"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."
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:
Staff Sergeant Sam Croft from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. The Commander of a Recon Platoon in World War II, he is a cold-blooded killing machine who loves combat andkilling. 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 he kills a Japanese prisoner, after giving him cigarettes and chocolate to give him the illusion he'll live, even though he learns the soldier has a wife and kid back home. When Ensign Newbie Lt. Hearn is assigned to the platoon, he resents being placed at second-in-command. Later, when he crushes an injured bird to death to spite a soldier, he is humiliated when Hearn forces him to apologize. The result is his Disproportionate Retribution; he misleads Hearn into thinking the path ahead is clear and Hearn is killed by a machine gun. Later, he quells a mutiny by threatening to shoot those responsible. 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. He assigns Hearn to recon as revenge for the latter's rebellion, expecting - perhaps even hoping - he will be killed. Like Croft, he is a Karma Houdini. His only punishment is the humiliation when his blundering 2IC, Major Dalleson, wins the campaign by accident; although he is given the credit for the victory.
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 destroys a kingdom and releases a horde of demons just so that he can get his wish. At least he pays for it in the end.
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.
Holden: Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
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 marrying a 15-year-old and promptly raping her, tricking a 14-year-old into marrying him immediately after her entire family is killed by paying a man to tell her her surviving love interest is dead, beating the tar out of his wives on a daily basis, completely neglecting his daughter in favor of his son, forcing one of his wives to eat pebbles because he thought her rice was undercooked, shoving a gun into the mouth of one of his wives, and finally trying to strangle her to death. 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 his own drunken neglect probably caused it.
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 rapes Amir's servant, Hassan, because he wouldn't give him a fucking kite, then goes on to become a member of the Taliban, where he takes small children from orphanages to become sex slaves, and on top of all that, he actually admiresAdolf 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 Julian, his best friend, then 'buys' two teenagers. Sexual depravity ensues.
Kingdom Rattus: King Marrow I. Assumed control of Vinjia by faking his wife's death and torturing her into becoming a mindless sex slave who rapes her own sister for his amusement. He proceeds to kidnap the mother of his child and threaten her with "Cleopatra's Fate", actively conspires to kill his own son, despite the fact that, without an heir, he can't hold the throne. He thinks nothing of committing genocide, he manipulates the other tribes to his own ends, sends his most hardened assassins on a suicide mission to get back at an old mistress, introduces crack cocaine to his own tribe, and abandons his subjects in a time of crisis to pursue a relatively minor act of revenge.
It gets worse when you learn that the author based him on It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey!
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. And selling his 12-year-old granddaughter to a partner in an insider trading scam, then conspiring to have her discredited or killed when she became unstable (he doesn't seem to care which happened).
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 cold-blooded murder of Door's entire family, especially that of the mother in front of her young daughter before (possibly) disposing of her as well. It's implied they castrated Door's brother as well, in a needlessly cruel way, to ensure the family line can't continue.
The angel Islington. The Marquis's reminder that Lucifer was an angel is there for a reason. To wit, he watched Atlantis sink. His response? "They deserved it." This coming from an angel. 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 get revenge at the ones who threw him into that prison.
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, 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, staging a hostile takeover of the farm by chasing away Snowball, stealing his idea for a windmill and rewriting history, claiming that Snowball was working with the humans all along, having several animals executed under false accusations of them working with Snowball and, worst of all, selling Boxer, who had worked himself to collapsing and had been loyal to Napoleon and the farm his whole life, to a slaughterhouse where he'll become glue and bone meal. When he is due for retirement. 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 HireMisanthrope 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.
Camaris: What manner of creature are you? Pryrates: Creature? I am what a man who accepts no limits can become...
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 uses his reinforced claws to injure Tigerstar, the original Big Bad, so terribly that he dies thrashing and gurgling in agony nine times in a row, all the while watching as if the moment was as mundane as grooming his fur.
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 plots with Tigerclaw to kill Bluestar and take over the clan, even though the same clan protected him from WindClan and ShadowClan when they tried to kill him. He is eventually killed by his own mother, Yellowfang, for the safety of The Clan.
