * In Crime and Punishment, another novel by Dostoyevsky, Svidrigailov has few if any redeeming qualities, seeing how he tries to rape Dunya, among other things. Luzhin almost looks nice in comparison to him(although completely and unambiguously lacking in redeeming qualities). He does have a Pet the Dog moment, when he leaves his money to Sonya - and then.
 * David Weber does Even Evil Has Standards very well, with honorable enemies who put Honor Before Reason and really aren't that bad. Then you get the Masadans, who, as well as Honor's jailors later in the series, who after  None of those, however, even came close to Saint-Just, who calmly , made all the worse by the fact that he seemed a Magnificent Bastard at first and degenerated from there. Fortunately, Weber also does the Karmic Death exceedingly well.

"Thomas Theisman: I think we've had quite enough of those kind of trials. Goodbye, Citizen Chairman."


 * Lord Pavel Young is a self-entitled, cowardly rapist who despises the heroine for getting ahead by being heroic (despite being low-born). It's implied that his father was the same - and his grandfather was worse. He does, however, receive a Karmic Death at the hands of the heroine.
 * Still, the unrivaled position of top Complete Monster of Honorverse goes to a one-book character: Andre Warnecke from Honor among Enemies. He is a revolutionary from the Chalice Cluster of Silesian Confederacy. A Smug Snake as well as a Complete Monster, he did not have any of the justifications of others. did that to save his ass, cold-blooded as it may be. Warnecke did that to prove a point. Torturing prisoners and raping women? Masadans were religious fanatics who did this to POWs. Warnecke's men did that to the civilians of the world he took over, who had no defence, and the crews of the defenceless merchant ships they captured, for entertainment. By the end of his part, you loathe him so much that him getting his comeuppance  does not even begin to soothe your rage.
 * Lijah Cuu from the Gaunt's Ghosts series at first simply established himself as a scary, Ax Crazy soldier with a mean streak a few light-years across. However, it isn't until The Guns of Tanith that his true nature is revealed, when Then, in Sabbat Martyr, he  Granted, he was,  but  that needed something to latch on to, like an already-present desire for some Murder-Death-Kill. In Straight Silver, he , and later on,  This just reinforces the fact that Cuu is an absolute Fething Bastard.
 * Dr. Gavin in the Girl Knights series. Though the tyrants of the book are one time, Dr. Gavin is a recurring antagonist. He is so repulsive to the point where the DX-Clan would declare war on him. He deceived Trey's parents by tricking them into getting a flu vaccine, when in reality, his vaccines contained the essences of the dragon Howling and the demonic octopus Bottom, respectively. He then let Trey's parents be consumed in fear and laughing about the destruction they cause with their fear.
 * Saren Arterius in the novel Mass Effect: Revelation, the prequel to the video game, is a pure amoral monster - his character is actually softened in Mass Effect.
 * in Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. He's introduced as
 * Though he usually favors more complex Anti Villains, Sanderson's other works have a couple too. Lord Straff Venture from Mistborn isn't as extreme as, but he's still an utterly unsympathetic piece of work who's utterly okay with systematically abusing both of his children to force them to conform to his standards, unleashing an army of Exclusively Evil monsters known for their ruthlessness and utter lack of mercy on an enemy city, and doing all manner of evil things that he thinks will help cement his power in general. Then, in Warbreaker, there's.
 * Brandon Sanderson has explicitly confirmed as a genuine sociopath.
 * Valentine Day in the highly obscure The Book That Is Not Written easily makes the grade. An assassin who never actually spends any of the money he's paid to kill but rather takes the job because he knows his employers will cover up his actions, leaving him free to kill again and again. The worst part is that, while his employers, The Last Gate, are pretty horrendous, they're doing what they do out of misguided hope for a better world. Valentine isn't driven by love, hate, revenge, or anything human. Protagonist Eduardo sums it up best:

"He doesn't feel. Not pain, not emotion, not the barest stirrings of empathy. The eyes are the window to the soul, they say, and having looked into his, I can state he doesn't have one. His desire to kill cannot even be called a desire. It is simply the only thing he does. It is as natural to him as breathing."


 * And to make it worse, at book's end, given a choice between forcing the main character's loved one to die in a fire and saving himself and therefore giving her the opportunity to escape, he chooses to remain and burn to death with her. He finds an agonizing end more bearable than the thought of letting someone live.
 * Dr. Victor Helios, aka Frankenstein (yes, that one), in the Dean Koontz' Frankenstein trilogy. Plans to knock off humanity and replace them with a New Race of his design, emotionally stunted and beholden only to him. He specifically patterns his plans after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. He regularly abuses and kills off his creations when they displease him (or just For the Evulz) and denigrates everything most people consider part and parcel of being human. Also counts as Light Is Not Good, given that his alias is the Greek word for the sun. The "monster", by contrast, is a being struggling for humanity despite the darkness of his origins. He made his own wife, genetically tailoring her to his 'standards', including allowing her (unique among his creations) to feel shame so that, when he sexually abuses her, he can have the full satisfaction of dominating her in every way possible. All of Victor's creations have a remarkable rate of recovery and are nigh immortal, which means that he can slap his wife around, breaking her bones and bruising and cutting her, and she'll be fully recovered in a few hours, in time to be socially presentable at a dinner party. Oh, and saying 'her' here is a bit misleading: each time the wife proves "flawed" in some way, Victor kills her off and builds a new one, "improving" on the model.
 * There's a scene in the first book where we see Victor going into the back room of a Chinese restaurant in order to sample a particular delicacy: live day-old mice, which are dipped into a vat of boiling oil and eaten. It is stated that he resorts to such barbaric extremes in taste largely because he is bored.
 * Krait, the Psycho for Hire from Koontz's The Good Guy, counts as well. The scenes narrated from his point of view actually make him more nightmarish.
 * Nefarian Serpine, from the Skulduggery Pleasant series of books. Geez, where to begin with this guy? He was The Dragon of an evil wizard who started a war to revive Eldritch Abominations, and he killed the protagonist's family then tortured him to death. However, after the guy somehow manages to come back to life and leads his side of the war to victory, Serpine double-crosses his old buddies by becoming The Mole and selling everyone out to get his own ass out of the fire. This, just so, many years later, he can get his hands on a super-powerful MacGuffin to start everything from scratch and kill everyone who even looks at him funny. It doesn't help that he only uses said MacGuffin on real powerful people because it kills them very fast and painlessly, while he prefers to kill everyone else in the most slow and painful way possible.
 * Serpine looks like The Messiah when you compare him to the Faceless Ones though...
 * The Duke of Ch'in in Bridge of Birds. He's introduced as a tyrant who only cares about money and power. Seems like your standard villain characterization, but wait, there's more. The protagonists find out that . But wait, there's more! . But wait, there's more! . At this point, readers will be heartily agreeing with Ten Ox's declaration that the Duke "must have the coldest heart in the world!" (If he even has a heart, that is...)
 * Duke Roger of Conté, Alanna's Arch Enemy and the Big Bad of Song Of The Lioness, was originally heir of his cousin King Roald before the birth of Prince Jon bumped him down the line of succession, and he stops at nothing to get his place back. He creates a Mystical Plague that kills many in the city of Corus before it reaches its intended target, the royal family, who were deliberately targeted last so that the palace Healers were too weak to save Jon's life. When this fails, Roger's second attempt on his cousin's life involves goading Jon into getting himself killed by exploring a cursed city. Alanna foils this too, so Roger sends multiple Animal Assassins after her, tries to drown her, turns her friend Alex against her so that he tries to kill her while sparring, and helps create a war with Tusaine so he can pull a Uriah Gambit on both of them. After the war is ended without his intended results, Roger casts a wasting sickness on his lawful aunt, the Queen Lianne, using a wax doll of the Queen, being periodically run under a stream of running water that slowly drains her life force; this wrecks her already-poor health enough that she dies little over a year after the spell has been ended. When Alanna uncovers this plot and finally exposes him, she kills him, but that doesn't end it. When Roger returns he has become a full-blown Omnicidal Maniac, who gives up regaining the throne in favor of destroying Tortall with an earthquake out of spite. Not even his own followers, except Alex, are told, most thinking that they're participating in a standard usurper plot and not realizing that he cares nothing for them either.
 * from Nineteen Eighty-Four. A deranged, sadistic Torture Technician who provides one of the most terrifying Mind Rape sequences in all time, unflinchingly. Obviously, Ingsoc is the Complete Monster of political ideologies.
 * Emmanuel Goldstein is portrayed as a Complete Monster in the regular Two Minutes Hate propaganda event, though, in reality, he was probably one of the idealistic founders of IngSoc whose utopia was corrupted and perverted into something awful by Big Brother. Assuming that he even exists. He could just be a fictional receptacle for the otherwise undirected hatred of the population at large. Eastasia is also portrayed in this way, along with many other enemies of the State.

"Eurasia is our ally. We have always been at war with Eastasia."


 * From Heaven's Door: Ashton "Ash" Sharpe is a despicable and depraved beast of a man defined by his thrill-seeking nature. A low-functioning sociopath with a constant craving for stimulation and a seeming inability to feel empathy, Ash has been a vicious bully all of his life, having tortured animals and maimed his classmates throughout his childhood. Having joined up with Red Clover alongside his partner Chayne Summers in adulthood, Ash becomes one of the top scientists of the P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. experiments, using his influence to torment and abuse the 100 test subjects as he pleases. Ash's worst treatment of a patient came when he brutally raped and tortured the teenage girl Tango, leaving her mute and unable to use her right arm ever again. His treatment of his own compatriots being no better, Ash smacks his troops for questioning him, beats one seemingly to death when prisoners escape, and unleashes the forces of Heaven onto his fellow scientists and all of the test subjects to be ripped to shreds when he and Chayne take over Red Clover. Throughout the story, Ash has happily become addicted to the godlike sensations that come from contact with Heaven, leading his mind to slowly become more impulsive and unstable, ultimately resulting in him making a plan alongside Chayne to unleash Heaven onto the Earth to wipe out humanity before the duo become gods, after which Ash plans to kill Chayne herself, all because everyone else is ruining his "perfect universe". His crimes only increase in the prequel story Before Heaven. Ash is revealed to have conceived a son, likely by one of his many acts of rape, whom he horrifically abuses with irons, knives, and his fists, even boasting to have "fucked" the child. Ash was a hedonistic monster who cared not for anyone or anything but how much fun he could get out of a situation, even if it meant dooming the entire Earth just to get his ultimate "high".
 * Alison "Alice" Witzenberg is a cold, amoral sociopath with a sick fascination with hurting others. Originally signing up for the P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. Project just for the fun and fortune it would bring them, Alice took to manipulating the teenager Jackson into becoming their "sidekick", and, when Jackson discovers the truth, Alice first poisons him, then tries to strangle him to death with a smile on their face. Returning after overpowering their new personality of Mint, Alice immediately sets a hospital aflame, killing more than a dozen people, to serve as a distraction before approaching then manipulating the mentally unstable Jango into leading a full-scale slaughter against the city of Haven. Alice's final plan is to have Haven's thousands of residents murdered before unleashing the forces of Hell onto the city, which will lead the Association to nuke the entire city and wipe out Jango's entire army as well as any survivors while Alice flees and starts a new life. Fully aware that her machinations will end with the minds of all those killed in the midst of Haven being taken by Hell to be tortured for all eternity, and indeed even cackling at the idea, Alice's final act is a disturbing attempt to trap Tango in their mind for all eternity, forcing her to rewatch her rape and torture at the hands of Ash over and over while Alice personally tortures her until the end of time. With no motive bar a creepy desire for fun and a hatred for anyone who knew their "Mint" persona, Alice stands out as the youngest villain in the story, yet still one of the most wicked.
 * Simon Legree is a sociopath and a sadist. He is brutal to his slaves, makes no bones about the fact that he works them to death—it's cheaper, he says, but it's clear he'd do it For the Evulz anyway—and he endeavors to drag them across the Despair Event Horizon, too.
 * Spoilers ahoy! In The Saga of Darren Shan, after his reappearance, has become this. First of all, he's a sociopathic mass murderer and with extremely violent mood swings to boot. Between  and  he's an all-round unrepentant scumbag (even thought of so by other villains and otherwise constantly described as such), loving every moment of it. At the end, there's a hint of a Freudian Excuse to his actions, but the truth is that he's caused so much suffering throughout the story that it's really difficult to feel sympathy for him at that point.
 * While we're on the subject of Shan books, Lord Loss from The Demonata is a perfect example. He feeds off of humanity's sorrow and pain and has been known to torture people just for the hell of it.
 * The Thin Executioner has three, Qasr Bint, the brutal leader of the Um Saga, and the fantastic team of Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair.
 * And the setting of The City Trilogy is populated by an overwhelming number of them. The title of "Worst Human Being Alive" belongs to either the Cardinal, the ill-tempered crime lord who wields absolute power over the city, or Paucar Wami, a personable serial killer/assassin who considers murder an artform.
 * The Domination of The Draka is a nation of these. How bad is it? Well, in the first book, Marching Through Georgia (as in, the country in the Caucasus Mountains), the average person WILL be rooting for the Nazis, the lesser of two evils (for example, the Nazis didn't enslave hundreds of millions of people or execute dissidents by impalement). What's worse,.
 * Baron Ryoval from the Vorkosigan Saga is such a Complete Monster that even other Jacksonians find him repulsive. He has his own father murdered, takes over the family business, then wipes out the rest of the family—by assassination in the case of the men, by mutilation and sale into sexual slavery in the case of the women and younger boys. And all that's before what he does to Mark ...
 * Ditto Admiral Vorrutyer and Crown Prince Serg, sadists who seem to spur one another on. We're not given any actual details about what they do, but the little that's brought up in the narration is bad enough. Likewise, we're told obliquely of Vorrutyer's 'toy' collection without any actual examples. Given that such a total degenerate as Serg was heir to the Barrayaran Imperium, it's no wonder
 * Child slave-dealer Genshed in Shardik, who specifically deals in unwanted and deformed children so he can gain a greater profit and use more barbaric methods. Instead of grown-up overseers, he grooms the cruelest of the boys to be his overseers, replacing them only when they kill or damage too many of the slaves (or learn too much). He prides himself on being able to drive children mad without even touching them, though he isn't above physical abuse—chains through the ears, knife blades under the nails or across the eyes, a device called a "flytrap" that keeps the mouth open. He castrates the boys, and it's implied that the children in his possession (mostly young ones, under fourteen) are sold as sex slaves of one kind or another. When he learns one boy will be used for begging, he cuts off the boy's hands to make him more valuable, then charges the new owner for the job. The only regret he ever shows is at the loss of a profit. Though he only appears in person for a few chapters, when he, it feels entirely appropriate.
 * Virgil Byrnes, the father of the title character in Chris Crutcher's Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. He, forced her to tell people she was burned when she pulled a pot of boiling spaghetti on herself, tied her up and wouldn't let her eat, according to Sarah Byrnes, and, in what could arguably be called his Moral Event Horizon, . There is no explanation or justification for anything he does; he's just batshit crazy; even his own kid says so.
 * Crutcher definitely has a thing for Complete Monster characters, especially in positions of authority: T.B. from Chinese Handcuffs (serial child rapist), Rich Marshall from Whale Talk (a racist who psychologically tortured his biracial stepdaughter), and Hudgie Walters' dad from Ironman (shot his kid's puppy because he forgot to feed it one time and tortured Hudgie to the point where he couldn't function socially, ) are some of the most chilling.
 * The Codex Alera has several:
 * Kord, a slaver and minor villain from the first book who has successfully turned petty, spiteful cruelty into an art form (how he breaks his slaves alone puts him beyond the Moral Event Horizon, to say nothing of his general nastiness to everyone he meets).
 * High Lord Kalarus, a major villain who, to paraphrase the series' character page, didn't cross the Moral Event Horizon—he pole-vaulted it. Even the other villains—people who happily plot treason, sedition, and murder purely for personal ambition—think he's disgusting and won't have anything to do with him.
 * Just to give you an idea, the way that Kalarus keeps his top intelligence agent in line? He's also systematically exploited every bit of wealth out of his subjects that he can manage in order to make his palace more ridiculously extravagant, maintains an economy run entirely on slave labor and organizes a massacre of a group attempting to abolish it through legal methods, and tries to have Tavi and Max killed because he doesn't want it to get out that his son got beaten by "Antillus's bastard" and "a furyless freak." Yeah, it's a rare day for Lord Kalarus that doesn't involve puppy-punting.
 * He also, and when he attacked , he started attacking orphanages to draw the defenders out. We weren't kidding about the pole-vaulting thing.
 * He also rigged up a Taking You with Me scenario in case his lands were conquered, by This ultimately led to one of the most brutal I Did What I Had to Do moments in the series, when
 * Kalarus' son, Brencis Minoris, has a "Well Done, Son" Guy complex going on despite the fact that Brencis the Elder isn't much nicer to him than to anyone else, so he follows in his dad's footsteps by being an arrogant, bullying, bigoted dick. As mentioned above, he makes a spirited attempt to murder Tavi with little to no provocation and, later in the series,
 * And Senator Arnos. Got a Lawful Good commander who's intelligent, open-minded, and competent enough to hold back an army outnumbering him 10-to-1 for several years? Can't have that, he might steal your political thunder. So he . Later, when a duel doesn't go his way, he tries to avoid justice by grabbing a nearby woman to use as a hostage..
 * Invidia Aquitaine was already well-established as a Neutral Evil jerk with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and no concern or empathy for anyone but herself. It was far from surprising when But it only really becomes clear what a sick person she is when we find out the sort of thing she'll do when driven by emotion beyond sociopathic self-interest:
 * The Deathstalker series has multiple occurrences of such characters. Perhaps most notable is the case of the woman from whom the Uber-Espers derived. She was such a Complete Monster that, broken into four parts, her spirit manifested as four different Eldritch Abominations that proceeded to wreak unspeakable horrors on humanity. Their most horrible crimes are, in fact, those they commit through their possessed thralls, everything from turning the noble Paragons in sadistic, cannibalistic, and wantonly murderous puppets to causing an entire stadium of people to rape, brutalize, and mutilate one another, including the children. And this was all while she had four minds directing her power in different directions.
 * Bernard Cornwell often presents rather multi layered villains who are sometimes even likable and no better or worse than the heroes. But when he creates a complete monster, he creates a monster. The most notable is Obadiah Hakeswill, the enemy of Richard Sharpe. Hakeswill is a sadistic British Sergeant who relishes tormenting those under his command. He murders the goodhearted Colonel McCandles, who was going to turn Hakeswill in for abuses of power, kills Sharpe's first wife, and then deserts the army to lead a band of murderous, rapist brigands. He thankfully gets his when Sharpe performs the coup de grace at his firing squad execution
 * Two of his other worst? Kjartan the Cruel of The Saxon Stories, a brutal Viking overlord who seizes power by betraying his own lord and burning him alive in his home. He also takes the lord's daughter as a sex slave for his son and lets every man in his garrison have her until she mutilates herself to make herself unattractive. He suffers the worst fate a Viking can get when the sons of the murdered lord kill him and deny him the honor of holding his sword at his death, consigning his soul to Nifleheim. And then there's Sir Martin from Agincourt, a corrupt priest who abuses his authority to rape and murder as he wants...
 * Sir Martin's karmic death made at least one person (namely myself) cheer at the absolutely perfect symmetry of it.
