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 have their own pages:


 * A Song of Ice and Fire
 * Redwall
 * Discworld
 * Harry Potter
 * Star Wars Expanded Universe
 * Stephen King
 * The Dresden Files

"Holden: Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
 * 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.
 * President Snow from The Hunger Games, as the overseer of the corrupt Capitol government that created and runs the child-murdering spectacle of the title, commits an insane number of atrocities all in the name of keeping his power. A consummate liar, Snow, at various points in the trilogy, authorizes the painful brainwashing of multiple citizens (including Peeta, something that destroys his mental faculties for months - and, implicitly, will affect the way he processes events for life, according to the epilogue), firebombs Katniss' home in District 12 (and later tries to plant guilt for the act on President Coin), and tortures Seneca Crane because Katniss and Peeta, without his interference at all, figured out how to survive The Hunger Games together and beat the system. Katniss and the others of District 12 are convinced that the Quarter Quell's rules are changed (to force two previous Hunger Games winners from each district to compete) out of pure spite, and most of his various tortures/murders inflicted against Katniss' friends are motivated similarly (he forces Katniss to watch Cinna's beating before the Quarter Quell). Katniss and Peeta, in being sentenced to surely die in the Quarter Quell, probably got off lucky - most other Hunger Games winners, Finnick Odair included, were forced by Snow to prostitute themselves out to other Capitol residents. His most heinous action does not occur until the war between District 13 and the Capitol, where he uses innocent Capitol children as human shields to protect himself, something that proves ultimately futile.
 * President Coin definitely qualifies as such as well. She is every bit as bad as, and in some areas worse than 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 lead to the death of Katniss' cherished little sister, almost completely breaking her emotionally.
 * 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.

"Camaris: What manner of creature are you?
 * 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 Complete 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.
 * 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, also contains a ripe bastard of a villain. The Other Mother tricks children into making them living funnier life they've always wanted. Then she sucks their life out, though not before she has sewn buttons on their eyes. She also seems to enjoy child abuse. She also cheerfully disfigures and tortures the beings she creates to capture children, just because they try to resist her. Poor Other Father...
 * 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.
 * And, 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.
 * In fact, most of the villains appearing in that series qualify. Curiously, it's entirely possible the villains have to be so bad because, otherwise, the only way we'd know who to root for would be that the narrator would be singing their praises...Oh wait...
 * While Napoleon of Animal Farm is a direct allegory to Joseph 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.
 * 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.

Pryrates: Creature? I am what a man who accepts no limits can become..."

"Thomas Theisman: I think we've had quite enough of those kind of trials. Goodbye, Citizen Chairman."
 * 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 probably the worst, 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 is especially a Complete Monster when he.
 * Brokenstar is 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.
 * Gretchen Lowell, the Big Bad of Chelsea Cain's Archie Sheridan series. She's quite fond of
 * 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 at all.
 * 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.

"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."
 * 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.
 * 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 Always Chaotic 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:

"Eurasia is our ally. We have always been at war with Eastasia."
 * 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 (the fourth one's major flaws were reading books and slurping her soup), Victor kills her off and builds a new one, "improving" on the model.
 * Not to defend the guy at all, because he's as bad as described, but he didn't kill Erika IV because she read books or slurped her soup, but because she A) betrayed him by killing one of his experiments (a head in a jar he created to test the ability to create ESP), and B) developed a sense of pity, and Victor was afraid she might get the idea to pity HIM, which, as a god of a new world order, he's above.
 * 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...)
 * The Ancestress. Hoo boy...
 * 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.