Darkstripe is also a complete monster. His Moral Event Horizon comes in The Darkest Hour when he feeds a kit deathberries! Later, he is fully willing to kill two innocent apprentices all because Tigerstar told him to. And he dies fully willing to let Scourge destroy all the clans just because he wanted a shot at Firestar! The icing on the cake is that he's the Butt Monkey of the villains.
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 his death, 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 making her victims swallow Drano.
Martin Vanger in The Millennium Trilogy. Martin is the likable CEO of a family corporation, but troubled since his sister vanished long ago. He is a nice guy and saves the protagonist's life in the movie. But in the end, Martin reveals his True Colors: he is a serial killer who has been torturing, raping and murdering hundreds of women since he was a teenager. His chilling explanation is: "This is every man's innermost dream. I take what I want."
There are at least three other villains from the series who are just as monstrous as Martin. First up is his father, Gottfried, an anti-semitic racist nazi, who not only raped his own daughter, but murdered at least 7 women in parodies of Old Testament (specifically, Leviticus) punishments. He is also the one responsible for raising Martin into another sick individual. Next up is Lisbeth's father, Alexander Zalachenko, a crime lord, who smuggles in whores and drugs and physically abused his two daughters. When Lisbeth fought back by setting him on fire, Zalachenko swears revenge on her even though he's been basically asking for backlash by his misconduct. Finally, there's Dr. Peter Teleborian, a respected psychologist who is, in fact, a closeted pedophile with a knack for physical and emotional abuse of his patients. He kept Lisbeth the sexy tied in restraints for more than a year nerd and is one of the ones most responsible for turning Lisbeth into a gek Broken Bird. All of these monsters get some form of karmic justice. Gottfried is drowned by his daughter during an attempted rape. Zalachenko gets killed by his handlers, when he tries to bully his way out of trouble one too many times. Teleborian winds up getting exposed as a dishonest fraud by Lisbeth's lawyer in a CMOA before being dragged out for possessing 8000 pictures of child porn. Nils Bjurman may not be a killer, but he is a sadist and a rapist exploiting his control over Lisbeth's finances for sexual favours from her. Her eventual payback is brutal but well-deserved. In the movie version, Martin suffers this fate as well, when Lisbeth denies him the same mercy he denied all his victims.
Dostoyevsky's Devils (AKA Demons or The Posessed) has one or two monsters. 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. But probably his most Magnificent Bastard moment, and the one that made him stand out, 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. At the end of the book, after the dust settles and several characters are dead, we find out what happens to Pyotr. He just leaves. Karma Houdini to the polished perfection.Good lord, what a slick king of sociopathic bullies. What about the second monster, then? Stavrogin, according to a deleted chapter where he confesses to raping an 11-year-old girl, who then committed suicide. Afterwards Stavrogin is surprised to have felt no emotion at all. Just.....
While less horrific than Svidrigailov, Luzhin is completely and unambiguously lacking in redeeming qualities.
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 raped several dozen female prisoners to death and enjoyed it, as well as Honor's jailors later in the series, who strip searched her every day in front of male guards after burning out the prosthetic nerves in her face. None of those, however, even came close to Saint-Just, who calmly detonated a nuke in the middle of a large city to destroy his opposition, 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 Deathexceedingly well.
Thomas Theisman: I think we've had quite enough of those kind of trials. Goodbye, Citizen Chairman.
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. Nuking a city? Saint Just 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 at Honor's hands and his hanging by the citizens of Sidemore 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 he rapes and kills a civilian woman and then murders Bragg for reporting him. Then, in Sabbat Martyr, he kills Colm Corbec while trying to kill Saint Sabbat. Granted, he was under the influence of Pater Sin's psykers at the time, but that needed something to latch on to, like an already-present desire for some Murder-Death-Kill. In Straight Silver, he almost beats Larkin (a relatively old man) to death for defending an innocent old lady, and later on, when Cuu finally attempts to revenge-kill Larkin while he was defenceless and in the middle of a seizure, he ends up murdering Sehra Muril, a fellow Ghost who catches him red-handed. 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.