 * , of James Ellroy's L.A. quartet—a media-lionized "hero cop" who's an absolute black hole of greed, corruption, and sadism. He has absolutely no qualms whatsoever about having his own men framed or killed in service to his driving ambition, which happens to involve taking over the city's vice rackets and installing himself as kingpin. (Incidentally ) The crowning horror, though, is how charming he is; there's just something extra-specially terrifying about a man who can make you laugh as he's ordering multiple homicides.
 * The Inchoroi of the Second Apocalypse series. They're Scary Serial Rapist Aliens who crash-landed during the height of the Nonmen (or Cûnuroi, as they call themselves) civilization. They eventually touched off a cataclysmic war between them and the Nonmen. To be fair, the Nonmen sort of started it, as they murdered the first Inchoroi captives they took, essentially because they didn't like the way the Inchoroi looked. However, to bring about their victory, the Inchoroi genetically engineered three new species (the Sranc, the Bashrags, and the Wracu), at least the first of which is so filled with hatred and lust that the only way it can interact with its enemies is by raping them to death, killing them first and then raping them, or, baring rape, just killing them in gratuitously torturous ways, such as cutting open the abdomen and strangling the unfortunate with their own intestines. Eventually, though, the power of the Quya (Nonmen sorcery) is such that the Inchoroi are driven to defeat. The Inchoroi meekly ask the proud king of the Nonmen what he'd like them to do for him. He decides that he'd like his species to be immortal. The Inchoroi assent and become the physicians of the Nonnmen, wandering among them and spreading their concoctions. What happens as a result of this is completely unjustified. The men all become eternally young and immortal, but every single woman of their race dies. No exceptions. The remaining Nonmen are upset and decide they would like to wipe the Inchoroi out for good. A grand total of two (out of at least a million) Inchoroi survive, hiding in the depths of their colossal spaceship. But perhaps what the Inchoroi did to the Nonmen doesn't seem entirely awful...until one realizes what it does to the surviving Nonmen. Their minds can only contain a few centuries of memory, before it starts to fade away. However, the exception to this rule is traumatic memories. Episodes of their lives filled with anguish, hatred, terror, and misery pile up, while everything beautiful and joyous, or even banal and trivial, they experience inevitably vanishes. By the time of the setting of the books, the Nonmen have been like this for at least four thousand years, and those of them that aren't desperately trying to keep together a last remnant of their civilization are so far beyond crazy that humans can't really hope to comprehend it. And the two surviving Inchoroi don't regret a thing. And let's not even get started with the Apocalypse How...
 * Jaffur the ifrit only appears twice in "Wandering Djinn", but between his onscreen (or onpage) support of a murdering rapist and his sheer sadistic joy at nearly ripping apart hero Malik's former lover, along with the indication that he's done a lot worse over his existence, he qualifies.
 * The necromancer Akhlaur from the Forgotten Realms Counselors and Kings trilogy. He combines the worst traits of a Mad Scientist, Evil Overlord, and an Evil Sorcerer, performing grotesque experiments on living captives (often though not always elves) so that he can puzzle out the secrets of life and death and acquire their power. He treats servants and captives alike with the same bored disdain, since he views all other people as being equally worthless. Oh, and he forcibly turned his former best friend into an undead horror under his complete control and together, they tried to murder his other former friend to steal his kingdom. Real piece of work, all right...
 * The Matter Manipulator from The Pilo Family Circus. A flesh-sculpting "artist" that lives in the Circus funhouse, he's about the only villain in the entire story that isn't meant to be likeable or funny, and for good reason: not only does he "discipline" poor old Winston by merging a hot coal with the flesh of his stomach, but he's also responsible for the creation of the Freaks - including the one who's constantly melting. And it's implied that some people ended up even worse off than that - recycled into living wallpaper and organic furniture for his studio.
 * Kurt Pilo Senior was this, according to many sources: Fishboy notes that he spent most of his life stealing magical artifacts for vile purposes - one of them being the Circus itself; the oldest of the gypsies recalls what Kurt Sr did to gypsy girls that had "made the mistake of being born pretty"; and Kurt Jr believes that his father's approach to discipline would be to skin the offender, sodomise him, and feed the remains to the Funhouse Inhabitants.
 * Edward Hyde in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by virtue of being Dr Jekyll with all notions of morality hurled out the window. He tramples a child simply because he couldn't be bothered stepping over her and thrashes Sir Danvers Carew to death for the fun of it.
 * Dracula, the titular vampire character of Dracula, is a monster, completely that is. He keeps Jonathan Harker in his castle, resulting in driving him mad, turns Renfield insane, kidnaps a baby to feed to the other vampires and then sends the wolves to kill the baby's mother, drains Lucy of her blood, attacks her and her mother as a wolf, resulting in Lucy herself as a vampire, and turns Mina into a vampire in order to know what the gang is doing to get him.
 * In Department 19, Dracula is the Big Bad, the first vampire ever to exist, and, despite his Faux Affably Evil manner, puts all other vampires to shame with his monstrous nature. Even before being turned, he was vicious; in The Rising, Valentin tells how he once brutally slaughtered a whole village because the mayor's wife didn't bow deeply enough. After he is resurrected, he devours hundreds, procured for him by Valeri Rusmanov, to regain his full power. He kidnaps Blacklight Director Henry Seward and subjects him to Cold-Blooded Torture both for information and For the Evulz (including ripping out and eating his left eye in Zero Hour, in which he also kills numerous Operators, including Acting Director Cal Holmwood). He is also responsible for turning thousands of violently unstable inmates into powerful vampires, resulting in at least several dozen deaths across the world. After vampires are revealed to the world, he secretly funds Van Helsing Hate Crimes to destabilize the UK. His first move against humanity is a terrorist attack that kills tens of thousands, during which he seizes the city of Carcassonne and gives its inhabitants two days to leave. At the deadline, he burns the city to ashes, killing 6,000 people who couldn't escape in time. His ultimate goal is to Take Over the World out of nothing more than Pride, which will result in countless deaths, vampires becoming the dominant species, and even the slightest dissent being punishable by Cruel and Unusual Death.
 * In The Diaries of the Family Dracul, Prince Vlad Tsepesh, formerly Vlad III, is the vampiric head of the Tsepesh household. During his time as ruler of Wallachia, Vlad earned the name "Dracula" note for his various acts of torture and sadism towards his subjects. Desiring immortality, Vlad made a pact with the Dark Lord to become a vampire, and has feasted upon hundreds of victims throughout the centuries, with infants comprising much of his prey. As per his bargain with the Dark Lord, Vlad offers up the souls of his family's firstborn son of each generation, binding them to him from infancy via a blood ritual. He has no tolerance for disloyalty among his family; he proved this by killing his "brother" Petru's wife and eldest son, Stefan as punishment for his unwillingness to serve him. Following Petru's death, Vlad attempts to corrupt his son Arkady to be his servant and terrorizes his pregnant wife Mary. He even violates his covenant with his family to never transform his own kin into vampires by transforming Arkady and his sister Zsuzsanna into vampires. He later abducts Mary's son Stefan and attempts to perform the blood ritual on him, only to kill him in a rage upon learning he is not Arkady's biological son, following this by killing Arkady himself. Over two decades later, Vlad moves to London to expand his array of victims. There, he turns Lucy into a vampire and kills her mother, corrupts, then later kills, Renfield, and performs a blood ritual with Mina Harker. Vlad's ultimate ambition is to achieve godhood through the use of a special manuscript, thus giving him dominion over all evil in the world.
 * Countess Elisabeth of Bathory, Vlad's cousin, is a power-hungry vampire who can match even the Impaler in brutality. Noted to have tortured and murdered over 650 maidens in her lifetime and bathed in their blood, Elisabeth made a pact with the Dark Lord for immortality, and has continued her killing spree in undeath. Having acquired the special manuscript by destroying its previous owner, Elisabeth uses it to increase her own power, hoping to achieve godhood through its use. Summoned by Vlad to restore his fading power, Elisabeth seduces Zsuzsanna, luring her into a seemingly loving relationship while in truth planning to sacrifice her to the Dark Lord as part of their bargain. While in Vlad's castle, Elisabeth mesmerizes and violates Jonathan Harker, joins Zsuzsanna and Dunya in feeding on an infant, sacrifices Dunya's soul to summon the Dark Lord, and turns three children into vampires. Arriving in London, Elisabeth kidnaps a young girl and tortures her to death, an act that horrifies Zsuzsanna to the point of leaving her. Following Vlad's death, Elisabeth kills Quincey Morris before assaulting Zsuzsanna to force her to help her locate the remaining key of the manuscript, promising that once she's achieved godhood, she will keep Zsuzsanna as her tortured slave for all eternity.
 * Dennis Lehane has quite a few in his Kenzie/Gennaro series, including Marion Socia in A Drink Before The War, a gang leader who pimped out his own underaged son; Leon and Roberta Trett and Corwin Earll, child molesters and murderers in Gone Baby Gone; and in Prayers For Rain, who specialized in driving people to suicide.
 * Lone Wolf: While the evil god Naar and his direct creations, such as the Darklords of Helgedad, are incarnations of evil itself, the same cannot be said for Naar's mortal servants:
 * Vonotar the Traitor was once a member of the magician's guild of Sommerlund, but sought to learn evil magic in conjunction with good magic to become more powerful. Vonotar sold out his nation and his people when he revealed to the Darklords that all the Kai Order would be gathered at their monastery for the holy Feast of Fehmarn, which allowed the Darklords to massacre the Kai and pave the way for their invasion. Vonotar was given command of an undead fleet of warships and prevented aid from coming to Sommerlund by sea and sent numerous assassins out to kill Lone Wolf to prevent him from retrieving the Sommerswerd. When Lone Wolf succeeded and helped beat back the invasion, Vonotar captured and tortured a former guild mate to flee to the icy wastes of Kalte to escape the wrath of both Sommerlund and the Darklords. He took refuge with the Ice Barbarians but murdered their leader and enslaved them with magical jewelry, often forcing them to commit suicide if they resisted. Ultimately captured by Lone Wolf, Vonotar was flung through a magical gateway into another dimension where he gathered the worst criminals in Sommerlund's history and attempted to cross back over to Magnamund to wreak his vengeance. While he was ultimately slain by the coincidental arrival of Lone Wolf, Vonotar the Traitor served as an effective Starter Villain and showed just how far men can fall to evil in their pursuit of power.
 * Zakhan Kimah is the cruel, tyrannical usurper king of Vassagonia. Kimah began his career by leading the Sharnazim, Vassagonia's Secret Police, and would root out and torture any potential dissidents to the Zahkan's rule. Ever power hungry, Kimah made a pact with the Darklords and murdered the previous Zakhan, Moudalla, to seize control of the country. In exchange for the Orb of Death, Kimah lured Lone Wolf to Vassagonia in the guise of peace talks with the intent of handing him over to the Darklords. When Lone Wolf escaped capture, Kimah had the innocent boat crew that carried Lone Wolf denounced as traitors, publicly executed, and their heads stuck on pikes as examples. While Lone Wolf would ultimately end up escaping his grasp and slaying one of the Darklords, Kimah stayed in their good graces by becoming the only human nation to ally with the forces of evil. He would go on to lead a great army for the Darklords and slaughter or enslave every village or town he came across as he made his way to the neighboring capitol city of Tahou. Leading the assault on the city wielding the Orb of Death, Kimah made it clear in his taunts to Lone Wolf that he intended to raze the city and murder every innocent inside the walls of Tahou.
 * Archdruid Cadak is the lord of the Naar-aligned nation of Ruel and master of the Cener Druids. Commanding his ancient cult to master the arts of poisons and plagues, Cadak sought to make the world of Magnamund appropriate to Naar's tastes by creating a deadly plague that would wipe out all life on the planet with the exceptions of those Cadak saw as worthy. Under Cadak's guidance, the Cener Druids bred terrible abominations to use as Cannon Fodder, used biological weapons on neighboring countries, and captured enemy soldiers and civilians to use as test subjects for their poisons and plagues. When Lone Wolf destroyed the deadly plague, Cadak swore undying vengeance on him and all he held dear. He would go on to capture Lone Wolf's closest friend, the mage Banedon, and torture him while trying to lure Lone Wolf into a trap that would kill both of them. Failing that, Cadak made one final attempt to enact Naar's unholy designs by using the powerful Deathstaff to summon the demoness Shamath and resurrect Vashna, the most powerful of the Darklords. Cadak intended to use Vashna and his undead legions to overrun Magnamund and annihilate the rest of the world. Cadak's plans were again foiled by Lone Wolf and the wicked archdruid was slain, but Lone Wolf had not seen the last of Cadak as he makes one final appearance in Naar's evil realm as Lone Wolf trekked through it. Cadak pleaded with Lone Wolf to free him from his well-deserved torment, but he only intended to trick Lone Wolf into taking his place in eternal damnation.
 * The Animorphs series gave us a number of nasty villains, but none so prominent or vile as Visser Three. He didn't rape anyone, nor did he beat his wife or steal ice cream from schoolgirls, but he made up for it by finding every excuse to kill people he could think of, often doing so then settling on an excuse. He was irrational, dim-witted, self-absorbed, and the sixteenth (later fourteenth) most powerful Yeerk in the entire species. Politically speaking, that is, being that his physical power was so monstrous, he had a habit of eating his enemies (to put that into perspective, his host body was a herbivorous being). No matter how bizarre the stories got, Visser Three gave the Animorphs the most nightmares.
 * Also, Crayak was, well, something of a dick, what with being the Satan equivalent and all. However, Visser Three managed to outdo the cosmic personification of evil when it comes to this trope. That's how bad he is. Well, he got more screentime. Crayak has been committing genocides for millions of years.
 * Visser Three's brother, Esplin 9466-secondary, shows that this runs in the family. He manages to find a way to survive without Kandrona rays: by eating other Yeerks. And no, not out of the Pool, he's trying to hide from his brother; instead, he finds Controllers, kills their hosts, and eats the Yeerks right out of their brains.
 * Taylor counts too, in my opinion. Or the mix of Taylor and the Yeerk, really. They scarred Tobias for life with that Agony Beam and Taylor herself was rather Carrie-like, wanting revenge after everyone started hating her fire-scarred appearance. Hence her agreement to become a controller in exchange for a new face.
 * Damon Julian, villain of George R. R. Martin novel Fevre Dream, in freaking SPADES. Vampires in this book are mostly slaves to their thirst and most are grateful to take a substitute when offered. Damon Julian, however, is so ancient - thousands of years, apparently - that he doesn't even feel the thirst. He kills because he likes it and likes to target people who are young and beautiful. His true Moral Event Horizon is when, proving a point, he crushes a baby's skull. Recountings of how he turned a steamboat into a floating slaughterhouse only cements his status.
 * Drake Merwin from Michael Grant's Gone (novel) series. It's clear almost immediately that, despite the other nasty villains in the books, Drake is a horrific, full-blown sociopath...and he's only fourteen. He waxes almost poetic on the subject of guns and his love of using them on people, gleefully volunteers to hunt, torture, and kill other kids, and And that's just in the first book. In the second, he  In conclusion, it says a lot about Drake that he makes friends with the force of pure darkness in the books, has dreams so twisted and revolting that the dream-reader, Orsay, is paralyzed with fear being in the same room with him, and Stephen King himself named him on a list of "Most Terrifying Book Villains".
 * And now there's a girl named Penny, who can cause hallucinations that fool at least the senses of sight and touch and possibly the other three. She uses them to torture people in absolutely horrific ways that the author doesn't describe until Fear, the fifth book. After Caine, he uses a half hour with Penny as punishment for relatively serious crimes. It's mentioned that Penny's last victim was unable to work for two days afterward.
 * First Mate Cox from Pratchett's Nation is quite like many of the Discworld villains listed above, except with none of the Evilly Affable charm, twice as much dog-kicking, and (possibly) cannibalism.
 * That last bit requires some context. Cox eventually turns up in the company of a cannibal war party. They don't like him very much.
 * Living Dead Girl features Ray, a pedophile who kidnaps a ten year old girl, takes her away from her family and starves her for five years so she doesn't get over 100 lbs and get curvy. This is just what's told to you at the beginning. It gets worse.
 * The Acts of Caine features Berne, who enjoys rape as a casual hobby, murders people when he can't find a satisfactory fight, and is singlehandedly responsible for all the Vasquez Always Dies in the entire series. Fucking Berne.
 * Garren in the Farsala Trilogy is the commander of the invading Hrum army. While most of the Hrum are anti-villains at worst, he openly espouses torture and is only waging war against Farsala in the first place because his father made a bet.
 * Drizzt Do'Urden's enemy, Errtu, in Forgotten Realms novels by R.A. Salvatore. It's a given, since he's a greater demon and the whole point of demons in that multiverse is to be Exclusively Evil. He doesn't really get to properly display the depth of it until he's given one of Drizzt's friends as a prisoner. While he's holding him, he constantly tortures him in unimaginable ways for no particular reason, including having him raped by succubi, having them bear his children, and then killing the half-breed babies while he watches. Presumably, any being of pure evil and chaos like Errtu would have done the same with anyone in their power, simply by definition.
 * Drizzt's Mother, Matron Malice, qualifies. Her first act after giving birth to Drizzt was to try and kill him in ritual sacrifice, and mercy had nothing to do with letting him live (one of her other sons was killed at the same time); it was more a question of pragmatism. She wipes out whole other families, children included, for political gain, has her husband killed for no other reason than her own amusement, and does everything she can to emotionally torment Drizzt's father.
 * Agatha Trunchbull from Roald Dahl's Matilda, the ultimate Sadist Teacher. How bad is she? She throws children vast distances—including out of high windows—and puts them in "the Chokey" (essentially a torture chamber), all of which nearly kill the children involved. It's hinted that she murdered her brother-in-law to get his estate and abuse his daughter. It makes one wonder how she was even allowed to be a school principal.
 * Probably the same way she gets everything else: pure force and intimidation. She also takes Refuge in Audacity: shying away from illegal caning, she instead resorts to even worse measures that parents are more likely to dismiss as wild stories. Fortunately, the misery she causes is undone when
 * From the Silence of the Lambs series, we have Mason Verger. He was a multiple offender child molester, raped his own sister, is heavily implied to have tortured people in Africa and possibly even crucifying them, and hired a team of Sardinian kidnappers to breed monstrosities for the sole purpose of killing Hannibal Lecter. It reaches truly amazing levels, though, when, after he is crippled and mutilated by Lecter's mental suggestion, he passes his time by traumatizing children so that he can drink martinis made from their tears.
 * Hannibal himself, oddly enough, may not qualify, since he is such a Magnificent Bastard that the reader can't help but root for him a bit, especially when he kills Dr. Chilton. However, he has a confirmed kill count of over 30 people. And that's just people that we know of that he's killed. Then, he eats some of his victims and will sometimes feed them to unsuspecting people. In Red Dragon, his first appearance, his presence is brief and he was likely intended to be this trope. Then Characterization Marched On.
 * Hannibal clearly has standards, though. There's nothing random or 'just because' about his evil. Most of his victims are Laser-Guided Karma. And the ones who aren't, you almost always understand. That's part of what makes him so disturbing. Most of his victims you'd 'want' to see get it...just not THAT bad.
 * In Power Lines, Shepherd Howling has a harem of underage girls as his "wives", and he beats plenty of other children. He gives them names like "Goat-dung" and "Nightsoil".
