Enfant Terrible / Literature

---

• And the Ass Saw the Angel (a book written by Nick Cave, whose musical career formerly provided the page quote — See Music, below) has the character of Beth. The Unreliable Narrator can't quite make up his mind whether she's actually a demonic witch or not.
• Virginia in Alex Grecian's The Black Country, who turns out to be the one responsible for murdering her half-brother Oliver. The reveal results in infanticide and suicide.
• Ray Bradbury:
  • The murderous newborn in "Small Assassin".
  • The disturbingly polite and sweet children in "The Veldt", who murder their parents because they've threatened to cut off their holographic nursery. Bonus points for being named Peter and Wendy.
  • "Zero Hour", in which every child in the world is convinced by an alien race to set things up to let them invade Earth and kill all of the adults. And they agree because they are promised later bedtimes, no baths, and all the TV they want. And it ends with the main character's daughter leading a group of aliens straight to her parents while calling to them as she searches the house.
• Bruce Coville's Book of...:
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens collects the aforementioned Ray Bradbury story Zero Hour, in which every child in the world becomes this when they side with the aliens.
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Ghosts II: The titular spook in George Pinkerton and the Bedtime Ghost is a little girl, no older than seven, who throws massive tantrums whenever a family that recently moved into "her" house tries to put their daughter to sleep. Justified in that she's been stuck in limbo for decades and furthermore, since she died right before she went to bed, she's been exhausted and cranky for all of that time.
• Gwendolen Chant from Diana Wynne Jones's Charmed Life may look like a china doll, but she has a vindictive nature and mistreats her brother Cat.
• Confessions (Saint Augustine): From observing other babies, Augustine deduces that he himself was as corrupt and self-centered as a child as he was in his adult life. He probably wailed and whirled his limbs around with as much force as possible, a behavior only tolerated because of how weak and pathetic his attempts at harm were.
• Josephine in Agatha Christie's Crooked House. She's responsible for a series of murders starting with her grandfather.
• Adore Loomis, the spoiled, precocious, mean-spirited brat in The Day of the Locust. He eventually takes it too far and pays with his life for it.
• Mordred Deschain, The Little Red King, from The Dark Tower series. At least two characters fall victim to this evil baby within hours of his birth.
• In The Death Gate Cycle has one whose role spans two books. Bane is the son of a mysteriarch, who had an Evil Plan to take over the human race in Arianus. He orchestrated this by switching the king and queen's legitimate child with his own son. The kid was kept safe from harm with sheer looks and eventually gets his comeuppance when he tries to kill the king. His previous mother then strangles him with magic, in a sort of parallel to the fate of the king and queen's original son, who suffocated from lack of air in the higher reaches of Arianus.
• Her Thumbleness in Dragon and Slave likes to select slaves to be entertained by, in various ways. Scaled ones get painted on or in one case carved. Others mostly get beat up.
• Dune: Alia, who is also the Creepy Child poster girl. She is born fully aware, and kills her grandfather at the age of two. And laughs. In fairness, he was the Big Bad.
• In the second Eisenhorn book, during the Thracian Atrocity, Eisenhorn comes across a child that he thought was in danger. Said child turned out to be an escaped Alpha-plus level psyker: it compels Eisenhorn to kill a Space Marine and nearly forces him to commit Psychic-Assisted Suicide before being driven off.
• Peter Wiggin in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game liked to torture animals to death and physically and mentally torment his siblings.
• Leck in Fire. Guess it comes with being able to put thoughts into people's heads... but a lot of people are damaged or killed thanks to him.
• In the Firebird Trilogy, Phoena was a wasteling^note third child, and thus required to commit suicide once her oldest sister had two children until the age of six when her sister Lintess died. Their sister Firebird privately suspected that Phoena had murdered Lintess, but could never prove it. Certainly, Phoena has always been "unswervingly selfish".
• This trope is deconstructed in Funny Business. As a toddler, Jeannette was like this because toddlers don't comprehend that other people have feelings and can be hurt. Once she grows out of it, she suffers a massive Heroic BSoD which continues to the time of the main story.
• Eppon in Galaxy of Fear is somewhere between this and Goo-Goo-Godlike until he grows up within hours. He's cute and loving and kills people by absorbing them as soon as there's no one but the victim around to see, but seems to have a soft spot for Zak and Tash.