Dilaf in Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. He's introduced as Hrathen's slightly loony sidekick, but it gradually becomes apparent that the guy is much more clever- and much more evil- than he appears. By the end of the book, he's revealed to be a superpowered warrior monk (and The Dragon to the theocratic emperor ruling half the continent), who thinks nothing of sacrificing his own men so that he acquires the power to teleport somewhere he could have walked in fifteen minutes. It turns out he blames the Elantrians for the death of his wife, but he loses any sympathy when we find out his plan - to commit the genocide of everyone in the kingdoms of Arelon and Teod, just because any of them might become an Elantrian someday. When Hrathen finally decides he's had enough and strangles Dilaf, it's truly a moment for the audience to cheer.
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 Dilaf, 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 Tonk Fah, who has a running gag of going through pets at a phenomenal rate - until we learn the reason for that is: he can't keep himself from torturing any animal that comes into his possession to death.
Brandon Sanderson has explicitly confirmed Tonk Fah 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:
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.
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.
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 the Duke tricked three gullible handmaidens into giving the feathers of the Princess of Birds' crown to him (thus rendering her unable to meet her lover in Heaven) and then murdered them so that they couldn't ask for them back, so that he could become immortal. But wait, there's more!The Duke then drowned a city just to be able to hide his Soul Jar there. But wait, there's more!The three aforementioned handmaidens? The Duke cursed them to guard his Soul Jar, essentially binding them to protect their murderer's heart for eternity. 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...)
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.
Eurasia is our ally. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
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. Fortunately, not only does he fail to break Tom, but Tom revives good and hope in some of the other slaves on Legree's plantation.
Spoilers ahoy! In The Saga of Darren Shan, after his reappearance, Steve Leonard "Leopard" has become this. First of all, he's a sociopathic mass murderer and with extremely violent mood swings to boot. Between seducing the hero's sister in order to get her pregnant and use his son as a bargaining chip against Darren and snapping the neck of Evra's son just for his own sick joy, 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.
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, they end up conquering the entire world.
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. Vorrutyer would have his schizophrenic assistant rape a woman until she got pregnant, and then give her to Serg; whatever he did with them are noodle incidents probably best left without description. 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 his father the Emperor invented a war to provide an opportunity to kill him. Taking down approximately five thousand other Barrayarans and an unknown number of Escobarans in the process. Ezar is more a Magnificent Bastard than monster, however, because he knows Serg would destroy Barrayar and the only way to get rid of him without igniting planet-wide civil war is to kill him and make him seem like a hero. His methods are brutal, but stabilizing Barrayar is the goal of everything he does.
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 gets his face torn off by the title bear, it feels entirely appropriate.
Virgil Byrnes, the father of the title character in Chris Crutcher's Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes. He held Sarah Byrnes' face against a burning wood stove when she was three, 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, stabs and nearly kills Moby out of pure spite. There is no explanation or justification for anything he does; he's just batshit crazy; even his own kid says so.
Karma gets him in the end. That last act brings to light all of his crimes and he ends up a fugitive. Then Moby's mother's boyfriend, Carver Middleton, who was a Vietnam War veteran who served in Special Forces, tracks him down and beats the shit out of him. Then the psycho gets a 20 year prison sentence.
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, and in Angry Management, it was revealed that Hudgie killed himself shortly after Ironman ended) are some of the most chilling.
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? Her training included serial rape, and she had a daughter at about age 15. Kalarus is holding the child, Masha, captive to ensure Rook's continued good behavior, despite the fact that Masha is probably his granddaughter. When he later takes High Lady Placida hostage, he stops her from attempting to escape by locking her in a room with the girl and several magical constructs— and if she tries to escape, they've been programmed to go for Masha first. 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 had his Brainwashed and CrazySuper Soldier Legions slaughter most of the female Citizens in the Realm, and when he attacked Ceres, 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 regularly pissing off Kalus, the great fury that resides within the volcano near his city, and then bound that fury's wrath to his own life so that as long as he was alive, Kalus wouldn't blow his top. the plan in this case being that if he was defeated, his city would be filled with hundreds of thousands of refugees, his entire Legions, and the Legions of his enemies, and they'd all be killed when he died. This ultimately led to one of the most brutal I Did What I Had to Do moments in the series, when Gaius deliberately triggered Kalus' wrath before refugees started fleeing and Kalarus' and loyalist Aleran Legions were inside the blast zone.