 * Emperor-Regent Nicosar of Azad in The Culture/The Player Of Games is a master player of the ruthless game of Azad that determines everything in the empire's society. A sadistic psychopath, Nicosar rules via torture, murder and brutality while broadcasting regular videos to the population with the "losers" facing mutilation, death or rape. Women are also seen as second-rate citizens, with abuse and violence towards them accepted, and any females who assault a male are summarily tortured to death. Despite his seemingly benevolent and passive façade, Nicosar rules over the Empire with an iron fist, regularly executing any who would try to rebel against him, and subjecting his own men to terrible torments should they cross him. When Nicosar plays the novel's hero Gurgeh, Nicosar is bested in Azad and orders his guards to massacre all the spectators, deciding if he has to go down, he'll simply kill every single one of his own subjects in the process.
 * In Surface Detail, Joiler Veppers is a wealthy playboy who once ruined the life of a supposed friend of his to get rich and take the man's daughter Lededje as his own. Regularly raping Lededje, Veppers murders her when she tries to escape, unaware her mind survives thanks to a neural race. Veppers also gets richer by selling and running artificial hells where the minds of countless victims on multiple worlds victims are tortured in horrific simulations for eternity. Worried that the anti-hell factions will win, Veppers arranges for an alien race to raze his estates into ashes with most of the innocent staff still there, all to avoid a loss in profits.
 * William Hamleigh in The Pillars of the Earth. Let's start from the beginning!
 * Nearly kills Tom Builder over wages
 * After which he allows Walter to do the same.
 * so she'll stop SMILING AT HIM.
 * It's actually faster to list the acts of his that AREN'T heinous.
 * The main antagonist of the Winds of the Forelands, the Weaver,, is a genocidal bastard who really likes Mind Rape, whose scheme pushed a fair but idiotic duke beyond the Moral Event Horizon, and who has big time Fantastic Racism going for him.
 * Zhaspahr Clyntahn of the Safehold novels. In the fourth book, he not only executes every vicar in the Church who even thought about opposing him, but their families as well, including children as young as twelve.
 * Silas Slade from Black Beauty. He's got no problem working his horses to death (literally), but he's also just as cruelly indifferent towards the people working for him. Before we even meet Slade, we meet a character who Slade is forcing to work despite it being very obvious the man is about to drop dead from pneumonia (he does, "cursing Slade's name" for the last few hours of his life). And he's never brought to task for his crimes against the animals or his workers.
 * Monsieur Thénardier from Les Misérables (novel) is a greedy innkeeper who accepts guardianship of little Cosette from her mother, Fantine, while beating the poor girl and using her to extort money from Fantine, resulting in Fantine prostituting herself and eventually falling sick and dying. After losing his inn, Thénardier prostitutes his own daughters and even has one, Azelma, mutilate her hand to make her a more effective and sympathetic beggar. Not above murder, Thénardier happily tries to kill both Jean Valjean and Javert at different points, even threatening to torture the former with a hot poker. Even when driven from France by Marius Pontmercy, Thénardier simply sets up shop in America as a slave trader to further profit from human misery. Be he a con artist, grave robber, or attempted murderer, there is no low Thénardier will not sink to for the sake of profit.
 * Bob Ewell from To Kill a Mockingbird gets Tom Robinson, a disabled black man, arrested for supposedly raping and beating his daughter Mayella. Atticus, the defense lawyer, shows that Tom was physically incapable of committing the crime and that . Since the book takes place in the Deep South several decades before the Civil Rights movement, the all-white jury sentences Tom to death anyway, but Bob stays angry at Atticus for digging up the truth. As revenge, he . It's also implied at one point that Bob's . When Boo Radley defends the children and Bob is killed by means of his own knife, it's easy to find oneself wholeheartedly backing the sheriff's insistance that Boo is not a killer and Bob fell on the knife. Ewell also tries to take revenge on Tom Robinson's widow, a poor woman with a lot of children to feed and a job that doesn't pay well. First, he would yell obscenities at her as she walked past his house on the way to work. When her boss found out and threatened to have him arrested for it, Ewell then began to stalk her as she went to work! And when her boss again confronted him, he claimed that he couldn't be arrested because he never actually touched her. It was certainly a Crowning Moment of Awesome when he was told "You don't have to touch her, you just have to make her scared." before threatening Ewell again with time in prison.
 * John Alpha from the 7th Son Trilogy. Oh, where to start with this one. Systematically killing his innocent clones (that's not a spoiler, clones are mentioned on the back of the paperback edition)? Mind raping/wiping his own mother? Arranging the nuking of ? Turning homeless people into disposable soldiers, trying to bring about a 4th Reich? And that's still not everything!
 * TECT in the name of the Representative from The Wolves of Memory. Not content with sending the protagonist off to a brief life of hard labor and torturous memory loss, he proceeds to taunt them about their situation. TECT's absolute lack of sympathy for Courane manifests itself in many ways throughout the story, as the AI is his only link back home, and then, it lies and distorts - just to hurt him.
 * Howard DeVore from David Wingrove's Chung Kuo. At first, he seems like a Well-Intentioned Extremist, but as the series goes on and we learn more and more about him, it becomes clear that he's long past the Moral Event Horizon - he doesn't cross it, we just learn more about him. Finally, in the eighth book, it turns out that The last book is pretty strange.
 * The Morgawr from The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara. He's a half man, half lizard freak who slaughters Grianne and Bek Ohmsfords' family, kidnaps Grianne, tells her her brother is dead, and convinces her that Walker, the Druid, and his Arch Enemy is behind it, then raises her to be as bad as himself. He's also a magic-draining leech who feeds on the souls, minds, and magics of his victims and turns people into People Puppets by pulling their brain out through the back of their head and eating it, leaving them with their skills, but no free will. He never repents and, unlike every other villain in the Shannara universe, has no excuse. He's not a Demon, he's not subverted by the dark magic like Brona or Rimmer Dall and the Shadowen, he's just evil. His Dragon, Cree Bega, is as bad. A Smug Snake Mwellret with a penchant for murder, Cold-Blooded Torture, Kick the Dog, Fantastic Racism, and (possibly) giant-lizard-on-female-human-rape, Cree Bega is chiefly responsible for turning Ahren Elessedil into The Woobie and causing his crush's suicide, which he then mocks Ahren about (She took ssso long to die little Elvesss. Ssso long it ssseemed it would take forever. Do you want to know what we did to her, when the Morgawr gave her to us?). Even his bravery seems to stem from arrogance rather than genuine courage and his death cannot come soon enough. It's worth noting that in the entire franchise, which now runs over twenty books, they are the only villains to indulge in onscreen torture and the only ones who ever indulge in villainy for reasons other than achieving their personal goals.
 * The Saga of the Noble Dead is set in a borderline-Crapsack World, so it has a couple of these:
 * Warlord Darmouth, a psychotic tryant who lives in a state of constant paranoia and, as such, kills anyone who looks at him the wrong way. And why does this guy still have followers? He uses a combination of blackmail, emotional manipulation, and pitting them against each other to keep them either dependent on his goodwill or too weak to resist, the only exception being The Dragon, who is loyal to him.
 * Ubad, a powerful necromancer and leader in the cult worshipping the series Big Bad, Eldritch Abomination il'Samar. His goal is to produce a Dhampyr Anti Christ to command an omnicidal army of the undead that will purge all life from the world and allow il'Samar to free itself. And unlike il'Samar's other followers, he's not undead himself, not in it for personal gain, and not deluded about what he's working for - he's just a fanatic who wants to push his magic as far as he can and doesn't care who has to die for it to happen.
 * Chane Andraso was a bitter misanthrope as a mortal, and when he became a vampire, he acquired the power to act on it - while he doesn't ruin as many lives as either of the above, he does have the highest on-page kill count of any character in the series (sometimes for feeding, often for fun) and has no remorse for it..
 * Worth noting he feels absolutely no remorse. He thinks most people exist for him to kill them for amusement. He also bites a child's throat out on screen and was mentioned to have killed more. They're just too weak to be fun to kill.
 * Conviction, by Richard North Patterson, features Eddie Fleet. Though initially coming across as nothing more than a petty criminal and domestic abuser, he's revealed to be something far worse. Fifteen years ago, he raped and murdered 9-year-old Thuy Sen, and than sold both his accomplice, Payton, and the accomplice's innocent and mentally-handicapped half-brother, Rennell up the river to save himself. Afterwards he continued his practices of hurting women and children, three of whom he abused to get revenge on Payton for trying to kill him for his betrayal. When Theresa Paget learns the truth from Payton and tries to expose him, Eddie becomes enraged and threatens to hurt her and her daughter, failing to act on his threats only for fear of getting caught. After going on the run following Theresa cornering him in his deposition, Eddie proceeds to beat and rape another woman, who shoots him in the mouth while he's asleep. Sadly, the innocent Rennell is still put to death. Narcissistic, selfish, and cruel, Eddie Fleet showed that even the pettiest of criminals could be among the worst of humanity.
 * The evil scientist Thatcher Redmond from Warren Fahy's Fragment. He originally comes across as just a Smug Snake with a nihilistic worldview, but only pages after we meet him, we find out that he murdered his love child to avoid paying child support. He drips with contempt for humanity, and when faced with the incredibly deadly Henders life forms, he sees the opportunity to advance his plans.
 * Virtually every villain in books by the late Richard Laymon, who specialized in creating some of the most vile characters imaginable to torment his leads. But special mention should go to Roy from "The Cellar", a serial pedophile who raped his own daughter, tortured his wife, and, upon his release from prison, killed a couple and kidnapped their daughter while chasing down his own ex and daughter. From the same book, Beast House matriarch Maggie Kutch gleefully presides over a horrific legacy of torture, rape, and murder, unleashing the Beasts on innocents regularly. Although she does have a Freudian Excuse (her husband and children were murdered by the Beast), it's insufficient to excuse the decades of murders and kidnappings.
 * From the same The Beast House series, horror novelist Gorman Hardy qualifies. He's a rare Laymon villain in that he's motivated by greed as opposed to sexual perversion, but his actions (luring a teenage girl into the Beast House, leaving her at the beast's mercy, and finally attempting to murder her in cold blood, all to further his twisted plans to make money off the house's legend) make him one of Laymon's most despicable characters.
 * Wesley and Thelma from Island should also be mentioned here, as they murdered the parents of two teenage girls who are living on the titular island, and kept those girls as sex slaves.
 * Since writing a straightforward Friday the 13 th story that is over four-hundred pages long would probably be a bit difficult, the five (nine, if you count the Jason X books) Friday the 13th novels published by Black Flame included subplots involving human villains. Almost all fit this trope, and they include:
 * Father Eric Long from Church of the Divine Psychopath at first appears fairly normal (debatably, since he does worship Jason as some kind of avenging angel) but as the story goes on, it becomes increasingly apparent that he's a Holier Than Thou lunatic; he shrugs off Jason killing his followers by reasoning they're sinners who deserve it, and after three of his followers are killed fighting a black ops team (who Long had sent them against, to protect Jason, who the team was sent to eliminate), he comforts the mens' grieving widows by convincing them to have sex with him, later violently throwing them out the room when he grows annoyed with them (forgetting about this later on, when he dismisses their death by saying they deserved it for "abandoning" him). He also condones the creepy fixation his dragon (who probably also counts as a Complete Monster) has with an underage girl.
 * Wayne Ricardo Sanchez from Hell Lake: for starters, he's based on Richard Ramirez, and tortured, raped, and killed people due to worshipping Satan. After discovering Satan does not appear to exist, he, after escaping Hell, decides to continue torturing, raping, and killing anyway, For the Evulz. Since the story involves Jason leading a ton of those condemned to Hell out, there's plenty of other examples in the book, but Sanchez is the most prominent.
 * Penelope and Norwood Thawn from Hate-Kill-Repeat: Holier Than Thou serial killing couple and members of a underground moralistic cult. Kill anyone they deem sinners, from drug dealers, to prostitutes, to the gay, to anyone who just uses drugs or has premarital sex or doesn't conform to what they deem is right and proper; they hypocritically "stoop to their level" to get close to their victims, and Norwood, after his wife fatally shoots a prostitute, is heavily implied to have raped her as she died.
 * Caleb Carson from The Jason Strain: Assholish television producer who has a team of mercenaries at his beck and call, he has them gleefully murder people who get in his way, and it's revealed that he framed the main character for a brutal double homicide just so he would end up in prison and become one of the Condemned Contestants on his bloodsport reality show. He was also willing to cause a global zombie apocalypse rather than be forced to cancel his show.
 * Carnival of Maniacs: Nathanial Morgas, rich Fat Bastard whose obsession with Jason has caused him to murder anyone who gets in the way of him acquiring anything Voorhees related. He randomly murders an assistant who "fails" him, orders all the owners of an auction site killed while throwing a hissy fit after losing the comatose Jason in an auction, and he and his dragon (also a Complete Monster) inflict severe Cold-Blooded Torture on a main character to get her to talk, using things like corkscrews, hammers, and razor wire. There's also the Grissom brothers, backwoods, inbred hillbillies who kill people for fun and sometimes food.
 * AM, the incredibly terrifying and nearly omnipotent Master Computer from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, who subjects the few humans he didn't eradicate to a horrific, eternal Fate Worse Than Death, simply for amusement, and regrets not having the capacity to express one one-billionth of the hate it feels for humanity.
 * In Ricardo Pinto's series The Stone Dance of the Chameleon, you have the Chosen, tall white humanoids who believe they are superior to every other being. They don't see any other humanoid as deserving of any kind of rights or freedoms. So you have most deciding to torture, rape, dismember, and destroy entire non-Chosen families/clans For the Evulz and a Law system that mandates the starvation and purification of said humanoids in death camps and slavery chains in inhospitable cold abysses beneath the ground so that the Chosen do not have to look at them. Yet, have hope for there is a Moral Event Horizon. However, it's somewhere where you don't slice out someone's eyeballs and replace them with stones because they glimpsed a Chosen's face or crucify someone in harsh sunlight by holding them aloft by wires cutting through their limbs and then watch for a week while that wire slowly slices off all their appendages and the victim dies of dehydration and the bloated, tortured body falls to the ground, which are all daily occurrences. It gets a LOT worse at the end of book 2. By the time you get to book 3, you have a jihad.
 * In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "A Witch Shall Be Born", Salome chose Constantius specifically "because of his utter lack of all characteristics men call good."
 * Valerius from "The Hour of the Dragon" is another complete monster. After usurping Conan's throne via the help of an evil wizard, Valerius realizes that once his allies have no more use for him, he'll be disposed of and replaced by a different king. So he decides to ruin the kingdom out of spite. He heavily taxes his subjects, and those who cannot pay are sold into slavery. He allows his soldiers to brutalize the common people and spends all of the kingdom's money on debauchery. Oh, and he also sentences the Countess Albiona to death by beheading when she refuses to become his lover.
 * Baal-Petor from "Shadows in Zamboula" was raised from birth to be a strangler for an evil cult. As a child he was given babies to strangle, then girls, then old men, then young men. He boasts about having strangled hundreds of people to death, but meets his match when he encounters Conan.
 * Most of the antagonists in The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop, and a lot of minor characters fall under this. Hekatah and Dorothea SaDiablo are very notable, though.
 * Hekatah even in an attempt to manipulate her husband, Saetan SaDiablo. It didn't really work as planned.
 * Siegfried de Löwe from the Polish novel The Knights of the Cross. He is a Teutonic Knight. He kidnapped and imprisoned a young girl in order to force her father to come to him, fully aware that her father is an anti-Teutonic rebel noble. Then, when her father came to rescue her, Siegfried imprisoned him. He then humiliated him by burning out his eyes and cutting off his tongue and right arm!! Then, finally, the girl goes insane in her prison and dies.
 * Saint Dane from the Pendragon series. He kills huge numbers of people, seems to enjoy it, and has been personally responsible for
 * This bears elaboration. He
 * Djuhn'Keep from Red Dwarf: Backwards. Being one of a series of androids dedicated to hunting down the remains of the human race (AKA Dave Lister) and torturing them to death, he's already pretty vile. But out of all of them, Djuhn masterminded the creation of the Death Wheel and the Hub of Pain torture chamber at it's very centre, stocking it with every single form of weapon that could be used to torture their captives with. And it gets even worse when Djuhn, needing spare parts, infects one of the other agonoids with a paralysing computer virus and dismantles him while he's still conscious; then, just to make sure that he'd have the privilege of torturing Lister and the other Dwarfers, he gathers all the other agonoids in the Hub of Pain and increases the gravity until most of them are crushed to death. The survivors are forced into the spokes of the Death Wheel and whittled down by the death traps, while Djuhn listens from the control room, "conducting the symphony of screams and death rattles as if it were the sweetest of sweet music." Then, when it seems that some of them have escaped alive, he ejects them into space and goes after Lister...
 * The Alternate Lister from Last Human. Apart from being an unfeeling sociopath with no regard for life or property, he also murders his "friends" aboard Starbug simply because he didn't want them getting hold of the coordinates of the DNA-Altering machine, even lasering Kryten's head off and jamming a Cuban cigar between the lips as a joke. And then, when the protagonist version of Lister rescues him from Cyberia, he repays this act of kindness by knocking his rescuer unconscious and forcing him to take his place at the prison. As a final atrocity, he goes as far as shooting Protagonist Lister in the balls with a rad pistol to try and motivate Kochanski into having sex with him.
 * From John Ringo's Council Wars, Celine Reinshafen (also the Mad Scientist). The other leaders of New Destiny have a mix of motives for their actions, some of which even some of the protagonists are sympathetic with. Celine just wants to create monsters out of people. The others quickly come to the conclusion, individually, that while they need her skills to win the war, once they win, she's got to go.
 * Benito Ramirez from the Stephanie Plum books. A violent boxer who absolutely loves to torture, rape, and mutilate women just because he can and because he likes to make a point of them that he's so powerful that he can do it to whomever he wants, whenever he wants. In the first book, he stalks Stephanie, even, at one point, . Later, he . Luckily,.
 * In The 120 Days Of Sodom, the Four libertines (Duc de Blangis, The Bishop, The President de Curval, and Durcet) are easily the poster children for this trope. They have no good bone in their bodies, find virtue disgusting, and commit so many acts of evil that if you were to make a drinking game out of how many they do, the damage to your liver would be irreparable. The sheer volume would take up the page. Their 8 female accomplices also qualify.
 * Jeffrey Harper Raines is a disturbing child who takes the name Baal in Baal. Revealed to be the demon Baal himself who possessed his 'mother' after having her raped and impregnated, Baal engineers the death of her husband at her own hands to 'protect' him, and later runs the orphanages he's sent to as a tyrant, resulting in massive amounts of deaths of children and staff. As an adult, Baal reigns over a number of cults, causing violence, sexual depravity and deaths before engineering an assassination attempt on himself via a Jewish man. Baal is revealed to have turned the demons against God with his master Satan and set himself up as a God to ancient civilizations where he commanded horrific atrocities. After the Jewish tribes destroyed his kingdom, Baal has maintained a grudge ever since and desires to plunge the world into bloodshed and slaughter while also exterminating every Jew alive before releasing Satan again to rule the world forever with humanity suffering eternity or giving into their darkest impulses.
 * John Connolly has written an awful lot of Complete Monsters throughout his books and short stories:
 * Buddy Carson from The Cancer Cowboy Rides. In spite of his ability to pass on his terminal cancers to anyone he touches with bare skin, you might be tempted to believe that the Black Worm is controlling him; but the book eventually makes it clear that while the Worm can prod and poke him down certain courses of action, it can't control him - and in the same sentence, it's revealed that Carson enjoys infecting others. In fact, not content with infecting a family with his disease, he stays in the house to watch them die in agony. Even his name adds more monstrosity to his character - it's a cruel joke, Carson being short for Carcinogenic.
