Monster / Literature: A to C

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

# - A

• 100% Match: Bartholomew "Bart" Bartley is a petty murderer responsible for killing most of his family. Desiring to be in a relationship, Bart spends his free time scoping out potential women to become infatuated with, all while secretly tampering with the food he cooks at his fast-food establishment and occasionally murdering innocents whenever it's most convenient for him. Whenever his dates go awry, Bart immediately kills the woman he was dating; one woman was sprayed with acid, while another was burned to death, along with her five children and three other civilians. Bart even goes as far as killing a police officer and violating her corpse simply because he didn't want her to discover he was driving with a suspended license.
• 1901, by Robert Conroy: Kaiser Wilhelm II, the inept-yet-lethal ruler of Imperial Germany, envies the British Empire's prestige. Desiring an overseas empire of his own, the Kaiser launches an invasion of New England, sparking a war with the United States that kills thousands. During the course of the war, the Kaiser orders German immigrants to America killed in mass executions, denouncing them as traitors; has New York City occupied and looted; destroys several important landmarks and has thousands of foreign vessels forcibly commandeered to help supply his army. Posing the demeanor of a sulking child, Kaiser Wilhelm II was so consumed by his insecurities he would risk anything, even war, to alleviate them.
• 30 Days of Night: Immortal Remains:
  • Bork Dela is a brutal vampire who views any recognition of humanity as a weakness. Bloodthirsty even by vampire standards, Dela is thought to have introduced Hitler to the occult, and may have had a hand in his death. In the present day, Bork Dela goes on a murder spree in Savannah, Georgia, draining men and women alike of their blood and severing their heads, earning himself the nickname of the Headsman, and supplying blood to the corrupt vampire Elder Enok. During his rampage, he beats and rapes a young woman, leaving her to eventually die giving birth to his offspring.
  • Enok is the rogue Elder who turned both Vicente and Lilith. Expressing disdain for the other Elders who seek to remain hidden from humanity, Enok seeks to overthrow the human race as the dominant species and reduce them to cattle, rounded up in slaughterhouses and systematically executed. Enok holds the dismembered but still "living" Lilith captive to be tortured by his underlings. Confronted by Dane and Eben, he sentences Dane to a violent death and very nearly kills Eben for not submitting to him.
• 7th Son: John Alpha kills his innocent clones and commits a cruel Mind Rape on his own mother. In order to drive up oil prices and make more money, he arranges for the nuking of Saudi Arabia. Alpha conscripts the homeless and less fortunate into an army as cannon fodder and tries to establish his own 4th Reich to reign over the world.
• Abarat: Mater Motley successfully brings about the end of all that is good by making a pact with the Nephauree, beings whose whole purpose is to destroy. She releases untold millions of evil insects, and then burns the world with a massive deathship. She burned down her own house rendering her son blind and killing all but one of her 20 or so grandchildren—the souls of whom, along with those of several of her other victims, she contains inside the dolls which make up her dress. Her abuse of Christopher Carrion for all his life, such as sewing his lips shut for even mentioning the word love, is what turned him into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Her only motivation for these actions is sadistic enjoyment.
• The Ables series:
  • The Ables: "Finch"—true identity Thomas Sallinger—is a Fallen Hero. Finch is an absorber who leads the Believers, a group dedicated to seeking the prophesied reincarnation of a nigh-omnipotent man known as Elben, intending to set himself up as a god using Elben's powers. Finch falsely believes that the protagonist, a blind hero-in-training named Philip Sallinger, is Elben, and spends the book trying to force Philip to unlock his powers. In order to do this, Finch turns Philip and his friends into outcasts with the help of Chad; puts Philip's mother into a coma and later kills her; mounts an invasion of Philip's hometown of Freepoint with an army of Believers, killing hundreds; and finally threatens to destroy the town using a nuclear bomb, claiming that if Philip, his grandson, can't stop it, then "I don't want to live, and you don't deserve to." Finch completely lacks in compassion, loyalty, or honor, and whatever kindness he showed on the outside was a sham to hide his true nature.
  • Strings: Marian Ettinger is the head of the Department of Homeland Security's Custodial Detection unit, and uses the fear of supers to justify capturing and imprisoning heroes, despite having superpowers herself. In order to keep the fear going, Ettinger uses her own superpower to force captured heroes to commit crimes, including forcing Philip's father to fight him. When not being puppeteered, the supers are kept in solitary confinement, with chips in their hands designed to cause agonizing pain if they use their powers. Ettinger lies to her superiors about the presence of a resistance movement in order to deploy the National Guard against Freepoint, destroying most of the town and taking many of its residents prisoner. When the Ables confront her in the capital, Ettinger takes control of Henry and uses him to control the Ables, gloating that with him, she can turn the supers into her private army, attempting to use the Ables' powers against civilians to demonstrate.
• Absolute Duo: Narukami Sakaki pretended to befriend Toru Kokonoe so as to gain entry into Toru's family sword-training dojo. Once inside, he casually murders everybody inside before setting the building on fire, while mocking his victims as "being weak." Next Sakaki turns his sword on Toru, which Toru only survives because his grievously wounded younger sister, Otoha, took the blow instead. Narukami then mocks the Heroic Sacrifice by saying "how boring, all she did was die." Some time later, Narukami does something similar to a boy who would later be named "K," killing the latter's older brother before him resulting in his family being torn apart, and him being sold into a criminal organization that made him a combination slave/test subject/Child Soldier, and when "K" wound up in prison after attacking Toru at Koryou Academy, Narukami teleported him out and sliced him in half, vertically, letting him live just long enough to tell him that his life was meaningless and his role in the story is over. When Toru returns home on a yearly pilgrimage to honor the dead, starting with his sister at the cemetery, he finds Narukami waiting for him at the site of his former dojo, acting as if nothing's wrong, like he doesn't understand why Toru's angry. After trying to make Toru sound crazy for wanting to avenge his fallen loved ones, Narukami gets bored and slices Toru's shield in half—along with the arm behind it.
• The Accursed Kings: Mahaut d'Artois is the countess of the lands of Artois, a corrupt and ruthless woman who uses poison as her favorite method of bending fate to her whim. Killing numerous people, even murdering King Louis himself to remove any obstacles, Mahaut is willing to chance Civil War and mass death to keep hold of Artois and ensure her bloodline sits atop the throne. To remove Louis's bloodline, she proceeds to poison the baby she thinks is Louis, delighting in the crimes she commits, with the more perverse and eviler bringing her the most joy.
• Act of Love, by Joe R. Lansdale: The Houston Hacker, real name Phillip Barlowe, is a depraved necrophiliac and cannibalistic serial killer who begins murdering young women in Houston, taking parts of them to cannibalize as well. After three such deaths, the Hacker is enraged the cops are hunting him and targets the hero Marv Hanson's teenage daughter, running her off the road and killing her boyfriend. He proceeds to use his civilian guise to convince Hanson his partner Joe Clarke is the Hacker, but does the same to Clarke as well, while murdering a reporter who got too close to the truth. along with the reporter's family. When Hanson is distracted, the Hacker takes the opportunity to attack Hanson's home, killing Clarke and the other cops there before planning to rape and kill Hanson's wife after he attempts to crucify her to the wall.
• The Acts of Caine: Berne distinguishes himself from other assassins, like Caine, by being a stone cold psychopath, torturer and rapist. We first see his insanity manifest when he kills a nonhuman prostitute for absolutely no reason, and he relentlessly hounds Caine and his allies with murder on his mind. Berne kills any of Caine's allies that he can and, at one point, tries to rape a captive man as an interrogation tactic. At the end of the day, Berne's only goal is to kill whom he can and get away with it. He especially wants a fight with Caine to satisfy his bloodlust.
• The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Little Man is a kind-looking coachman who runs the Land of Toys, a paradise country for children devoid of teachers, books, and schools. In actuality, the Little Man is a sadist who lures in hundreds of lazy boys to the Land of Toys to be turned into donkeys, whom he sells as slave labor. Using some of those donkeys to pull his wagon, he bites the ear off of one for mistreating Pinocchio. Turning Pinocchio and Lampwick into donkeys, the Little Man has them sold into slavery, with Lampwick dying at the farm he was sent to.
• The Adversary Cycle: Rasalom is an ancient Evil Sorcerer who embraced a role as the champion of darkness in forgotten eons. Defeated by his Arch-Enemy Glaeken, Rasalom was sealed into an old keep in Europe until World War II. Posing as a vampire, Rasalom convinced a Jewish teacher to aid him in guise of being a Noble Demon fighting the Nazis. To gain power, Rasalom murdered the German soldiers and revived them as enslaved undead until Glaeken returns to destroy him. Surviving by binding his soul to an unborn baby decades later, Rasalom emerges to take the world itself: plunging the world into eternal night before driving human beings to insanity and murder while unleashing monsters that kill indiscriminately on the populace. Rasalom only spares the now elderly Glaeken's apartment solely because he wants Glaeken to see the world he loved burn before Rasalom kills him slow. He's also angry one of the humans nearly accidentally caused his host-mother to miscarry and plans a similar fate for him. Even in the dark world of the Repairman Jack and Adversary Cycle books, Rasalom stands unique as the greatest monster the saga has to offer.
• Aeon 14: Rika's Marauders novel Rika Redeemed: Stavros is the dictator of a relatively small empire in the Praesepe Cluster called the Politica. He drove the Oranians off their homeworld onto another location deeper in the system, turning their home in exile into a Vichy Earth in direct imitation of the ancient Romans and Nazis, something he says he's done elsewhere. He has also technologically and psychologically enslaved almost his entire military, including many combat cyborgs known as "mechs". In the book proper, when Silva, the mother of his heir by a one-night stand who was later turned into a mech, attempted to retrieve her daughter Amy, whom he beats, he captured her and enslaved her as Amy's bodyguard/pet, using her compliance chip to force her never to reveal that she is Amy's mother while encouraging Amy to address her as "Meat", a Fantastic Slur for mechs. When Rika, Silva's former subordinate, goes undercover in The Politica as a defector from her mercenary company, Stavros insists on installing a compliance chip in her as well. Rika is immune, but in order to maintain her cover is forced to play along with Stavros using the chip to make her perform a sexual act on him. Leslie, one of Rika's teammates, is captured during the mission and chipped as well. When Rika finally initiates the plan to liberate the mechs and kill Stavros, he resorts to using his own daughter Amy as a Human Shield. While other villains in the franchise have significantly higher body counts, few approach Stavros for sheer personal vileness.
• After Midnight, by Richard Laymon: Steve, a Serial Rapist and Serial Killer, travels the US with his ally Milo, the two raping and killing as they go. Tiring of Milo always taking "first dibs" on the women, Steve sets him up to be killed by the novel's heroine Alice, and decides upon her as his next victim. Stalking Alice and murdering those in the vicinity, Steve eventually assaults and attempts to rape her, revealing he has another women held hostage. Steve reveals his intent to rape both of them and then force them to fight to the death for the "honor" of being his Sex Slave as he goes on a new rape and murder spree.
• After the Fire, by Will Hill: "Father" John Parson was the despotic leader of the Lord's Legion. Even before joining, he was sent to prison for severely injuring his neighbor with a baseball bat. When John took over the Legion, he initiated stricter rules, with disobedient members being punished with beatings, whippings, starvation, and even being locked in a box for days without food or water. Extremely troublesome members were exiled, with the condition that they did not expose the Legion's activities under the threat of death. He also brainwashed his followers into believing that everyone outside the Legion was evil, had them engage in brutal combat training, and at night, he would open the women's barracks to let the men rape the women, aside from the women he would take as his personal harem. When the authorities raided the Lord's Legion, John decided to simply abandon his followers to their deaths without a hint of remorse, also ordering his Centurions to shoot themselves.
• Aftermath, by Kelley Armstrong: Tiffany Gold, along with her boyfriend Isaac Wickham, planned to shoot up their school in a massacre in order to make themselves "legends". Tiffany and Isaac kill several kids and severely wound others before having an innocent friend of theirs take the fall, leading to his death. After they escape, Tiffany tricks Isaac into killing himself in order to tie up loose ends. When the sister of her fall guy, Skye Gilchrist, starts to investigate to prove her brother's innocence, she tries to drive her insane, even attempting to burn her alive. Finally staging her own kidnapping, upon being saved by Skye, Tiffany intends to kill Skye's aunt and then her in order to frame her for it so that her crimes can remain unpunished for good.
• After the Revolution: Alexander Dubois is one of the most repulsive characters in the nightmare world of the American continent after the Second American Civil War. Alexander is a young man who is also a senior official in the Heavenly Kingdom, a Christian Fascist state. Alexander runs the Sons of Jacob, a group that lures young women to the Heavenly Kingdom through online trickery, pretending to be kind and compassionate, but when they arrive Alexander forces young women to marry members of the Sons of Jacob against their will and then the Sons of Jacob commit marital rape on these women. Alexander is also the main selector for the Storming Battalion, where Alexander chooses all nonwhite arrivals to the Heavenly Kingdom to join the Battalion. After joining the Battalion, the recruits' brains are removed and installed into drones and autonomous cars that can bypass jamming and drive-through checkpoints that scan for human drivers and sent on suicide missions.
• Airman: Sir Hugo Bonvilain is the Marshall of the Little Saltees who conspired to overthrow the king. A power-hungry megalomaniac, concerned about no one about himself, Bonvilain has killed, deceived, and manipulated his way to power. His first act was to assassinate both King Nick and Vigny, while making it appear they killed each other. However, when his ruse is discovered by Conor Broekhart, Bonvilain has Conor take the fall for Bonvilain's crimes and thrown in prison. Pulling a double deception, Bonvilain has Conor believe his family thinks of him as a criminal, while his family believes Conor to be dead and the young man in prison to be one of the traitors whose actions led to his death. While Conor spends the next few years in prison, Bonvilain takes the King's daughter under his wing as a "puppet queen". After his hold over Queen Isabella and Conor's family wanes, Bonvilain plans to murder this generation of the royal family and her followers too, aiming to poison them, while he partakes in a Self-Poisoning Gambit to stave off suspicion.