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, allies with the Vord to save his Dirty Coward hide and becomes their brainwashing and Mind Rape specialist, with some actual rape thrown in to boot.
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 orders Tavi to slaughter a village who surrendered to the Canim for "conspiring with the enemy," then charges him with insubordination when he refuses. Later, when a duel doesn't go his way, he tries to avoid justice by grabbing a nearby woman to use as a hostage. Luckily, said woman was Invidia, who's a Neutral Evil bitch in her own right, so Fidelias was free to shoot the both of them.
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 she joined the Vord Queen, throwing hundreds of millions to their deaths to save herself. 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: when Septimus defied his father's plans to marry him off to Invidia and married Isana instead, she arranged his assassination. There wasn't even anything official. She'd just assumed Septimus would marry her despite the fact that he actively disliked her and took his marrying a commoner as a calculated insult against her. Yes, the entire conflict of the series was Invidia's fault.
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.
Miss Minchin of A Little Princess — Greed Incarnate. She discovers her richest 11-year-old pupil has been orphaned because her father died of shock after apparently losing all his money in a bad investment. Her reaction? "So who's going to pay her bills?!" Her solution? Enslave, torture, and starve her until she's satisfied she's saved more than her father charged. It takes a truly complete monster to heartlessly treat a tragedy to a little girl as a math problem and to ignore the agony an event causes another in favor of seeing a minor inconvenience it causes to yourself. But wait, it gets worse. The text makes it clear she's doing it for more than money but out of an honest desire to hurt the main character. That's why she's treated worse than even the other maids and servants.
Mrs. Norris (no, not that Mrs. Norris) of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is so cruel, she's one of the few Austen villains that is not a Karma Houdini. Because she has no life of her own (no children, no husband after he dies, no work or business because she's an aristocrat), she devotes her life to making one person's life miserable — the heroine and her niece, Fanny — making sure her sister and brother-in-law don't treat her as well as their own children, making sure Fanny's aware of how she doesn't deserve to be treated like their children and why (because her family is poorer), treating her like a servant even when the tasks cause her physical harm, and taking every opportunity to Hannibal Lecture the girl about how worthless and ungrateful and generally horrible she is and owes everything to her aunt's and uncle's "kindness", which she doesn't even deserve anyway...for no reason! Fanny doesn't even live with her! She doesn't even have the excuse of the girl ever putting her through any inconvenience. She is just that mean.
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. For those who don't have time to read the magnificent book, Sir Martin attempts to rape the hero's wife while he is out defending their lives against a superior force, all the while saying the hero is unworthy to have a wife at all, mostly because the hero's mother spurned him. Then, as he begins to scream "Let's make a baby!" A moment filled with Squick, she uses a crossbow hidden in her bag the hero gave her to shoot him through the scrotum and up into his bowels, leaving him to slowly bleed to death in agony.
Lieutenant Dudley Smith, 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 being personally responsible for the Sleepy Lagoon murder — turns out, he really didn't approve of his niece dating a Mexican boy.) 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...
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 implication that he's done a lot worse over his existence, he qualifies for this trope.
The necromancer Akhlaur from the Forgotten RealmsCounselors 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.
The Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons is another example of a complete monster. She is unable to feel emotions except hate, envy, and jealousy and simply ruins peoples lives without regrets, purely for sport.
Another Marquis: in Vanity Fair, the Marquis de Steyne proves the ultimate tyrant towards everyone who is dependent on him. And he uses his money and social status only to get people dependent on 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 Scott Pearce 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.
His host body, Alloran, was an Andalite Prince who was absolutely ruthless, and in order to win a war against the Yeerks, attempted to destroy the entire Hork-Bajir race. Alloran being trapped within his body with the Visser actually made people feel sorry for him. Let that sink in. Visser Three makes the audience feel sympathy for a General Ripper who, without a shred of remorse, committed nearly planet-wide genocide.