 * In The Ritual Of The Bones, the Faculty of the horribly elitist Montague School hit Complete Monster status by admitting impoverished scholarship students...so they can be eventually sacrificed to resurrect the school's mascot in a ritual that strengthens the ties of loyalty among the upper class.
 * Garcia, the latest recruit of the Believers in The Black Angel: a serial killer with a habit of kidnapping prostitutes, murdering them, and then using their bones for art projects - including the twisted sculpture of the Black Angel itself. And it's implied that before coming to America, he did even worse...
 * From the same book, Brightwell, the immortal second-in-command of the Believers; assisting Garcia in the worst of his exploits, he also goes about much of the Black Angel's dirty work across the centuries: murder, torture, brutal assaults upon defenceless monks and a host of other offences. For good measure, he has a nasty habit of consuming the souls of his victims and adding them to "the great chorus within..."
 * By far the worst might just be the Crooked Man from The Book of Lost Things. Quite apart from holding a massive gallery of past victims and special tortures, his method of Staying Alive is utterly repulsive: he talks a child in our world into sacrificing someone they hate to him - usually a younger brother or sister; he feeds upon their heart and their life for as long as they would have lived, while the corrupted child is crowned king or queen...of a world built out of his or her own nightmares. For good measure, the child's tormented by the reality of what they've done and will eventually discover that all his or her attempts to atone for this crime by ruling justly will come to nothing, because they have no power of their own. Eventually, the king or queen will grow old, the victim's life force will begin to fade, and the Crooked Man goes looking for another child that's prepared to have their unwanted siblings horribly murdered...and he's been doing this for centuries.
 * Another rotten character from the same book would be the huntress: bored with her usual game and finding humans too fragile to keep up the entertainment, she's taken up grafting the heads of human beings onto animal bodies - through a technique she learned from three surgeons she happened to abduct and torture. Because adults don't adjust well to the shock, the recipients of this treatment are children, who generally spend the last tortured minutes of their lives running through a dark forest in an unfamiliar body before being shot dead, partially eaten, and having their preserved remains hung from a wall. Holy shit.
 * Kronos the Big Bad of Percy Jackson and The Olympians Before the events of the books he cuts his father Ournauos to pieces and then ate his Children because he was worried they would rebel against him. In the actual series itself:
 * In the first book:
 * In the second book:
 * In the third Book:
 * In the fourth book:
 * In the Final book
 * King Minos from the fourth book. He started off
 * Zandramas from David Eddings' Malloreon. Between betraying everyone who helps her, kidnapping Garion's son, attempting to start a civil war in the West, having successfully started one in the east, consorting with demons, brain-washing Ce'Nedra, regularly trying to break the rules of Prophecy, cannibalism, cruelty to animals, and standing around naked in front of a toddler, she really pushes the envelope. That's all on top of already being a priestess of a Religion of Evil who liked to cut out people's hearts and bathe in their blood while nude. Even Torak and The Dark Prophecy think she was a psycho.
 * In Journey to the West, Liu Hong stands out as an utterly selfish and despicable man even when compared to the various demons and sorcerers Xuanzang and his disciples would later face. Beginning as a simple boatman, when Liu Hong lays eyes upon Lady Yin, he immediately wants her for himself. To that end, he kills her husband Guangrui and their horse boy, dumping both bodies into the river. He then forces Lady Yin to consent to his demands at knife point and proceeds to steal Guangrui's identity, taking over an important position Guangrui was supposed to receive, living a life of wealth and leisure. When Lady Yin gives birth to Guangrui's child, Xuanzang, Liu Hong planned to drown him but Lady Yin convinced him not to, allowing her to get her child to safety. After Xuanzang returns and claims justice for his parents, his mother would kill herself over guilt for consenting to Liu Hong, even though her own father told her she was not at fault. Never referred to anything other than a bandit, Liu Hong's crimes are treated with disgust and outrage by all who know of his deeds.
 * Mona, the stepmother in the dark Cinderella story Sunny Ella, poisons her second husband (and is implied to have similarly disposed of her first as well), fires the hired help, forces Ella to do all her chores, and removes Ella's voicebox when she complains, which leads to Ella losing her mind. Mona also tells her own daughter that, if she doesn't win the prince's affections, she needn't bother coming home.
 * In The Witcher saga, there is Vilgefortz of Roggeveen. The only reason that he is commiting bad actions is FOR POWER or For Science!! He also wants to use Ciri for his wicked plans and hurts Geralt in order to get to her.
 * Leo Bonhart is even more evil. He is hired to brutalize Ciri and kill all her friends, but he is NOT doing it for money, but For the Evulz. Made worse because, while there are hardly 'good' people there, they have a Freudian Excuse of sorts or are just doing it for a living, so those two above represent some special kind of evil. Dijkstra genuinely cares for his country, and so does Emhyr. Filippa works towards a better future for sorceresses and magic in general. The Rats were all broken mentally in the past. Elves have reasons to hate humans. Humans have reasons to hate elves. There has even been a benevolent vampire. In case of Vilgefortz, he despises women and cares only about Ciri's placenta. Leo wants people he kills to...express emotions beforehand.
 * Jadis the White Witch from The Chronicles of Narnia. Before hitching a ride to Narnia, Jadis ruled a world of her own called Charn. Her sister led a rebellion to overthrow her tyrannical regime and she responded by destroying every living thing on her native world all the way down to bacteria by uttering the deplorable word. Even counting the long list of atrocities she committed in Narnia including turning it into a frozen Hell, this was by far her greatest crime and she was proud to have committed it. Oh, and remember Mr. Tumnus' words, how cruel she can be if he would disobey her; she would cut his tail off, rip off his beard, and turn his hooves into those made of crystal! And she momentarily killed Aslan, after putting him through needless torture and humiliation first! She is very much the series' equivalent to Lucifer.
 * Lady of the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair is every bit as bad. She killed the Queen of Narnia in a first place (Caspian's wife). Later she kept Prince Rilian under her spell for ten years. She also enslaved the whole under land, and did many other things that it would take half of the page to mention. Other contenders are Miraz from Prince Caspian, the abusive, despotic, slavedriving, genocidial king who killed Caspian's father and attempted to do the same to Caspian, his own adopted son. And Shift the ape from The Last Battle, a psychotic Smug Snake whose actions bring about the apocalypse, all because he wanted wealth, glory, and attention.
 * Cathy from East of Eden. "I've done things that would turn your blood to spit." These include It's probably just as well that she
 * Brian Keene has several in his book series. The Rising series (as of now consisting of The Rising, City of the Dead, and The Rising: Short Stories for the End of the World) is by far one of the easiest to identify, from the Siquissm, zombies who take the bodies of anything recently deceased . They are able to access memories, and whenever it's not put towards locating survivors, it's used to scare and traumatise anyone who knew that person when they were alive, . True, they do have some excuse in that God did reject them and cast them into a cold and torturous netherworld for all eternity to work on humanity instead, but it's nowhere NEAR enough to make up for anything. They easily qualify for Nightmare Fuel, and the worst part? You may not be able to tell whether they are alive or dead, and they will enjoy taking advantage of this. Special mention goes to Ob, who ends up.
 * The human antagonists in the first book are actually WORSE than the Siquissm. Two redneck, racist cannibals nearly kill Jim and Martin at the start, and are implied to have killed . One of the whores at the Meat Wagon (Paula) tries abusing the others to alter the status quo inside by beating and raping some of them, including fourteen-year-old Aimee, but thankfully, Frankie beats her down so some of the soldiers go and shoot her. Hands-down, however, the Complete Monsters of the first book are the, a whole brigade of Ax Crazy rapists. If we had to give specific examples, however...from the lower ranks we have Private First Class Kramer, a petty rapist who . Slightly higher up the ranks is Staff Sergeant Miller, . Then there's Co-Dragons to Colonel Schow, Captains Gonzalez and Mcfarland, who are clearly mentally insane, as most obviously shown when they gleefully discuss whether or not . Later, the two nutjobs . Thankfully, all.
 * And finally there's Schow himself, the man who needs one entire paragraph to himself. Schow is a cold-blooded General Ripper who may have saved people in the short term, but in such a way that they would rather die. He forces women that his brigade rescues into service as whores for his men, saying it is for purposes of "morale". Refuse that and they end up as bait (alongside those too unfit for physical duty) to lure stray zombies out. He drafts most male civilians into his construction duty, also forcing them to work in hellish conditions. He has several MEH moments, making it impossible to pick a defining one. However, his attitude to deserters and traitors (and ) leads to the ones easier to find. He has two deserters crucified so that zombie birds will eat them, then tells the men they have target practice. He then has a man that failed to kill him stripped bare so that his penis goes through the wall of a zombie-filled shed, so he eventually bleeds to death. And when poor Skip runs for his life, he orders them all to beat him half to death, lets them , and allows them to gun down a crazy man who was riding with her. Then poor Skip , then threatens to do the exact same thing to poor Worm. And his final moment is hurling poor out of his command Humvee even after .  Read into "Dead Sea" and look for a mention of Pennsylvanian National Guardsmen who shoot some looters. That's him all right, just a different version (the series takes place in a multiverse)
 * From "Selected Scenes", General Dunbar counts, forcing resistance members into deadly gladiator games against captured zombies. He also tortures.
 * One of the stories in Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark, entitled "Wonderful Sausage", features a butcher named Samuel Blunt, who.
 * Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time 
 * The Forsaken, a group of thirteen villains who all fit the trope or come very close. Ishamael/ is thoroughly nihilistic . He works for the Dark One because he knows one evil victory ends the world (the rest just think they'll get immortality). That's just for starters. Aginor created Trollocs and the Blight. Graendal is a massive perv. Lanfear is an example of how Love Makes You Evil. Mesaana . Perhaps the worst (Ishy notwithstanding) is Semirhage, who invented a weave to swap one's blood with another substance instantly. Normally, the shock is an instant kill, but if you use a substance that mimics blood well enough, the torture recipient lives in indescribable agony for as much as a full hour. She describes it as her greatest triumph. All of them are said to have committed more massive atrocities offscreen, during the Age of Legends. That's without yet getting into, say, Padan Fain, who absorbed the manifestation of the biggest non-Dark-One-related evil; Slayer, who kills wolves; and Mazrim Taim is shaping up to be one as well.
 * While he may not be portrayed as an actual character (except those all-caps bits in the Pit of Doom), the Dark One himself is essentially responsible for all evil in the world, excepting only instances like Shadar Logoth.
 * Some of the bad guys, however, are characterized as essentially being selfish brats given a lot of power (even said straight out by some of the other characters), also evil, but not to horrifically monstrous heights. Asmodean, while initially a servant of the Dark One in order to be the best musician ever(?), does help The Chosen One against the Dark One, even if for selfish reasons. Damodred and Sammael apparently just really, REALLY hate The Chosen One. Sammael, in fact, would likely never have even joined the Shadow if not for Lews Therin.
 * Cthulhu Mythos has Nyarlathotep, who differs from most of H.P. Lovecraft's gods - while Lovecraft describes other Outer Gods and Great Old Ones as mindless or unfathomable, he is cruel, manipulative, and takes much more enjoyment from driving his victims insane than from destruction.
 * Sadly, Nyarlathotep isn't the only example of this trope in the mythos, as proven by Y'golonac the Defiler, the fittingly titled god of depravity and a particularly nasty Great Old One that is reviled even by the priests of Cthulhu for its unspeakable perversions. Gathering cults of those with carnal hearts, Y'golonac has his followers engage in whatever grotesque fantasies they can imagine in tribute to it, hoping to eventually break out of its walled prison and walk free among men before wiping out all humanity with the other Great Old Ones. A sadist fully able to understand and manipulate humans, Y'golonac possesses people at its own merriment and gruesomely devours all those who do not pledge themselves to serving it. Debuting In Ramsey Campbell's 1969 Cold Print, Y'golonac possesses a bookseller in lower Brinchester and drives a man to insanity to draw in more victims for it to subvert or eat—children among them—and ultimately closes the story by devouring the protagonist.
 * Some of the human villains (if you can even call them that) need a mention as well. The Temple has Lieutenant-Commander Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, commanding officer of the U-29 during World War I, who is introduced sinking the lifeboats from a freighter he's torpedoed, making it clear that he's done this many, many times before. When the supernatural begins to interfere with the crew of his ship, causing them to experience feelings of guilt and remorse over the lives they've taken, Heinrich has those effected scourged, before escalating to shooting anyone who objects or mutinies. Killing almost all of his own crew, and aiding his executive officer in committing suicide, Heinrich dies alone on the ocean floor, a victim of his own evil as much as the supernatural.
 * Next we have Joseph Curwen from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a wicked necromancer and slave trader in the 1600s, routinely buying and murdering slaves for his dark rituals. Finally hunted down and destroyed, Curwen uses magic to ensure one of his descendants will resurrect him. Upon Charles Dexter Ward doing so, Curwen attempts to revive his old practices, including conjuring the spirits of humanity's wisest figures and torturing them for knowledge in dark rites. When Ward finally objects to the bloodshed Curwen propagates, Curwen murders him and takes his place, thrown in an asylum when he can't properly pass as his descendant due to his antiquated mindset. It is further revealed Curwen is allied to a horror from beyond, where his plans could lead to the complete and utter annihilation of all life in creation.
 * And lastly, from The Thing on the Doorstep, there's Ephraim Waite, the father of Asenath Waite, who was a man affiliated with various dark covens and powers in life, and sought immortality regardless of the suffering he inflicted upon others. Consulting dark tomes for a way to live forever, Ephraim finally found a way to expand his own life by body-swapping with his own daughter and damning her to insanity and slow death within his own old body as he took hers. Seeking a male body with strong intellect and weak will to him to weaken and possess, Ephraim slowly seduced Edward Pickman Derby while slowly driving him further and further into madness. When Derby killed Asenath in a desperate bid to stop Ephraim, Ephraim ultimately swapped bodies with him and condemned him to horrific undeath within the rotting corpse of Asenath. Unstopped, Ephraim's dark practices would destroy the peace and comfort of the world as he unleashed untold horror on humanity, jumping from body to body and damning countless more innocents to death for all time.
 * In To Welcome Oblivion, Nyarlathotep is the ultimate architect of the plot's conflict and a wicked Outer God who delights in nothing more than madness and misery. As the herald of Azathoth, Nyarlathotep has plunged countless universes and trillions of lives into eternal agony within the grip of the Outer Planes, with entire planets and civilizations driven to destroy themselves under his influence. On Earth, Nyarlathotep arranges events like The Black Death and the rise of Adolf Hitler for his own amusement, and seamlessly arranges the events of the plot by setting up the rise of both Peter Grallman and Dr. Lilith Madison into their positions, the former by killing his young sister Marissa to drive Grallman to darkness. Arranging the opening of the Outer Gate while disguised as Madison's assistant Noah T. Trepaly, Nyarlathotep eventually betrays both Grallman and Madison, torturing the former into his possessed slave and unleashing the populace of the Outer Planes onto Rielington. Finally cutting loose in the climax, Nyarlathotep slaughters thousands of people in the most creatively depraved ways he can think of—such as tricking an cafeteria's worth of children into cannibalize themselves and forcing hundreds of the Old Brotherhood's members to become either breeding fodder or food for the eldritch monsters he summons—and attempts to plunge the entire universe into the Outer Planes, and finally gloats to Grallman as one last spiteful move that he'll resurrect Marissa and torture and rape her for centuries in Grallman's form to hurt the both of them. With a mile-long sadistic streak underscored by a psychopathic sense of humor, Nyarlathotep commits every atrocity he does purely to satisfy his sense of amusement, intent on one day betraying even the Outer Gods to torment the rest of the multiverse himself.
 * Dr. Lilith Madison is a callous sociopath of a scientist with an utter disdain for any life other than her own. Obsessed with finding out the secret to life at any cost, Madison turns to murder in some desperate attempt to stimulate herself—the deliberate suffocation of an infant she is trusted to take care of just one example—before eventually finding out the existence of a Deep One's carcass in the Antarctic. Killing her own research team to use the carcass for her own ends, Madison allies with the Old Brotherhood and its leader Grallman to kidnap hundreds of innocents and forcibly implant them with organs from the Deep One to spread Eldritch Energy across the world, more often than not resulting in the painful deaths of those forced to bear the transplants. Causing a series of bombings that lead to over 250 deaths to cover the actions of the psychopathic Rhett Talbot, Madison eventually unleashes Talbot onto Rielington to slaughter and rape as he will to take care of the Seratin sisters and their ally Robin Lockwood. Ultimately, Madison betrays Grallman and tries to open a gate to the Outer Planes in her attempt to find the secret to existence, fully willing to let the denizens of the Outer Planes pour out on Earth and ravage humanity in the process.
 * The aforementioned Rhett Talbot is a sadistic supervillain and the Arch-Enemy for Elara and Kaya Seratin. As a teenager, Talbot raped and molested several children while posing as a babysitter. After he was taken by the Old Brotherhood and experimented on, he used his newfound powers to murder his parents, and later conducted a series of massacres—one of which took place at a playground Kaya was playing at, where he cut off her arms and attempted to rape her—all for his own enjoyment. Several years later, Talbot goes after the Seratins again, where he murders several civilians and police officers in and around a restaurant. Talbot also participates in raping and killing members of the Brotherhood alongside the eldritch monsters in the breeding chamber, and when he's confronted by the Seratins again, he tries to kill them both. Even after Sera tells Talbot that Madison and Nyarlathotep are going to destroy the whole universe, Talbot coldly tells her that he doesn't care, moments before he tries to rape her.
 * Dr. Mark Ahriman of Dean Koontz's False Memory. He's a psychiatrist who mind rapes his patients and uses them however he sees fit. Some he sends to commit homicide and/or settle his personal vendettas, some he drives to creative suicide for his own entertainment, and some he uses for...other things. While most of his patients wind up "cured" (read: stripped of the phobia he himself planted in the first place), there's always a chance he'll decide they're more fun to destroy. If the patient is a pretty woman, she's probably screwed, in more ways than one. And he gets away with it for twenty years before anyone properly catches him.
 * In Geek Love, Arturo "Arty" Binewski is Oly's elder brother who murdered his infant siblings in his early childhood and tries to do the same with his younger brother, Chick, by smothering him with a pillow. When his plans failed, he hires some random teenagers so that he could kill him. As the time went by, Arty tricks and manipulates Chick into becoming a surgeon for his own cult by using his psychic powers to mutilate the members of the cult. Said cult members are made up of people he manipulated into giving their lifesaving for the "privilege" of surgically removing their limbs so they can be just like him. When he caught his Siamese twin sisters, Elly and Iphy, having sex with another man, Arty gave the twins into one of his underlings and arranges the rape and forced childbirth for them. After Arty asks Doctor Phyllis to do a half-lobotomy to his twin sister so that he could kept Iphy for himself, Arty implements the lobotomy procedure to his own cult, which Dr. Phyllis disagrees with and starts a rebellion. When Arty found out that Oly is pregnant, he tries to beat her with a plunger. When Arty found out that Oly's daughter is almost like a normal person, he threatens Oly to have her own daughter being fed to Elly and Iphy's overweight child Mumpo. Arty subverts any potential redeeming qualities and is motivated to do his atrocities by his own selfish desires and jealousy to other people, and ended up ruining people's lives without any remorse.