• Akata Witch: "Black Hat" Otokoto is a wicked sorcerer formerly of the Leopard People who has killed many of their number. A servant of the wicked spirit Ekwensu, Black Hat intends to unleash her upon the world to destroy it, and to this end kidnaps, tortures and murders numerous children as sacrifices to do so.
• Akumaizer 3: Before and After: Mezalord shows himself in this prequel to already be as vile as in the series. Once a childhood friend of the first Xavitan, Mezalord was responsible for rallying the Akuma Clan into hunting humans and preparing for an invasion of the surface. When Xavitan tried to escape with a human woman, Mezalord led a force in hunting them down and personally killed his former friend. Mezalord would then use the incident to pass a new law declaring that all newborn males must have circuits embedded in their heads which would allow him to torture them should they ever show disloyalty.
• Alex Cross has faced many revolting criminals, but these stand out as the worst:
  • Kyle Craig, or The Mastermind, is a former FBI special agent and Alex Cross's Arch-Enemy. A violent individual since childhood, Kyle was responsible for multiple killings even before joining the FBI, including that of his own brother. As the Mastermind, Kyle perpetrates a series of bank robberies followed by murders in Roses Are Red, making sure to dispose of his accomplices, and raping the women he had hired post-mortem. While his partners at the FBI are busy investigating the murderous robbers, Kyle rapes and kills a woman in a home invasion, and then sets his eyes on Alex's girlfriend, committing the same crime with her and mutilating the body afterwards. Kyle calls Alex to inform him about the horrendous death of his girlfriend, just so he could hear his reaction. Realizing in Violets Are Blue that he has been exposed, Kyle attempts to kill Alex's partner and later a woman he had saved from another killer, but is arrested and sent to death row. Assuming the identity of his attorney in Double Cross, Kyle escapes and kills his mother, using her money to travel around the world and murder more people, including the judge who had sentenced him to death. Failing to kill Alex, Kyle returns years later in Cross Fire, this time posing as a FBI agent he had killed who had been assigned to work with Alex. Seeking to hurt Alex's loved ones, Kyle attempts to take his family hostage, and commits suicide upon defeat, dying in confusion to why Alex did not kill him. A merciless Serial Killer with an obsession for female bodies and being Alex's shadow, Kyle was one of the worst criminals Alex had to face in his career.
  • Gary Soneji, real name Gary Murphy, is one of Alex Cross's earliest and most personal foes. First appearing in Along Came a Spider, Soneji is a depraved killer who claims to have killed over 200 people, and starts the book by brutally murdering two black families, mutilating the women and even killing an infant. Longing to become the most infamous criminal mastermind in modern history, Soneji duplicates the Lindbergh baby case by abducting two private school children, fully intending on burying them alive while he disappears without a trace. Killing the FBI agent in charge of the case as well as a schoolteacher, Soneji has a breakdown after his plan goes awry, and takes a McDonald's restaurant hostage, killing an innocent man and a cop. Upon his capture, Soneji quickly plans his escape, and once he's free he attempts to murder Alex Cross's family for revenge. Returning once again in Cat and Mouse, Soneji, feeling he has nothing to lose due to contracting AIDS in prison, decides that the whole world deserves to be punished for his misfortunes, and goes on a cross-country killing spree, slaughtering innocent men, women, children, cops, and even his own wife; he leaves his young daughter alive, but tied up in his house's cellar to slowly die of starvation. When confronted by Cross yet again, Soneji takes a bus full of innocent people hostage with a bomb, and abducts a baby to ward off the cops before attempting to beat Cross to death for "ruining his life". A relentless and utterly unstable murderer who longs to top other killers in sheer brutality, Gary Soneji would stop at no limits to feed his pathological need for attention.
  • Geoffrey Shafer, known by law enforcement as the Weasel, is one of Cross's most personal enemies. A diplomatic staff member moonlighting as a Serial Killer, Shafer is playing a "game" with a few other men that he met at the MI6, who style themselves after The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with Shafer playing the role of Death. He is introduced in Pop Goes the Weasel, when he finds a prostitute and brutally kills her. He then puts on blackface, goes out in a cab, picks up a woman and murders her. He later goes out again, finds a man, and kills him too. Shafer stalks George Bayer, who plays Famine in the "game", murders the women he solicited, and leaves the bodies in a compromising position. Realizing the police are on to him he goes south to Maryland and kills a mother and her teenage daughter. Shafer then targets DC Detective and Cross's love interest Patsy Hampton and brutally kills her. Cross arrests him, but evidence being inadmissible due to diplomatic immunity means he gets acquitted. Shafer then kidnaps Cross's fiancée Christine. He murders the other players of the "game". After a fight with Cross he apparently dies, but resurfaces in Europe and kill his wife. He reappears in London Bridges living in Brazil. Here he continues his murderous hobbies until The Wolf uses a streetwalker to draw him out, kidnap him, and get Shafer to work for him. Shafer bombs an army base, and then meets a sniper and has her kill the CIA Director. He later goes out and kill another prostitute. After that he goes and confronts his sister-in-law and children. He threatens them, asks them for a kiss, and when they refuse he only refrains from killing them because he states that he "does not have permission" to kill them.
  • Cross Country: Abidemi "The Tiger" Sowande is a nihilistic African warlord driven by his own amoral belief in committing atrocities For the Evulz. The leader of a large group of savage Child Soldiers, and an attack dog for corrupt members of the CIA, Tiger grabs Alex's attention by dismembering his ex-girlfriend and her entire family, children included. Having perpetrated countless gut-wrenching crimes with his minions, Tiger rapes and murders Alex's friend in front of him, but not before massacring her entire family for fun.
• Alex Rider:
  • Stormbreaker: Herod Sayle is a multimillionaire who holds a petty grudge against England and the Prime Minister. After being bullied incessantly as a child and teenager by English schoolchildren, Sayle planned to strike back by creating a smallpox outbreak that would kill hundreds of thousands of children. Using his new Stormbreaker computers, Sayle hid small vials of smallpox into the devices so that they would be released once children turned on the computers. When Alex Rider's uncle, Ian, found out about this, Sayle had him murdered. Later on, after Sayle discovers Alex was working undercover for MI6, Sayle instructed one of his lackeys to torture Alex to death with knives. Once Sayle's plans are foiled by Alex, Sayle kidnaps Alex and almost shoots him to death, all while promising that he'll resurface in the future to strike back at England again.
  • Skeleton Key: Conrad is a freelance terrorist and General Alexei Sarov's most trusted lackey. A former bomber who blew up his school and later committed terrorist acts across the globe, Conrad began to work for Sarov shortly after he was injured in an accident. After Sarov comes up with a plan to take over Russia by setting off a nuclear bomb and dismantling most of Europe, Conrad wastes no time helping Sarov get the materials he needs, killing anyone who interferes with their plans. Once Sarov kidnaps Alex Rider, Conrad tries to have him killed on numerous occasions, despite Sarov's demands to keep the boy alive. While Sarov wanted to bring Russia to a more stable country with him as its leader, Conrad only helped Sarov for the sake of getting rich, not caring that millions would perish in the process.
  • Scorpia: Julia Rothman is an executive board member of Scorpia. Under orders from a client to spoil the special relationship between America and Britain, Rothman infects every schoolchild in London with nanites containing cyanide, planning to make claims that she knows can't be satisfied and make a less extreme demand to America with the same consequence knowing that they will meet them after that. To demonstrate the weapon and show that she is not bluffing, Rothman kills a completely separate group of football players without giving them a chance to be saved. She also manipulates Alex into joining Scorpia by getting him to think his father worked for them and was killed by MI6 when it was the other way around. Rothman is also an awful boss who will frequently murder her own men for failure and kills a colleague via venomous snakes when he objects to her plan. When confronted by Alex, Rothman shrugs off the thousands of deaths that will occur, all for the sake of money.
  • Scorpia Rising: Abdul-Aziz Al-Rahim, better known as just Razim, is another agent of Scorpia, and is affiliated with them purely to slake his sadistic curiosities. A cold, unfeeling sociopath since his history of violence in his youth, Razim sold out his own parents and sister to Saddam Hussein before joining Scorpia. Come his involvement in Operation Horseman, Razim plans to blackmail Britain into handing over the Elgin Marbles, or else defame the country by revealing the contents of the Horseman file, ultimately to assassinate the Prime Minister of England and throw the country into a war. Fascinated by pain, Razim routinely tortures countless innocents to death in perverse "experiments", in an attempt to create a measurement for pain, initially claiming it for the sake of science but likely simply to amuse himself more than anything. When Razim captures Alex, Razim forces him to watch his mentor and guardian Jack Starbright blown up—in truth handing her off to the Grimaldi twins but keeping the emotional stab to Alex all the same, while casually adding the boy's emotional pain was so great, he may have to create a second measurement. From there on, Razim tries to have the US Secretary of State assassinated, framing Alex so that he'll be shot dead. Lacking the scale of previous antagonists but trumping all of them in sheer, frightening sadism, Razim makes his mark even in the dark world of Alex Rider as Alex's most personal foe.
• Alex Van Helsing series, by Jason Henderson: The Icemaker, true identity Lord Byron, is a vicious vampire clan lord, and is bad even by their standards. Formerly a narcissistic poet who abused his lover Claire Clairmont and abandoned their young daughter Allegra to die, Byron became a high-ranking member of the vampire organization, the Scholomance, and seeks to bring about humanity's downfall and allow the undead to claim the Earth. Noted for his excessive bloodlust and slaughtering entire communities, the Icemaker's ultimate ambition is to revive Claire to rule as his queen, motivated primarily by obsession rather than true love. It is later revealed that the psychopathic vampire Elle is his daughter, and that Icemaker had her kidnapped from her foster father Polidori and converted into a vampire, traumatizing her so much that she repressed all memories of her childhood. When this is revealed to Elle, Icemaker immediately abandons her once more, leaving her a broken wreck.
• Alex Verus:
  • Vitus Aubuchon, an old mage and the heir of the Aubuchon family, has survived centuries by using dark magic to harvest the blood of victims to preserve his own life. Vitus has preyed primarily on children, abducting them into his ancestral home and cutting their throats to get to their blood before storing their bones like trophies. In the present, Vitus has realized the magic is no longer working for him as it once did, and instead switches to abducting magic apprentices for their blood with one such disappearance prompting the attention of Alex and his friends. When they make their way into Vitus's home, Vitus promptly attempts to slaughter everyone inside.
  • Vihaela is the true leader of the White Rose organization, a series of mage-run brothels. Vihaela has women and children abducted to serve as prostitutes with many of them having their minds forcibly altered to make them more docile. Others who resemble celebrities are physically altered and then mentally forced to service any fantasy of the client. Vihaela also runs the brothels on a "points" system, with whoever fails a task or displeases a client obtaining a point. At the end of the month, the one with the most points is sent to Vihaela's laboratory and never returns. Upon being discovered, Vihaela promptly betrays her associates and sacrifices an innocent woman made to look like her in order to escape.
• The Algebraist, by Iain Banks: The Archimandrite Luseferous is a gleeful sadist with a love for hurting others and lust to be feared and hated above all else. Having risen through the ranks of the military after sentencing his own father to death, Luseferous founded the "Starveling Cult", a militaristic group of barbarians who Rape, Pillage, and Burn entire planets at their leisure, all as part of Luseferous's quest for galactic domination. In his downtime, Luseferous enjoys perfecting styles of torture, such as keeping one of his foes' heads around as a sapient punching bag, killing an assassin by making his teeth grow until they pierce his brain, and raping entire harems of women, taking sick pleasure from their utter loathing of him. While invading the Ulubis system, Luseferous displays his utter joy over a huge body count by first blowing up an entire city, then later destroying the life supports systems of a Habitat, leading 80,000 people to be sucked into the vacuum of space. Once arriving at Ulubis's capital planet, Luseferous first reveals that, for every second it doesn't surrender, he will fire a man, woman, or even child prisoner of his into space to die, then follows it up by unveiling hundreds of Ulubis children he kidnapped from a field trip, promising to start executing them randomly until he gets what he wants. When reinforcements arrive to drive Luseferous away, he orders all the children slaughtered and the remaining 20,000 prisoners dumped into space, before attempting to flee the entire war effort, leaving behind orders to firebomb billions of innocents just as a last spiteful move. Luseferous was an irredeemable beast, with nary a likable or sympathetic quality about him, just horrific cruelty.
• Alice in Zombieland, by Nickolas Cook: The Dead Red Queen used to be a human just like Alice who wandered into Wonderland and took it over by manipulating her way into power during a Zombie Apocalypse. With the zombies under her control, the Red Queen now rules the weird wasteland of Wonderland as a cannibalistic tyrant, where her living subjects don't tend to stay living for very long and heads roll every minute or so. At one point, the Red Queen invites Alice to a game of croquet, where every implement in the field is made from human body parts and the Queen goes about smashing the brains of her own servants with her croquet mallet. The Red Queen even abandons her own husband the King to die when the ravenous hordes of zombies break from her control.
• Alien Chronicles series: Ehssk is the glory-seeking head researcher at the Vess Vaas institute, responsible for finding a cure for the Dancing Death plague long feared by the Viis. Noting that the various abiru species are immune to the disease, Ehssk studies the possibility of splicing their immunity over to the Viis. To this end, Ehhsk uses captive abiru women as Breeding Slaves, artificially impregnating them with half-Viis hybrids. The hybrids are dissected shortly after birth, and the women killed off when they can no longer reproduce. Ehssk's research produces few, if any, useful results, despite the horrors his test subjects are put through, yet the Viis Empire continues to give him a blank check out of desperation to cure the Dancing Death, oblivious to Ehssk's methods and unwilling to call out his lack of results; said funding allows Ehssk to maintain an extravagant lifestyle. Even the Viis Empress Israi is horrified to learn that he artificially impregnated Ampris and dissected her daughter shortly after birth.