"He killed eleven million men in the death camps of Pilor IX during the brief reign of the mad Emperor Justacious.
 * 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.
 * 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 his victims to suicide.
 * 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.
 * The Archimandrite Luseferous from Iain M. Banks' novel The Algebraist. "[T]hat most deplorable of beings, a psychopathic sadist with a fertile imagination."
 * 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.
 * The Shuhr from the Firebird Trilogy are a colony of Evilutionary Biologists, who regard decency as weakness. If you live on Three Zed and are not a Complete Monster, you'd better have inner psychic shields you can hide behind while presenting the appearance of sheer depravity; otherwise, you'll be "culled in training".
 * As an example of how evil they are: Dru Polar, on hearing how Micahel Shirak Mind Raped someone he murdered before finishing her, asks him to share the memory so he can enjoy her terror.
 * And they devised the dendric striker, a contraption that can be used to draw out agony for hours before unconsciousness and death. . Not only that, but they planned to make a Mind Raped Brennen use it on Firebird..
 * Then there's their habit of lulling their moles with promises of power and then removing the lulling when said mole Has Outlived His/Her Usefulness, once again to enjoy their terror.
 * Drake Merwin from Michael Grant's Gone 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.
 * 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 eachother 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 alike.
 * 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-worshipping 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 meglomania.
 * 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 Always Chaotic 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 verbally 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".
 * Elethiomel Zakalwe of Use of Weapons is a chilling example of this trope. Known for flaying his victims (a messenger sent to him returned without skin), he earned the name of 'Chairmaker' by  and sending it to her brother, the chief opposing general in a civil war, to get him to kill himself.
 * It's implied that he actually drove himself mad by crossing the Moral Event Horizon with the "Chairmaker" stunt and actually believes the massive deception he's been pulling off (he completely breaks down when confronted with the truth).
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 when first introduced, 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. Most of the aforementioned Condemned Contestants could also count, but since the author dumps that storyline to feed her zombie fetish, we don't really get to know them that well outside their intro chapters.
 * 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 even 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 own Moral Event Horizon moment--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 Parent 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!
 * 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 BigBad.
 * 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.
 * He threatens to do the same to his son.
 * He forcefully "bonds" with other Wizards, placing them under Mind Control.
 * He 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.
 * 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.
 * 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, being portrayed as a malevolent sadist who lives to torture those who end up in her domain. Ka Anor, the Big Bad, is only seen once, but that scene--where he slowly devours a likeable character alive--more than pushes him across the line.
 * 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, ever.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Shakespeare's character of Aaron the Moor provides a classic example of an unrepentant monster. Throughout the play Titus Andronicus, he engineers various acts of malice and villainy. Before his death at the play's end, he recounts a litany of atrocities he has committed and claims, "If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul."
 * Iago from Othello is one of the most (in)famous in history. Tricks his best friend into killing his own wife and then committing suicide, leaving a path of bodies in his wake (including his former accomplice and his wife, who angered him) for what many think was no reason whatsoever. And people still called him "Honest Iago" until the last couple of pages. Iago is so evil that, by the end of the play, many audiences feel that his ultimate fate (being dragged off to be tortured to death) is too good for him.
 * Richard III is one of the most famous examples of a Historical Villain Upgrade in English drama. Richard informs us early on that he is determined to prove a villain and ruin the day for everyone else. To that end, he seduces Anne Neville, whose noble husband he himself murdered, with every intent of discarding her later. He has his brother George, Duke of Clarence, sent to the Tower of London and murdered, drives his older brother King Edward IV into an early grave and has Edward's two young sons imprisoned in the Tower of London, before having them murdered. He poisons Anne herself, and even begins having his allies killed. On the night before his battle with Henry Tudor, he is visited by the spirits of his victims, who tell him to despair and die. Richard is left alone, deserted by all, and at the end, he admits that even he has nothing but hatred.
 * 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.
 * The Gentleman from the Spider-Man Sinister Six Trilogy is this, hidden behind a facade of being Affably Evil. On one occasion, an agent was sent to apprehend him during the Tet Offensive (which he helped plan). The agent was sent back blind, with his tongue cut out and addicted to heroin. He also brainwashed Pity after killing her parents so she'll be forced to do anything he tells her to do without question. However, he made sure that she kept her conscience so she'll be tormented by the atrocities she's forced to commit. And that was just to get back at her parents, who were dead most of her life anyway. Most of what he's done can be summed up with his own explanation of himself: an investor in chaos; find fertile ground, start wars, assassinations, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or whatever else and profit from the fallout.
 * Slappy from Goosebumps certainly counts. If you ever noticed a pattern in the Night of the Living Dummy series, you will notice that most of his "slaves" are little girls. 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. Does this remind you of anything? In Slappy's Nightmare, he contemplates on whether to kill the protagonist and her family if he's found out. And in Slappy New Year, he tries to cut a boy's head off, but fails.
 * 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.
 * 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 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.
 * 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:
 * 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 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.
 * 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 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."


 * 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.
 * The Crucible has two absolutely revolting characters among it's cast: Abigail Williams and Deputy Governor Danforth.
 * Abigail is a teenage sociopath who ends up kickstarting the Salem Witch Trials by getting a group of young girls to pretend that they were being affected by witchcraft and has them accuse many innocent people of being witches themselves, and keeps them all in line with intimidation and fear. Thanks to this, many innocent people end up either executed or permanently disgraced and the entire religious community of Salem is turned over on it's head due to mass paranoia and hysteria. Why did Abigail cause all this trouble in the first place? Because she refused to take responsibility for the fact that she and the other girls were actually doing a voodoo chant with an elderly slave. On top of being a sociopath, Abigail also harbors an unhealthy lust for protagonist John Proctor (who had an affair with her before the play begun) and accuses his wife of witchcraft so she can have John to herself while Elizabeth Proctor is killed. And during the play's climax, she ends up getting the group of "afflicted" girls to try to throw one of their own under the bus by accusing her of witchcraft and ends up getting Proctor accused (and killed) by the girl who had completely broken under pressure. And after all of this, Abigail showed no remorse for her actions and instead fled the town after stealing some money. While Abigail's actions may have stemmed from a desire for attention and affection from others, her repeated behavior demonstrates that she puts her own wants where her moral compass should be. She knowingly dooms and ruins the lives of many so long as she gets to reap the benefits.
 * Danforth on the other hand is an iron-fisted Knight Templar of a judge who assumes complete control during the trials and oversees the fate of the accused. Completely cold and detached from any semblance of tenderness, he absolutely refuses to allow anyone accused of witchcraft to be declared innocent and gives them the choice of either denying their "crime" which would doom them to die via hanging, or to confess to these fabricated crimes and allow their reputation to be ruined for life. Having no respect for the privacy and lives of others, and playing up the belief that questioning him is questioning God himself by extension, Danforth goes out of his way to destroy the lives of innocents all because he doesn't want to be held accountable for having already sentenced twelve innocent people to death and instead wants to make anyone who questions his authority to look guilty by association.
 * It is worth noting that there's an often omitted scene in Act 2 that causes speculation over how much of Abigail's actions are out of malice or out of dementia. If the latter is true, then she might have a reason to be cut some slack, but Danforth has no such excuse, being an adult completely in his right mind yet still choosing to destroy lives out of pride and self righteousness. In Proctor's "God is dead!" speech, he states "I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black heart that this be fraud- God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together." Even in the sending of a message that everyone is equally guilty of being the Devil in their close-minded behavior and actions, Danforth still comes out looking the worst and most devilish among them all, with Abigail close behind. Abigail dropped the ball, and Danforth deliberately kept it rolling.