Complete Monster/Stephen King

Stephen King has written some pretty nasty villains in his day, but these Complete Monsters particularly stand out. With rare exception, the actual monsters of his works tend to pale in comparison to the more human villains.


 * Rose's husband Norman in Stephen King's Rose Madder. Setting aside for a moment the fact that he's been beating and sexually abusing Rosie for fourteen years, including causing her to miscarry, after he finds out that she left him, he is determined to hunt her down and torture her to death. His methods for locating his ex-wife are tracking down, torturing, and murdering the people who helped her. His favorite method of killing is biting his victims to death. He is also a racist, sexist, homophobic creep who thinks all feminists are lesbians and despises one of his victims as soon as he finds out he's Jewish. His feelings about women are summed up in the fact that when he is in disguise and has to come up with the name of a woman who's protected him, he uses the first and last names of his two favourite porn actresses. When he finally meets his admittedly gruesome fate, there is no chance that the reader feels any sympathy for him.
 * Selectman Jim Rennie from Under the Dome. At best, he's a cold-blooded amoral, greedy, psychopathic bastard. Soon after the start of the novel, Then it gets worse.   Jim Rennie is easily one of Stephen King's worst villains. Happily, he gets one of the more horrifying deaths.  Either way, he deserved it.
 * From IT:
 * The titular monster is neither animalistic nor alien in its thought processes; the creature has full understanding of human morality, it just doesn't care. In the town of Derry, IT awakens from its hibernation every three decades and proceeds to murder and devour the children of the town, often using the avatar of a Monster Clown named Pennywise to lure children into its clutches. IT prides itself on using its shapeshifting and hallucinogenic powers to torment its victims, preying on their phobias and acquired fears and likening the cultivation of their terror to "salting the meat." From 1740 to 1743, IT was responsible for the disappearance of three hundred Derry Township settlers. In 1957, IT killed Bill's six-year-old brother, George, and devoured Patrick Hoffstetter alive while in the form of his greatest fear, leeches. IT also drove Henry Bowers to madness, then killed Bowers' friends after they succeeded in luring the Losers' Club into the sewers. After waking up in 1984, IT kills a man named Adrian Mellon before resuming its violent killing spree of children. IT proceeds to manipulate Henry Bowers into trying to kill the Losers; drives Bill's wife, Audra, catatonic by exposing her to its deadlights; and manages to kill Eddie before its final defeat.
 * Patrick Hockstetter, who . He is described as so profoundly sociopathic that the concept of morality was impossible for him to grasp. In a sense, he was born on the far side of the Moral Event Horizon.
 * Randall Flagg from The Stand, of course. He has a history of inspiring some of the world's worst people, raping and murdering for generations before the events of the book even start. He is seen as an embodiment of evil itself. Living through different lives in different worlds, the one constant about Flagg is that he is always working to sow the seeds of chaos and despair wherever he goes. Flagg was part of the Vietnam War, Klu Klux Klan lynching, police murders, and race riots, and each time he was part of a violent experience it would ultimately serve to empower the evil within him.
 * In The Stand, Flagg appears as a Dark Messiah in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ravaged United States. Here he builds a new civilization in Las Vegas, calling to him those with penchants for destruction, power and fascism. Flagg has people publicly crucified for opposing or failing him, murders his pregnant girlfriend for enraging him, and plans on destroying the peaceful "Free Zone" settlement just so his civilization can be the dominant one.
 * In The Eyes of The Dragon, Flagg is an Evil Sorcerer in the medieval country of Delain. Here, Flagg has Queen Sasha murdered, poisons King Roland, frames Prince Peter for the crime, and then plunges Delain into a new Dark Age by manipulating the remaining heir, Thomas.
 * In The Dark Tower series, it is revealed that Flagg has lived for so long and accumulated so much power that he has become the emissary for the Crimson King. Flagg earns Roland Deschain's undying hatred for beating and sleeping with Roland’s mother, and for aiding the revolutionary, John Farson, in causing the destruction of the city of Gilead. Flagg also forces Roland to let his preteen companion, Jake Chambers, die, and drives a girl insane by telling her the trigger phrase which causes a formerly dead man to recount the afterlife to her. Corruptive, treacherous and sadistic, Flagg's ultimate goal was to betray his master and climb to the top of the Dark Tower in order to become God of all.
 * As noted in the Film section, Carrie's mother Margaret and Alpha Bitch Chris Hargensen are both utterly horrible people; their abuse of the titular character is the main reason she's more a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds than just an Omnicidal Maniac at the end. However, both could be said to have some form of Freudian Excuse for their depravity and terrible actions. The same cannot be said about The Sociopath Billy Nolan, who is thoroughly nasty and malicious just because.
 * While the movie tones Billy Nolan down, the original book makes it clear that he's a total psychopath. He often beats up his girlfriend, Chris, and humiliates her, and his own "friends" are terrified of him. He barely knows who Carrie is; he just wants to destroy her life. What makes him arguably the scariest character is that he has absolutely no connections to Carrie and does the prom prank only For the Evulz -- he took over the plan from Chris and did most of it himself, and it's stated that he would find it just as funny if Chris were the victim of the prank.
 * Reverend Sunlight Gardener in The Talisman. Brainwashing children is probably the least despicable thing he does. "Can ya gimme Hallelujah?"
 * Also Morgan Of Orris, Eviller Counterpart of the Big Bad, Morgan Sloat. While Sloat has some care for his son, his twinner has no such redeeming qualities to him.
 * Percy Wetmore from Stephen King's The Green Mile.
 * The biggest Complete Monster of The Green Mile is Wild Bill, because he . Percy is almost saved from this trope when he.
 * Needful Things: Leland Gaunt is a very different kind of a monster villain, a genial and well-spoken owner of a little novelty shop that just happens to have your heart's greatest desire in stock. He's willing to sell it to you for a paltry sum and a little favor. This is a harmless prank to play on your neighbor. What you don't know is that your "needful thing" is in fact a malevolent charm that will make you paranoid and obsessed over it and drive you into murderous insanity, and all the harmless little pranks are designed to thrive on old grudges and insecurities, exploit all the dirty secrets your neighbors (and you) have and stir up all the incipient feuds, turning people against each other until your whole town tears itself apart with weapons that Mr. Gaunt helpfully supplies. Even if you're spared by the slaughter and general madness, it is only so you could realize that you're partially responsible for it and kill yourself. Mr. Gaunt will just stand there at the window of his little shop, savouring chaos and death, like he'd done countless times before all across the world. Although he is heavily implied to be, so it makes sense.
 * The consciousness of the entire Overlook Hotel in The Shining can be viewed as being this. Anyone who stays in the hotel becomes corrupted and evil by its powers, and those corrupted who die there are condemned there for all eternity. This is shown clearly with Grady, who killed his wife and his two daughters, and Jack Torrence trying to kill his own wife and son.
 * From The Dark Tower series:
 * Jack Mort, a sadistic psychopath who's responsible for ruining Odetta Holmes' life twice (first by dropping a brick on her head, causing her multiple personality disorder, later shoving her on the railtrack, causing her to lose her legs, not knowing or caring it was the same woman) and killing Jake by shoving him under the bus. Roland gives back a fitting death by controlling his possessed body to jump before an oncoming train and leaving Jack's body, leaving Jack to die alone.
 * Hitler Brothers, fascist scumbags who torture Father Callahan's friend, Lupe Delgado, and later assault Callahan for being a 'nigger-lover'.