• Alien Hunters: Skrum, the Big Bad of the first book, is a lord within the Skelkrin Empire and a devout follower of Emperor Lore. As Lore's follower, Skrum murdered his parents when he was ordered to, and later participated in wiping out most of the pirilians. After Midnight, a pirilian Skrum kidnapped and tortured, escapes from the skelkrins, Skrum and his forces chase after her on Cirona. While there, Skrum's forces burn down several farms and callously slaughter any civilians they run into. When they finally recapture Midnight, Skrum gloats how the skelkrins intend to torture her and clone her millions of times over so they can use her powers to conquer the entire galaxy.
• "Al-Kitab Al-Ghoul", by Aaron Vlek: Abdul al-Hazrad is the abusive father of the story's narrator, Ibn al-Warith, destroying his son's life and converting him to a cultist so he may turn him into a ravenous ghoul as he's done to many others. A worshipper of the Old Ones, al-Hazrad proceeds to unleash the apocalypse, with a storm of ghouls emerging to slaughter and devour everything on Earth until nothing is left to consume but themselves.
• "All the King's Horses", by Kurt Vonnegut: Communist guerilla chief Pi Ying is a wealthy, sadistic, racist POW Camp commander who despises America and its values. Taking Colonel Bryan Kelly, his troops, and his family hostage, Pi decides to showcase his superiority by challenging Bryan to a chess game, with his troops and family as the pieces. Each piece claimed by Pi results in the person dying, with Pi threatening each of Bryan's pieces with torturous deaths should they take too long to decide where to move. Prolonging the game just to make Bryan suffer as he hopes to eventually kill his entire family, Pi is eventually fatally stabbed by his abused girlfriend before he could give orders to kill one of Bryan's sons.
• All the Sinners Bleed: Jeff Spearman, seemingly a caring, friendly teacher murdered in a senseless act of violence, is a sadistic monster in truth killed by one of his victims. Soon after his death, tapes are discovered of Spearman with his accomplices abducting minority children and brutally torturing them to death. Seven children are seen on video, with more victims later confirmed.
• "All the Ways to Hollow Out a Girl", by Gwendolyn Kiste (link): An unnamed trio of sadistic youths accidentally murder the story's POV character, Nyssa, only for her to bounce back to life in front of them. Initially shocked, the boys decide to take advantage of this and Nyssa's unwillingness to fight back. The three proceed to spend their summer break killing Nyssa over and over in increasing gruesome ways; beating her to death, drowning her, and burning her alive. Finally, the three of them decide to row Nyssa out to the nearby lake and chain her to the bottom so she can spend the rest of summer drowning, coming back to life, and drowning all over again.
• Along the River of Flesh, by Kristopher Triana: Detective Keith Drakeson is an egotistical bully obsessed with exercising power over others. A depraved and corrupt cop, Keith has abused his position for years to rape countless underage girls, taking sick pleasure in the idea that he has destroyed their lives with his actions. Blackmailing child trafficker Josh Negus into allowing him first pick of new victims, Keith provides Negus with child pornography stolen from police files in exchange. When the police begin closing in on Negus' operation, Keith conceals his involvement by murdering Negus along with an eight-year-old girl whom Keith had previously molested and then makes it look like she was killed by Negus. Having helped put Serial Killer Edmund Cox behind bars, Keith views Cox's escape from prison as a personal insult and makes it his mission to recapture him for the purpose of reaping the glory. Crossing paths with private investigator Gary Chatmon and teenage runaway June Audrey in this endeavor, Keith repeatedly fantasizes about raping June and later murders Gary in a fit of paranoid rage. A pathetic coward at his core, Keith, upon finding himself at the mercy of Cox and the demonic River Man, attempts to plead for his life by offering to rape even more children as an offering of tribute to the River Man.
• Altered Carbon: Reileen Kawahawa is a "Methuselah", or "Meth"—a long-living human in an age when people can achieve mental immortality through the storing of their memories. Starting her career as a young gang member in Fission City who forced people to drink contaminated water or see their families tortured, Kawahara eventually rose to the top by torture and murder. Running a virtual prostitution ring, Kawahawa has people indulge their sick fantasies before allowing them to do the same to a living woman, making certain they are women who will die permanently. When one of her fellow Meths, wealthy businessman Laurens Bancroft, refuses to assist her, Kawahara has him drugged so he will murder the next prostitute he's with to put him under Kawahara's thumb. To force the hero, Takeshi Kovacs, to assist her in framing a former associate of hers for the crime, Kawahara threatens to put Kovacs's girlfriend into virtual torture and later decides to try to do the same to Kovacs himself for all eternity.
• American Gothic, by Robert Bloch: G. Gordon Gregg is a serial black widower who frequently murders his wives for money, opening the novel by killing his current one. A killer who runs a "murder hotel", Gregg traps his victims there to utterly vanish them, bleeding and dissecting them. Murdering two other would-be brides, Gregg seduces a journalist named Crystal while planning to dispose of her as well, having killed dozens of innocents within his walls.
• American Psycho: Patrick Bateman is a despicable and narcissistic psychopath who moonlights as a mass murderer while keeping up his appearance as a stockbroker. Bateman's murderous tendencies having started for no discernible reason, he began brutally raping, torturing, and butchering innocents in the most horrifying ways he could imagine, even cannibalizing some of his victims. Bateman's evil is so petty and unpredictable that he disembowels vagrants after pep talks, takes an axe to one of his associates for having a better business card, and tortures defenseless animals. One of his worst moments comes when Bateman slashes a child's throat just to see how it feels, quickly deciding it isn't as fulfilling as killing someone who has lived a full life. After going on a shooting spree, Bateman comes to the conclusion that he is completely wicked with no capability of care or compassion for others. Though the idea that some of his crimes were just imagined is implied, Bateman's character is nevertheless pure evil. Driven by his sadism and pathological desire to be important, Patrick Bateman fully earns the various terms he is referred to as: an inhuman, a ghoul, and a monster.
• Angelmaker: Shem Shem Tsiem, or the Opium Khan, was born a Prince during the twentieth century and quickly moved to have all his family members he could hunt down with a claim to the throne drugged and burned alive. Choking his surviving nephew to death to seal his claim to the kingdom, Shem Shem Tsiem commits so many atrocities against his people that they flee in terror to the surrounding woods, and forcibly focuses all agricultural production on producing opium to avariciously conquer the world market. To stroke his own ego, Shem Shem Tsiem tortures an archbishop into insanity, leaving him reduced to a barking animal to proclaim his divinity. To spite his own mother and her love of elephants, Shem Shem Tsiem sadistically creates a worldwide poaching ring to have them killed for sport, much to her torment, later cutting out her tongue and decapitating her to put her head on a spike. Under the alias "Brother Sheamus", Shem Shem Tsiem takes over Edie Bannister's former organization, the Ruskinites, and savagely corrupts them, creating minions by brainwashing and destroying the minds of countless people, including young orphans. Ultimately dreaming of turning the whole world into a mass of lobotomized, obedient slaves and extensions of himself, Shem Shem Tsiem uploads his mind into Vaughn Parry to live forever as an unquestioned God. Facing off against Edie in present day, Shem Shem Tsiem has her ally, Joe Spork, sent to an asylum in the hopes of breaking him for information and than turning him one of his mindless minions. An utter monster embodying the most narcissistic of god complexes, Shem Shem Tsiem cements his position as Edie's Arch-Enemy.
• The Angel of Vienna, by Kate Hewitt: Dr. Jekelius is the Medical Director of the Am Steinhof Facility children's hospital. Despite being well-liked by the people of Vienna, Jekelius secretly uses the funds given by the Reich to the hospital to fuel his own greed, turning the hospital into a neglected hell house. A psychopathic man who sees all of his patients as nothing but irredeemable scum, Jekelius would create a special pavilion in his facility with the whole purpose of murdering the patients by giving them a slow, painful death, with the youngest victim being 18 months old. After murdering the nephew of nurse Hannah Stern, Dr. Jekelius is confronted by her, and proclaims that all of his actions are ending their suffering, before attempting to stop the last survivor of his massacre from escaping by sending the Gestapo to capture them, killing Hannah in the process.
• Animal Farm: Napoleon seems like a benevolent revolutionist at first, trying to make Old Major's dream a reality, but it quickly becomes clear that he is just a selfish, power-hungry tyrant, who cares not one bit about his fellow animals. He starts by rationing food exclusively for him and the other pigs, and secretly forms his own private squadron of attack dogs, by abducting all the newborn puppies from their parents and raising them to be fully obedient to him. Later he backstabs his ally Snowball and frames him for every wrong happening on the farm, while continuing to manipulate everyone into worshiping him and mercilessly sentencing everyone to death who shows the tiniest sign of resistance. Merely in order to buy himself more alcohol, he sells the completely loyal, and extremely hard-working, horse Boxer to the knacker after he got sick. He justifies his actions by having Squealer constantly alter the law, and the past, to fit them. After a few years and a whole lot of more horrendous crimes, the other animals can barely tell him and the other pigs apart from the humans, whose reign they so desperately tried to escape.
• Animorphs: In a series full of shades of grey and with a theme of War Is Hell, a select few stand out as truly monstrous and evil individuals.
  • Esplin 9466 Prime, better known to the cast as Visser Three, is the only Andalite-Controller in existence, and is the sole Yeerk with the power to morph. Cruelly scorning his weaker twin, Esplin 9466 Lesser, and eventually sentencing him to exile to die of agonizing starvation, Esplin begins his career in the Hork-Bajir war where he is responsible for untold war crimes in his attempt to seize an Andalite body. Later claiming Prince Alloran Semitur-Corass as his host, Esplin uses Alloran's knowledge to launch a series of nightmarish attacks, killing countless Andalites and civilians in a wave of conquest and enslavement. Serving under Visser One on Earth, Visser 3 finally ends his rivalry with Prince Elfangor by devouring him alive. Having acquired countless monstrous Morphs through Alloran, the Visser is keen to use them to kill and torture. Forsaking all subtlety to embrace his personal sadism and cruelty, the Visser slaughters his own subordinates by the shipful for any real or imagined failures, even morphing into a Yeerkbane, one of the few Yeerk natural predators to consume them in an ultimate taboo for his species. Behind the infestation and murder of numerous humans, Visser Three eventually arranges the downfall and agonizing execution by starvation of Visser One to seize control of her rank in order to lead the invasion and institute a fully armed assault to slaughter humanity into submission. Unwilling to be cowed, Esplin will sacrifice untold thousands of his own, planning the complete extinction or enslavement of the Andalites and countless others to satisfy his cruel ego and petty spite toward Elfangor.
  • Crayak is an alien and member of The Highest Powers who acts as the series' God of Evil. A nearly omnipotent Social Darwinist, Crayak seeks to create a universe ruled by one species and one species alone. To that end, Crayak engineered the Howlers, a race of psychopathic child soldiers who think that killing is a game, and used them to gruesomely exterminate countless species, including the pacifistic Pemalites and Graffen's Children. In order to ensure that the Howlers' Hive Mind is never contaminated by memories of defeat, Crayak obliterates any Howlers who fail him; he also destroys any Howlers who realise that their victims are people too. Not content with having created one of the most feared races in the galaxy, Crayak also lends his godlike might to other vicious species, secretly backing the Yeerks and other would-be galactic conquerors; he plans, for example, to have the Yeerks enslave humanity, only to then be wiped out by the Howlers. In a series filled with shades of grey, Crayak was as close to pure, unadulterated evil as one was likely to get.
  • Subvisser Fifty-one, also known by her host's name, "Taylor", is a cruel Yeerk. Infesting the mentally ill girl, Taylor becomes an angry monster who serves as Visser Three's Torture Technician. Using a device that tampers with the pain and pleasure centers of the brain, Taylor captures Tobias and makes him relive the worst moments of his life and inserts agony to the recollections of his best memories. Returning months later after Tobias is rescued, Taylor reveals she severed her mental link with her host, regaining her sanity but not an ounce of morality. Taylor manipulates the Animorphs into helping her kill Visser Three, taunting Tobias about the suffering she put him through, hoping to provoking him into attacking her so she has an excuse to hurt him more. Revealing that her actual plan is to kill thousands of her fellow Yeerks, Taylor intends to pin the blame of her attack on the Yeerk Peace Faction.
• Anna Dressed in Blood & Girl of Nightmares: The Obeahman is a voodoo ghost/demon hybrid who takes large chunks out of his victims. His first known victim is Cas Lowood's father, who was killed when Cas was only seven years old, leaving the latter traumatized and suffering nightmares. Ten years later, the Obeahman returns, killing three more victims. He had been following the Lowoods since murdering Cas's father, eventually killing their cat Tybalt as well. As Cas and his friends fight him, Anna pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice by opening a portal to Hell and dragging the Obeahman down with her. A year later, Cas discovers that, while both are in hell, the Obeahman has been torturing Anna the whole time. When Cas and another girl, Jestine, make their way to a part of Hell, they find that the Obeahman had transformed into a spider-like creature that had linked Anna to it, sewing Anna's eyes and mouth shut before harvesting her. While fighting the creature, Cas recognized other nearby ghosts—some innocent—and realizes that the Obeahman had been haunting his athame, and has been feeding off these spirits.
• Anthem, by Noah Hawley: E. L. Mobley, "the Wizard", is one of the wealthiest people on the planet, a preternaturally untouchable man who uses his endless resources to slake his thirst for adolescent girls. Mobley rapes at least three girls a day, through coercion, manipulation, and outright brutalization, preferring most of all children whose futures he can steal for nothing more than a night's pleasure. Mobley has left tens of thousands of girls raped and traumatized in his wake over decades, and he desires most of all an heir to continue his legacy. To fulfill this, he kidnaps a young woman, rapes her until she becomes pregnant, and plans on killing her as soon as she gives birth to his son.