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 cement him as a pure monster.
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. They use it on Phoena in front of Brennen, forcing him to watch, after using her to lure him to Three Zed. Not only that, but they planned to make a Mind Raped Brennen use it on Firebird. It...didn't work out that way.
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 captures a daycare of little kids and infants, fully ready to feed them to coyotes if they resist. And that's just in the first book. In the second, he used his mutated "whip-hand" to beat Sam within an inch of his life while grinning the whole time, suggested using razor wires to shred a girl with super-speed abilities to bits, and almost killed the Big Bad's love interest by hurling her almost casually into a rock. 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 becomes King of Perdido Beach, 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. After a kid named Cigar accidentally kills someone in a drunken fight, Caine sentences him to Penny for twelve hours. Even Caine seems horrified when Cigar emerges eyeless and completely insane. And then she teams up with Drake in slavedriving a pregnant Diana across a desert while causing her to hallucinate things like the baby being a bug and eating its way out. When Diana finally gives birth, Drake and Penny do it again.
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 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. To list the full account of the atrocities he commits in the Silmarillion would take up too much room
Sauron, Morgoth's understudy in evil, is quite the monster himself. Tolkien referred to him as being as close to pure evil as one can get. Between torture, attempts to dominate and pervert all life, his corruption of Numenor, and feeding prisoners to werewolves for fun?
And then there's Glaurung, father of dragons, whose cruel manipulations of the children of Hurin is just ghastly (driving a brother and sister to marry one another so when they learn the truth, she commits suicide when she's pregnant? Yeah.)
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 Matilda tricks her into believing that her brother-in-law's ghost is out for revenge, terrifying the Trunchbull into abandoning her job and the wages and house she took from Jenny.
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, possibly even crucifying them, and hired a team of Sardinian kidnappers to breed pigs for the sole purpose of eating 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 it's implied that 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.
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 murdering his stepsister and former lover and making a freaking chair of her bones and skin and sending it to her brother, the chief opposing general in a civil war, to get him to kill himself. He did, but Zakalwe still lost the looming final battle. Elethiomel assumed his identity and has been the hero of the book. Puts a very dark spin on everything we've yet read.
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).
Kills the steward Matthew, cuts off Richard's ear, and rapes Aliena, all in one day. After which he allows Walter to do the same.
Burns Kingsbridge to the ground for no apparent reason.
Has his soldiers gangrape a prostitute.
Is impotent on his wedding night until he beats his wife 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, aka Dusaan, 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 Bob caught Mayella making advances on an unwilling Tom and beat her himself. 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 tries to kill Atticus's children on their way home from a school play. It's also implied at one point that Bob's been sexually abusing Mayella. 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 Saudi Arabia JUST to drive up oil price? Turning homeless people into disposable soldiers, trying to bring about a 4th Reich? And that's still not everything!
TECTin 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 he's a multidimensional alien monster masquerading as a human, whose goal has been to wipe out humanity while making them suffer as much as possible in the process. He, or it, is responsible for all the atrocity and cruelty in the world. 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 SnakeMwellret 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.
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 because he's Darmouth's son and tries to exert a moderating influence on 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 DhampyrAnti 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. Then the waters get muddied when he has a Heel Realization and decides he's become little more than an animal. While still evil, he now only kills to feed and has become the Token Evil Teammate, though, admittedly, the person he's working with is Wynn, the one human he truly cares about, and she only accepts him because she's unaware of the true extent of his crimes. Where he'll go from here is unknown, but if Wynn was to die or reject him, he'd almost certainly backslide into full Complete Monster territory.
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. He leaves his fellow scientists to die on Henders' Island, does everything he can to eliminate the intelligent and gentle Hendropods, and indisputably crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he releases five Henders Rats onto the ship with the intention of unleashing them on an unprepared humanity. The guy's as close to an Omnicidal Maniac as a normal human villain can get.
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 13th 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 zombiefetish, we don't really get to know them that well outside their intro chapters.