• Euphemia in My Godawful Life, a parody of Misery Lit: a foul-mouthed girl genius who turned her former foster parents into spiders and who has driven many of her carers to suicide. She also hints that she fakes her Asperger's Syndrome in order to avoid being locked away, and may have murdered her father (a paedophile) and his friends.
• The Bernard Taylor novel The Godsend tells the story of an English family of six who takes in an abandoned baby. As the little girl grows up, she murders the other children, one by one, so she can get all of the parents' attention. The father eventually figures out his adopted daughter is evil, but does not succeed in stopping her.
• Gaia in the Gone series, so very much. Within the four hours from her birth to the end of Fear, she manages to torture Penny after she accidentally drops her and then laughs at the scene, laughs once more at seeing terrified children walk into a fire due to Penny's visions, and forces her mother to relive her horrible memories of eating Panda. And that's not all... She also attempts to kill both her own father, Caine, by trying to crush him against the FAYZ barrier and Sam, by trying to rip him apart via telekinesis, though she doesn't succeed in either case.
• Tara Webster, Michael's little sister from the Goosebumps book The Cuckoo Clock of Doom appears to gain a sadistic pleasure from making her brother's life difficult, and displays no redeeming qualities at all. It appears that she's ALWAYS been like this, to the point that she would make things difficult for her brother even when she could barely speak. At the end of the book, it's hard to feel bad about Tara's existence being erased.
• Rhys in The Granite Shield, by Fiona Patton, is a royal bastard touched by the Gods, with consequently very different priorities than the normal people around him. When he fights at a castle siege at age twelve, he nonchalantly talks his younger brother into climbing up the privy shaft together in the middle of the night, then sneaks into the kitchen and contaminates the commanders' goblets with a horrid disease. Within weeks, the siege is over. His brother later talks a fortress into surrendering by telling the harrowing story.
• Kludd, the young owl, from Guardians of Ga'Hoole. At first, he seems like a stereotypical annoying big brother, but Mrs. P. senses that there's something very off about him, "unowlish." Kludd pushes Soren from the nest in an attempt at fratricide, threatens to eat Mrs. P., kills his parents, takes Eglantine to the evil owls known as the Pure Ones, and by The Rescue has become Metal Beak, the Big Bad.
• Young Tom Riddle as seen in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is already convinced that he's special and different from everyone around him, honing his magical skills by torturing other children and killing animals, and manipulating adults by putting on a polite and quiet act when he wants something. He was also a murderer at least twice over — and also a lich—by the time he grew up.
• Haunted (2005): Brandon Whittier is a 13-year-old cursed with progeria, a disease which causes its victims to age at seven times the normal rate, becoming Younger Than They Look. He tricks the female volunteers at the nursing home where he works into thinking he's eighteen, begging them not to let him die a virgin, and then threatening to report them for child molestation unless they give him ten thousand dollars.
• Acheri, from Hell's Children, by Andrew Boland, is a little girl who sadistically kills many people through the course of the story.
• Heretical Edge: Ammon, the main character's younger-half brother, is one seriously effed-up kid with a Compelling Voice and absolutely no regard for the lives of others. He's repeatedly described as adorable, contrasting sharply with his horrifying brutality.
• Pruitt in the Jane Rice short story "The Idol of the Flies", who is, among other things, an animal torturer, a Self-Made Orphan and a devil worshipper who totally deserved to be Hoist by His Own Petard.
• The In Death series: Ten-year-old Rayleen Straffo is revealed to be this in Innocent in Death. She is The Sociopath who killed her own baby brother (at the age of 7), two male teachers, an old woman in a nursing home, and also tried to kill her own mother. There is no Freudian Excuse for this child.
• In Infanta: A hopelessly cute, seemingly sweet and innocent orphaned princess, raised to be the bride of a warlord and legitimize his claim on her rightful kingdom...who turns out to be the mortal avatar of a sea demon called The Serpent who Devours and the actual Big Bad of the book. Keep also in mind that the heroine spends the entire book thinking that it's the warlord who's the demon's avatar...and, as a result, is too late to stop this kid from assuming her true form and eating him.
• In I Sit Behind The Eyes, the real Emily is initially believed to be a typical Jerkass. However, as part of a double-twist ending, it turns out that she is a ruthless, manipulative Psychopath, who has no qualms over killing people she doesn't like. She spends almost the entirety of the story being possessed by an Eldritch Abomination, who took over her body to stop her from succeeding in killing one of her classmates.