• Anti Magic Academy The 35th Test Platoon: Haunted is a monstrous psychopath obsessed with spreading despair to all around him, and serves as the Arch-Enemy of numerous characters due to his evil. Introduced butchering and sacrificing over 50 people to summon a demon and have it slaughter innocents, Haunted later invades one of the Inquisition's schools and murders his way through dozens of trainee students. In his quest to cause despair to everyone he sees fit, Haunted murders one of his partners in the arms of her sister, reunites a lost girl with her mother only to decapitate the girl while her mother watches, and forces Mari to serve him by using numerous orphans as hostages, then revealing he killed the children long ago. In his grandest scheme of despair yet, primarily targeting his self-proclaimed greatest foe Takeru, Haunted turns the boy's sister into a killing machine, knowing Takeru will either have to kill her or watch her slaughter humanity, and occupies his time by wiping out an entire town of innocents. In the end, Haunted is beaten after revealing he has killed close to 13,000 people over the years, and uses his final moments in an attempt to kill Takeru to snuff out the "beacon of hope" that the world sees him as. A truly depraved lunatic who horrified and repulsed even his own organization and partners—many whom he kills at the drop of a hat—Haunted stands out even in this dark world as a twisted individual.
• The Anubis Gates: Horrabin is a servant of the Master and a chillingly evil Monster Clown who rules over the beggars and outcasts of London. Horrabin disfigures them so they'll bring in extra revenue from the begging. Those he mutilates too much, his "mistakes," he locks in his sewer lair. These include his own father who he routinely torments and threatens to visit worse cruelties on. Horrabin uses his network to murder those who cross him or that he sees as a potential problem. Throughout the whole novel, Horrabin is a sadist and a fiend who is evil on a level none of his compatriots can match.
• Arc of a Scythe series: Curate Mendoza is an ambitious, manipulative Tone Cult curate who wishes to use Greyson Tolliver's position as "The Toll" to control all Tone Cults worldwide. Tiring of his failure to control Greyson, Mendoza convinces a violent cult to kill Scythe Tenkamenin, with the resulting attack leaving countless innocents and cultists dead. Mendoza is uncaring when Greyson has the cult's curate killed for the attack and tries to manipulate him further. When Scythe Goddard order the genocide of the Tone Cults, Mendoza tries to start a war with the Scythedom, which Greyson banishes him for. Mendoza then goes to Goddard and convinces him to spare some cultist and kill Greyson so Mendoza can take over the cults and enact more brutal attacks on Goddard's rivals and help the vicious Scythe expand his bloody reign.
• Armageddon Force: Dr. Edgar Malbarn, an utterly psychopathic sadist, runs the Carvina Cooperation, an organization which takes wounded soldiers off of battlefields and conducts fiendish, torturous experiments on them. Malbarn, using only enough anesthesia to prevent Carvina victim Jon Heck from passing out, replaces Jon's blown-off arms with mechanical ones. Much to Jon's disgust, Malbarn plans to make Jon head of Malbarn's brainwashed army, which will spread chaos throughout the world. All the while, Malbarn taunts Jon, and lashes out when he gets angry, torturing him even beyond the experiments. Once Jon is rescued, both he and fellow Carvina victim Yui Shinozaki are haunted by nightmares of Malbarn, which continue even after Jon kills Malbarn.
• Arrethtrae:
  • Lucius the Dark Knight is the traitorous general of the King who sought to overthrow his superiors and take over for himself. After this murderous coup resulted in his banishment, he sets his sights on the land of Arrethtrae, seeking to dominate it through any means simply because the King wants to bring peace to its people. Lucius employs a variety of evil tactics in his schemes, from mass murder to slavery to genocide, and fully endorses his nightmarish Shadow Warriors and the vile brands of evil they bring upon Arrethtrae. After his initial plan to conquer Arrethtrae and subject its people to an eternity of torment and dictatorship fails, Lucius returns with the goal of wiping out all life in the world except himself and his army, his lust for power leaving thousands dead in his wake and attempted countless more.
  • Kifus is a self-righteous fanatic who uses the name of the King as a means of subjugating the people of Chessington. As leader of the Noble Knights, he "protects" Chessington through his own designed methods, involving oppressing and starving the people, torturing and maiming them for small infractions, and ignoring the plights of anyone outside of Chessington, even leaving a family to be butchered and the survivors sold into slavery because they aren't under his jurisdiction. After being humiliated by the Prince during a duel, Kifus has the Prince hanged, then begins persecuting anyone who follows the Prince's teachings, eventually deciding to kill them all, from active spreaders of the Prince's harmless messages to completely unarmed and defenseless prisoners. Kifus has no problems ordering Noble Knights be mutilated and killed if they show sympathy for the followers of the Prince, and, in his most vile act, attempts to hang an entire family—children included—just to spite a former Noble Knight who had become a follower of the Prince.
  • The Kingdom Series: Zane, the eldest brother of Leinad, is introduced trying to murder Leinad for fun. Zane hands his own father, Peyton, over to Lucius to be executed as revenge for Peyton banishing him when he killed his own twin brother. Given the go-ahead by Lucius to lead a war campaign against the city of Chessington, Zane happily tries to slaughter the entire city, only being stopped by Leinad in a duel. He promises to pull his forces back in exchange for Leinad sparing his life, only to then stab Leinad's Love Interest Tess in the gut and order the attack on Chessington to continue as soon as Leinad shows mercy. Though a minor villain in the overall story, Zane was the first purely evil villain Leinad met, and one of the worst.
  • The Knights of Arrethtrae:
    • Sir Kendrick and the Castle of Bel Lione: The Shadow Warrior Lord Ra is the ruler of the Bel Lione castle, a depraved stronghold where he lures in people by the thousands who, should they give into his vast array of inhibition-lowering activities and magics, are locked in his dungeons and kept barely alive, starved, and tortured for the rest of their lives. Ra keeps his prisoners alive as long as possible, forcing them to experience as much pain and despair as possible before they die, and turns any with the potential for evil into Vincero Knights, who he sends out to cause chaos across the land, entailing the massacres of entire villages among other atrocities. Killing any Vincero Knights who try to flee his control and having thousands of victims, Ra cheerfully boasts that he had no true goal to his crimes, he simply enjoys putting people through intense pain and despair.
    • Sir Bentley and Holbrook Court: Avarick is a Shadow Warrior who goes undercover in the kingdom of Holbrook to manipulate Lord Kingsley into oppressing and terrorizing his citizens. Ordering the Lucrums to kill many people of Holbrook to keep the city in fear and in "need" of his protection, Avarick taxes the citizens to the point of starvation, and happily has women and children taken and sold into slavery if a household can't pay. When his true identity as a Shadow Warrior is exposed, Avarick murders Kingsley and one of his daughters, before ordering his army to wipe out every living thing in Holbrook, even the "weak and crippled children", simply because he can.
    • Sir Dalton and the Shadow Heart: Lord Drox, real name Skia Ek Distazo, is the Shadow Warrior in charge of Lucius's most secure prison, where he abuses and tortures any and all Knights of the Prince he captures. Drox always leaves the cells of the prisoners unlocked, offering them the chance to flee at any point, but those that do are then tracked down by him and his hounds as a sick "hunt" before being butchered, with their family and friends being targeted if he can't find the escapee himself. Often feeding prisoners alive to his vicious dogs and birds, Drox is confronted by the Knight Sir Dalton and, after realizing he is beaten, orders the dozens of his weakened, defenseless prisoners to be killed where they stand to spite Dalton and ensure that no one ever escapes his prison or grasp.
    • Lady Carliss and the Waters of Moorue: Lord Malco is a handsome, alluringly charming Shadow Warrior who seeks to destabilize Arrethtrae by drugging its waters, city by city, with esca venom, a poison secreted by esca lizards that make those who ingest it have vivid hallucinations of their greatest fantasies. Slowly corrupting the city of Woodrue into becoming nearly entirely dependent on the poisoned water Malco is supplying them, he is also secretly breeding the esca lizards and, needing a food supply for them, resorts to kidnapping men, women and children by the dozens and feeding them alive to the lizards. Malco plans to eventually plunge all of Arrethtrae into mass hallucinations, leaving countless people defenseless to be fed to his ever-growing esca lizard supply, with his noting that he will never stop breeding the lizards, and so will always needs fresh victims to feed to them.
• Artemis Fowl: Artemis Fowl and Holly Short have faced various deadly foes, with these being the worst:
  • Opal Koboi is a genius pixie who desires to become "empress of the world". Opal before the series became head of her father's company by driving him insane and having him and her mother locked in an insane asylum. Organizing the Goblin rebellion alongside Briar Cudgeon, Opal took advantage of their violent nature to cause an uprising, while all along planning to betray them. To escape prison after being arrested, Opal creates a clone, not caring it will die easily and cannot think for itself, allowing her to manipulate it. Killing Holly's mentor, Julius Root, by having a bomb strapped to him and then cruelly tricking Holly into detonating it, Opal then frames her for it and Mind Rapes a kind-hearted humanitarian, forcing him to send a probe into the Earth and reveal the Faerie people, hoping to cause a war behind humans and Faeries. Opal is also revealed to have experimented on and killed endangered animals to make herself more powerful. In the final book, Opal murders her own past version of herself when the past version of her was trying to free the present Opal from prison, which causes all products produced by her company to explode, with planes crashing and global communications cutting off. Finally, Opal manipulates the ghosts of dead Faeries to Kill All Humans and take over the surface world. A thoroughly childish woman dedicated to getting whatever she wants regardless of innocent lives lost, Opal is Artemis's greatest and most evil enemy.
  • Lost Colony: The demon Leon Abbot, real name N'Zall, was a bellicose proponent of demonkind's war with mankind even when it meant certain extinction for their race. Sabotaging a ritual by the demonic warlocks to save their people to kill the warlocks, Abbot returns to the demons, pretending to be a savior while brainwashing the masses into thinking they were resuming their war with humanity, with Abbot instead using it as a ruse to keep them under his control. Savagely torturing any who show opposition to his power, Abbot remains apathetic even when Artemis and his allies reveal that Abbot's methods will lead to the destruction of his dimension. Causing the extinction of his people before time is reversed, Abbot again tries to kill the heroes even after being brought back to life, endlessly bitter and power-hungry.
• Artful, by Peter David: Mr. Fang, the magistrate, is a bloodthirsty vampire who runs crime on the streets of London. Letting his vampires feed on and murder people at will, he leaves the children open to recruitment for criminal enterprise, the fate that befalls young Jack "Artful Dodger" Dawes when Fang personally murders his mother. Intending on turning Princess Alexandrina into a vampire, Fang plans to rule The British Empire through her, no matter how many he has to kill.
• The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: Thrane, aka Hemlock—"like the poison"—is a vicious vampire warlord whose body count exceeds the other villains. One of the oldest of his kind in the world, Thrane was a barbarian warrior in life and never outgrew that attitude in undeath; he believes that vampires, being stronger than humans, have the right to rule over them, and that Thrane himself should rule the vampires. In a setting where many vampires try to live in some degree of harmony with the living, Thrane openly flouts such ideas by keeping pens of human slaves he feeds on like livestock, and even "favored" mortal minions get treated like dirt at his whim. Vampires who disagree with him are treated no better; at one point Thrane casually decapitates a potentially ally for daring to ask what benefit he might get from their alliance. Adding to his crimes, many characters believe that Thrane was responsible for the Great Fire, a catastrophe near the beginning of the series that destroyed most magic and caused the near-total collapse of civilization on at least three continents, and in the aftermath he further provoked the chaos by backing various brutal warlords; all in the name of tearing down human rule to place vampires on top, and himself as ruler of vampires. In the end, the other vampire elders and human heroes unearth a forbidden weapon capable of slaying a vampire elder and all his brood for the sole purpose of putting Thrane down for good.
• Ash Princess trilogy, by Laura Sebastian: Kaiser Corbinian, ruler of the Kalovaxians, invades the kingdom of Astrea where he kills the Queen and keeps her daughter Theodosia as a slave and trophy to humiliate her. Running his regime on ethnic cleansing, torture and execution, Corbinian forces Theodosia to watch would-be rebels tortured and executed, including her own father, while threatening a little girl with the most agonizing poison alive. Murdering his own wife to marry Theo himself, it is revealed Corbinian slaughtered her family and people on their wedding day, forcing her to bear him his son Soren. Corbinian is an abusive Serial Rapist, with the women he takes a fancy to eventually looking like they've had the life drained from them after so long with him. Representing the worst of the Kalovaxians, Corbinian is a sadistic bully out for his own glory, with no care if even his own son dies in the process.
• Asian Saga: Most of the books heavily feature a Gray-and-Gray Morality, and the majority of the antagonists are well rounded and semi-sympathetic, but Gorth from Tai-Pan is one of the exceptions, being a brutal sexual sadist who, unlike his father, has no sense of honour whatsoever. Gorth enjoys hurting or assaulting others and clearly enjoys their pain. In order to hurt his enemy of the Struan family, he tries arranging for his son to be drugged and bedded by a prostitute with syphilis which was completely incurable in those days and a very, very horrible way to go.
• Ask the Bones & More Bones:
  • Ask's title story: The man with cruel eyes is a Serial Killer who targets boys. He takes them in as servants, forces them to kill and skin a bull, takes them to the mountains, wraps them in the bull's skin, waits for a giant bird to grab them, tells them to give him rubies, and then leaves them to die. He attempts this with Yusef, but Yusef escapes, having learned the mountainside is strewn with the bones of the man's past victims.
  • More's "The Peasants' Revenge": Lord Hatto is a Villainous Glutton who starves his peasants and refuses to give them food during a famine. When a group of them come begging for wheat, Lord Hatto locks them in an empty granary and sets fire to it in an attempt to kill them all, only for a bolt of lightning to turn them all into mice. Even then, Lord Hatto feels no remorse, only wishing he'd been kinder to cats so they'd devour the mice.
