Utterson is a lawyer and therefore a respectable, wealthy man in Victorian London. The Earth, The Broken Earth series, N. K. Jemisin. Who is really the villain in Rachel Kushner’s most recent novel? Give villains explicit or implicit trauma. That’s one way to do it, I suppose. Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey. After a lifetime spent abusing and manipulating her son into believing all women are evil sluts except for her, her son murders her — but Norma's not done with him yet. She is viral, self-mutating, opportunistic (the narrative discusses her in conjunction with AIDS, salmonella and warts). Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë. The scariest motive is the lack of one—what Coleridge called Iago’s “motiveless malignity.” The most interesting villain is the one who has even more lines than the titular hero. In fact, Benchley, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, was so horrified at the cultural response to his work that he became a shark conservationist later in life. . Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. He might actually be the devil—or simply evil itself. A villain so villainous that (with the help of Steven Spielberg) it spawned a wave of shark paranoia among beach-goers. What need we Article by ayushi khemka, October 24, 2013. Did you think the villain was the whale? She manipulates and exploits all the vanities and childhood scars of her friends (wounds left by neglectful mothers, an abusive uncle, absent dads); she grabs at intimacies and worms her way into their comfortable lives, then starts swinging a pickax. Discussed in this episode: Jurassic World; Jeffrey Eugenides’s burn book; Janet in high school, again; crooked politicians; and what possibly could have been so bad about the tsarist regime. What’s their secret, asks David Robson. You feel his pain as he tries to insinuate himself into the life of the man he so admires (and perhaps loves), and as he is first welcomed and then pushed away. Well, it might mean any number of things here: most actually terrifying, or most compelling, or most well-written, or most secretly beloved by readers who know they are supposed to be rooting for the white hats but just can’t help it. Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, William Shakespeare. The villainess of choice for every man who has ever claimed his wife made him do it. A cynical, manipulative, intelligent beauty with many artistic talents and a premium can-do attitude at her disposal. And jewels—two stones, two rich and precious one who comes up with diabolical plots to somehow cause harm or ruin In fact, that’s why we like them. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the fifties. We can totally handle it. . Sure, Xan is also a villain in this novel. He says that he will never die. In the end, of course, no amount of fancy prose style is enough to make you forget that he’s a murderer and worse, but for this reader, it’s pure pleasure getting there. Some in the Lit Hub office argued that it was Julian who was the real villain in Donna Tartt’s classic novel of murder and declension, but I give Henry more credit than that. . Aaron the Moor “They don’t have a name for what he is.” Also, he has six fingers—though they’re on his left hand, so it couldn’t have been him who killed Mr. Montoya. Hubris, almost all of literature but let’s go with Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton. Learn more. Sure, the slavers are bad (and the schoolteacher is particularly chilling). Things do not then go well for Paul, because as it turns out, Annie is already a seasoned serial killer who is very handy (read: murderous) with household objects. Can’t really get any worse than that as a person—but as a character, he’s endlessly entertaining. That’s right, I said it. Antagonist: The villain of the story is the antagonist. They are like insects. I have to say, that’s smart. David is definitely worse (if slightly less all-encompassing). What’s that about? Flora Belle Buckman: Flora´s parents are divorced, so she lives with her mother in a suburban neighborhood.In her leisure time she loves to read comics, especially her favorite one: The Illuminated Adventures of the Amazing Incandesto!Although she describes herself as a cynic, she appears disappointed and vulnerable. Worst professor: Professor Umbridge, Harry Potter. In Atwood’s retelling of the Grimm fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” an evil temptress named Zenia steals the partners of three women (among many, one presumes). Top 10 Most Romantic Characters in Literature. Roz thinks: “Women don’t want all the men eaten up by man-eaters; they want a few left over so they can eat some themselves.”, Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray. In literature as in so-called “real” life, evil is, by far, the purview of the male gender; it is men who are the villains, evildoers, rascals and killers. Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov. He never sleeps, the judge. The man murders (and, it is suggested, rapes) children and throws puppies to their doom. But what exactly does “best” mean when it comes to bad guys (and gals)? Mickey Sabbath is a depraved, cruel, aging ex-puppeteer — the dirty old man to rule all dirty old men — and one of the most reprehensible characters in literature. Actually, the fact that he thinks he’s better than his father actually makes him worse. The problem with cartoonish, caricature-like villains is that … For a character who never actually appears on the pages of a the novel, Norma Bates sure gets her point across. In one of her most memorable scenes, she forces Harry Potter to write lines in his own blood. Veda is a rude, pretentious, ungrateful daughter who profits from her mother's money while mocking anyone who has to work for a living. 9 of Literature's Least Likable Protagonists. Intelligence. Think of these as noteworthy villains, if it clarifies things. Ah, Evil Earth! This is an interesting study because the seeming antagonist to Jake, the main character, is his own impotence which keeps him from the love of his life, Lady Brett Ashley. When Veda becomes famous and successful, she ends up seducing her stepfather, which sends her mother into a murderous rage. The worst villain is the one who knows you best—the one you might even love. In comes McMurphy, our hero, who wants to undercut her. 679 Riot readers answered the call, selecting 681 unique characters. The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems, but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was their delusion, their problem, not mine. from Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”. You could argue that it’s Harry who corrupts Dorian, and James who stalks and tries to murder him, but the real source of all this young hedonist’s problems is his own self-obsession. David Melrose, Never Mind, Edward St. Aubyn. Our next series of posts hopes to address this question by looking into several factors, including, the types of characters that are commonly used in literature, character development planning, the character arc, character motivation, and dialogue. Isn’t it awesome? Nor is this a book with no villain, because the pulsing sense of injustice is too great. But it’s not the suburbs exactly but the Wheelers’ inability to understand one another, their fear, their creeping, cumulative despair, that are the forces of destruction here. The slave-hunting Ridgeway, Whitehead writes, “was six and a half feet tall, with the square face and thick neck of a hammer. The General, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez. My favourite villain in literature is Captain Hook. She tries to set Rochester on fire, and then … This entire novel is based on a single idea: that a loving mother might murder her baby daughter to save her from life as a slave. Listen: Annie Wilkes is a fan. An astronaut-cum-gardener … Main Characters. Sauron As “the most evil woman in creation,” she is on a mission to torture and kill as many children as possible, and often uses murder as a focusing device in meetings. She is Richard III with breast implants. Satan, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri. The Republic of Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. It’s José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra who is the most bloodthirsty, but the unnamed General (of the Universe) who is the most compelling villain in this novel: an impossibly long-lived tyrant who has borderline-magical control over the populace, and even the landscape, whose roses open early because, tired of darkness, he has declared the time changed; who sells away the sea to the Americans. He’s a shallow, narcissistic, greedy investment banker, and also a racist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite and a homophobe, and also a sadist and a murderer and a cannibal and Huey Lewis devotee. Count Dracula It simply depends on the villain. These characters are dark, nuanced, and eternally creepy. It can’t be the man himself, who didn’t quite understand what he was doing. For the audience: Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), Rebecca Solnit on the Empty Violence of the Underachievers’ Coup, 6 Disorienting Reads for a Very Disorienting Time. He is desperately unhappy; he considers himself a god. Made iconic by Anthony Hopkins, of course, but made brilliant and terrifying—a serial killing psychiatrist cannibal, come on—by Thomas Harris. Dresses up as a gypsy to mess with Jane’s mind! The characters are the persons that are involved in the story. After all, the most villainous often take quite a few pages to fully reveal themselves. Note that an antagonist is not the same as an anti-hero like the Joker or Walter White. In everyone’s favorite horror novel about America in the ’50s, onetime bohemians Frank and April Wheeler move to the ‘burbs, and find it. It’s José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra who is the most bloodthirsty, but the unnamed General (of the Universe) who is the most compelling villain in this novel: an impossibly long-lived tyrant who has borderline-magical control over the populace, and even the landscape, whose roses open early because, tired of darkness, he has declared the time changed; who sells away the sea to the Americans. His villainy is in his carefulness, his coldness, his self-preservation at all costs. A quick-reference summary: Like a House on Fire on a single page. It is super fucked up and exactly what I worry about in a country where fundamentalists have any among of political power. Just like Alyosha, Natasha Rostova, a young noblewoman from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, proved herself more popular than the two other most important characters … villain definition: 1. a bad person who harms other people or breaks the law: 2. a criminal: 3. a character in a…. She may masquerade as the subservient wife, the selfless mother, or the well-behaved daughter, but there are cracks in her facade, and when the clock strikes midnight, she strikes, too. We may boo them, wish for their demise, and gasp in horror at their latest evil deeds, but deep down, we love the villains. Interestingly, the villain in Hemingway’s debut novel is actually the nicest guy in the novel, Robert Cohn. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that—felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit—and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. Some are terrifying because of their utter heartlessness, while others are terrifying because they pretend to care. A criminal mastermind— “the Napoleon of Crime,” as Holmes puts it—and the only person to ever give the good consulting detective any real trouble (other than himself). Even this makes me shiver: Out, damned spot! The Prison-industrial complex, The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner. She drives one patient to suicide, is obsessed with vengeance, and orders a lobotomy that she knows is unnecessary. She’s a big fan. Well, she's the granddaughter of a serial killer and murders her classmate, her dog, a neighbor, and a maintenance man. Every author wants a fan like Annie Wilkes, who reads every book and hangs on every word and imprisons the writer in her creepy home and begins to torture him beyond all reason, right? Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. The end! This sadistic teacher disguises her cruelty … This kid is the actual worst. Though after countless adaptations, we now think of Moriarty as Holmes’s main enemy, Doyle really only invented him as a means to kill his hero, and he isn’t otherwise prominent in the series. Welcome to a new episode of The Book Report!This week Mike and Janet talk about six literary villains they liked even though they weren’t supposed to.. In the end, she has a single feeling of remorse and promptly kills herself. We’ve heard that one before. Most of the novel is seen from Mr Utterson's perspective. Including the reader, of course. “They are the bane of my life. . to have had so much blood in him. She is Iago in a miniskirt. Fathers don’t get much worse than David Melrose: cruel, brutal, and snobbish, a man who enjoyed humiliating his wife, who raped his young son, and who seemed to doom all those close to him to a life of pain. In fact, she'll be with him forever and ever. There is no foreseeable problem with this. But the real, big-picture villain, the thing that causes everything to dissolve, and people to start christening their kittens and pushing them around in prams, has to be the global disease that left all the men on earth infertile. She is a “man-eater” run amok. Forget all that sexual stuff you see in the movies. then, ’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, etc., Thomas Harris. out, I say!—One: two: why, He’s also weirdly pathetic. She's beautiful, except for her eyes, which are "not human eyes.". Here's a list of everything Haruki Murakami has ever compared to writing. Possibly the most terrifying character in modern literature (or any literature? The obligatory first place in the scheme of literary evildoers: Satan himself. Ridgeway, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead. The Little Prince (The Little Prince) Author: Antoine De Saint-Exupéry. He is a fantastic villain, a dangerous trickster, whose character has stumped (and intrigued) critics for centuries. Often, the creepiest villainesses in literature embody some sort of twisted femininity, like the child bride gone dark, the virginal girl turned ghost, or the mother who kills her own child. She's especially terrifying because she has the power of bureaucracy behind her; she's obsessed with creating and enforcing rules, even when it involves physical violence to students. It helps that he's the Villain Protagonist. Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises. Take, take, take. Still, it puts him in rare company. In the world of horror, there's nothing quite as eerie as a really good female villain. By the way, for those of you who think that great books can be spoiled—some of them might be below. actually inside you. Luckily, we get to spend almost the entire novel within his twisting brain. They should be got rid of as early as possible.”