• The Kharkanas Trilogy has three for the price of one: the triplets Envy, Spite and Malice. They enjoy torturing their brother Arathan, including siccing a rabig dog on him or making him almost drown in an icy lake. Later, Envy and Spite murder Malice (who eventually gets better), but to cover up their deed, instead of hiding the corpse, they decide that the best course to take is to murder everyone else present within the keep as well. Then they discover that (almost) dying wakes some dormant powers within them, e.g. influencing people far away to do bad things...
• Lord of the Flies is all about how a lack of immediate consequences for their actions brings out the worst in a group of castaway children.
• In the Andrew Vachss Burke book Mask Market, Burke found that Beryl Preston, one of the children he had been tasked with retrieving, turned out to have been playing both her parents and her "captor". In the present day, he finds out that, far from growing out of it, she has only gotten worse.
• Angel from Maximum Ride, who has a very innocent appearance.....but can read and influence minds, and can communicate with fish...but mostly sharks. She also tries to take over the flock from time to time.
• V.J. in Robin Cook's biotechnological thriller Mutation — a boy whose superior intellect (and perhaps his angelic good looks as well) is the result of his father's genetic tinkering. He, however, has no sense of morality, commits a series of high-tech murders, and uses underhand means to finance his own biotechological research.
• Myth Adventures: Markie, a toddler who makes life miserable for Skeeve and his associates. Somewhat subverted in that she is actually The Ax, from a race of Older Than They Look people. She was hired to ruin Skeeve's reputation.
• In Palimpsest, people who can travel to Palimpsest in their dreams are marked with a tattoo of a region of the city somewhere on their body. One woman so marked had a baby after receiving her tattoo — and her baby was born covered in tattoos — not of Palimpsest, of someplace else — and minutes after birth he looked at his mother and said "I want to go back." His mother had a sort of Freak Out and gave him up for adoption.
• Redwall's Veil Sixclaw. He's an Always Chaotic Evil ferret, who ends up being raised by the good mice. From the start he makes them suspicious, hence the name they choose for him. It's an anagram of "evil" and "vile". His foster-mother Bryony puts it down to fear of Carnivore Confusion and adores him, but by his teens, he's attempting to poison fellow Abbeydwellers. Some fans who see him as the Woobie forget that he continues this behaviour in his wanderings, committing highway robbery and murdering two foxes (who admittedly had captured him earlier). He apparently gets his psychotic tendencies and grudge-holding abilities from his father. What really mixes up this example is the fact that he pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to save Bryony at the end of the book. This has the effect of convincing Bryony that he really was evil in his heart all along (it doesn't make sense in context either).
• Second Apocalypse: Anisurimbor Kelmomas is the son of Anisurimbor Kellhus, an Impossible Genius Dunyain. Kelmomas has inherited more of his father's Dunyain "strength" than he lets on, making him a Child Prodigy. He pretends to be an ordinary, sweet, doting eight-year-old, but in reality, he is a manipulative, psychotic and sadistic murderer who is obsessed with doing anything necessary to be showered in love by his unknowing mother.
• Seventh: Ceres Walt wrapped Meisel and Clare Walt around her little finger by the time she was about thirteen, despite behaving every inch the Alpha Bitch to her older brother, protagonist Lyle Walt: she was fawned over as a great beauty, and is also an inhumanly strong Magic Knight who repeatedly beat him in sparring matches to the point where he was disinherited in favor of her. Basil Walt infers that she is in fact a "Heretical God's Child", a Dark Messiah figure.
• Amity Adora ("Amma") Crellin in Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects; charming, childlike, spoiled, vicious, manipulative, morbid, sexually precocious, and, incidentally, a triple murderer by the age of thirteen.
• A Song of Ice and Fire.
  • The Royally Screwed Up Joffrey "Baratheon". King at the age of thirteen, his favourite activities include ordering executions, having men fight to the death, and shooting starving peasants with a crossbow for target practice. He also cut open a pregnant cat as a child and picks on his "weaker" brother.
  • At age twelve, Gregor Clegane burned off half of his younger brother Sandor's face when the latter dared to play with one of Gregor's toys, a toy that Gregor did not want anymore.
  • There's also the nine-year-old Arya Stark, who is rapidly becoming one of these as she continues her revenge against everyone who has harmed her or her family.
  • Varys's "little birds" don't just steal secrets. They also carry knives.