• Asshole Yakuza Boyfriend: Kawada is regarded as monstrous even amongst his fellow Yakuza, and almost all of the other villains in the book eventually turn on him, usually out of disgust. In addition to being an admitted and proud sadist and murderer, he's also the mastermind behind both a dog-fighting operation and a human trafficking operation. He has a penchant for disgusting and elaborate punishments, and is adept at psychologically manipulating his victims with threats of rape or the needlessly cruel murder of their loved ones; for example, he threatens to road-haul Rose's ex-boyfriend and leave the remains in her bed while she sleeps. He also considers women to be "meat," and treats them as such, up to and including preparing to eat Mina.
• The Association, by Bentley Little: Jasper Calhoun, President of Bonita Vista's homeowner's association, is a humanoid monster who revels in the power the association gives him. Expanding Bonita Vista and murdering the neighborhood pets as they go, Jasper has anyone he deems problematic murdered or taken to be tortured, mutilated and abused sexually, or used for slave labor. When hero Barry's wife Maureen falls pregnant outside the rules, Calhoun sends a man with a wire hanger to forcibly abort the child.
• The Asterisk War: Gustave Malraux is a former member of a terrorist organization of Asterisk that in the past carried out the "Jade Twilight" plan. Hired by Nicolas Enfield to stop his daughter, Claudia, from participating in a tournament known as Gryps Festa, Gustave wasted no time attacking Claudia's best friends, Ayato and Julis, with his chimera when they visited the capital city of Julis's home country, Lieseltania, resulting in Julis tighten up the security. Returning in Volume 6—episode 25 of the anime—Gustave sends his chimera to attack the capital city in order to distract the police forces, and plans to attack the orphanage in order to lure the heroes out. After he successfully lures them out, he then attacks them with his hydra, leaving the hydra to cause destruction in the poor district of Lieseltania's capital city.
• The Auctioneer, by Joan Samson: Perly Dunsmore is an alluring auctioneer with designs to turn the town of Harlowe into his own capitalistic fiefdom. Having likely murdered an elderly woman to steal her home, Perly uses auctions to fund his own personal police force in Harlowe with which he terrorizes the populace into continuously giving away their belongings to supply his auctions. Any townsfolk who refuse to cow to Perly are murdered or severely injured by him, with one woman paralyzed in a car accident and another family's youngest son drowning in a well. Perly has a twisted fascination for children, which is revealed to be utterly depraved when he is ousted as having raped a teenage girl for months. Perly takes his auctions so far that he begins selling children of his victims to wealthy parents looking to adopt. When he is finally driven out of Harlowe, Perly ditches his wounded, loyal right-hand man and arranges for someone else to die in his place to cover his tracks.
• August's Eyes, by Glenn Rolfe: Llewelyn Caswell, the "Ghoul of Wisconsin", was a Serial Killer who raped and murdered dozens of young teenage boys over the course of multiple years. Having murdered Ethan, the friend of Johnny Colby, Johnny became the only boy to ever escape Llewelyn, who later learned a ritual from historian Eden Silko before strangling her to death. As a ghost, Llewelyn crafts a world to imprison the souls of his victims for him to abuse for eternity, attempting to trap Johnny there so Llewelyn can rape him and keep him with the rest of his captives.
• The Aurelian Cycle trilogy: Ixion Stormscourge is a sadistic, arrogant noble who will do anything to restore the Triarchy rule over Callipolis. Becoming Firestrider of the New Pythian air fleet after his sister's death, Ixion would abuse and humiliate any peasant under his command, such as locking their children in high-profile military targets during an air raid to ensure their loyalty. Ixion launched airstrikes on Callipolis, killing countless civilians with dragon fire. After seizing power in Callipolis, Ixion would begin to reinstate the old regime's brutal policies, as well as having several villages burned to the ground to make the peasants fall into line. Believing that peasants were inferior to nobles and were his property, Ixion represented the worst the Triarchy had to offer.
• "The Autopsy", by Michael Shea: The alien parasite is a vicious, smug sadist that revels in its supposed superiority to humans. The parasite infested the body of Joe Allen and kept him alive and conscious to enjoy his fear as it fed on his blood. Abducting and murdering numerous people, the alien soon risked discovery and triggered an explosion in a mine that killed 9 people. Preserving two victims to slowly drain them of blood, the alien prepared to be "rescued" and brought to the morgue. Upon being autopsied by mortician Carl Winters, the alien then autopsies itself so Joe Allen feels every hint of the pain, with full intent to infest Carl and make him experience every murder it commits after.
• "Avengers of Space", by Henry Kuttner: The alien brain known as Droom is a powerful, godlike being that reigns over Mars, or Kathor. A childish sadist, Droom subjects countless beings to painful torture, with cruel games and wide-scale sacrifice it invokes upon its followers. Upon the arrival of Terry Shawn, Droom tries to have him and his crew tortured, with Terry's lover sacrificed.
• Azincourt: Sir Martin is a corrupt priest and member of a clan of abusive backwoods hicks. He abuses his position as priest, telling women that the Bible requires them to get naked in front of him, then rapes them, and if their husbands complain, murders them. He tries to kill the main character, Nick Hook, and when Nick hits back, runs to the local lord to whine about how Nick struck a priest. He later frames Nick's handicapped brother for stealing so that King Henry will hang him, and makes repeated attempts to get Nick in trouble with the rest of the army for "living in sin with a Frenchwoman"; what he's really upset about is that he wanted to rape Nick's eventual wife himself and Nick got in the way. Finally, when the fighting at Agincourt is at its heaviest, Sir Martin decides the battle is lost, and sneaks off to rape Nick's wife while everyone else is busy, leaving his cousins, brothers, and bastard sons (he's got a few) to what he believes is their certain death.

B

• Baahubali: Before the Beginning trilogy, by Anand Neelakantan ^{Other Appearances}Film duology & The Lost Legends: Bijjaladeva is the self-centered older son of Mahishmati's Emperor Somadeva. Abusing his subjects, Bijjaladeva regularly conducts torture and casually tries to rape a slave girl, leading to her suicide. His frequent bouts of cruelty making Somadeva pass him up for the throne, when his father and brother die, Bijjaladeva schemes to ensure his own son Bhallaladeva is named Emperor to rule as he desires. Feeding his son's hate, when Bijjaladeva's nephew Amandera Baahubali is made Crown Prince he frames Baahubali as a traitor to be exiled, later having him killed and wiping out his wife's kingdom. As advisor under Bhallaladeva, rebels are whipped to death and citizens are robbed to fund an ostentatious golden statue, and when it nearly falls while being erected, Bijjaladeva states he hopes the "sacrifice" of the hundreds stuck beneath will keep it intact.
• Baal, by Robert R. McCammon: Jeffrey Harper Raines is a Creepy Child who takes the name Baal. Revealed to be the demon Baal himself who possessed his "mother" after having her raped and impregnated, Baal engineers the death of her husband at her own hands to "protect" him, and later runs the orphanages he's sent to as a tyrant, resulting in massive amounts of deaths of children and staff. As an adult, Baal reigns over a number of cults, causing violence, sexual depravity and deaths before engineering an assassination attempt on himself via a Jewish man, fomenting violence against Jews. Baal is revealed to be the ancient demon who, along with his master Satan, turned the demons against God and set himself up as a God to ancient civilizations where he commanded horrific atrocities. After the Jewish tribes destroyed his kingdom, Baal maintained a grudge ever since and desires to plunge the world into bloodshed and slaughter while also exterminating every Jew alive, before releasing Satan again to rule the world forever, with humanity suffering for all eternity or giving into their darkest impulses.
• Baccano!:
  • Lebreau Fermet Viralesque, one of the original immortals, was the caretaker of the child Czeslaw Meyer, with a public reputation as an affable and trustworthy man. However, once they were immortal, Fermet revealed his true colors as a vicious sadist who tortured Czeslaw for years and years, with new, inventive ways, ranging from throwing him into a roaring fireplace, to making him bathe in acid, claiming to be testing the limits of immortality, but really doing so out of sadism. It's then revealed that Fermet's the reason why the child torturing cult SAMPLE spread across the world. Fermet also killed Huey's wife Monica, resulting in Huey becoming who he is. Fermet also nearly killed Niki, who loved him and was close with Huey and Elmer, and then tells Elmer and Huey that their bomb did it just to see the pain on their faces. Fermet will murder, torment, hurt and betray practically everyone who crosses his path just for fun, even the people who love him. Especially the people who love him.
  • Szilard Quates is an alchemist who believes in knowledge being the most important commodity in the world, and to that end devours immortals for their knowledge. After becoming immortal, Szilard devoured the brother of the immortals' leader before being driven away. Szilard creates homunculi to serve him, abusing them mentally and physically. He also developed his own immortal potion that he feeds to intelligent people before devouring them to amass their knowledge without working for it. He isn't above straight up murder for his purposes either. It's mentioned at one point he finds no greater joy than in devouring others.
• Back in the USSA's "Tom Joad": Frank Nitti is the wicked enforcer of Secretary Al Capone. A sadist who loves his work, Nitti oversees labor camps to find Tom Joad, having many innocents tortured in the process. Upon assembling a family to ask questions, Nitti has them gunned down with relish even after seeing they likely know nothing. When Eliot Ness sneaks into his hotel, he sees Nitti is also a rapist who likes to abduct and violate young women after torturing them.
• The Bad Girl: Fukuda is a shady Japanese businessman that participates in illegal trades and the worst of the many lovers of the titular Bad Girl, offering her protection and a new identity as "Kuriko" in exchange for becoming one of his many mistresses and partner-in-crime. Revealed to be a degenerate fetishist, Fukuda uses the Bad Girl as his Sex Slave and forces her into humiliating and painful sexual acts to satiate his own lust and break her will, making the Bad Girl develop genital injuries and Stockholm Syndrome towards him. A heartless man with a seemingly inoffensive appearance, Fukuda's torture of the Bad Girl would haunt her for years.
• The Bad Seed: Bessie Denker, born Schober, was a sociopathic murderer who systematically killed her own wealthy family members to her profit. Dispatching her younger siblings as a child, Bessie soon after took the lives of her grandfather and both parents. Marrying a wealthy man to enrich herself by convincing him to take out an insurance policy, Bessie then killed him as well, careful to keep up the façade of a sweet, caring community member to avoid suspicion. Later marrying the father of heroine Christine, Bessie killed him too, before being finally exposed by her cousin, killing said cousin and three of her own children—Christine herself barely escaping her wicked mother—hoping to frame her dead cousin and escape justice until being caught and executed. Even long after her death, Bessie's memory haunts Christine well into adulthood and her genes give way to Christine's own daughter Rhoda taking up her grandmother's mantle as a budding psychopath in her own right.
• The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Dr. Volumnia Gaul had the Hunger Games—where teenagers from each of the Districts are forced to kill each other—implemented into society to solidify the Capitol's oppressive regime, forcing Casca Highbottom to take credit for creating it even after he regretted what he had done. In the book proper, Gaul conducts horrific experiments on Avoxes out of scientific curiosity; has a girl injected with snake venom for lying to her; and has Coriolanus Snow kill a tribute to prove that killing is humanity's natural state. Nihilistic and misanthropic, Gaul manages to convert Snow to her worldview, resulting in him becoming the brutal tyrant he is in the original trilogy.
• Balthazar: John Redgrave is a cruel and ancient vampire known for bringing out the worst in his followers. In the seventeenth century, when the title character discovers Redgrave's obsession with his young sister, Charity, Redgrave takes revenge on the family by killing them all except the siblings, then torturing Balthazar for days before turning him into a vampire. Forcing Balthazar to choose between turning either his Love Interest or Charity into a vampire, Redgrave murders Balthazar's beloved in response to him reluctantly vampirising his sister and forces Charity to become his lover while molding her into a vicious monster. After tormenting Balthazar throughout the ages, Redgrave discovers a psychic girl in the modern day whose blood makes vampires relive their most ecstatic memories and plans to constantly drain her blood to create an army of euphorically inebriated vampires for himself. Sending hundreds of vampires to attack her town, Redgrave Mind Rapes Balthazar with visions of his past pain when he tries to stop him.
• Bamboo Guerillas, by Guy N. Smith: Colonel Sika is a sadistic prison commander during World War II who has his captives brutally tortured and murdered, with even his own men not safe from his depredations. Upon capturing nurses, Sika has them gang raped and tortured while keeping their leader Sonia as a Sex Slave. Upon capturing guerrilla Allied soldiers, Sika has them tortured and forces them to "perform" with nurses in the hot sun until they finally give out and die. Even after this, Sika intends on killing a nurse a day if guerrilla leader "Jungle" Carter is not brought to him so he can torture Carter to death himself.
• Banished Lands setting, by John Gwynne:
  • Asroth, the Demon King and lord of the Kadoshim, was once Elyon's most beloved creation before he fell from Grace. A sadistic monster of a demon, Asroth is the force behind Calidus who seeks to annihilate all that lives in the Banished Lands. Returning in A Time for Courage, the final book in Of Blood and Bone, Asroth orders the genocide of the Sirak tribe for their king's opposition to him and has his forces run rampant over the Banished Lands, butchering all they find and turning others into undead abominations to serve his legions. Chasing the Ben-Elim and Order of the Bright Star to their last stronghold, Asroth orders both annihilated with any civilians so he may spit on the grave of the long-dead Corban and spite Elyon as well, killing many heroes personally in the process in his quest to reign as the most powerful being in creation.
  • The Faithful and the Fallen series:
    • Calidus is the high captain of the Kadoshim, fallen angels who serve the dark lord Asroth. The first of the Kadoshim to assume human flesh, Calidus takes the form of a wise old man who secretly manipulates events in the human world to remain chaotic and brutal while also manipulating a young man named Nathair to become Asroth's champion, "The Black Sun." Continuously pushing Nathair to worse deeds, including murdering his own father, Calidus intends to pave the way for the other Kadoshim and Asroth to annihilate all of humanity. Forcibly installing a multitude of Kadoshim into human hosts while they're alive and tormented, Calidus directs them to massacre human settlements and villages while also encouraging cannibalism as fuel for their new bodies. Calidus murders the mother of the hero Corban and later desecrates her grave just for kicks. While he hides his true nature behind a mask of civility and wisdom, Calidus is a ruthless, savage being utterly dedicated to the annihilation of humanity and his own advancement alongside Asroth.
