Complete Monster/Redwall

The Redwall series has it's share of these. And with 22 books, there's a lot of them to go over.


 * In the first book, we have Cluny the Scourge, the Big Bad rat warlord who is a complete sociopath and enjoys killing anyone and anything, sometimes even eating them. Most of the time, he treats his mooks like dirt and kills or tortures them without hesitation should they fail him. This is especially showcased at the very beginning of the book, when he orders one of his henchrats to get the horse that's driving his army's cart to move faster. The mook succeeds, but then falls to his death, being crushed under the wheels of said cart. Cluny laughs as the mook dies and says "Tell the devil that Cluny sent you, Skullface!" This is even brought Up to Eleven in the graphic novel when he continues with "Tell him I've come to Mossflower and it's precious Abbey, to do his work!" This basically sums up that fact that Cluny is indeed like a demon in the form of a rat. And that is just the beginning of the book. After much killing, manipulating, and torturing on his part, at the end of the book, his troops capture a peaceful family of dormice. Cluny then orders the father mouse to sneak inside Redwall and open the gates for his horde, or else the mouse's family (including a baby) would die (and knowing Cluny, it would probably be a horrible death). When the dormouse tearfully complies and opens the gate, Cluny has him nearly killed. He then orders the massacre of everyone living at Redwall before being stopped by Matthias. Regarded as a satanic figure by the superstitious, and as a mad beast by everyone else, he set the standards for evil in the Redwall universe.
 * The second book, Mossflower, features Queen Tsarmina, who begins by murdering her father and framing her good-at-heart brother for it, sentencing him to life imprisonment in the dungeons of her Castle Kotir. Tsarmina then becomes a totally ruthless tyrant, exacting her power over her rebel "subjects", the woodlanders, by sending a giant, mindless, and bloodcrazed rat-monster-thing to attack the woodlanders and slaughter them. And while the monster is killed before it can do this, it's painful to imagine what it might have done had Stormfin not been there. And like many other villains, she treats her mooks horribly, forcing her partially lame advisor to hobble ahead of her marching troops and avoid being trampled. For about an hour. In the hot sun. He barely comes out of it alive. (Needless to say, he pulls a Screw This, I'm Outta Here later on.) Worse still, when provided means of escaping from a practically certain death by her only underling that ever seemed genuinely loyal (and just proved that he was), she immediately leaves him to perish, just because that spared her some extra risk. Not to mention the fact that she basically drove the entire kingdom into poverty by demanding pretty much everything the citizenry had, and then doesn't care when her troops start complaining about hunger.
 * Tsarmina's uncle is the truly vile Ungatt Trunn. Trunn believes the path of conquest is his destiny and wholeheartedly embraces it with no regard for friend, foe or family alike, abandoning his homeland because inheriting the throne from his ailing father would wound his considerable ego. Trunn is notable for his so far unique supremacist philosophy as well. His Blue Hordes are considered the 'master race' and members of the "lesser orders" are to be enslaved or wiped out. He conquers Salamandastron, resulting in the deaths of many heroes, including its old badger lord, and brutally treats the survivors as slaves. His own men are terrified of him, and his personal seer only works for him because Trunn slaughtered his family long ago, something Trunn mocks him over again and again. One of the worst things Trunn does is his decision when supplies run low in the conquered mountain. He simply proposes eating the hostages they have. It's worth noting that despite his claims of superiority in everything, Trunn is wholly without honor. After being challenged to a one on one duel by Lord Brocktree, Trunn accepts, then instructs his men to murder the Badger Lord if Trunn loses the advantage.
 * Then there's Slagar the Cruel (Chickenhound), a true From Nobody to Nightmare psychopath, who most definitely Would Hurt a Child. And not just hurt, but brutaly beat, psychologically torture, force-march for days, and sell into a nightmarish underground kingdom to be slaves for the rest of their lives (said kingdom is ruled by yet another Complete Monster). And all because a snake bit his face and he blames the heroes for it. That excuse doesn't hold much water since even before that happened he was a thoroughly empathy-deficient teenager who did not mourn his mother's death, robbed the Abbey dwellers after they saved his life, and (admittedly accidentally) killed Brother Methuselah when the old mouse caught him in the act. All the snakebite really did was remove the last of his inhibitions and cause him to think a little bigger.