  • Cersei was arguably even worse than her son Joffrey in her youth — for all she was a lot brighter when it came to covering her worst offences up successfully as, at most "just a mean, but cute, brat". Abusing her baby brother Tyrion, seducing her twin brother (Jaime), accusing a servant girl of theft and having her beaten so badly that she lost an eye, murdering her best friend to keep her quiet about their visit to a fortune teller (and because said friend also fancied Jaime)... she did all this and more as a lass. What's worse is that she doesn't regret any of this as an adult. If anything, she's proud she was so "bold", so young. In light of this, it's no wonder Joffrey turned out the way he did with Cersei as his primary parental figure.
  • Unsurprisingly occurs in House Frey, the poster House for Big, Screwed-Up Family. Two of Walder Frey's young grandsons, "Big" Walder and "Little" Walder, who are only 52 days apart in age, embody this in different ways, both being bullies. However, Little Walder shows a nastier and more sadistic streak, taking part in the cruelties of the sadistic Ramsay Bolton. His cousin Big Walder, despite being very low in the line of succession (his father is Walder Frey's 13th son) makes it clear early on he intends to become Lord of the Crossing. It's almost certain he murdered Little Walder, who was ahead of him in the line of succession, even though he was only 9. However, he still comes across as sympathetic, considering what an Asshole Victim they were, and the fact Big Walder shows a more decent side in "A Dance with Dragons".
  • Euron Greyjoy, in a preview chapter for The Winds of Winter, confirms to his brother Aeron while torturing him that he has murdered (or orchestrated the murder of) three of their brothers. His first being their half-brother Harlon who was murdered as a child. One needs to remember that Harlon was at least a few years older than Euron when the deed was committed. While he was still young, Euron also regularly sexually abused Aeron and another brother, Urrigon, explaining Aeron's hatred and utter terror of Euron. Growing up has only increased Euron's depravity.
• Struwwelpeter: "The Story of Cruel Frederick" is about a boy who abuses animals, breaks things, and even bullies his nursemaid Mary. Frederick gets his comeuppance when a dog he beats bites him on the leg, leaving him bed-bound for days and forced to take nasty-tasting medicine.
• Princess Violet from The Sword of Truth. A spoiled princess who orders to chop off heads a-la the Red Queen. A few books later, she is taught to cast curses through magical drawings. Cut to a Little Miss Badass coming to visit; Well... Who's that on the drawing? Oh, that's right, it's me. (draws a few lines) Well, Violet, now it's you. Cut to Sound-Only Death.
• The Twilight Saga:
  • Jane and Alec: despite their eternal childlike appearance, the twins are very feared and respected by every vampire who knows their rare psychic powers and evil personalities.
  • "Immortal children", a.k.a. very young kids turned into vampires. Unable to control themselves at all, they are killed when found, as are their creators, anyone who tries to protect them, and anyone who knows about them.
• The Big Bad of the Tunnels series is one: Rebecca Burrows, the protagonist's 12-year-old little sister.
• Eva Spencer of Void Domain enters adolescence as a highly adept Blood Mage who thinks little of wandering down an alley and reducing any would-be muggers or assailants who follow her to raw materials. Running away from home as a young child and becoming the pupil of a Mad Scientist demonologist probably didn't help matters much.
• Tad Williams's The War of the Flowers just straight out calls it The Terrible Child. Everyone knows he's pure evil though. That was kind of the point of creating him in fact.
  Lord Hellebore: That child is an abomination.
  Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles: Then you have achieved your purpose, my lord.
• Warrior Cats: When Yellowfang first sees Brokenkit after his birth, she notices he seems angry and hate-filled already. At that moment she believes he'll be a danger to the forest (which he is as an adult).
• The protagonist of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks is a 16-year-old boy who has killed three children and numerous small animals, the children at a very young age.
• Wings of Fire:
  • Subverted with Clay. As a teenager, he doesn't feel particularly evil or violent, which confuses the others because of how he was as a hatchling. Right after hatching he attacked the other eggs and had to be torn away from them by force. However, it turns out he wasn't actually attacking them. This is normal MudWing behavior. The first-hatched dragonet (called a "bigwings") has a natural Big Brother Instinct which causes them to help break their siblings out of their eggs.
  • Peril was raised as one. She has a Fictional Disability where she produces too much fire. Just touching her causes severe burns. So, an evil queen decided to raise Peril to kill others for blood sport.

---