    • Lykos, Calidus's closest human servant, serves Asroth's plans despite being one of the few to know what Asroth truly is. With Calidus's help, Lykos rose to become king of the brutal Vin-Thalun pirate culture, his people. Promoting violent raids and a dog-eat-dog society, Lykos makes advancements into Nathair's own kingdom when he is away and sets up illegal fighting pits where people are forced to fight to the death for Lykos's amusement, with one of the few survivors being the warrior Maquin. Lykos then magically enslaves Nathair's mother Queen Fidele and rapes her while also using her as a puppet to set up legal fighting pits and ruling through her as a tyrant while she is aware of everything. After Maquin rescues Fidele, Lykos develops a disturbing fixation on her and continuously tries to recover her, resulting in her death when she kills herself to save Maquin from suicide at Lykos's order when he holds her hostage. Lykos shows no compunction cheating at his fights if he's actually in danger, and when he finally faces Maquin in a duel to the death, continuously mocks him about Fidele's death, standing apart as the vilest human being in the series, considered barbaric even among his own allies.
  • Of Blood and Bone series: Kol is a Ben-Elim who gave in to material lusts and hubris. Promoting the seduction of mortals as a living god to them, Kol hid his transgressions by forcing the mothers to murder any half-breed offspring that resulted, the results of which are seen in a mass grave and the trauma of the women forced to endure it. Upon learning of a surviving half-breed, Kol attempts to kill her, and kills those in his path before launching a coup that kills many Ben-Elim, including their leader Israphil. Hiding his crimes, Kol even murders the young hero Bleda when he threatens to expose him, sneering only how humans refuse to learn their place.
• The Bank, by Bentley Little: Mr. Worthington and Julius Pickering are a pair of greedy, controlling bankers who betrayed their partner Theo for total control over the "First People's Bank" all for themselves. Trapping the magical Theo in a room and feeding off his powers for decades, Worthington and Pickering turned the originally good First People's Bank into a corrupt, twisted organization designed around ruining and destroying lives for its owners' purposes. Recruiting and assisting serial killers in their endeavors, turning innocents into mindless slaves, and forcing those indebted to the Bank to butcher each other when they can't meet the Bank's demands, Worthington and Pickering use their strategies to take over entire towns and cities, with each and every citizen being ruined, enslaved, or killed, all while the bank owner duo go so far as to sexually extort and exploit their clients for fun. Even willing to financially endorse far-right militia groups to terrorize minorities, Worthington and Pickering's most vile act comes when they supply the means, funds and weapons to a pair of school shooters, happy to let them loose and watch the ensuing massacre of students just for the funds and word of mouth it brings them.
• The Barrow, by Mark Smylie: Seemingly Lovable Rogue Gilgwyr and Leigh are both members of The Nameless Cults that worship the dark Forbidden Gods. Manipulating the novel's main character Stjepan and their companions into locating the titular Barrow and entering it, Leigh and Gilgwyr proceed to kill almost everyone in the adventuring party while leaving the corpses for flesh eating Ghuls. Gilgwyr personally leaves two to be eaten alive. The motivation of the the two is to resurrect the monstrous, cannibalistic tyrant Azharad, buried deep in the barrow, so that he can proceed to raze the world. Leigh is driven by revenge against the mages who ejected him from their fellowship, as well as greed, while Gilgwyr is simply enjoying himself. The two also ritualistically torture and murder women, including the handmaiden of Azharad's chosen bride, before intending to offer Stjepan's flesh and soul for Azharad's appetites. Leigh tricks Gilgwyr and instead makes him Azharad's meal before going on with the ritual while ranting about the power he will obtain.
• Battle Royale: Kinpatsu Sakamochi is the sadistic director of the Survival Program, and a Professional Butt-Kisser and Psycho Supporter of the Government. Willing to hurt anybody that stands in his way, he murders Mr. Hayashida, Class 3-B's teacher, for protesting the Survival Program. To show that he means business, he displays his corpse to the class. During the briefing on the Program, he casually tells the students that some of their parents died trying to stop him. When Yoshitoki Kuninobu asks what happened to he and Shuya's caretaker at the orphanage, he brags about raping her, which sets off Yoshitoki and prompts Sakamochi to kill him. To really twist the knife, he reveals that he was lying about raping the caretaker just to piss Yoshitoki off and give him an excuse to kill somebody. He later then throws a knife at another student just for whispering, and shoots Noriko in the leg for protesting his actions. He takes joy in dashing the hopes of the students competing, such as when Megumi tried to call her parents, only for Sakamochi to intercept the call and taunt her. Throughout the game, he'd make snarky comments at the expense of the dead students. At the end of the book, he reveals that he has children of his own, but would gladly sacrifice them in the Program to boost his own reputation. He even made sure to brainwash his kids into accepting that fate. He then learns that Shogo managed to disable Shuya and Noriko's collars, leading him to fatally shoot Shogo before meeting his own demise.
• Battlecry: Patrick Campbell, better known as Atropos, presents as a heroic, daring hero for the tabloids. In truth, Patrick violently abuses his teammates and keeps most of the money for himself, while loathing all ideals of heroism. When heroine Jill flees with others, Patrick tries to hunt them down, trying to rape another heroine named Ember. Finally succumbing to pure villainy, Patrick tries to draw them out by attacking a high school, killing hundreds of innocents, slaughtering multiple people in the walls and keeps the rest hostage. Deciding he's happy being the villain, Patrick burns the school, killing hundreds there, before trying to murder his old teammates.
• Bazil Broketail series:
  • Master Heruta Skash Gzug, Sorcerous Overlord of Padmasa, is the overarching villain for the first four books of the series. All the bloodshed and slavery Padmasa is responsible for traces back to Heruta and his endless, insatiable lust for power. Millions suffer under his reign, where at best punishment for any and all crimes will result in execution, and at worst the unlucky victim will be fed to a Thingweight to be consumed for weeks at a time. Thousands more become breeding slaves for Heruta's demon imps, replenishing his armies through demons borne of women kept in states of agony for months at a time. Projects under Heruta's purview usually entail the sacrifice of innocents as a basic function of their existence—such as the creation of the orcs, who need to be fed human slaves directly after they are born, which Heruta happily signs off on after ordering a demonstration. Despite his pretensions of being a Well-Intentioned Extremist, Relkin and Lessis see through Heruta's lies in an instant and drive him to his Villainous Breakdown by exposing what he is; an ego unchecked who won't stop until the Nine Cities of Argonath have been destroyed, to leave "not one stone atop another, except for the gibbets and the pyramids of skulls."
  • Waakzaam the Great, the Deceiver and the Dominator, is the Big Bad of the latter half of the series. Formerly one of the seven divine spirits tasked with building and ordering worlds for the Great Mother, Waakzaam's pride gradually but totally consumed him, as he eventually committed the first murder in existence and went thereon from uplifting civilizations to destroying them. In the present day, any vestige of goodness in Waakzaam is dead and gone, as he rules twelve worlds as a cruel tyrant. Some of these worlds have their populations almost completely eradicated, leaving nothing but barren planets for Waakzaam to plunder resources from and a few select survivors upon which Waakzaam experiments. Waakzaam has a particular proclivity for children and infants in his monstrous experiments; in one instance, the heroes find a laboratory filled with over a hundred dead and dying children, kept in agony as subjects for Waakzaam's plagues. Waakzaam is responsible for the death of billions and seeks the death of billions more, seeking to conquer Ryetelth—or otherwise cull it of most life—and then a whole skein of new worlds alongside it.
  • Bazil Broketail (first book): The Blunt Doom of Tummuz Orgdeem is a living rock imbued with an evil consciousness by the Masters of Doom themselves. The Blunt Doom runs Tummuz Orgdeem as a hellscape of slavery and torture; the male slaves are castrated to depopulate the areas they're taken from, and the females are either put up for sex slavery or made breeding fodder for the demonic imps which make up so much of Padmasa's army. The Blunt Doom itself is a capricious sadist who, envious of all life for having the flesh and blood it does not, mutilates and tortures its own servants as a means of joy. It projects its mind into three slaves—respectively its Eyes, Ears and Mouth—who have had all other redundant orifices sewn up. Its Eyes, in particular, used to be a human magician who made the mistake of sneezing in the Blunt Doom's presence, and paid for it with ritual mutilation.
  • A Sword For A Dragon: Mesomaster Gog Zagozt, one of the most depraved apprentices of the Masters of Doom and already halfway to becoming a Master himself, is The Man Behind the Man to the cult of Sephis the Terrible. Gog dresses up a demon as the return of the pagan god Sephis the Terrible, and binds both the demon and its thousands of cultists to his will, brainwashing them into a campaign of slaughter and Human Sacrifice that soon consumes thousands of innocent lives. Entire villages are butchered at a time so their flesh may be used as the building material for grotesque golems known as "blood myrmidons". Having the cult of Sephis sweep across the country of Ourdh, decapitating its leadership and overrunning entire cities, Gog eventually plans to have the female population of the country enslaved for the imps, while keeping the rest of the country as a human-sacrificing puppet state for Padmasa.
  • Dragons at War: General Lukash is the soldier assigned to lead the Padmasa military campaign against the coastal cities of Argonath. A dangerous combination of stupidity and bullheaded cruelty, Lukash engages in a general campaign of Rape, Pillage, and Burn across the Argonathi countryside, and engages in war crimes that infuriate and disgust even his allies with their pointless atrocity. Despite being explicitly ordered to keep the demon imps in his army under control and to spare officers who may offer valuable intel, Lukash openly shows no interest in trying to control them and repeatedly lets his imps off the leash. This results in his prisoners of war being roasted alive over open flames, eaten alive by demons and indiscriminately tortured to death, in such numbers the nearby lakes run red with blood.
  • A Dragon at World's End: Lord Zulbanides is a ruling member of the golden elves who rule the hidden city of Mirchaz. In Mirchaz, human life is comparable to an animal's; tens of thousands of slaves are used as living psychic batteries to power an artificial universe in which Zulbanides and the other lords play their "Great Game". Life as a Living Battery is a short and miserable one, as slaves are replaced in no more than a year and then abandoned to die after their minds give out. The artificial universe itself is even worse; life is created simply to be tortured to death, or used to fuel pointless wars that consume hundreds of millions, all for the entertainment of the elves. As the most prominent and most influential member of the ruling clique, and one of the top ten players, Zulbanides is the one chiefly responsible for all this horror. Zulbanides comes off as monstrous even in comparison to his fellow elves, with a particular proclivity for torture and horrific human sacrifice that eclipses even the cruelty of his compatriots.
• Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales:
  • "Bluebeard": The titular Bluebeard is a vicious Serial Killer who adopts orphans before brutally murdering them after baiting them into disobeying his rules. Having already killed six boys, Bluebeard adopts Pietro, and upon the boy discovering the chamber containing the corpses of his past victims, Bluebeard gleefully attempts to murder him as well.
  • "Rumpelstiltskin": Rumpelstiltskin, The Devil himself, is a sadistic imp who regularly preys on mortals and tricks them into guessing his name, the penalty for failure being eternal damnation. Having claimed millions of souls, the Devil selects Mathilde as his new target, forcing her into a Faustian pact that entails giving up her firstborn for him to do as he pleases with. When she appeals for mercy, the Devil gives her three days to guess his name, with the penalty for failure being forced to give up her next child as well.
• Beasts of the Caliber Lodge, by L. J. Dougherty: Wilhelm Stengl, alias Kristian Beckett, is a Nazi war criminal who was in charge of hunting down the "impure" for Hitler. Having sent many to their deaths, Stengl also investigated fellow Nazis to see if they were not pure Aryans. Stengl used this to send many of his fellow officers to their ends to advance himself. Helping to enact a resurgent Nazi plot, Stengl later burns a maid to death in a fit of cruelty and paranoia.
• Beast Tamer: Edgar Fromware is the sociopathic son of the Lord of the Horizon who believes the title enables him to do whatever he wants. Once a month, Edgar kidnaps a woman from the village, threatens to execute the citizens should he be denied, and tortures and abuses them to his heart's content. Upon learning of an ultimate species named Nina, Edgar threatens to kill children to get her compliance and enslaves her with an enchanted collar designed to prevent her from accessing her godlike powers. Regularly beating her to sate his perversions, Edgar tries to make Sora and Runa his new slaves, only to side with Arios Orlando when Rein Shroud opposes him. Failing to kill Rein, Edgar becomes possessed by the demon within his ring and goes on a rampage.
• Behind Closed Doors, by B. A. Paris: Jack Angel is a fear-loving sadist who wants nothing more than a perfect slave to torment. Having taken advantage of his father's abusive nature to abuse his mother, Angel eventually beat his mother to death and framed his father for the crime. Becoming a defense attorney for battered women solely to soak in their pain and terror, Angel eventually romances Grace Harrington to get access to her challenged teenage sister Millie. After turning Grace into his abused wife who he tortures and starves at every turn, Angel reveals his plans to fake Millie's death and lock her in a horrifying room for the rest of her life so he can bask in her agony until he gets bored of her, and he "tests" this room out by throwing Grace's dog inside and leaving him to starve. In the end, Angel plans to murder Grace and Millie's parents, then keep the sisters as his slaves to torment to his content, taking sick glee in the fact that he'll be able to enjoy both of their pain as he forces one to watch the other be tortured.
