Who is your favorite literary villian?

a reply to: tikbalang

Ha ha for a second I thought you meant Dean Moriarty from Kerouac's On the Road.

Sherlock Holmes, good play sir/madam

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Watch it, you might incur a curse on your entire progeny

I thought this one might come up.

originally posted by: zosimov
Watch it, you might incur a curse on your entire progeny

Even the ones I don't know about?

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Ignorantia legis neminem excusat

Smaug from The Hobbit....he's a friggin dragon that eloquently trash talks *drops the mic*

a reply to: zosimov

Hah, good point. The late 90's/early 00's were a little fuzzy though.

a reply to: zosimov

Agatha Trunchbull from Dahl's Matilda was a great villain with very little to excuse her excessive tyranny. Cruella De Ville also seemed very dark when I was a kid and so did the General Woundwort rabbit in Watership Down. Trunchbull raises more smiles and takes the lead.

The creature from Frankenstein was an irredeemable monster whose villainy was made worse by his obvious capacity to know right from wrong. Misdoings in spite of intellect makes for a great literary monster.

Macbeth could be another and yet he was arguably led down his path, in the same way as Judas, by forces beyond our ken.

a reply to: Kandinsky

Good ones! Thanks for weighing in

a reply to: zosimov

I'll be thinking of literary villains all day tomorrow.

To be 'favorite' they have to be more than plain evil and that's the fun of trying to nominate one of the buggers.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: zosimov

To be 'favorite' they have to be more than plain evil and that's the fun of trying to nominate one of the buggers.

Agreed. I had to modify my original nominee after my post! Semantics is a tricky thing sometimes.

+1 on Moriarty.
Doctor Fu Manchu. There are modern additions to Rohmer's canon. I recommend 'Ten Years Beyond Baker Street', in which the devil doctor matches wits with a retired Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. Ignacio Narbondo from James P. Blaylock's Langford St. Ives trilogy (Homonculous, Lord Kelvin's Machine, The Ayelsford Skull). Brilliant hunchbacked vivisectionist, expert on amphibian physiology, generally up to no good. Homonculous serves very well as a stand-alone book, one of the author's best.

a presumed descendant of Narbando's, Dr. Hilario Frosticos, provided the villainy in 'The Digging Leviathan', a stand-alone book that I highly recommend (also by Blaylock).

Janso Skorzeny, the vampire in 'The Night Stalker', the novelization of the tv movie back in the day that led to a classic tv series. (and a later series that wasn't so classic). interesting modern details of how a vampire would live, negotiating to buy a used car and robbing a blood bank; settled in Las Vegas, suitable as it's the proverbial city that never sleeps.

a reply to: ElGoobero

Thank you for your interesting contribution!!
Dr. Ignacio Narbondo sounds particularly villainous!



Might I add Miss Havisham to our list?

Who could forget the decaying banquet, the aging skeletal bride-to-never-be, the clocks stopped at the time she was promised to be wed?

a reply to: Kandinsky

Macbeth could be another and yet he was arguably led down his path, in the same way as Judas, by forces beyond our ken.

And one force entirely within our ken, whom Shakespeare managed to make seem more evil than he:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

His wife.

a reply to: Astyanax

Folie à deux indeed.

Here's Tom Brown's Schooldays from my bookshelves

Flashman was a dreadful rotter and unceasing bounder.

a reply to: Kandinsky

Had to read it in school. The dubious pleasures of a post-colonial childhood.

a reply to: Astyanax

But for the vexatious pricks of conscience, she'd be vilianous through and through:

Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.

Grand Admiral Thrawn

Got a few more for the list:
--not exactly a "villian" but rather an anti-hero-- Ignatius J. Reilly.
So unlikeable and yet there is something about him.. one of the most memorable antagonists of all time.
--the Grinch deserves an honorable mention!
--Dom Cassmuro (Lord Taciturn) the narrator whose reliablility is admittedly questionable relates the tragic fate of his family and his turning away from wife and child due to suspicians of her infidelity. Powerful story.

a reply to: zosimov

Two other great Shakespearean villains tell us something about the nature of evil.

One is Shylock. His insistence on the letter of his contract with Antonio at the expense of mercy and humanity makes him no different from many an ‘honest’ businessman, even in our day. Donald Trump was boasting about his own achievements in that department just the other night. Shylock is a creep, but he is an honest man, a devoted father and a suffering victim of racial prejudice. Indeed, it is only prejudice — shared by the characters in the play and Shakespeare’s audiences at the Swan and the Globe — which makes him into a villain at all. Shylock is a Jew. That is his greatest fault.

To Shakespeare’s great credit, the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice shows how prejudice and continuing insult have embittered Shylock to the point where he yearns for sanguinary revenge against his Christian tormenters. But — as a man who is, by his own lights, decent and moral — he insists on having his revenge through the courts, through due process of law.

Shylock is a villain, but he is not an evil man.

The other great Shakespearean villain is, of course, Iago. Though Iago gets his comeuppance in a dubious kangaroo-court trial at the end of Othello, he hasn’t really committed any crimes. What he has done is manipulate a husband, through the malicious deployment of third parties, to murder his wife. Even his motives for doing this are not clear: is he simply angry at Cassio’s promotion? Envious of the Othello’s success? Angry at his own failure? Was he, perhaps, spurned by Desdemona? Iago is the classic literary villain because there is little or no justification for his villainy; he represents the apparent inscrutability of evil.

Of course, evil is only inscrutable if you think of it as a self-sufficient quality or entity. But discussing that will carry us off topic. I prefer complex villains to simple ones.

Another of my favourite villains, though for largely sentimental reasons, is HAL9000.