 * The antagonists of Keys to the Kingdom are largely cursed, have sympathetic reasons, or both, but Superior Saturday is an out-and-out monster. Her method of disciplining subordinates is to turn them inside-out and turn their blood into glass, essentially making them an organ jar. Since her subordinates are immortal, this is a Fate Worse Than Death for however long it's in effect. She's practically the Big Bad herself, being behind most schemes since the beginning of the series, including releasing a mind control virus, attempting to nuke a town, throwing a man into Nothing to be dissolved and blaming his brother, and more. What do all of her schemes focus on, you ask? She wants to be the woman in charge. She wants the Incomparable Gardens. She should have been favored during the creation of the Universe, not Sunday. That's it. It speaks volumes that she's killed by her supervisor and it's not viewed by anyone as his Moral Event Horizon —especially because said supervisor is the man she tossed into oblivion.
 * Galbatorix from Inheritance Cycle did at least think himself a Well-Intentioned Extremist and had been driven mad by the death of his first dragon, which happened when he was a mere boy (and is said to have been a traumatic experience), so he at least has a plausible if not justifiable Freudian Excuse. He also ends up killing himself once he feels regret for his crimes, eliminating him from this trope. But his original Dragon, Morzan of the Forsworn, was definitely in the running from what we know - he (and the other twelve, plus their dragons) joined Galbatorix willingly and was described as having a thirst for power. He was also an abusive father to Murtagh, throwing his sword at his son when the boy was hardly five and leaving him with a debilitating scar on his back. He brutally killed the partner dragon of While most villains in the series have some sympathetic qualities or are otherwise not quite evil enough, Morzan counts without question...and he's dead before the story even begins!
 * While Lord of the Flies in general reveals the savagery people can descend into, Roger, the right hand man of Jack, was already a savage beast before he came to the island and only needed the lack of consequences to embrace his true nature. Roger quickly became the chief torturer and executioner of Jack's group, keeping others in line with threats of impalement and tortures those who won't submit to Jack. He is also the only boy to commit cold-blooded murder by crushing the boy Piggy's skull with a boulder when Piggy desperately tried in vain to restore sanity.
 * Shima Neddhu from The Pearl Saga is a truly cruel and hateful bastard. Taken in as an acolyte of Mother, the local leader of their people, the Kundalan, in a hope to redeem him, he instead forms an alliance with seven other male acolytes and his lover to betray Mother and take the Pearl to use it for his own purposes, convincing the others that Mother is using their faith to rule over them all. He has the poor woman bound and gagged and leads his chorts down into a hiding place that holds the Pearl, depsite Mother warning them that they will die if they do so. Two of the cohorts are promptly killed by a monster. Neddhu then orders the others to keep moving on despite the obvious danger, where they immediately call him out and ask him why he doesn't go himself. He then decides to send his daughter into the cavern holding the Pearl. his mentally and physically handicapped, very young daughter. After he manages to practically push her inside, she comes back with the Pearl, where the obviously slightly possessed girl tells him he is not worthy. He then decides to kill the girl, but instead ends up killing his lover when she leaps in the way of his blade to protect the poor girl. Also, he is using a tool that is purely ceremonial and is explicitly stated to not be used as a weapon of death, and to do so is incredibly sacrilegious. He then chases after the girl after she tries to escape from him, and tries to convince himself that his lover must've cheated on him with another man, for surely his loins would never give birth to a defective child. He does kill the child and throws Mother at the monster currently chasing him to save his own worthless spine. Using the Pearl, He learns that a powerful alien race, The V'ornn, is coming to Kundala, and so plans with his surviving conspirators to trick the V'ornn and use them for their own purposes. The V'ornn end up enslaving the entire planet and all but destroying the Kundalan culture. Oh, and pins the blame for his murders on the Rappa, a more animal-like race, simply 'cause he looks down on them as beasts, leading to centuries of persecution and demonization by the Kundalans onto the poor creatures. What makes Neddhu such a disgusting creature is that 1) unlike a large portion of the villains, he's a human being motivated less by racism and more by personal selfishness, and 2) he tries to paint himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, but it is revealed that he's only doing all he does to attain personal power. Sadly, we don't get to see what happens to him afterwards, but doubtless it, would've been very satisfying. His actions were so terrible (that were public knowledge at any rate) that male Kundalans can no longer have a high level of power in most Kundalan societies. What's worse, Shima Neddhu isn't even the Big Bad!
 * The Bone Clocks: Immaculée Constantin was the second member of the Anchorites, a group that drank people’s souls, particularly children and the mentally disabled, to fuel their immortality. After being rejected by a 7-year-old Holly Sykes, Constantin bore a grudge. Corrupting Hugo Lamb, Holly’s one-time lover, Constantin directs him to perform unsavory crimes, such as torturing Crispin Hershey for information on Esther Little, Constantin laughing in the distance. Right before the final battle, Constantin mocks Holly on her age, makes a crude joke about her relationship with Hugo, threatens to murder her family so Holly will “howl with regret” and pulls other petty jabs. When she reveals to Sadaqat that they lied about letting him join the Anchorites—with casual racism to boot—she gleefully murders him. Complicit in the deaths of hundreds to fuel her lust for immortality and with a sadistic streak she takes pride in, Constantin was the face and the worst of the Anchorites.
 * Don Reba from Hard to Be A God, a thoroughly despicable Smug Snake of a minister who personifies everything wrong about humanity. He framed the former Prime minister for treachery and tortured him to death, along with the whole cabinet; he declares everybody literate (and not noble) enemy of the state; he starts wars for petty revenge; he stages a Coup d'Etat, and when it succeeds, he kills his co-conspirators; finally, he tries to.
 * Hawk, The Big Bad from Spellfall, may not be responsible for that many deaths, but he "compensates" for this with sheer ruthlessness: He drives his wife to suicide by killing her bonded animal, and threatens to do the same to his son. He forcefully "bonds" with other Wizards, placing them under Mind Control, and threatens to do this to his son, too!. He forces the wizards under his control to commit atrocities, including kidnapping other victims for "bonding". One of these is the heroine, a twelve year old girl. It is revealed that he also forced them to . He intends to "bond" with the heroine, gleefully exclaiming that, after that, she "won't be so shy", after she demands privacy for changing clothes. He intends to, possibly killing hundreds of wizards, making their ancestors Deader Than Dead and depriving the survivors of their home and living, just so he can get some mana. He casually leaves a Muggle (the heroine's stepbrother) to his death. When his plan fails, he tries to kill the heroine, along with his son. His ultimate punishment is quite fitting, though.
 * Chronicles of the Necromancer:
 * Jared Drayke, the evil elder half-brother of hero Martris "Tris" Drayke, is introduced when Tris stops him from raping a servant. Later making a dark pact with the Vayash-Moru mage Foor Arontala, Jared launches a coup against his own family, killing his father and destroying his soul, as well as Tris's mother and Jared's own younger half-sister. Becoming a vicious tyrant, Jared has his men slaughter entire villages for insufficient payment of taxes, while leading purges of magic users in the kingdom. Jared has members of the Sisterhood of mages slaughtered and tortured, while also butchering the other Vayash-Moru. Having others abducted, tortured and slowly impaled, Jared also becomes a serial rapist who abducts, tortures and rapes women regularly before murdering them. When he finally confronts Tris, Jared boasts that he will take Tris's beloved, Jared's former arranged fiancée, and rape her endlessly, killing the first child she has to remove any issue with paternity.
 * The aforementioned Foor Arontala assists Jared with everything listed above, torturing members of the Sisterhood and also leading purges of his own race, the Vayash-Moru. In addition, Arontala enslaves the souls of his victims, holding them in agony, while regularly using the spirit of Tris's dead sister to torment him. Holding the trapped spirit of the evil mage the Obsidian King, Arontala feeds it the captive souls while intending to revive him at a certain time and become his new host, bringing a wave of death and destruction to the world, claiming that if the Obsidian King does annihilate everything, Arontala will simply rebuild it in his own image.
 * Malesh is a particularly vicious Vayash-Moru who savors the hunt. While at first he has to limit himself to vile criminals due to treaties and laws, Malesh is fond of tormenting them and draws out their fear at death. Deciding that it's time for vampires to reign over humans, Malesh brutally slaughters the population of multiple villages while attempting to provoke a battle with the goddess The Dark Lady's chosen Vahanian. Malesh attempts to turn his lover Carina and promises that if Vahanian delays in challenging Malesh—while knowing that to kill Malesh might doom Carina, as a Vayash-Moru fledgling's life is linked to its makers—then Malesh will continue butchering villages. Intending to spark a war between humanity and vampires and make oceans of blood flow, Malesh attempts to flee Vahanian by using a child as a Human Shield, only to reveal he had already drained the child to the point of being impossible to save anyways. Even his own maker is horrified at Malesh's actions, at which point Malesh declares him a weakling before intending to create a slaughter so great that Malesh believes he will be raised to serve as the consort of the Dark Lady and reign over a new kingdom of undeath and destruction.
 * The Night Angel Trilogy has some incredibly evil villains.
 * Hu Gibbet, the 2nd best assassin alive. But don't tell HIM that, because he'll kill you for it. Hu is mentioned to be addicted to murder and regularly beats and rapes his teenaged female apprentice - and she gets off lucky as he generally kills women he's sick of. At one point, Hu slaughters a family and leaves the corpses strung up in a particularly nightmarish scene.
 * Roth, the son of God King Garoth Ursuul, who murders and cannibalizes four people a week.
 * Garoth Ursuul, the God King, is probably the worst. He's a murderer, torturer, and tyrant, who rapes and abuses women and discards them when he's finished. It's also worth noting that his room is full of furniture made out of the corpses of women.
 * Shadowdance Trilogy: Fat Bastard Leon Connington, the head of the Connington family, made much of his vast fortune running a prison to hold anyone the Trifect wants to disappear. In a world of Black and Gray Morality and depraved villains, Connington stands out for personally heading much of the vicious torture of these victims and for being a serial rapist, torturing and raping Melody Gemcroft for years and convincing the Gemcroft family she was long dead to continue assaulting her. He also threatened to do the same to Alyssa Gemcroft. In addition, he dressed up and raped Stephen Connington, his heir, driving him insane and making him into the Widow, a butcher and Serial Killer. Utterly unrepentant of these crimes, he is directly responsible for the creation of many of the villains in the second half of the series.
 * Dragon Prince:
 * High Prince Rolestra is a petty, cruel Evil Prince with a very high level of depravity. After murdering his father at the tender age of eight, he ascends to Princemarch's throne and used his position to play other princes against each other for his own amusement, nearly causing several wars. When his request for a Sunrunner was refused he trapped and addicted one to drugs, then slowly cut off the Sunrunner's supply of drugs when he ceased to be useful. He then attempted to use these drugs to enslave and rape another Sunrunner, Sioned, and when he fails burns his mistress Palila alive and banishes two of his children, one being a newborn. When we next hear about him he has cornered the market on the only medicine to a plague and only supplies it when enough of his rivals have died of it. When he enters a war with his greatest rival left alive, Rohan, he salts a battlefield after losing a battle out of spite.
 * Princess Ianthe, Rolestra's daughter, is a cruel and heartless woman, and just as vile as her father. She causes several of the events that lead to Palila being burned alive and her sisters being exiled simply because she didn't like them. She then concocts a plan with her father to kidnap, drug, and rape Rohan to make her son heir to the Desert. When his wife, Sioned, comes to rescue him she locks her in a lightless room and has her guards rape her for a month straight. When she finally lets them go, she releases them into the desert with only a little water and no food.
 * Mireva, a sorceress from the mountains, is a bitter and power-hungry woman. Prior to the events of the story, she introduced drugs to Palila that kickstarted several of Rolestra's villainous acts. She helps Ianthe's sons escape the fire she dies in and trains them into her tools to try to conquer the world with. While orchestrating these plots, she enslaves a princess with a mirror, forcing her to raise an army to try to invade Princemarch, which would cause the death of hundreds of people, if not more. She kidnaps a princess named Ruala with latent sorcerer powers to use as a power source and tries to blackmail another prince to do the same to him. As part of this plot she also impersonates a princess and rapes Rohan's son Pol, then has one of Ianthe's sons nearly rape the princess disguised as Pol. She also threatened to murder two children due to wanting revenge on a Sunrunner.
 * Requiem for Dragons trilogy: High Priestess Beatrix Deus is the new Requiem ruler and the leader of the Cured Temple. As ruler, Beatrix routinely sought out any Vir Requis who could shift into dragons and exposed them to tillvine in hopes of ridding the Vir Requis race of their transforming power. Anyone who refused to be "cleansed" with the tillvine was either murdered or imprisoned and tortured, resulting in thousands of casualties. After Beatrix hears that Eliana, the stepsister of Cade Baker, has the power to turn into a dragon, she sends her daughter Mercy to expose her to tillvine, only to discover that Cade is a Vir Requis too. When Mercy fails to find Cade, she burns down his village and murders his stepparents. Once Beatrix realizes that there are other Vir Requis who oppose her rule, she tells Mercy to hunt them down by any means necessary, and later imprisons her own son Gemini to be tortured to death after he inadvertently allows two Vir Requis to escape. She later orders Mercy to murder thousands of infants when her supply of tillvine runs low and declares war on the Horde, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Due to Mercy's repeated failures, Beatrix summons an army of bonedrakes to sniff out the Vir Requis and finish them off. In the final battle, when she's confronted by her former lover, Korvin, who tries to persuade her to surrender peacefully; Beatrix responds by subduing Korvin and orders her guards to hang him from her Temple's balcony. While Beatrix acts like she cares about the Vir Requis, she's really a hypocritical, abusive mother obsessed with "curing" the Vir Requis of their "disease," even if it means taking innocent lives.
 * In Death: Oh, boy. To put it bluntly, almost every murderer in the series is a Complete Monster. The exceptions to this are Witness In Death, Judgment In Death, Portrait In Death, Haunted In Death, and Salvation In Death. These exceptions are due to Sympathetic Murderer or Sympathy for the Devil. Richard Troy, Eve's father, is a Complete Monster for raping his own daughter and intending to make her into a prostitute and sell her to child molesters. His death at Eve's hands was deserved. Eve's mother (called Stella, Sarajo Whitehead, Sister Suzan, Sylvia Prentiss, etc.) is a Complete Monster for deliberately leaving Eve with Troy when she had to have known what Troy had planned for her, teaming up with murderous pedophiles without a qualm, killing a cop without a second thought, and so on. Her death at the hands of a murderous pedophile she teamed up with was actually relieving. Patrick Roarke, Roarke's father, is a Complete Monster for using naive Siobahn Brody to have a kid when he was already married, murdering Brody because she ran away from him with Roarke, beating his own son half to death for sport, betraying both cops and criminals which resulted in the deaths of a squad of cops, and so on. Summerset going Papa Wolf and murdering Patrick Roarke in alley in what was probably Revenge and a desire to protect Roarke and Marlena from Patrick's wrath was just perfect. Meg Roarke, Roarke's mother was a Complete Monster for treating Roarke like cabbage, wearing Brody's claddagh ring when she had to have known what Patrick did to Brody, and just leaving Roarke with Patrick. She hasn't appeared since, but hopefully, she will end up in a morgue somewhere.
 * The Little Man (AKA The Coachman) from The Adventures of Pinocchio who runs the Land of Toys. He has no regrets about any of the horrible things he's doing to little boys. He specifically targets gadabout boys, whisks them away, turns them into donkeys, sells them, and gains millions of dollars. The book calls him a horrid little being, so it's canon. He is even WORSE than his Disney counterpart! The latter at least did not go as far as to mutilate the kids!
 * In Everworld, Hel gets this treatment. A Two-Faced monster, her cruelty extends to her servants, who are kidnapped from elsewhere and castrated when they are made to serve her. This pales though compared to what she does to those who end up in her domain. Those who are unfortunate to come to her hell domain are buried up to their chin in rock, and has their head used as a cobblestone, until the skin is worn away and their skulls are crushed. Ax-Crazy to the extreme, she lives to torture people and even among the variety of gods and monsters in the series, she is by far one of the worst.
 * Ka Anor, the Big Bad, is the one being that the setting's myriad of Jerkass Gods fear. The god of the insectoid alien Hetwan, Ka Anor invaded Everworld with his army of mind slaved soldiers, intent on conquering the pocket universe and devouring all of its gods. A huge sadist, his single most horrific act has to be his cannibalization of Olympian cupbearer Ganymede. Having captured the young god, Ka Anor takes the form of a swarm of insects, and strips him down to the bone, keeping him alive to the very last second, as the heroes watch in horror. During the siege of Olympus he offers Zeus the chance to escape with five chosen gods, if he will sacrifice the rest of his pantheon to Ka Anor's appetite; it is later revealed that Ka Anor had no intention of holding up his end of the bargain. His Hetwan legions violate every conceivable rule of warfare, even by ancient terms, using acid and fire as their main weapons. Ka Anor shows that even in a Crapsack World, there are some who rise above the rest in monstrosity.
 * Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Doctor Clark Wagstaff, Doctor Sidney Lee, and Doctor Samuel La Fond in Weekend Warriors are dentists with great publicity...as well as rapists who raped Kathryn Lucas in front of her disabled husband (they knew he was suffering from Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis because Kathryn told them when they asked), one of them drunkenly admitted to raping lots and lots and lots of women and all three of them completely deserved the John Wayne Bobbit treatment. The Monarch HMO family in Payback is this for causing several people to die and just using them for money. Actually, it could be argued that every villain in this series is a Complete Monster. Rosemary Hershey in Sweet Revenge is interesting, because she plays the trope straight at first by causing the deaths of three people, ruining Isabelle Flanders' life, and displaying zero remorse for the three deaths. However, it gets subverted when it turns out that she blocked out the name of the toddler who was one of the three killed. Complete Monsters don't block out memories of their heinous deeds from their minds.
 * Queen Etheldredda in Septimus Heap killed her baby daughters only so that she could stay Queen forever - when she almost had a immortality potion already. Both the protagonists, her son Marcellus Pye and historical record, are horrified, to the point that she is called Etheldredda the Awful. She doesn't show any signs of regret for any of this.
 * The meat packers from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, who don't care how many people die from the contaminated food they put out so long as they turn a profit and, at times, with the assistance of the Chicago political machine that bends over backward to kiss their collective ass, seem to enjoy screwing over their workers essentially For the Evulz. Perhaps the worst of them is the loading boss, Mr. Connor, who forces the protagonist's Moe Ill Girl wife to sleep with him or else he'll use his connections to have her entire family turned out onto the streets. The No-Holds-Barred Beatdown this earns him at the protagonist's hands is very cathartic, though given that this is the Crapsack World that is the early 20th-Century Chicago slums, it's the protagonist who ends up really paying for doing this. The packers' actions, based on true stories, so horrified the readers of the day that Congress passed laws to ensure that they could never reach such depraved depths again (which, incidentally, was considerably less than Sinclair wanted to happen, as he, a Socialist, had hoped that his novel would spark an overthrow of the entire government).
 * Broud from Clan of the Cave Bear rapes Ayla only because she hates it and pretends not to hate her later on so his father would pass the leadership onto him. He then completely flips out and enacts changes that would destabilize the clan, just so he could cause pain to Ayla. After
 * Vlad Tepes of Count and Countess, though he definitely didn't start off as one. At one point, he's trying to lower the drafting age for young boys in his army...when the drafting age is already twelve.
 * Gregory Grue of Extraordinary. Dear GOD, Gregory Grue. He's a, one could argue that he was Just Following Orders (not that it's a good excuse anyways). However, when he , he was not.