• Beleth Station, by Bryan Smith & Samantha Kolesnik:
  • Robert Livingston is the mastermind of the horrible Gauntlet and the cesspool of violence that Beleth Station has become. To satisfy his own lust for power, Robert created a council of "Elders", empowered sadistic thugs like Rebecca Lawson, and used them to enslave the town for their cruel whims. Robert would oversee the Gauntlet being used to force kidnapped drifters into horrible acts of depravity and violence, all while Robert indulged in his own vile ways by raping and torturing women for fun. When a rebellion tries to rise up against him, Robert has the members brutally tortured and tries to wipe them out, as well as forcing lead Krista to torture two women to death to save her lover's life.
  • Rebecca Lawson is one of the most powerful people still remaining in Beleth Station. A Sadistic fanatic of torture and abuse, Rebecca participates in the regime by running the Gauntlet where victims are forced to run, kill, and torture one another for Rebecca's pleasure, with the "victors" simply taken back to her home so she can rape and abuse them before carving off their faces while they still live.
• The Belgariad:
  • Magician's Gambit: Ctuchik is High Priest of the Grolims, and chief disciple of Torak, ruling Cthol Murgos in Torak's stead after the god was left comatose. Completely uninterested in awakening Torak, Ctuchik nevertheless keeps Grolim rituals of Human Sacrifice going for five hundred years, sacrificing untold thousands of slaves to a god he does not even worship in order to cement his control over the priesthood. Pursuing his own agenda, Ctuchik aims to Take Over the World in order to satiate his lust for power, and maintains a private torture chamber for his own amusement.
  • The Malloreon:
    • Harakan, alias Lord Mengha, is one of Urvon's underlings, and the most treacherous Grolim in the whole of The Malloreon. Posing as the leader of the Bear-Cult, Harakan twice sent assassins to murder Queen Ce'Nedra; mind-controlled her into nearly murdering her own son; and after his plan to trigger a war between Garion and King Anheg failed, raised the Bear-Cult in revolt in Drasnia and Cherek alike. When this plan and a subsequent one to worsen the war between Cthol Murgos and Mallorea both resulted in disaster, Harakan made contact with the Demon Lord Nahaz and cut a deal with him, whereby Nahaz would drive Urvon mad, make Harakan ruler of the world and by seizing the Orb of Aldur and the Sardion destroy both the Light and Dark Prophecies and make the King of Hell the new Lord of the Universe in place of UL. He also resurrected demon-worship in Karanda; turned the Malloreon Civil War into a Mêlée à Trois; used Nahaz's demons to sack multiple cities and massacre their populations; and convinced young Karandese women to let Nahaz impregnate them, a process that would not only kill the girls, but would unleash demons that were not of this world and could not be banished. Never quite as clever or in control as he thought he was, Harakan was nevertheless fully aware of what he was doing when he unleashed Nahaz, and was prepared to risk the destruction of the multiverse for the sake of personal power.
    • Zandramas, the Big Bad of The Malloreon, is a former Grolim priestess who liked to cut out people's hearts and bathe in their blood while nude. Her crimes include cruelty to animals; betraying everyone who helps her; kidnapping Garion's son Geran; having successfully started a civil war in the east and attempting to start one in the west; brainwashing Ce'Nedra, regularly trying to break the rules of Prophecy; and cannibalism. She uses ships to travel undetected, but once at her location, she kills the other sailors, often either by burning the ships or feeding the sailors to wild animals. Even Torak leaves a note to Garion asking him to stop Zandramas.
• Belisarius Series: Venandakatra the Vile is the first cousin of the Emperor of the Malwa and a depraved hedonistic sadist, hated even among the other Malwa. Venandakatra's tactics involve throwing his soldiers at the enemy until the enemy runs out of defenses before he runs out of men, and when he takes a city he subjects it to horrific massacres, with women taken as spoils and civilians massacred in huge numbers, often by his favorite execution method, impalement on short stakes. When he and Belisarius conquer one city, Venandakatra has a rebel leader with his family brought to Belisarius for rape and torture; Belisarius has them killed swiftly to spare them the fate. Venandakatra is also a pedophile who brutalizes little girls he inducts into his harem, requiring frequent replacements when he kills them, disgusting even the Malwa spymaster Nanda Lal. When he is placed in charge of a section of the empire, Venandakatra's excesses eventually drive it into open revolt. When his chief holding is under siege, Venandakatra has a commander who contradicts him blasted out of a cannon and forces his slaves to carry him to his palace, threatening to impale him should even one of them stumble. When they delay in getting him to safety, he orders them impaled on the spot, only to find out his troops have deserted him, leaving him to the mercies of his greatest enemy.
• Benny Rose, the Cannibal King: Benny Rose himself, a terrifying Urban Legend in his little town of Blackwood, Vermont, rises each Halloween with the flesh of children as his only craving. Any child who sets foot in town is subject to become Benny's meal. Emerging to consume several children who wander in, Benny stalks the rest from house to house, killing one girl named Sierra and then preparing to painfully devour the others.
• Between Two Fires:
  • Lucifer himself schemes to test God's care for humanity before taking over all of creation for his own. Unleashing The Black Death and various monstrosities upon Earth to kill millions and sending three of his top devils to sow chaos throughout humankind, Lucifer takes advantage of God's lack of reaction to these atrocities by declaring war on Heaven. Lucifer hopes to destroy all of humanity, then subject every single angel not under his banner to the torment of Hell for eternity while he personally dethrones God and reigns supreme for all time.
  • Baal'Zebuth, Ra'um, and Bel-phegor are three devils dispatched by Lucifer to Earth to take advantage of the Black Death and bring forth the destruction of humanity. Bel-phegor traps souls in a "court of the damned" where he abuses them to his heart's content; Ra'um uses an avatar to trick dozens of people into torturing themselves and crucifying their neighbors under the false illusion it will protect them from plague; Baal'Zebuth kills hundreds of people and revives them as tormented, zombified slaves he uses as labor and to seduce unsuspecting targets to perform necrophilia. Together, the trio encourage torture, rape, and murder across Europe, and tear apart entire villages to find potential foes. The triumvirate intends to stir up bigotry against Jews until they are all oppressed and wiped out, then pave the way for Lucifer's armies to ravage the whole Earth, and when their victory appears at hand, the three devils begin slaughtering all of Avignon to bring in their bloody success.
• Beware! by Richard Laymon:
  • Laveda is a tyrannical cult leader with mystic powers who seduces and brainwashes people into joining her cult. Laveda regularly performs sacrifices of followers and captives, drinking their blood for the power. Desiring to spread her influence, Laveda has influential public figures and innocent people in her way assassinated, eventually planning to kill the President and throw the US into chaos to allow her cult to spread through all aspects of society. When one of her followers is taken to a de-programming specialist, Laveda has the doctor murdered and sets on the trail of the heroes who have taken her former assassin captive. Planning to kill them all regardless of giving up said assassin, Laveda tortures the novel's heroine with a chain whip, relishing and even getting aroused by the pain she's causing.
  • Sam Hoffman, formerly Laveda's chief assassin, was a thug who raped his teacher and became a rapist and Serial Killer. Recruited by Laveda, Hoffman was turned invisible and began murdering high profile targets for her. Finally splitting from the group after killing and raping—in that order—one of Laveda's favorite women, Hoffman returned to his hometown, killed his parents and raped a previous object of his lust named Lacey. Hoffman follows her to a hotel where he kills multiple people before being taken hostage by the heroes and reveals he knows about Laveda. Biding his time while pretending to cooperate, Hoffman escapes and rapes Lacey again, also assaulting another woman in the group before being subdued and meeting his end at Laveda's hands—not because she cared about the woman she killed, but only because he betrayed her—as the house the two are in is incinerated.
• Beyond This Horizon: McFee Norbert is a high-ranking member—and possibly the leader—of a revolutionary group called the Survivors' Club. He plans a takeover of America and eventually the world and intends to turn the majority of the human population into genetically-modified secondary beings designed to serve a small group of leaders including himself. In preparations for the takeover, McFee kidnaps women from the "barbarian" regions still recovering from the devastating Genetic Wars and forces them to carry babies McFee then uses for cruel genetic experiments. After the takeover, McFee intends to wipe out the "barbarians" except for a few saved, once again, for experimentation. With his utter lack of morals or scruples of any kind, McFee's crimes stand out in the very changed world of the future as much as they would today.
• BioShock: Rapture: The novel-exclusive Pat Cavendish is a constable for Rapture who uses his position to abuse and bully anyone he wants. Cavendish routinely brutalizes and tortures prisoners of Rapture, regardless of their level of guilt, and is the most trigger-happy constable in the city, always wearing a grin while gunning down suspects. Seeking to line his pockets with extra cash, Cavendish begins kidnapping citizens and handing them off to Sander Cohen to be nightmarishly murdered, and also kidnaps young girls to sell them to Dr. Yi Suchong to be experimented on. When sent to capture Bill McDonagh for execution, Cavendish gleefully plans to take in the man's wife and daughter as well just because he can, and attempts to gun down one of his fellow constables when the man tries to show mercy to Bill's family.
• Black & Orange, by Benjamin Kane Ethridge: Chaplain Cloth is the mysterious, not-quite-human head of the Church of Midnight, having established annual sacrifice of those who bear the "Heart of the Harvest" unfailingly for thousands of years, all in a bid to fuse the real world and the Old Domain to unite the Churches of the two worlds. Cloth regularly possesses people in the real world to burn out their minds so he may take over their bodies, overseeing his minions as they butcher the Nomads who try and stop his affairs, eventually chasing after his intended sacrifices—quadruplet infants who all bear the Heart—when they elude him, driving a bar full of people to kill themselves and cruelly killing one of the lead Nomads himself.
• The Black Angel:
  • Garcia, the latest recruit of the Believers, is 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. It's also implied that before coming to America, he did even worse.
  • Brightwell is the immortal second-in-command of the Believers, who assists Garcia in the worst of his exploits while also going about much of the Black Angel's dirty work across the centuries: murder, torture, brutal assaults upon defenseless monks and a host of other offenses. For good measure, he has a nasty habit of consuming the souls of his victims and adding them to "the great chorus within..."
• Blackbeard's Pirates vs. The Evil Mummies, by James Black: Sakhmet is a former Egyptian queen who has become the ruler of the evil mummies. Feeding on the souls of her victims, Sakhmet kills many people to join her legions, massacres the crew of a Turkish ship when they hold her sarcophagus, and later targets Blackbeard's own crew. After killing many more people, Sakhmet possesses and kills Blackbeard's sister Mary before announcing her intentions of unleashing her armies on the world to reap and devour the souls of countless innocents until she reigns over what's left.
• Black Blade: Victor Draconi is the sadistic head of the Draconi family and heroine Lila Sterling's Arch-Enemy. As a teenager, Victor attempted to lead the Draconi to annihilate the city's ruling families before being stopped by Lila's mother, Serena. Becoming a vicious murderer and torturer, Victor kills his enemies to take their abilities as his own and over the years tortures to death both of Lila's parents. His own family fairing no better, Victor keeps his wife and daughter around for their powers and regularly threatens and abuses them, with his wife beaten and starved. Attempting to take over the city by bloodbath with the power of the titular Black Blades, Victor responds to being foiled by massacring members of the Sinclair family before taking their matriarch hostage to torture. When Lila herself is captured by him, he has her electrically tortured before attempting to feed her to the same venomous snakes he used to kill her father as a dark form of irony for himself.
• The Black Company:
  • The Dominator is the true Big Bad of The Books of the North. Once a powerful sorcerer, the Dominator began to crave the power to bring destruction to all he saw fit, and kicked off his tyrannical rule by slaughtering his own hometown. Upon establishing the Domination by forcing ten evil wizards into his servitude as his "Taken," the Dominator turned the lands into a horrific era where entire kingdoms were raped, pillaged and burned at the Dominator's whim. Though locked away in the Barrowlands for his crimes, and later left to rot in them when his wife, the Lady, and Taken escape, the Dominator reaches out and begins corrupting the rebel forces against the Lady's growing empire, and kickstarts a bloody slaughter of a war that ends with a quarter of a million people dead. After failing to use the life-devouring Black Castle to aid his escape, the Dominator attempts to spread dozens of the stones that build the Castle throughout the world to kill countless people and enable his freedom. When finally blasting his way out of confinement, the Dominator butchers all in his path on his way to the Lady, planning to murder her for leaving him in the Barrowlands before restarting his horrific Domination and plunging the world into a hellish nightmare of agony and death for all.
  • The Taken known as the Limper is a vicious Evil Sorcerer and the evilest of the Taken, with malice and sadism matching even the Dominator himself. Ruling his domain in the Lady's empire via brutality, cruelty and regularly allowing massacres or rapes with his forces, the Limper secretly betrays the Lady to work with the rebels and, when convenient for him, massacres the rebels, only to attempt to betray the Lady again to allow the Dominator to free himself and make the world into a twisted hellhole. Returning in the fifth novel, The Silver Spike, the Limper leads a hellish army on a march throughout the country, razing whole cities to the ground and annihilating their populaces save the few he enslaves, with no sign of stopping until he has crushed the world under his heel. One of the single most monstrous foes the Black Company has ever encountered, the Limper also remains perhaps their most personal and sadistic enemy.
  • Longshadow is the leader of the Shadowmasters, leading his forces across the Glittering Plane to conquer the world of Hsien, whereupon he enacted a horrific dystopia that saw Hsien ruined and countless innocents over the world dead or tortured. Enslaving the demons known as Shadows before arriving on Homeworld, Longshadow conquers the south where countless others are killed and enslaved in a nightmarish rule. Intending on betraying his own forces, Longshadow plans to release the Shadows to consume his enemies, even his own forces, to ravage the world until he is left to reign over the ashes, with all knowledge belonging to him and him alone.