Carnival of Maniacs: Nathanial Morgas, richFat 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.
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 murdered one of her own newborn children 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 multiple parallel universes ("territories") plunging into mayhem and possibly evil.
This bears elaboration. He tried to: teach a medieval society how to use the equivalent of dynamite, poison the entire territory of Cloral, give nukes to Nazi Germany, trap the vast majority of a planetary population in a simulation so their real bodies would die (a success), start a race war so that a species of cat people would completely lose their main resource and die, start another race war so that the winners would be so weakened that cannibals would come in and kill them all, destroy the last remnants of a pre-dystopian culture to ensure that the territory in question was stuck as a Crapsack World (another success), attempting to destroy an island paradise and its inhabitants, and as his crowning achievement, tricks a main character into altering history, which allows Saint Dane to found a cult which, to put it simply, retroactively conquers the universe. Said cult is based on the concept of marginalization. What results is a Crapsack World taken Up to Eleven, and he intends to destroy even that, along with the afterlife, to replace it with his own version where he is God. That's right: a Class Z-3 Apocalypse for no other reason than because he thinks the world doesn't suck enough.
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 spaceand 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.
Alison from Pretty Little Liars could possibly count for this trope. She murders her twin sister in a fit of rage for simply switching places with her. Alison kills Ian because of his relationship with Courtney. Later on, she kills Jenna simply because she knew the secret. Not only that Alison pretends to be Ian in an IM conservation, stalks the girls as the second A, repeatedly blackmails them, and feeds them false information. She then tries to have someone else framed for her misdeeds. In the last book, when she appears, she manipulates Emily's feelings for her, pretends to be friends with Hanna, tries to steal Aria's boyfriend, and then attempts to kill the girls of the book. She also sends Hanna fake tickets and has her sent to a mental institution. Alison even stated in her letter that she was glad that she had killed Jenna. Talk about being a good friend...
Wendy from Blubber. She will bully anyone who dares opposing her, make their lives a living hell, and feel no remorse. No one will believe you if you complain because she's eleven and Children Are Innocent.
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, calling her in the middle of the night and leaving a voicemail that's being recorded as he assaults a pleading, screaming woman and taunts them both. Later, he rapes and absolutely brutalizes a prostitute, whom Stephanie had spoken to about Ramirez earlier that day and leaves her bloody, unconscious, naked body tied up on Stephanie's balcony. Luckily, in the fifth book, he's shot to death (albeit by someone ELSE trying to kill Stephanie) while trying to break into Stephanie's apartment.
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.
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..."
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: He has Luke steal the Master Bolt of Zeus and accuse Percy of it. Then he has Ares slip Percy the bolt so Hades would think he stole it and kill him. This would make both Zeus and Poseidon angry at Hades and cause a war between them.
In the second book: He was Luke poison the tree that causes the barrier for the camp allowing monsters to attack it. He frames his son Chiron causing him to be replaced by a cruel Tantalus. While Percy and Co manage to find the Golden Fleece to restore the tree and prove Chiron innocent, restoring the tree brings Thalia back to life. This is bad because Thalia is a daughter of one of the Big Three and it is near her 16 birthday when she is tempted with power to destroy the Olympians.
In the Third Book: Kronos has his minions Atlas and Luke trick Annabeth into holding up the sky. When Artemis sees this she takes pity on Annabeth and holds up the sky herself. When Percy sees this in his dream he tries to go and rescue her bringing Thalia among other along. There he has another of his minions tempt Thalia into killing an innocent creature to give her the power to destroy the Gods. When the after mentioned Atlas fails and ends up holding up the sky again. Kronos decides to keep him in that state.
In the fourth book: Kronos has Luke lead his troops through the Labyrinth and attack the camp killing at least two campers. He also possesses Luke to bring himself back to life.
In the Final book Kronos attacks New York, and because the Gods were distracted by Typhon. Only Percy and his fellow campers are there to defend it. He also reveals that he intends to kill his host Luke to bring back his original body. Luckily Luke does a Heel Face Turn and kills himself causing Kronos's conscious to explode making it unlikely to ever get a body again.