 * The Darkglass Mountain Trilogy: Eleanon, leader of the Lealfast, is a Jerkass with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that takes his whole species along with him. He treats women, especially his sister, like garbage, and forces his sister to act as sexual bait. As the speaker for the Lealfast, instead of working for what is best for them, he deliberately alienates any allies that extend a welcoming hand to the Lealfast so he can retain control over them. In order to meet an Eldritch Abomination and secure a deal with him, he lets thousands of his own people get massacred in battle, then blames it on Axis. He then makes a deal with said Eldritch Abomination which enslaves the Lealfast to it forever. When he finds a woman, Ravenna, under a curse to not be noticed, he claims he can lift the curse, then instead modifies it so she becomes invisible to everyone but himself, forcing her to become his spy.
 * From the Fault Lines Trilogy':
 * Last Call: Georges Leon is a sociopathic card player who will stop at nothing to gain immortality. Originally devising a way to body jack his own children, Leon successfully turned his eldest into a spoulless puppet before attempting the same on his 5 year old son Scott, planning to make even more children and do the same to them afterwards. When his wife shoots him in the groin and saves Scott, Leon creates a new method to steal other's souls and bodies by tricking them out of them during card games. Though he has to wait decades before collecting the souls, Leon also curses those who owe him with bad luck that leads to the ruination of their lives and the deaths of those around them. Along with murdering his way into becoming the "Fisher King" crime lord, Leon routinely orders the executions of any who would stand in his way, even the infant children of his targets to make sure they don't grow up to seek revenge. Leon ultimately plans to continuously steal the bodies of hapless card players and prolong his own life as long as possible, having zero true care or concern for anyone but himself, bar keeping loyal servants around to inflate his own ego.
 * Expiration Date: Sherman Oaks is one of the two main antagonists of the novel, and handily the most evil. A ghost hunter who both inhales the ghosts for himself and captures them to sell on the black market, Oaks has devoured thousands of ghosts over his centuries of immorally prolonged life, viewing each one as a tasty meal for him to consume. Not content with average ghosts, Oaks murders the artistically talented and inhales their ghosts, wanders military hospitals to steal the ghosts of dying soldiers, and drains newborns of their "ghost shells", parts of their psyche that break off for a few seconds due to the stress of birth, and the children are left with a large chunk of their personality missing as they grow up. In the present, Oaks catches wind of a powerful ghost, and, after brutally torturing and murdering a man and woman for information regarding it, begins tracking their son, Kootie, who now possesses the ghost, planning to kill the child then inhale the ghost all for himself, and sells off his thousands of captured ghosts to fund his expedition. At the end of his rope due to withdraw from not having inhaled a ghost recently, Oaks tries to kill everyone he can in the end, showing nothing but sadism and a sick curiosity for power all the way to his death.
 * From The Last American Vampire trilogy:
 * Thomas Crowley was a vampire and a doctor who accompanied the English colonists to Roanoke. Crowley would poison several colonists before draining them dry over a series of days. When discovered as a vampire, Crowley butchered every man, woman and child in Roanoke save young Henry Sturges, whom he turned into a vampire out of whimsy and a little girl named Virginia who Crowley planned to raise and take as a lover when she was of age. Surviving until the 1800s, Crowley continues killing victims at random, before becoming Jack the Ripper and massacring innocent women, publicly leaving them out for Henry as a "challenge".
 * Virginia Dare herself, the first English child born in the Roanoke colony, grows to adulthood and becomes Henry's wife, before convincing him to turn her. Becoming a vampire supremacist known as A. Grander VIII—who doesn't even care about Roanoke but just wants power—Virginia kills peace envoys of the vampire order by using special masks that makes the sun burn through magnifying lens placed over their eyes, and personally assassinates Adam Plantagenet, the Order's leader who believes in human and vampire coexistence. Masterminding a series of attacks from anarchists to create new wars—including, among other acts, the Russian Revolution—Virginia attempts to engineer enough chaos and bloodshed for vampires to take over and dominate the world while overthrowing America, even lending her aid to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
 * From the Magic Kingdom of Landover series:
 * Former Court Wizard Mister Meeks is directly or indirectly responsible for every terrible thing that has happened in Landover since the death of the old king. Having persuaded Prince Michel Ard Rhi to abandon the throne, Meeks auctioned off the crown to the highest bidder, disposing of those who backed out and tried to reclaim their money, while Landover, bereft of the kingship disintegrated into anarchy, the country falling apart and the magic that sustained the land dying. When Ben Holiday managed to get the kingdom back in working order, Meeks returned to Landover, with the intent of deposing Ben, undoing the repairs that had been made, and reclaiming his books of magic—books whose power depended on the continued enslavement of the souls of the unicorns trapped within. Willing to consort with demons, slaughter innocent nymphs, and otherwise do everything in his power to ruin Landover, Meeks violated his oaths to the crown and country in every way possible.
 * Ben Holiday has had many bitter enemies, but none so vicious or persistent as the witch Nightshade. Part human, part fairy, and all vindictive bitch, Nightshade marked her first appearance by damning Ben's friends to Hell in Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold, an experience which nearly killed them all. She made two more attempts on his life in The Black Unicorn and Wizard At Large, and after an enchantment forced her to care about him in Tangle Box, responded by trying to murder his wife and kidnap his newborn daughter. It's in Witches' Brew, however, where Nightshade truly comes into her own. She tries to kill Questor Thews, Abernathy, and the Gnome, Poggwydd, and succeeds in kidnapping Ben's daughter Mistaya. Convincing Mistaya that they are friends, she forces the girl to create a series of monsters which she looses on Ben, intending that he should either be killed, or driven mad by his constant transformations into The Paladin. When this plan too fails, Nightshade gives Mistaya a poisoned brooch and sends her to hug her father, intending that Ben should die at his daughter's hands. Concerned only with her own pride, Nightshade was willing to cross any line if it meant Ben suffered.
 * Ambrosio, the titular character of The Monk. A Sinister Minister who quickly jumps from breaking his vow of chastity to committing kidnapping, Black Magic, rape, murder, and incest. And finally, he sells his own soul.
 * Grendel from Beowulf is described as such by the narration. He continually breaks into Hrothgar's mead hall, driving him further and further towards the Despair Event Horizon, brutally massacres his soldiers and carries their bodies back to his lair to eat, preventing them from being granted a good Christian burial. He's a descendant of Cain and serves Satan, so not even God likes him. After Beowulf kills him, the text describes how no one mourns his passing. To top it all off, he so fittingly happens to be a literal monster as well. In Grendel, however, the eponymous monster is depicted as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
 * Slappy from Goosebumps certainly counts. If you ever noticed a pattern in the Night of the Living Dummy series of stories, you will notice that most of his "slaves" are little girls whom he wants to pleasure him and whom he feels free to verbally, emotionally, and even physically abuse as he sees fit. A particular example would be in Bride of the Living Dummy where he threatened to murder everyone in the basement if he didn't get a wife. The doll Ellen accepts his offer, but he was really talking about the female main protagonist. The Fridge Horror comes when he would often have a 'bride' and he would often violently attack them, then referring to his assault as a "love tap." Does this remind you of anything? In Slappy's Nightmare, he contemplates on whether to kill the protagonist and her entire family if he's found out, and attacks the girl towards the end. And in Slappy New Year, he tries to cut a boy's head off with a pair of garden shears. Sadistic, cruel, and disturbing, Slappy struck fear in the hearts of many.
 * There's also the Big Bad of Goosebumps Horrorland, the Menace. When he was completely alive, kids died on his rides but he didn't care, due to his experiments in fear. The park was so scary, it somehow ended up in an alternate universe. Later, he found out Horrorland was made on his park, so he got contact with a horror to invite guests there so he get them to panic park, and make them bring the fear meter up so he can PP back to the normal world. it's implied he's done this before...but the previous kids got so scared they died and he simply doesn't care. He even got several other Goosebumps monsters to follow him, including Slappy and King Tutten-Ra.
 * Mr. Toggle from Piano Lessons Can Be Murder is a self-described brilliant robotician who runs a piano school that Jerry is sent to by his parents. Initially appearing to be a harmless, if eccentric figure, Toggle soon reveals himself as a particularly depraved Mad Scientist and implied Serial Killer. Despite his status as a famed robotician, he couldn't make robotic hands properly, so he lures men, women, and children alike to his piano school and cuts their hands off and uses them for his experiments in hopes of creating beautiful music, all to satisfy his ego. (The TV Adaptation even implies his first victim was his mother, who ends up tormenting him to play the piano forever.)
 * Oswald Manse of "Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls", in life was a teenage criminal who terrorized the aptly named town of Highgrave with his brother Martin. The two started a fire that destroyed half the town and caused hundreds of casualties, condemning the souls of the victims to haunt the cemetery as Graveyard Ghouls, unable to leave without taking someone else's body. Years later, when the protagonist, Spencer Kassimir stumbles across the brothers' grave, Oswald, now a ghoul himself, hijacks his body, leaving Spencer a disembodied spirit. After adjusting to his new form, Manse goes on a violent rampage and begins setting fire to the neighbourhood before trying to incinerate Spencer's body so he can move onto a stronger one, all while gloating how powerless the boy is to stop him. When Spencer thwarts him, Oswald reunites with his brother's ghoul, and the two try to murder Spencer's family with fireaxes out of spite. An unrepentant maniac who took sheer thrill in the terror and destruction he spread, Oswald was reviled and feared even among his fellow ghouls.
 * Jordan Krall's King Scratch includes a few nasty individuals:
 * Jim and Peggy take a ride from a Scary Black Man named Fred. He looks jovial, if odd at first, but with a little bit of conversation, both Jim and readers realize what a scumbag the guy is when he casually states he could rape Peggy (who is lying unconscious on the backseat). Then, while driving, he tries to strangle Jim with his other hand.
 * The Dark Knight Trilogy novelizations: Unlike his more passive film counterpart, the novel version of Dr. Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, is presented as a terror-loving maniac. Having gotten his start in his criminal ways after using several of his students as test subjects, driving them to the brink of madness in the process, Crane allies with the terrorist group the League of Shadows in the present, creating and supplying them with Fear Gas so as to unleash it onto all of Gotham and drive the city to tear itself apart in madness. Along the way, Crane performs more horrifying experiments in fear on his hapless patients at Arkham, orders a nosy attorney be murdered, and drives his partner, Carmine Falcone, insane to keep him from talking to the police about their crimes. After his plan to drive Gotham mad fails, during which Crane lead a prison riot, murdered a police officer, and tried to run down Rachel Dawes and a child she is protecting, Crane becomes a drug dealer of a lethal hallucinogen, using it on a junkie then murdering the man as a test run. In his final appearance, Crane takes a spot in Bane's conquered, anarchy-filled Gotham, presiding over a Kangaroo Court where everyone from corrupt politicians to innocent people are forced to walk across the icy river of Gotham, invariable leading to their deaths as they break through the ice, much to Crane's delight. A sadistic monster who plans to cure fear simply so he can rule over the "brave new world" as leader, Jonathan Crane more than matched up with the likes of the Joker and Bane, despite his seemingly polite, harmless exterior
 * The Squidder, by Ben Templesmith:
 * The Dark Father is the unfathomably old Eldritch Abomination who is the leader of the Squid Hive Mind. A ravenous parasite of a cosmic horror, the Dark Father has spent eons devouring countless universes by draining them of all life and energy, and leads the Squids into Earth's universe to initiate the wholesale genocide of mankind and the domination of Earth. The Dark Father responds to resistance by unleashing a plague onto humanity that reduces all it infects to hideously mutated likenesses of the Squids called Cuttlemen. Once the war ends, billions have died and humanity has been reduced to a few starving populations, during which the Dark Father oversees countless female children taken from their villages— leaving no other survivors—and forcefully converted into Squid-human hybrids to serve as acolytes. The Dark Father bides his time by playing with humans like toys, molding their flesh and fusing their living bodies together into abominated structures comprised of dozens of conscious humans. The Dark Father ultimately seeks to draw the rest of his form into Earth to finish destroying the universe before moving onto others. A stoic, despotic monster who threatens all subordinates who fail him with unmaking, the Dark Father roundly proves himself to be less a god and more a rapacious parasite of an abomination.
 * The Queen Unit 59B, or the Squid Queen, is just as nasty as the Dark Father. Initially a willing servant of the Dark Father who participated in the genocide of mankind, the Queen comes to savor her independence from the Dark Father's mind and eventually resolves to overthrow him, organizing attacks outside of his permission and hunting down a renegade Squid acolyte named Seph after she abandons her temple. The Queen breaks into a temple with full intent to butcher everyone there and boasts to Jack, the last of the Squidders once meant to stop the Squids, how she helped to completely wipe out the Squidders and how "good" they were at dying. After the Dark Father attempts to kill her for her failures, the Queen abruptly betrays him and leaves him to die with full intent to usurp him and lead the Squid to devour all reality, intending to consume trillions upon trillions of universes until all that's left is one organism with herself as its supreme nexus. Brutally murdering the Mother Superior and vowing to destroy Earth to this cause, the Queen proves that individuality from the Dark Father's control mixed in with her own ambitions breeds true evil.
 * Mr Grin from Andersen Prunty's Jack and Mr Grin kidnaps Gina Black, Jack Orange's girlfriend, then calls him to tell him he has two days to find her or he will never see her again. After merely hearing Mr Grin's voice by phone, Jack can immediately tell the latter is a wretched scum, even being able to imagine him with an unnatural grin based on his malicious tone without true joy. After Jack's quest to find Gina begins, Mr Grin proceeds to phone him occasionally to let him hear Gina being sexually abused, even being explicit about it. Prunty manages to paint Mr Grin as a sleazy, disgusting scumbag. Mr Grin's motivation? None provided, so you'd guess he merely does it For the Evulz, which fits in a surreal horror story along the lines of Twilight Zone.
 * In the Transitions series, Arklem Greeth from The Pirate King is a powerful lich and the leader of the Arcane Brotherhood in Luskan. The de facto lord of Luskan, Greeth sought to expand his influence by weakening the Sword Coast and the Silver Marches. He made Luskan a haven for the very worst pirates and tried to dissolve the recent peace treaty between the orcs and dwarves, catching the attention of Captain Duedermont and Drizzt respectively. In the ensuing coup, Greeth displayed his evil by releasing ghouls to butcher the people of Luskan and killing thousands when he set his base to explode when he retreated. Even after losing, he was driven by revenge against Duedermont and destroyed supplies needed to feed Luskan's people and burned the ship, the Sea Sprite, to ensure the captain would die in the ruined city. His supposed love for his Dragon, Valindra Shadowmantle, was also made moot when he sent her off to die and then raised her as a lich, proving he cared for her only as a tool. While ultimately only a pawn for Jarlaxle and Kensidan, the titular Pirate King, Greeth was vile enough that every faction agreed that he needed to be eliminated.
 * The Wardstone Chronicles: The Fiend is the master of the dark and main antagonist of the series who tries to bring the world to a new age of darkness. Having control on the practitioners of the dark, he sentences his enemies as well people who make deals with him to eternal torments. Fathering many children with witches, he kills those who are neither abhumans nor witches as he killed Grimalkin’s baby son earning her hatred. He prevents Bill Arkwright’s ghost parents from reaching the light condemning them to haunt their mill. When the witches release him from his plane, his mere presence on earth causes many wars. He murders and takes the appearance of the bargeman Matthew Guilbert. After failing to convert Thomas Ward to his cause, he challenges him to face his daughter Morwena with the threat of killing his friends if he refuses or gets killed. He later tricks Tom into selling his soul and when his other daughter Alice prevents him to claim it, he curses her to share her friend’s fate. He submits her to unspeakable torture and allows Tom to hear her cries. When Grimalkin takes one of his eyes, he threatens his followers with eternal damnation. Finally and sends the Vampire God Siscoi against Tom and sends his agents to murder Tom’s brother James out of spite.
 * Laura Caxton: Justinia Malvern was a sociopath as a human who arranged her own uncle's death when he wouldn't give her candy. Upon becoming a vampire, Justinia became a sadistic murderer, killing humans for sport while torturing her maker to death and killing his predecessors as well. When her body failed her, Justinia used her powers to seduce wealthy men, sway them into doing her bidding and having sons to continue the line, before murdering them. When the remainder of the vampires were destroyed, Justinia was held for twenty years by the state of Pennsylvania. Forming a mutual enmity with state trooper Laura Caxton, Justinia tricks her mentor and Justinia's former arch-nemesis Jameson Arkeley into letting Justinia turn him to fight other vampires, but corrupts Arkeley into a monster. Later taking over a woman's prison, Justinia massacres the population or turns others into vampires before escaping, pursued by Laura. Jusitnia proceeds to try to kill everyone Laura ever loves, massacring humans by the dozens to regain her old strength. Even the prospect of her own species' extinction doesn't trouble Justinia, as she views herself as the most powerful, ruthless and devious vampire to have ever lived.
 * Stones Of Power: While initially wanting to restore the earth of the past in the post-paocalyptic Jon Shannow trilogy, Sarento became corrupted and eventually absorbed the power Bloodstone, giving him a hunger for human souls. Forming armies known as Devourers, Sarento leads genocidal crusades against humanity, massacring so many people humanity faces extinction. Devouring his own followers eventually, Sarento goes after the last survivors and eventually comes against one of the final cities on earth, while revealing that devouring souls leaves them trapped in agony within him, something Sarento gleefully laughs about. Sarento only deigns to spare the cities when hero Jon Shannow uses a spell to send Sarento to the earth's past, with millions of people to devour. Sarento gleefully accepts, mocking Shannow how he'll feast on everyone he can, before it's revealed Shannow had chosen to send them to the first testing site of the atomic bomb.
 * In Carlton Mellick's Apeshit, there are background characters never seen in the actual story proper and only mentioned. The first we know of Dan, Stephanie's big brother, gives an image of a deadbeat, unpleasant loser tired of his life, although he's mentioned to have been on relatively good terms with the six main characters at some point before his life started being all downhill.
 * Kawada of Asshole Yakuza Boyfriend is regarded as monstrous even amongst his fellow Yakuza, and almost all of the other villains in the book eventually turn on him, usually out of disgust. In addition to being an admitted and proud sadist and murderer, he's also the mastermind behind both a dog-fighting operation and a human trafficking operation. He has a penchant for disgusting and elaborate punishments, and is adept at psychologically manipulating his victims with threats of rape or the needlessly cruel murder of their loved ones; for example, he threatens to road-haul Rose's ex-boyfriend and leave the remains in her bed while she sleeps. He also considers women to be "meat," and treats them as such, up to and including preparing to eat Mina.
 * Conrad Bland from Mike Resnick's Walpurgis III. The only regret he expresses about murdering his parents is that he did it quickly and quietly, rather than torturing them to death. He tells one of the viewpoint characters, "You are a man of honor, a man of duty and decency. In short, you are the Enemy. You are the embodiment of what I must destroy." He's also quoted as saying that "Evil is its own justification." The prologue notes that:
 * Kawada of Asshole Yakuza Boyfriend is regarded as monstrous even amongst his fellow Yakuza, and almost all of the other villains in the book eventually turn on him, usually out of disgust. In addition to being an admitted and proud sadist and murderer, he's also the mastermind behind both a dog-fighting operation and a human trafficking operation. He has a penchant for disgusting and elaborate punishments, and is adept at psychologically manipulating his victims with threats of rape or the needlessly cruel murder of their loved ones; for example, he threatens to road-haul Rose's ex-boyfriend and leave the remains in her bed while she sleeps. He also considers women to be "meat," and treats them as such, up to and including preparing to eat Mina.