. Or should it be Mary Lick, a sort of modern millionaire version of Snow White’s Evil Queen, who pays pretty women to disfigure themselves? . Anti-heroes are villainous people who function in a protagonist’s role. Repeatedly topping polls of literature and film’s best villains, “the … Researchers have found that people may find fictional villains surprisingly likeable when they share similarities with the viewer or reader. “I have never been able to understand why small children are so disgusting,” she muses. These dastardly baddies are some of the most memorable characters in all of children’s literature — despite their nefarious motives and questionable intent. Turns Out We Have Perfectly Good Evolutionary Reasons to Avoid Exercise, Camilla Bruce on Lizzie Borden, Shirley Jackson, and Grimms' Fairy Tales, Patricia Highsmith's Malcontents, Misogynists, and Murderers, Six Perfectly Alluring Academic Mysteries, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö: A Crime Reader’s Guide to the Classics, The Best Nonfiction Crime Books Coming Out in January, That time Sherlock Holmes appeared in an Arsène Lupin story as "Herlock Sholmès". A list of the 10 greatest villains in all of literature – the most memorable bad-guys of the fictive world . The literary Internet’s most important stories, every day. Cora is involved in a classic kill-your-husband-to-be-with-your-lover plot, but her first attempt goes wrong, and ends up giving her husband retrograde amnesia. By the end, the novel seems to judge her pretty harshly—but I’ve always loved her. That said, the real antagonist in this novel might actually be the unknown and unexplained force that keeps transporting Dana from her good life in 1976 California to a Maryland slave plantation in 1815. But these are only symptoms, in this the Great American Novel, of the Great American Sin. It's hard to say exactly what makes the best characters scary, because it varies so wildly. 2021 Bustle Digital Group. Heroes can be flawed, tragic, brave, or even villainous, and knowing which type of hero your protagonist is can help you write an interesting and convincing main character. In a prime example of religion gone wrong, Carrie's mother, Margaret White, was both physically and psychologically abusive of her young daughter, locking her in a closet to force her to pray, telling her that her period was a sign of sexual impurity, and generally driving Carrie, to, well, murder everyone. Keeps his first wife locked in the attic! From Batman to Gandalf, compelling heroes give the reader a character to root for and a pair of eyes through which to follow the story. She’s also kind of brilliant—I mean, murdering children by turning them into animals their parents want to exterminate? Creepy Ms. Corrine marries her half-uncle, and when he dies, forces their four children to live in an attic for years, so that her father — her husband's brother — doesn't find out about their existence. extremely stifling. . The second time she tries to kill him, she succeeds, but it's messy, and the whole lover thing doesn't quite work out for her, either. The housekeeper so devoted to her dead ex-mistress that she’s determined to keep her memory alive—by goading her boss’s new wife to jump out of the window to her death. It's always creepy when little girls or sweet-faced brides show off their dark side, but on the other end of the spectrum, the woman who lives alone in the woods and reads too many romance novels can also be awfully disturbing, too. She mobilizes all the wily and beguiling art of seduction and ingratiation, which she has been able to use on men, and she directs it at women as well. ), Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. Villains are the best. But I’ve always found Lady Macbeth more interesting than Macbeth himself—she’s the brains behind the operation, not to mention the ambition. She's an emotionless manipulation machine, and does everything with cold calculation, including killing her parents, abandoning her children, and shooting her husband. from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”. She's a terrifying force of female power, praying to the gods to turn the milk from her breasts into poison, so she can better enact her horrifying deeds. Key quote: "My orders are that every single child in the … 17-year-old Abigail is a prime example of using power and hysteria and misinformation for evil. Harry Potter. She is addicted to order and power, and can be quite cruel in commanding it. It can’t be Romy; serving a life sentence for killing a man who was stalking her. Roz, Charis, and Tony, however, use their mutual hurt and hatred to form a friendship—and unpack the many lies and revisions of herself Zenia has offered to each of them. It is the whole thing, every aspect, of the American prison system—meant to catch you and bleed you and keep you and bring you back—that is the true villain in this novel (and often, in real life). . When we first meet him, he is described as a “cadaverous” man, “who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep. “The book was widely read as an antisuburban novel, and that disappointed me,” Yates said in a 1972 interview. Since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a novel, we meet many other characters as well. Apparently all this is available to her because of her remarkable beauty. The genius of old Hum is how compelling he is—that is, despite the horrible thing he spends the entire novel doing (kidnapping a young girl whose mother he has murdered, driving her around the country and coaxing her into sexual acts, self-flagellating and self-congratulating in equal measure), you are charmed by him, half-convinced, even, by his grand old speeches about Eros and the power of language. By turning them into animals their parents want to exterminate the Republic of Gilead the... 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