King Minos from the fourth book. He started off from a pretty poor position on the morality scale (imprisoning Daedalus and his son in an absolutely horrible prison when someone else managed to outwit the Labyrinth), and threatened war on King Cocalus for holding Daedalus after he escaped. This action caused him to get killed by Cocalus's daughters, but unfortunatley he grew worse after death. He Mind Raped people he came across in the Labyrinth for no good reason including Chris Rodriguez one of the campers, and manipulated Nico into trying to kill Daedalus to bring his sister back, telling him "a soul for a soul" . However little did Nico know that the soul he had in mind was his one.
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! She momentarily killed Aslan!
Lady of the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair is even worse. 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.
Cathy from East of Eden. "I've done things that would turn your blood to spit." These include murdering her parents. It's probably just as well that she abandoned her children.
Peter Kirk from Anne of Ingleside. At his funeral, his former sister-in-law denounces his cruelty to her late sister, including saying that she should have died too when her baby was stillborn. His widow publicly thanks her.
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 ( except for insects/arachnids and plants - so it gets a LOT worse). 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, so Jim and Danny are tormented by the body of the woman who used to be Jim's wife and Danny's mother. 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 drawing out and killing one hundred humans in a single day from a fake "all clear" broadcast.
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 everyone but a hunter and his son. 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 Pennsylvania National Guard, 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 ends up abandoning the rest of them just for one last chance to rape the whores before he is killed, an act that ends up killing a fourteen-year-old girl. Slightly higher up the ranks is Staff Sergeant Miller, who wants to send poor old Martin out into a combat zone so he can get away - good thing he didn't count on Martin having been an army chaplain earlier in life. 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 Skip will die from his very cruel death and then reanimate. Later, the two nutjobs show how mad they are again when they gun down Ob's current body and also kill Schow by accident, carrying on their killing spree regardless, even laughing it off. Thankfully, all get karmic ends. Kramer has his penis bitten off by Frankie and bleeds out after raping and killing Aimee, Miller is stabbed through the head by Martin, who didn't tell him he was an army chaplain, and the two Captains are killed when a dying Baker blows their command Humvee up with a missile launcher.
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 poor Worm) 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 and fails, he orders them all to beat him half to death, lets them rape Frankie, and allows them to gun down a crazy man who was riding with her. Then poor Skip is forced to bungie jump out a helicopter so zombies can gather round and eventually reduce him to little more than a stripped skeleton - it's implied that Skip is STILL ALIVE for a few seconds at this stage, then threatens to do the exact same thing to poor Worm. And his final moment is hurling poor mentally handicapped, childlike Worm out of his command Humvee even after Baker promised that he would not betray him. His death is VERY karmic, with a list of crimes that big, it would simply be a Karma Houdini beyond belief. It's still a bit of one though, as he was simply shot in the back once and shredded by a machine gun. 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)
Ramsey from the second novel avoids this because he does want to save more people and is mentally insane. DeMasso is a BIT closer to this trope, being a homophobic and cowardly Fat Bastard with some perverted tendencies, but still avoids it narrowly when he realises he won't hurt Danny, as he is a child. From the first book, T-Bone and his gang ARE pretty nasty, but one of his gang members is a bit uncomfortable shooting an undead baby. A religious fanatic from "Selected Scenes" avoids it for the reason that he is crazy and not aware of what he is doing.
From "Selected Scenes", General Dunbar counts, forcing resistance members into deadly gladiator games against captured zombies. He also tortures the leader of the movement's wife by injecting gasoline into her veins until she dies.
One of the stories in Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, entitled "Wonderful Sausage", features a butcher named Samuel Blunt, who kills children, kittens, and puppies before grinding them up into meat, then serving and eating them as his titular product.
Chuck from Sky Rocket by Margaret Cabell Self, who is very cruel to horses.
The Diamond Duchess and her Chief Ranger in Margery Sharp's Miss Bianca. She is a child enslaver and abuser, and he pursues her escaped victim.