 * Conrad Bland from Mike Resnick's Walpurgis III. The only regret he expresses about murdering his parents is that he did it quickly and quietly, rather than torturing them to death. He tells one of the viewpoint characters, "You are a man of honor, a man of duty and decency. In short, you are the Enemy. You are the embodiment of what I must destroy." He's also quoted as saying that "Evil is its own justification." The prologue notes that:

"He killed eleven million men in the death camps of Pilor IX during the brief reign of the mad Emperor Justacious. He killed seventeen million men on Boriga II in a manner that made the gas ovens of ancient Earth and its Third Reich seem compassionate. He killed five million women and children on New Rhodesia. He killed three thousand seventeen men on Cambria III, each in a different way. He invented torture devices that even Spica VI, which was in revolt against the Republic, would not use."


 * Jinnrise: The Kibr is the tyrannical overlord of the Kibrani, an alien race currently invading the Earth. A stout believer in Might Makes Right, the Kibr is convinced of the idea that he deserves to lord over all beings that he deems worthy of living, and to this end, uses the Kibrani empire to enslave and wipe out entire species across the universe, claiming billions of lives throughout the cosmos, regardless how defenseless or pacifistic the race may be. Once arriving on Earth, the Kibr orders entire cities obliterated, manipulating his top agent Lahasad Brim into serving him by proclaiming his son died on the battlefield to motivate him. In reality, the Kibr himself murdered Lahasad Brim's son with his bare hands just to keep Brim under his thumb, alongside promising a man the release of his family should he assist the Kibrani, despite the fact that the Kibr has already killed said family. His master plan being to use the powers of the ancient magical race of Jinn to destroy or subjugate everything that isn't the Kibrani, the Kibr tries to murder Yunus' aunt and uncle just to torture the boy, and gleefully reveals to Lahasad Brim his hand in the murder of his son while mocking his compassion for said son. His goals being nothing but a lust for battle and conquest, the Kibr would have encompassed the entire universe in death as long as it meant establishing himself as the most powerful being to ever live.
 * Sweeney Todd, the demon barber from the Penny Dreadful stories that began with The String Of Pearls. While later given sympathetic qualities in the retelling of the legends, the original Sweeney Todd was a monster whose only motivation was cruelty and greed. Sweeney would lure customers into his barber shop and proceed to drop them down a tunnel to break their skulls or necks, before 'polishing them off' with his straight razor if they still lived. Coming up with another plan to make more money, he and his partner Mrs. Lovett cooked the bodies into meat pies to sell with a hefty profit. Hundreds of corpses are seen in the preparation room, and Sweeney also keeps a kidnap victim to work the furnace to keep the meat coming, with full knowledge that he'll eventually join the pies when Sweeney decides he's been there too long.
 * In the relatively obscure but dark German fairy tale The Juniper Tree, the story's Wicked Stepmother, upon marrying the husband, grew to resent her stepson, knowing that he would inherit the family's wealth when he got older. Forming a plan, she convinces her stepson into looking into a chest for an apple, only to then decapitate him by slamming the lid onto his neck. The stepmother uses a bandage to reattach her stepson's head, and she manipulates her daughter, Marlinchen (or Marlene in some versions), into thinking that she killed her own brother. She then takes the body, cooks it into a stew, and she serves it to her unsuspecting husband. The story repeatedly makes it clear that the stepmother cared only for herself, and that she committed these actions out of greed, as well as a genuine hatred for her stepson.
 * The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood: The Ogress Queen Mother is left to look after her daughter in law and grandchildren when her son, the prince, is called away to war. For no apparent reason, she decides to cannibalize them, starting with her four year old granddaughter, Dawn, ordering her steward to kill and cook her. The Steward hides Dawn away and kills and cooks an animal instead, repeating the process with the three year old grandson, Day, and the princess. When the queen realizes the trick, she gathers the princess and her children along with the steward and his wife and servant girl, deciding to drop all six into a vat full of snakes and poisonous toads.
 * LaDean LaRene in The Wicked survived the Salem Witch Trials by feeding on children. For centuries, LaDean has haunted the town, devouring children in order to stay young and beautiful. When a young girl named Amanda throws rocks at her house, LaDean kidnaps her with the intention of killing her as well. When a group of teenagers arrive to save Amanda, LaDean kills two of them and eats them. She also murders a ranger by tearing out his throat. She later kills a police officer inspecting her house. She finally attempts to suck out the souls of the teenagers when they try to stop her.
 * Mouseheart: Felina is the queen of the feral cats who terrorize the subway tunnels of Brooklyn, forcing Emperor Titus of Atlantia to regularly supply her with rodents to butcher for fun in exchange for her leaving his kingdom alone; when Titus's wife Conselyea discovered the truth and attempted to reason with the feral queen, Felina murdered her. When the truth behind the peace accord is revealed and Titus is dethroned, Felina declares open season on every rodent in the tunnels, devastating Atlantia and abducting Prince Zucker to use as a hostage and personal plaything. When the rodents, led by Hopper, counterattack and drive off the ferals, Felina attempts to crush Zucker to death out of spite before devouring Titus when he intervenes. It's later revealed that before moving into the tunnels, Felina caused the death of Ace's mother by tricking her into taking her place on death row at the animal shelter, keeping her collar as a souvenir.
 * In Masks Of Aygrima, the Autarch is the ruler of Aygrima who created the masks to prevent any rebellions from ever happening. He is brutal and unforgiving of traitors and doesn't hesitate to pull a You Have Failed Me for almost any offense. If a person fails their masking he sentences them to a Fate Worse Than Death by sending them to a slave mine where slaves work in the horribly cold mountains where cave-ins are common and female prisoners are raped by the guards. He has an extreme Lack of Empathy for everyone around him, shrugging off the deaths of his personal guard and closest advisors. He's an Immortality Seeker who is fully willing to suck the life out of all of his subjects and personally shows up at the masking of several gifted just for this purpose, a decision that normally leads the failure of that person's masking. He has a group of young gifted follow him around so he can sap magic for them which leaves them sickly and weak. Not long before the start of the series he has all masks changed so that all citizens become extremely submissive to his rule and later uses these masks to control all citizens to fight the rebels attacking the capital causing many of them to die in combat and others to drop dead once they are released from his control. Finally he intends to posses Mara's body to extend his lifespan.
 * Rebel Genius: Ugalino, the Big Bad of the first book in the trilogy, was once Pietro's student until he made a Tulpa, a Golem-like creature with destructive capabilities. Rather than learn humility from being expelled, Ugalino used his Tulpa, which he named "Zanobius," to be a living weapon. He tries to paint himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, but he used Zanobius to murder countless people, including Ozo's wife and daughter, regardless of whether or not it furthers his goals. He ripped his Genius Ciro's gem out of his head so that he could use its magic capabilities without needing to perform an act of art, which is shown to physically and psychologically damage Geniuses. When getting information out of Duke Oberta on the Creator's Compass, he repays him by having Zanobius slaughter almost everybody in his castle. With the information Oberta gave him, he went to Baldasarre's villa and he threatens Baldasarre's wife, prompting Enzio to tell him, and he then abducts Enzio so that he could lead them to the Compass. When the first location turned out to be an illusion, he uses Enzio as a sacrifice for a ritual that could lead him to the true location. Zanobius, who had developed a bond with Enzio during his captivity, stops Ugalino, only for him to be subjected to Mind Rape. When Ugalino catches up to Giacomo, he orders Zanobius to kill him and his friends, but Zanobius tries to rebel again, causing Ugalino—not for the first time—to give him Laser-Guided Amnesia. With Zanobius loyal to him again, he threatens to kill Aaminah if Giacomo didn't give him the Compass, and only lets them live because he found out Giacomo was a Tulpa and hoped to use him as a weapon. With the Compass in his possession, he uses it to assassinate Nerezza, not caring who gets killed in the crossfire.
 * Dead Space: Martyr: Craig Markoff is a high-ranking military officer who is obsessed with unearthing the Marker. After Michael Altman leaked video footage of two DredgerCorp employees killing themselves, Markoff broke into Altman's house and threatened to kill him if he didn't divulge everything he knew about the Marker. Once Markoff got the answers he wanted, he forced Altman, his girlfriend Ada, and several of Altman's coworkers to work at a floating facility dedicated to retrieving the Marker. Several of Markoff's employees kill themselves or lose their minds due to the Marker's influence on them, but he ignores all the suicides and keeps pressuring them to get the Marker. When Altman escapes the facility and goes public about what Markoff is doing, Markoff confronts Altman again and forces him to return, threatening Ada if he doesn't comply. He punishes Altman by having Krax torture him with knives. When necromorphs attack the facility, Markoff leaves everyone inside to die while he safely records video footage of how the necromorphs and the Marker operate. Markoff captures Altman again after he sinks the facility, and he, Krax, and Stevens all gloat how Altman's efforts were futile. He later reveals that Krax murdered Ada, shortly before he and Stevens explain how Altman will become the founder of the Church of Unitology, and that Markoff had Krax killed when he deemed him "expendable". Markoff then has Altman killed by forcing him to fight a necromorph-enhanced Krax using nothing but a spoon, and continues his research on the necromorphs and Markers. Even for a series with an already bleak tone, Markoff stands out as a man who wants nothing but power, and considers everyone to be either a weapon to use to his advantage or expendable.
 * The Star of the Guardians has Abdiel, the Big Bad of the initial trilogy of books. The leader of the Order of the Black Lightning, a rogue faction of mind-rapists, he uses his abilities to build an army of mindless followers by promising them exquisite pleasures, but actually uses his followers as toys to torment for kicks. Abdiel is also revealed to have orchestrated the old revolution against the monarchy, murdering the whole royal family to seize power before his gamble was exposed and his Order destroyed. In revenge, he proceeded to hunt down and wipe out every member of the Blood Royal genetic line. Afterwards he became The Man Behind the Man to the corrupt President Robes, and through his political influence, initiated an galaxy-spanning invasion by Corrasian aliens. He later tries to sell a doomsday device that could destroy all life to a rival empire for profit as part of a plan to see all order in the galaxy crumble completely. When his enemies finally put him down for good, he ensures that his final blow will drive his slayer Maigrey insane to the point of self destruction, forcing her soulmate Sagan to Mercy Kill her to spare her the pain. An anarchist and nihilist to the extreme, everything Abdiel did was out of a venomous hatred for humanity, religion, all forms of order, and life itself.
 * Mumtaz from Patricia McCormick's Sold is a fat, repulsive madam who runs an ironically named Indian brothel called the "Happiness House" with an iron fist, keeping the many girls working there in line with threats of death and violence, and leaves them up to their eyeballs in debt to her so they can never leave. Whenever innocent 13 year old protagonist Lakshmi is bought from her Nepalese village, she gets this treatment first hand when she refuses to lay with a customer and is taken by Mumtaz into a small room and locked up for days, beaten and starved until she submits, then drugged so that her compliance is assured. As bad as this treatment is though, it's nothing compared to the punishment Mumtaz has in store for girls who try to escape or receive gifts from customers, which is dipping a stick in a mixture of chili peppers and shoving it up the offending girl's gentials. Mumtaz's Lack of Empathy isn't just saved for young girls, as she also forces a sickly mother named Pushpa to work every day, not giving a damn that she's sick and needs to rest until she gets too sick to work and is dumped onto the street with her children. Mumtaz does offer to take in her baby girl... so she can use her as a prostitute when she gets older! And she did all these atrocious deeds in the name of profit and self benefit, not once having a second thought about any of it and even seeming fond of being needlessly cruel. Greedy, sadistic, and just plain vile, Mumtaz is the horrors of sex trafficking given a human form.
 * King Leck of Graceling, though at first seeming to be a kind and noble ruler, is quickly revealed to be the most monstrous character in the story. Developing his Grace of Compelling Voice as a toddler, Leck used it to abuse his own father and all those around him in any way he could, while taking a liking to torturing and killing small animals. After murdering his father, Leck eventually takes control of an entire kingdom after murdering all of the current royalty. As king of Monsea, Leck uses his ability to force people to overlook the fact that he regularly tortures hundreds of animals at a time, abuses his own staff, and is kidnapping dozens of little girls from surrounding kingdoms. Having a wife, Leck regularly abuses and rapes her, leading to the birth of his daughter, Bitterblue, a girl Leck plans to torture and mold into the "perfect heir" to his throne. When Bitterblue and her mother flee, Leck casually murders the woman, before trying to recapture Bitterblue, at which point he is killed while trying to cause maximum emotional pain to all those around him with his powers. Despite his death, Leck's influence and evil continued to haunt the kingdom of Monsea for decades to come, with it being revealed that Leck used hundreds of innocent women and little girls as subjects for his horrifying Grace-experiments, often resulting in said subjects' deaths, while also forcing his own advisors to rape, torture, and murder dozens of those same subjects for his own amusement, relishing their screams of agony and horror, before forcing his healers to revive the women so he could do it all over again. Sadistic beyond belief and viewing his various atrocities as "art" that should be honored, King Leck was the worst this fantasy series had to offer, horrifying and repulsing all those who knew his true nature.
 * In Burning Fields by Michael Moreci, Tim Daniel, et al.: Commander Decker Marce is the head of Verge and a sociopathic militant brought in to investigate a series of murders around a Verge-owned oilfield. Already an extremist before getting roped in with the murders—all done under the command of the demon Asag—Decker previously had an entire family, the children not spared, executed on the vague potential of them being terrorists, and shows open willingness to employ lethal violence against the Iraqi population. After an ill-fated attempt to investigate underground tunnels leads to Asag taking Decker into its service, Decker becomes significantly worse, slaughtering an innocent man, massacring several Carapace soldiers, and brutally murdering his own men for little reason at all. Decker ultimately proves himself to have full agency when serving Asag when he deliberately threatens to keep Asag unsealed if he's not provided with a position of comfortable power, and ultimately devolves from a man with some semblance of standard into a fanatical zealot seeking to unleash Asag upon the world and bask in the flames that consume all humanity in the process.
 * Abbadon, by Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Spencer Marstiller, et al.: Bloody Bill, real name Wesley Garrett, is a monstrous Serial Killer who terrorizes the old west in this Western thriller graphic novel. Years ago the leader of a vicious gang of rapists and murderers who would lay waste to entire towns, butchering his way through countless innocents before raping and torturing the young women and girls residing there, Bill earned the ire of nearly every other criminal around him for his propensity for overkill, cannibalism, and murdering his own gangs out of boredom. After striking out alone and becoming a killer who would keep his victims' eyeballs and organs in jars as trophies, Bill resurfaces after years of inactivity to resume his spree in the town of Abbadon, murdering numerous innocents in his trademark way of torturing, stringing up, then gutting them, a method that began when he did it to a man's teen daughter after butchering said man's entire lynch mob that came for Bill. In his public identity of Garrett, Bill executes anyone, kids included, who could reveal him as Bill, and ultimately frames innocent men for his crimes, leading to their deaths. A despicable sadist with a goal of nothing more than his own lusts and fame abroad, Bloody Bill cared only for how something could make him ever more famous, treating all else as disposable.
 * Threshold: Nzame is an Eldritch Abomination from beyond our world. Finding a way into our world, he turns the portal into an Eldritch Location and murders several people working on this portal in increasingly horrific ways. He uses this portal in the form of a pyramid to breach into the human world and Mind Rapes the population of Threshold into worshipping him. Once they do, he transforms them into stone golems in constant pain. When the protagonists rise to oppose him, he attacks them through their dreams, threatening bodily harm to them and their loved ones. He pays special focus to the heroine, Tirzah, threatening to possess her unborn child and leave her husband trapped in an Eldritch Location. Twisted and cruel, Nzame does not care for anything but himself and power.
 * In Tricky Business, Tark is a low-level driver of a drug boat. Tired of this, he decides to rob his bosses in a major drug deal. In the middle of a tropical storm, he has three of his associates beat up and knock out two guards of the boat. He mutilates and castrates one guard, and decides to force the other guard to swallow his own blood with his hands tied behind his back. When he gets to the drop-off point of the deal, he murders everybody crewing the operation. He then proceeds to betray and kill each and every one of his associates and even tries to kill some innocent people who get in the way. Motivated simply by greed, no one in the novel outshines Tark in sadism or disloyalty.
 * Welcome to Hoxford by Ben Templesmith: Gordon Baker is the warden of the titular asylum, and is in actuality the leader of a savage pack of werewolves. Deposing his own father as alpha and keeping him locked in a dark room while keeping up the appearance he's still subordinate, every month Baker and his pack slaughter and consume all the patients at Hoxford at their own merriment, repeating the process with every batch that comes in. Baker spitefully locks an otherwise innocent psychiatrist named Jessica Ainley within Hoxford during the night of the hunt after she refuses to leave and soon after sets about gruesomely slaughtering everyone he can find. Baker personally captures a cannibal named Gravy and psychotic protagonist Ray, delightfully noting the irony of a cannibal being consumed and instructing Ray himself to devour a still-living Gravy once he expresses kinship with the werewolves with an air of amusement.
 * The third installment of The Great Brain series of books introduces an almost jarringly vile man who easily outclasses the series' typical bullies and strict adults: the outlaw Cal Roberts. A multiple-murderer and cattle rustler played dead straight, Cal and his posse built up a reputation of being savage killers who never left witnesses at the scenes of their crimes until he screwed up and accidentally left a night watchman alive. Arrested and brought to trial, Cal swore to break himself and his gang free from prison and murder the judge, district attorney, and foreman of the jury who just so happened to be protagonist J.D.'s father. Making good on his threat, Cal broke five of his men from prison after killing two guards and descended upon Adenville, tossing the town into a state of panic as he and his men rode in to wipe out his targets. After botching an attempt at killing the judge by hanging him, Cal fled and showed how low he could sink by kidnapping J.D's four year old adopted brother Frankie, while forcing J.D.'s family to cater to his every whim on threat of Frankie's life. His endgame is to parade Frankie around town with a gun to his head, stroking his ego as he shows all of Adenville that he pulled a fast one over the town's marshal. And despite swearing to the marshal and J.D.'s father that he wouldn't kill Frankie if his demands were met, he later confesses that he was going to murder him anyway just to spite the men he failed to kill. An all around low-down skunk of a man with no respect for the lives of others, Cal doesn't even care about his own followers as he reacts to the news of their deaths with casual indifference.
 * House of the Scorpion: El Patrón (the original Matteo Alacrán) is the most powerful and evil drug lord of them all. El Patrón rules over the country of Opium and punishes anyone who tries to illegally cross his borders by capturing them and implanting computer chips in their brains, turning them into eejits. These eejits are essentially human robots, programmed to do certain tasks all while their thoughts and emotions are repressed by the computer chip. Even El Patrón's security team and certain staff members have been implanted with chips, turning them into high-functioning eejits bound to El Patrón's will. The most common usage of "dumb" eejits is for manual labor in the fields used to create his drugs. Due to the harsh conditions and poor care, they tend to have a low life expectancy, leading to hundreds of thousands of bodies being buried beneath the poppies. El Patrón, like many drug lords, keeps himself alive to nearly one hundred and fifty-years old by harvesting organs from clones. Unlike most drug lords, however, El Patrón doesn't destroy his clones brains, instead he raises them like they were his own children, only to harvests and kill them without hesitation when the time comes. El Patrón cares for no one but himself and sees everyone around him as his possessions, such as the dead siblings he only valued because they were his. In the end, after his death, he still manages to murder everyone close to him by poisoning the wine they drank at his funeral. He also put his country into lockdown with deadly force fields only to be dismissed by his DNA, leaving them to starve as a "fitting tribute" to take with him into the afterlife, just like the kings of old.