 * Badrang the Tyrant from Martin the Warrior is a great example. First off, he rules a fortress run by slaves, whom he treats cruelly. His mooks don't get much better treatment, as summed up by Skalrag's fate: after carrying out Badrang's orders to burn down his Affably Evil rival's pirate ship, said rival captures Skalrag, and, instead of killing him himself, sends him back to Badrang, who then proceeds to put the poor fox on the torture rack before tying him to the gates and having him shot full of arrows. And it seems that he did this just because he was pissed off at his rival. Then later, a band of traveling circus players came to the fortress to distract the vermin troops so that the slaves could escape. One act involved a pretty young squirrelmaiden going to be "sacrificed" by a (collapsible) dagger. When the ringmaster hare asked the audience if he should kill the squirrelmaid, none of the normally bloodthirsty vermin spoke up. Except, of course, Badrang, who casually growls, "Run her through rabbit, and get on with it." And of course, the infamous ending, where Badrang brutally kills . He's probably one of the most hateful villains in the series.
 * Another obvious example is the very, very Ax Crazy wolverine warlord, Gulo the Savage. He murders his father and then becomes obsessed with killing his brother so that he can get the MacGuffin. Following his brother across the sea to Mossflower, he wreaks havoc in the land, butchering anyone he comes across. And eating them, as both he and his entire horde are cannibals. His list of victims include several hares that were on their way to deliver a gift to Redwall Abbey, a tribe of river rats, and more than twenty squirrels who were on parade. And as a present for their friends and family, he leaves their mangled heads behind. Some of these victims were eaten alive, too. Basically, Gulo is a completely insane and sadistic brute who lives to kill and enjoys every bit of it.
 * Outcast of Redwall has Swartt Sixclaw, who is probably one of the most sadistic Redwall villains and who pretty much hated everybody. He did get married, but it was only because of tradition that he inherited the previous warlord's daughter as his wife, and he pretty much ignored her all the time. When she died giving birth to his son, he blew it off as nothing and even left the infant ferret to die on a battlefield. (It didn't.) Swartt kept the hero of the book, Sunflash the Mace, as an abused slave for a time, and when he assembles a massive horde, he's known for backstabbing his allies when they outlive their usefulness. He deals with possible sedition in his horde by having the flunky of the ringleader force feed him an entire crow...then has the flunky killed for 'murdering an officer'. It earns him the name 'The Pitiless One'.
 * Special mention has to go to Vilu Daskar from The Legend of Luke. In the beginning of Luke's tale, he and his crew slaughter Luke's tribe "for fun", Vilu personally cutting down his wife, Sayna. When he spies Luke and his crew following him on a ship, rather than ram the Goreleech into his enemy's much smaller vessel like Akkla suggests, he says he'll wait until the mice work and sweat to fix the ship anew...then he'll swoop in and sink it, taking the survivors as slaves. When he gets new slaves on his ship, Vilu finds the sickest and weakest by making them pull the log; those who can't are "given" their freedom and forced to Walk the Plank. (As one slave - whose father couldn't haul the log - says, "If'n the big fishes don't get 'em, the sea does.") His crew is treated little better: when some pirates are found guilty of theft, Vilu has them savagely beaten and hung from sunrise to sunset with sea water poured into their wounds. And it turns out he had been even worse than we knew. One of the pirates recalled a past incident when Vilu dealt with four hedgehogs who hid some sacks of grain. Vilu promised to set them free if they reveal where their harvest is hidden, and when they did so, he had the four creatures sewed up in those same sacks, along with heavy rocks, then tossed overboard, saying, "You leave my ship alive, free to go where you will!" The fact he does all of this with a general casualness and utter disregard for life, despite his Victorian manner and eloquence, puts him at the top of the bottom. All you need to know about Vilu can be summed up in one line: "I do my best to be the worst."