The Forsaken, a group of thirteen villains who all fit the trope or come very close. Ishamael/ Moridin is thoroughly nihilistic ( which is why the Dark One makes him Nae'blis). 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 nearly pulls a Mind Rape on Egwene (only to suffer the same fate) and is the cause of the split in the White Tower. 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, PadanFain, 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'sFalse 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.
Despite what the Hatedom would tell you, Galbatorix from Inheritance Cycle. Most of his atrocities are, admittedly, indirect ones, caused by the Raz'aac and the Urgals carrying out his orders (the destruction of Carvahall and Yazuac) or happened offscreen. However, on his first official appearance in the final book, he officially comes into this territory, when he tortures Nasuada by having "burrow worms" dig and crawl through her body and later holds two children hostage to prevent Eragon from attacking him. He's also a coward, using the true name of the ancient language to prevent his enemies from using magic, and has Murtagh fight Eragon in a swordfight, rather than do it himself. Let's just say that his Driven to SuicideKarmic Death (blowing himself up after Eragon forces him to "understand the wrong he has done") is, in fact, well deserved. Galbatorix 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. 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 Brom, who idolised Morzan. 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!
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 kidnap The Hero's Love Interest, which backfires horribly, leading to the Downer Ending.
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 kill the heroine's mother.
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 slaughter the Tree of OQ, possibly killing hundreds of wizards, making their ancestors ( including the heroine's mother) 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.
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. He's also a rapist of both genders and has been ever since he was very young.
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 non-biological 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 into CM-territory
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.
The Narrator from "The Tell-Tale Heart.'' Though he is a Tragic Villain saying that he was tortured by the old man's vulture eye and is also the main character, that still doesn't excuse the fact that he murdered the old man and cut the man up and put his pieces underneath the floorboard.
The Outsider from the Mythago Wood mythos fits with this trope, killing and destroying like the Big Bad that he is. Christian Huxley, snared by the magic of the wood, becomes the Outsider and tragically dies when he is about to escape it, fulfilling the myth.
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 ever.
Venandekatra the Vile in Belisarius Series is so hammy in his evilness that you get the impression the author mainly wanted to see how much evil he could cram into a single character.
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 MoeIll 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 "causing" the earthquake, he then blames Ayla and orders the new Mog-ur to place a death curse on her.
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 vampire con man. At least when he was hired by Mutual's parents to convert him into a vampire, one could argue that he was Just Following Orders (not that it's a good excuse anyways). However, when he converted Cathy, killed Fred, and tried to manipulate Jen into converting, 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." And he's far from the only monster in Titus — considering what kind of play this is, perhaps a better question would be who isn't a monster during the play in one form or another (possibly Lavinia).
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.
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-ManSinister 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.
General Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game. He seems normal at first, however, it's been stated that he grew tired of hunting animals, because they relied on instinct rather than wit. So, he hunted people that crashed on the island. It was also implied that he fed the corpses to his dogs. And he told the protagonist that he would be knouted by Ivan if he did not accept his challenge.
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. Luckily, Jim keeps a knife with him just in case and stabs him in the chest before taking control of the car, driving to the side and kicking Fred off. However, when Jim is going to hide Fred's corpse in the trunk, he discovers dead babies with bite marks on them.
In Keith's moonshine-induced flashback, we meet General Entwistle, who, we're told, liked sending his troops into certain-death situations and pleasuring himself as we watch them get slaughtered.
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. Only we soon find out that Stephanie is pregnant. How? From Dan repeatedly forcing himself on her for a long time and, despite Stephanie's requests, refusing to use a condom, because he finds it more exciting that way. To pass time and coerce her to have sex with him, he would also torture Stephanie, among other things burn marks on her with a cigarette and throw ants on her. Stephanie, being 17 and needing a parent's permission for an abortion, has to turn to her mother, who is a Christian fundamentalist. How does her mother respond? Despite Stephanie telling her Dan has impregnated her by rape, she dismissively claims that it's still God's child and aborting it would be wrong. Dan only gets excited at the thought of being able to keep Stephanie as his wife forever. Stephanie may consider herself lucky despite being forever stuck inside the forest, physically damaged and not being able to leave it without dying.