 * The Magicians: Raynard the Fox is a hulking mass of muscle, red fur and sharp teeth, summoned by a sect of magicians who believe they are calling upon a benevolent goddess. When summoned, Raynard promptly proceeds to take the 'sacrifices' he sees as his. Setting upon the magicians, Raynard kills many of them horribly and painful, mortally wounding one and sneering over the young man's dying attempt to offer himself to let the final two live. When one promises her life in exchange for the other's, Raynard chooses to interpret it in a dark way: he promptly brutally rapes her in front of her friend and tears her humanity out when finished.
 * In "Hope Chest" by Garth Nix, the Master is the demonic leader of the Servants of the State, a Nazi-like hate group that slowly amasses more and more members due to the Master's mind controlling abilities. Having his growing army perpetrate brutal assaults, rapes, and murders against minorities and vagrants across the country in his name, the Master seeks to spread his influence worldwide until his hateful rhetoric is forced upon every person alive, with his motive being nothing more than a love for causing pain and controlling others. When confronted by Alice May, the Master forces the girl to fight her own brainwashed sister to torment her, and spends his final moments mocking Alice May that he forced her sister to have sex with him, gleefully offering Alice May a place at his side to share the experience.
 * In Pride and Joy, Stein is a nihilistic Psycho for Hire infamous for his brutality. Employed in the past as a hitman for crime boss Daddy Delaney, Stein establishes his brutality by forcing protagonist Jimmy Kalvangh to watch as he tortures a man to death with a knife, later striking a deal with Jimmy and his associates to overthrow Delaney himself. After he's double-crossed, Stein breaks out two decades later to pursue revenge against Jimmy and his entire family, tormenting him by leaving the corpse of an eviscerated man in his daughter's bedroom and mowing down a cop with Jimmy's own guns. Castrating Jimmy's friend Lenny and later killing both Lenny and his brother, Stein badly wounds Jimmy and leaves him to bleed out with the promise he'll be killing Jimmy's teenage son Michael next.
 * The Handyman, by Bentley Little: Frank Watkins is a jovial and creepy practitioner of Vietnamese black magic who uses his nightmarish abilities to torment the unfortunate innocents who hire him to repair their homes. Having learned to communicate with and manipulate the spirits of the dead from a Vietnamese teacher who he promptly murdered, Frank seeks to expand his ever-growing collection of trapped spirits, and carries this out by cursing the homes of those who desire his handyman services, leading to the ruination and deaths of all those who lived in the homes. Frank has ruined the lives of countless people, and despite at times recruiting partners or servants, he always kills or tortures them to death when they outlive their usefulness. Keeping hundreds of souls trapped in eternal torment inside his house, where he has decorated entire rooms with the body parts of his victims and delves into rape, cannibalism, and all forms of torment, Frank ultimately schemes to raise the Dark Wife to its full power then bask in the apocalyptic chaos she brings upon the entire planet.
 * Adeline March of The Thirteenth Tale is the unstable and violent twin sister of Emmeline and cousin of Vida Winter, who described Adeline as "genuinely dangerous" and that "violence was always her first instinct". The twins, inseparable while growing up, had the run of the house while children and caused all sorts of havoc, which came to a head when the two pushed a baby in a carriage down a hill. When the local doctor's wife came to inquire about the incident, Adeline, who was nine years old, hit the doctor's wife in the back of the head with a violin. The twins' mother was framed for the incident and a governess was hired to instill discipline. On the first day of school, Adeline stabbed Emmeline in the ankle with a pencil. The twins were separated for a time to see if they would improve but to no avail; when the girls were reunited, Adeline gave Emmeline a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. When the three girls were 17, Adeline murdered two of the servants, Missus and John-the-dig; the former For the Evulz, the latter because he acted as a mentor to Vida. Shortly afterwards, Emmeline was impregnated by Ambrose Proctor, a local boy working at the house. Despite her bond with her sister, Adeline attempted to murder Emmeline's baby twice, forcing Vida to hide him in the village. In her attempts to murder the boy, Adeline set the house on fire, prompting the normally docile Emmeline to go on the attack for the first time in her life. In the ensuing fight, Vida was forced to lock Adeline in the burning room to save herself and Emmeline. Adeline was willing to cross any line to receive attention and didn't care who she hurt in the process, with her actions casting shadows to the present.
 * Lord Foul of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is one of the most horrifically evil Dark Lords in fantasy, and proud of it. He's called "the Despiser" for a reason, namely that he holds every living thing that's not himself in purest contempt, and is perfectly willing to annihilate physical reality purely so he can escape from it. While he's waiting to accomplish that, he gets his jollies by causing smaller-scale apocalypses (the one in the Second Chronicles purely to screw with Covenant's head), driving people so far past the Despair Event Horizon that they become agents of their own destruction, and giving magnificent monologues about how much you suck compared to him. All of this without the slightest shred of remorse, by the way, and Word of God notes that while he's essentially the Anthropomorphic Personification of evil, don't think it absolves him of moral responsibility for his crimes- at least theoretically, Foul always had the option to choose to stop being the Despiser, but doing so never entered his head. Rather, after every defeat, he just examines what he did wrong so he can be even more evil next time around.
 * The Man With the Scarlet Eye, the Big Bad of Swan Song who may be The Devil, has been wandering the earth in different guises, arranging and committing a multitude of massacres and other evil deeds. When he helps to arrange nuclear war, he ends up massacring a group of other survivors in his pursuit for the woman known as Sister and an item she carries to lead to the girl Swan. When he discovers Swan's power to bring life back to the dead earth, the Man with the Scarlet Eye brings the information to a militia known as the Army of Excellence, leading to attacks on settlements and more death. It is revealed the Man with the Scarlet Eye is helping the now insane former President of the US trigger a doomsday device to wipe out the world and the remainder of humanity while he watches, enjoys the show and dances on their graves.
 * The Woman: Chris Cleek, the patriarch of the Cleek family, is an extreme take on misogyny. Upon encountering the titular woman in the woods, he kidnaps and imprisons her within a fruit cellar, under the guise of civilizing her. In reality, he intends on dominating her whether it be through several types of torture, such as using a high pressure power washer to bathe her, or by raping her. It's revealed later on in the novel that Cleek had raped his daughter, Peggy, each night, which culminates in her being pregnant with his child. When Miss Raton, Peggy's teacher, confronts him on this, he knocks her out, and feeds her to his dogs; the scene also reveals that Cleek had a daughter, who suffered from anophthalmia, imprisoned in the barn, thus causing her to revert to an animalistic state. Misogynistic and depraved, Cleek didn't care who he had to hurt to make his fantasies a reality.
 * In The Call, Conor Geary is a bully at the academy where teens are trained to survive their Call (a day in the Gray Lands of the Sidhe where they will be hunted). Viewing himself as the 'king' of his group, Conor becomes obsessed with the heroine Nessa and attempts to rape her. After being driven off, a humiliated Conor plans to kill her before he is Called. Savagely fighting off the Sidhe, Conor makes a pact with their leader Dagda: to, as a King, revoke the treaty banishing the Sidhe and allow them to overrun humanity, subjecting their ancient enemies to torture and death as long as Conor gets to rule the remnants. In return, Conor requests only to murder Nessa himself, and murders several of his supposed friends as school when the barriers weaken. Finally, Conor attempts to kill Nessa, demanding only that she kiss him first to show him her submission to him.
 * Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes: Dave/William Afton was the co founder of both Fredbears Family Diner and Freddy Fazbears Pizza. Unable to deal with the stress in his life, he turned to murder to relieve himself. At Fredbears, he murdered the son of his business partner Henry, despite the fact that Henry helped him start Fredbears. At Freddys, he lured five kids backstage, killed them, and stuffed their bodies inside the animatronics, causing them to become possessed by their spirits. While working as a security guard at a mall, he notices Henrys daughter Charlotte and her six friends, and decides to kill them too. He kidnaps Charlottes friend Carlton and places him in a springlock suit, gleefully telling him that if he makes one wrong move, the suit will slowly crush him to death and his spirit will be unable to pass on. He leaves Carlton to stand alone in the suit with this knowledge while he goes to kill the others. He later kills an officer and takes Charlotte hostage when the group tries to escape.
 * In Dinner at Deviant's Palace, Sevatividam is a universe travelling energy being with a lust for draining planets' populations, particularly those populated with sentient life, of their life forces. During his travels, Sevatividam has draine countless species of their minds and lives, with his strategy always pertaining hypnotizing the planet's population into worshipping him, then using them as his slaves and cattle to use and dispose of as he wishes. When arriving on Earth, Sevatividam first started a Renaissance that he planned to use to nurse despair in ther people to make them taste better, and later creates his cult of Jaybirds, psychotic fanatics who will follow Sevatividam's orders, even if it entails their death. When any of Sevatividam's cultists break his strict code, Sevatividam sentences them to his horrifying Holy City prison, where they are radioactively poisoned, drained dry of their blood to use in drugs, and locks them in suits of armor known as trash men where their decaying limbs are replaced with pieces of trash. In the end, Sevatividam tries to manipulate Sivas into joining him, and illustrates his power by ordering an entire room of his cultists to kill themselves before using Sivas' Love Interests as hostages to force him into servitude. A gleeful psychopath with a sweet tooth for innocents' lives, Sevatividam was obsessed solely with himself and his pleasures.
 * On Stranger Tides: In this classic pirate novel, Leo Friend stands out as the most depraved pirate around, surpassing even Blackbeard in brutality and evil. As a child, Friend poisoned a magic user to learn his secrets before killing him despite promising to provide the antidote, then used his new powers to torture animals and poison candy that he left near school grounds. In the culmination of heinous childhood acts, Friend tried to rape his own mother in a sick attempt to show his gratitude for her recognizing his greatness, ending with said mother's death. Becoming a pirate later in life, Friend perpetrated numerous atrocities, from luring a crew of innocents into a raid where he personally killed many of their number, to sending one of his own crews to die as a distraction before gunning down a man who tries to save them. Friend later betrays his partners, kidnaps one's daughter, Beth, then tries to rape her while casting an illusion to make her resemble his mother, and he fully plans on torment Beth into becoming his broken slave. Having garnered immense power by his final duel, Friend raises a crew of undead pirates to assist him in his planned conquest of all he sees after massacring an entire ship of pirates. Showing his truly despicable colors more and more as the story went on, what Friend lacked in manners, charm, and sympathy, he replaced with a sickening god complex with which he proclaimed all of his crimes to be simply his divine right to commit.
 * In Such A Pretty Girl by Laura Wiess, Charles Shale is a horrible excuse for a father and a serial pedophile responsible for heroine Meredith's plight throughout the novel. Having began molesting and raping his own daughter Meredith as she grew up, Charles' abuse reached its peak when he raped her to the point of bleeding when she was 12. Following this, 5 other children reveal that Charles has done much the same to them, with one in particular attempting to kill himself because of the molesting. Years later, once released from prison for his crimes, Charles immediately begins picking out new victims to restart his spree, and decides to begin by violently raping Meredith once more to show his "love" for her. A disturbingly realistic depiction of a child predator, Charles Shale was defined by his horrifying, disturbed nature of sexual lust.
 * The Watson Girl: In this Crime Novel by Leslie Wolfe, the Chameleon stands out even alongside family annihilator the Family Man as a pure evil Serial Killer. Originally discovering his sadistic nature when he assaulted and raped a fellow college student in his youth, the Chameleon fully embraces his depraved nature after murdering his business partner's family to cover up a potentially imprisoning mistake. Though successfully killing 3 children in the process, the Chameleon missed one of the children, Laura, and, to both increase his public image and keep an eye on her better, adopted her as his daughter in his public persona of Bradley Welsh, and though he restrains himself to prevent suspicion, he constantly wishes to brutally rape and murder the poor girl throughout the years. Later, the Chameleon continues to murder entire families, always framing it to look like the active killer the Family Man was the perpetrator, and slowly grows into torturing and raping the women of the families. When the Family Man is finally arrested, the Chameleon begins experimenting in various ways of killing to decide which way he enjoys best, from nailing a woman to a wall, to nearly flaying another one alive, until he finally settles for kidnapping a woman every now and then, take her an isolated shack, then send days raping and mutilating her until he finally kills her. Not restricted to killing solely to get his kicks, the Chameleon beats a man to death with a crowbar for cutting him off in a parking lot, slashes the throat of an elderly woman after she sees him kill her granddaughter, and, in the end, tries to stab Tess Winnet, the lead detective on his case, to death. A chilling maniac who believes that he has every right to kill humans, because just as they kill lesser animals without remorse, he has surpassed humankind and can do whatever he pleases, the Chameleon treated each and every one of his murders as nothing but a tasty meal for him to consume, then promptly shrug off until next time.
 * Department Q trilogy: In these Danish crime thrillers, most villains have truly horrible backstories and severe tragedy to their characters. The same cannot be said for the 2nd film, The Absent One's, villains, Ditlev Pram and Ulrik Dybbøl. Their career in evil beginning as early as high school, Pram and Dybbøl were vicious bullies and budding psychopaths who would mask themselves, then brutally assault, rape, and otherwise ruin the lives of dozens of innocents all just to alleviate their boredom. After framing a teacher for raping a student to keep himself from failing a class, Pram, alongside Dybbøl, rape a teen girl in front of her brother before stabbing the duo to death, and, when Pram's girlfriend Kimmie decides to back out of their spree, the duo savagely beat and rape before trying to murder her, with Pram fully aware that she is currently pregnant with his child. As adults, Pram and Dybbøl never stopped their depraved acts, as they now own a torture chamber littered with blades and needles, recordings of them sexually torturing a woman, and a trophy case filled with dozens of victims' keepsakes, with what looks to be a child's underwear being just one of the items present. After failing to murder detectives Carl Mørck and Assad when they get too close to the truth, Pram pathetically tries to manipulate a vengeful Kimmie into sparing his life, with neither him nor Dybbøl ever once showing remorse or guilt for their crimes, or even a legitimate motive beyond amusement, firmly establishing them as the most wicked villains Mørck and Assad had ever faced.
 * Griffin Ranger: Deverall is the Evilutionary Biologist commissioned by the Big Bad Duumvirate of Whitehead and Russell. His job: To develop and ultimately release a genocidal plague to kill all griffins and their hanz servants. He takes the job enthusiastically, provided with griffins (and all the other sentient species) kidnapped from griffin!Earth and sent through Whitehead's dimensional gate to human!Earth. Despite knowing that the griffins he was working with were fully self-aware and intelligent beings, he subjects the captives to a never-ending Trauma Conga Line, forcing them to rape one other to produce the eggs needed to incubate the virus, and using Cold-Blooded Torture to keep them in line. Then, when they become infertile, insane, or too crippled to mate, he removes and murders them by injecting them with test strains of the plague - over, and over, and over again, until one finally proves fatal. The greenie Sharkan-eet says it flatly: No griffin leaves there alive. He treats the vet and lab techs no better, lying to them about the intelligence of the griffins, something which gets them mutilated and dismembered when the captives try to fight back. When the cavalry - led by Harrell's ex-mate Vaniss - finally arrives backed by the human police, he electronically locks all the doors and takes the entire building hostage, killing griffin and human police alike, and forcing Vaniss' War Flock to kill nearly everyone in the lab to get to him and the plague. He finally meets his end when one of his own captives, a Not Quite Dead Winter, punches her newly sharpened talons through his leg, forcing him to inject her with the plague he had on him. Pinned by her dead body and bleeding out from an artery cut, he can only lay there as Vaniss sets the building on fire behind him, then ultimately uses explosives to bring the roof crashing down. He gets his Laser-Guided Karma, but Sharkan-eet was right: Their bodies may be alive, but the griffins they were before died in their cages. What emerges is the walking wounded, physically and mentally, and will never truly be free of the chamber of horrors that was Deverall's lab.
 * Child 44: Vasili Nikitin is a slimy, power hungry operative of the MGB during the height of the Soviet Union, having taken his position for no reason other than for the opportunity to hurt others. Getting his start in the Union by getting out own brother thrown in prison for decades for insulting Stalin while drunk, Vasili actively assists the Union in locking up innocent in horrific prisons for minor offenses. Teaming up with Leo Demidov, Vasili tries to undermine the man at every turn before impulsively torturing and executing two farmers, trying to kill their children as well, for being "traitors" to the Union. Once learning that they were seemingly innocent of this perceived crime, Vasili rounds up other people and threatens them to admit to being guilty to cover his tracks. Growing to hate Leo due to his noble nature, Vasili frames the man's wife for treason, gets him demoted, ruins the lives of his parents, and ultimately subjects the man to a torturous drug, all with almost sexual glee. Threatening men's entire families to get them to assist him throughout the story, Vasili, upon learning that Leo and his wife Raisa evaded an assassination ordered by Vasili, executes one of Leo's friends before tracking the couple down, giving his men orders to head into the housing complex they are in and kill everyone in sight if they try to escape again. Vasili is a true sadist, enjoying all of the pain and suffering the Union brings innocents, and is finally killed while trying to force Leo to watch as he kills Raisa in front of him, laughing the whole way.
 * In the crime thriller novels White is the Coldest Colour and When Evil Calls Your Name Dr. David Galbraith is a sociopathic pedophile who targets young boys. A child psychologist, Galbraith uses his profession to get close to his preferred targets, then takes the children to his home, where he tortures and molests them for days on end, filming the entire ordeal, then manipulates the kids into believing it's their fault to keep them quiet. The leader of a pedophile ring, Galbraith regularly calls meetings with his ring, meetings that involve each member bringing a few kids for them to take turns molesting. When each meeting is over, Galbraith guts a small animal in front of the children, swearing he'll do the same to them if they incriminate him. After accidentally murdering one of his victims, Galbraith dissects the body for no particular reason, then psychologically tears down his accomplice in the crime until he commits suicide. Years ago, Galbraith took a liking to a young woman named Cynthia, and, after murdering the woman's then-current fiancee, subjected her to horrific psychological torment, turning her into his abused slave. When Cynthia had two children from Galbraith raping her, Galbraith was furious that the kids were female, and thereby not his "type" to molest, and began physically abusing them and their mother as a result. Having over a hundred victims, Galbraith kidnaps his latest target, Anthony, from his home after trying to bludgeon the boy's mother to death, and plans to record himself torturing Anthony to death then send the video tape to his family. When his wife, who, along with his two young daughters, he has physically and psychologically abused for years, finally stands up to him, Galbraith assaults her, then tries to kill Anthony, at which point he plans to torture his wife to death for defying him. Homicidal and sadistic, Dr. David Galbraith was a monstrous and repulsive pedophile of the highest order of depravity.
 * Jeff Gilday, or the Iceman, in the book Creatures of Appetite, is a twisted psychopath who, after being rejected by his long-time crush, Barb Mullens, in favor of his best friend, decided to murder Barb's child daughter, Darcy. To better avoid suspicion for the crime, Gilday decided to mask Darcy's death as just one of numerous killings, and, to this end, began kidnapping young girls between 5 and 12 years old, at which point he would sadistically murder and eat them. After butchering 20 girls, 9 of whose body parts he left in an area highly-populated by children, just to terrify the kids, Gilday kidnaps Darcy, and, when dropping off one of his victims' bodies, opens fire on numerous police officers. Framing an innocent man for his crimes, Gilday forces him to eat body parts of one of the children to further incriminate the man, then shoots him in the head to make it look like a suicide. Capturing Emma Kane after murdering her current date, Gilday tries to force her to watch as he kills and eats Darcy, at which point he plans to do the same to her. When Kane's partner shows up, Gilday tries to murder an officer, leaving him crippled for life in the process, then makes one last attempt to escape by using Darcy as a human shield. When questioned by Kane as to why he ate the children, Gilday simply replied, "They taste good."