  • Kina the Destroyer is an ancient goddess hellbent on bringing about the "Year of the Skulls", an apocalyptic event where she hopes to reign death and destruction onto all of the 16 worlds. Orchestrating her various Deceiver cults in a wide array of atrocities, from cannibalism to mass murder on the daily, Kina's cults have killed thousands over the years, with Kina herself even approving of and endorsing the betrayal and murders of her own cult members. Regularly employing Mind Rape to turn people to her cause, Kina possesses the body of Lady's infant daughter Booboo and brainwashes her for decades, convincing her that Kina is her actual mother, yet having no care for the young girl except as a tool. Though her cult believes she will bring everlasting peace to much of the world, Kina in actuality plans to kill everything she can upon her revival, with visions of her planned future showing nothing but wastelands of corpses and bones that Kina dances throughout, adorned in infant skulls. After beaten by Croaker, Kina gets one final revenge by taking full control of Booboo and trying to murder her mother, forcing Croaker to either kill his daughter or let his beloved wife Lady die.
• "The Blackest Heart", by Zach Rosenberg: Conte Aurelio di Bentivoglio is a nobleman who secretly practices evil rituals. Summoning children to the house and methodically murdering them in an attempt to contact the demon Ashmedai, Aurelio proves to have done his evil work for years and to even have sacrificed his previous wives without hesitation. The sadistic, deeply misogynistic Aurelio attempts to sacrifice his current wife Laura to summon Ashmedai, only to end up killed when she herself summons Ashmedai and her ally Caterina chooses to let Ashmedai kill him for his horrific crimes.
• The Black Farm:
  • Muck is a hulking monstrosity who is easily the worst of the Pig's creations. Sadistic and cruel, even by the standards of the Pig Born, Muck elicits fear throughout the Black Farm even from his own race. Abducting Nick and a woman named Megan to torture, Muck rapes Nick and then attempts to make him watch as he does the same to Megan. Nick refuses to, so Muck cuts off his eyelids. Muck then wraps Nick's legs in barbed wire and tries to force him to beat Megan with a hammer, cutting off his arms when Nick does not comply. After Nick is unable to eat the tough slab of meat Muck forces on him, Muck decides that Nick needs "stronger teeth". He yanks out all of Nick's teeth and then jams a handful of screws into his gums. Those whom Muck grows bored of torturing are placed in the "Needle Fields", rows and rows of spikes stuck into the ground upon which Muck impales his victims and leaves them to a slow death either of exposure to the elements or other Pig Born coming to feed.
  • Ryder is the depraved leader of the "Hooves of the Pig" cult. Under his direction, the cult has abducted countless women and imprisoned them to be used as breeding stock for the Pig Born. Certain abductees, such as Megan, are chained to Ryder's bed so that he can hack off bits of their flesh and eat them, and his room is littered with the bones of his past meals. When Nick meets with Ryder as part of his plan to infiltrate the cult and rescue his girlfriend Jess, he is unable to mask his disgust at the Villainous Glutton's eating habits. Ryder cuts off a piece of Megan's shoulder and insists that Nick eat it, laughing at him as he reluctantly complies and assuring him that the taste will grow on him. When threatened by Nick, Ryder proves unable to live up to the standards of his own cult as he cowardly pleads for his life.
• The Black Hole novelization, by Alan Dean Foster: Maximillian is explicitly named as responsible for reprogramming his fellow robots aboard the Cygnus to put down the mutiny against the mad Dr. Hans Reinhardt. After quashing the revolt, Maximillian has the robots painfully mold the crew into android husks to serve Reinhardt as broken slaves. Attacking the crew of the Palomino when they discover the duo's crime, Maximillian signals for the robotic conversion of one member and even abandons the trapped Reinhardt to settle a petty grudge with the heroic robot V.I.N.CENT.
• Black Jewels: Hekatah SaDiablo, the Big Bad of the original trilogy, is one of the Demon-Dead who gleefully kills others for their blood, children included. Once the wife of High Lord Saetan, Hekatah attempted to manipulate him by using their newborn child as a bargaining chip, eventually having her baby killed and dismembered before later starting a war and initiating purges of the Blood across the lands. In the modern day, Hekatah assists Dorothea of Hayll with her tyranny, having many raped, killed or slaughtered as she kills many people to start a new war, dedicated only to her power at the expense of all others.
• Blacklands by Belinda Bauer: Arnold Avery is a sadistic child killer with a penchant for rape and torture. Having grown up a vicious bully to all around him, torturing animals and fellow children alike, Avery continues this malicious streak into adulthood, eventually kidnapping, raping, and murdering a child who reminded him of a victim who ratted him out in middle school. Discovering how enjoyable this was, Avery began routinely raping and murdering children, racking up 9 victims before he was caught. Taking time to send letters to his victims' families to mock them over their plight, Avery soon arranges a prison riot to escape from prison so as to track down the nephew of a child he once killed. Once tracking down the boy, Avery gleefully attempts to rape and murder him, hoping for nothing more than to continue his spree afterwards.
• Black Mouth, by Ronald Malfi: The Magician is a sinister being who made a pact with the eldritch force living in the cave known as Black Mouth. Targeting children to feed the creature with negative emotion and souls. The Magician sways children to evil, getting them to murder others including their parents. Such acts also reach others into adulthood, creating enough murder and death for the Magician to continue in his current state.
• Black Onyx Chronicles, by Victor Methos:
  • Black Onyx: Sebastian Valdez, better known as "El Sacerdote" (the Priest) is a Man of Wealth and Taste with a predisposition for torture and murder, and a Mexican drug lord who burned his own parents alive at the age of twelve and eventually killed his own mentor to seize his cartel after years of serving as the man's attack dog. Introduced cheerfully throwing a DEA officer into the clutches of his ravenous crocodiles to be devoured—and tossing in one of his own concubines to die in his place after fishing the man out once his superior begs for his life—Sacerdote ruthlessly exterminates any and all opposition to his operations, murdering the family of one man after he turns to the DEA. Sacerdote's long-term goal is to flood America with his own weapons and eventually destroy the nation through a war of his own design, casually ordering one of his own men to kill his second-in-command Miguel once he's horrified by the prospect of it—moments after saying he'd never kill Miguel himself. Once learning of the powerful Black Onyx suits, Sacerdote tortures an associate of a man who knows their location to get him to talk and plans to utilize the suits instead in his goal of destroying America.
  • Black Onyx Reloaded: Atlantis is a savage queen who once ruled the entire Earth with an iron fist, killing all who stood against her. Once revived from her self-induced slumber thousands of years later, Atlantis immediately begins exploring her surroundings, slaughtering hundreds of innocents for nothing but a show of force. As she gathers several of her elite guard from their slumbers, Atlantis leads an assault on an entire city, massacring all in her path and ordering her troops to leave no man, woman, or child alive in the city, after which she plans on going on a worldwide murder spree, killing off nearly all of humanity in an attempt to restore her former kingdom to its original glory, with her as power supreme.
• Black Sheep, by Rachel Harrison: Lucifer is the father of heroine Vesper Wright and the master of the satanic cult of Virgil. Pretending at being a loving father as Vesper has always wanted, Lucifer manipulates and abuses her to sacrifice her before his congregation with the intent to kickstart the apocalypse and burn everything alive in pure hellfire so he might rule the world as a new hell.
• The Black Spider: The Devil makes a dark pact with the village in return for an unbaptized child. When farmer's wife Christine attempts to cheat him by having children baptized, the Devil causes spiders to erupt from her face to kill the livestock. When the Devil is repulsed, he turns Christine into a black spider to kill villagers en masse across 600 years.
• Blindness: The King of Ward 3 is shown to be the most savage of the barbaric society formed from the people afflicted by the blinding White Sickness. Assuming control over the asylum in which the afflicted are quarantined, the King molds Ward 3 into a gang, then rations all the food to himself and his gang, taking the valuables of the other Wards with promises of food in return (which he dispenses sparsely). Threatening death to all who challenge him, the King forces the starving Wards to give his gang the women of the asylum if they want food. The brutal mass-rape that ensues leads to the death of one of the women raped, but the King doesn’t care, and allows the rapes to continue.
• Blood and Rain, by Glenn Rolfe: The werewolf, Stan Springs, has grown to enjoy his bestial nature. Slaughtering a man in the intro, Stan continues a steady spree as a werewolf Serial Killer. Eventually going on a violent killing spree, Stan slaughters over a dozen people and turns a man into a werewolf to continue his actions, before attempting to murder the people his rival Joe Fisher loves for spite and hunger.
• The Blood Guard trilogy: Evangeline Birk is the supreme head of the Bend Sinister, an organization dedicated to killing the thirty-six Pure souls and bringing about the end times so she and her followers can mold the resulting world into their liking. In her centuries-long endeavor, Birk has orchestrated global catastrophes and even sacrificed the souls of hundreds of her followers to create a mask with which to detect and track down the Pure. In the present, Birk has her followers construct a lightning device with which to kill a Pure, then revive them and repeat the process until the accumulated trauma kills every other Pure around the world, attempting to use the device on 13-year-olds Ronan and Greta.
• Blood Meridian: Judge Holden is introduced casually ruining a man's life by claiming him guilty of a crime several towns over, before confessing he had never met the man before and just destroyed his life for giggles. Holden acts as a corrupting force to the Glanton Gang throughout the novel, subtly pushing them to commit more and more atrocities on the undeserving. Holden's savagery and cruelty utterly outstrip the rest of his contemporaries and the lives he takes are often done so with more terrible violence then the others. Holden thinks nothing of murdering children, and they tend to go missing from areas he visits after he is seen tempting them with sweets. The true nature of Holden is left ambiguous, but regardless he is a creature who desires nothing less than permanent violence and closes the novel with a murder implied to be too horrible to show even in the story's depressingly bleak world.
• Blood Of Eden series: Sarren is the most evil and savage monster in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by vampires. He delights in targeting innocents and cold-bloodedly torturing his enemies to death or brainwash them to kill their loved ones for him. The methods he uses to indoctrinate his pawns include turning them into vampires, then starving them and setting them on women and children. After his vampire sire Kanin and Malachai Crosse try to experiment on him to find a cure for the Red Lung virus that wiped out most of humanity, he tracks down and kills every single scientist who worked on it, along with their families. When he arrives in Eden to get the cure, he unleashes mindless mutants called Rabids on the island's population, killing hundreds of people. Ultimately, he wants to use a modified version of the Red Lung virus to wipe out both humans and vampires completely.
• The Blood of Stars duology: Gyiu'rak is a malevolent demon who makes a deal with the warlord known as the Shansen for a massive blood sacrifice in return for giving the Shansen power. Acting as partners, the two start a war and leave thousands dead in their homeland. Gyiu'rak eggs on the Shansen into greater and greater atrocities, leading to the massacre of an entire city of people. Ultimately, when they achieve complete control, Gyiu'rak intends to betray the Shansen and rule the country alone, with its people reduced to misery.
• Bloodrush, by Bryan Smith: Vampire Narcisa Vulpes is a vicious thrill killing Serial Killer who turns the main character David Rucker into a vampire. Slaughtering those around him, Narcisa corrupts him into a killer himself while using him as a plaything. Narcisa regularly leaves massive trails of corpses behind her, at one point invading a diner and slaughtering everyone within, torturing a number to death first before ordering David to kill his mortal girlfriend.
• The Blood War Trilogy:
  • General Vorrul is the brutal warleader of the Grol, dedicated to his own glory and advancement. Vorrul obtains powerful weapons known as O'hra, giving the Grol access to magic for the first time. Vorrul obliterates human cities he comes across, massacring everyone within the last man, women and child who are used for meat, with Vorrul himself happily devouring a dozen human infants as a victory feast. Leading his men to the prized city of Lathah, Vorrul manages to overcome the city where he massacres all left in the walls and attempts to hunt down and murder the survivors, particularly his nemesis, the O'hra wielding human Arrin.
  • Sultae, the secret master of Vorrul, is a powerful Sha'Ree who has grown to believe that any other race beyond the Sha'Ree are an affront to the world. Massacring Sha'Ree for disagreeing and happily torturing others for information, Sultae arms the Grol and other violent races with O'hra, intending to have them wipe out any peaceful race before turning them against each other to complete the genocides. Capturing another Sha'Ree, Sultae tries to force him into being her mate via torture and mental manipulation, intending to stop at nothing to complete her annihilation of all she deems below her.
• Blood Work: After being rejected from the LAPD for antisocial behavior, Daniel Crimmins, obsessed with being a "somebody", and proving his superiority, became the "Code Killer." Crimmins murdered numerous people in his rampage, sending taunting messages to the police about their inability to stop him. When Terry McCaleb, Crimmins's appointed "nemesis," experiences a heart failure, Crimmins, refusing to let him die so simply, begins killing organ donors with McCaleb's blood type, knowing this will get him a heart transplant faster. When Crimmins's plan to frame McCaleb for the crimes fails, Crimmins kidnaps Graciela, McCaleb's Love Interest, and her young nephew, planning to starve them to death by burying them alive, just to torture McCaleb. Even when dying, Crimmins refuses to take the blame for his crimes or reveal the hostages' location to McCaleb. While implied to have an Inferiority Superiority Complex, Daniel Crimmins was ultimately a sadistic and homicidal lunatic who cared about his own "legacy" more than anything else.
• The Bloody Chamber (and other stories): In this Grimmification of classic fairy tales, the following villains stand as the most monstrous:
  • "The Bloody Chamber": The Marquis is a Serial Killer who murders his brides by torturing them to death through gruesome methods such as a torture rack and iron maiden before turning their corpses into trophies for him to admire. Luring the protagonist into becoming his newest bride, he reveals he intends to offer her the same fate as his previous victims and even intends to off a servant of his who tried to help her.
  • "The Erl-King": The titular Erl King is a monstrous tree person who charms young women who enter the forest. When they're in his grasp, the Erl King either rapes or abuses them before branding their necks with his claws. After growing bored with him, the Erl King transforms them into songbirds whose voices have been taken out and cages them with him having dozens of victims, a fate he intends to impose on the protagonist.
• Blue World, by Robert R. McCammon: The title story's Travis is a psychopathic cowboy who murders women he grows obsessed with. After watching a pornographic film called Super Slick, Travis hunts down and drowns one of the actresses, before finding the second working in a sex club. Travis proceeds to murder her, as well as many others in the club before escaping as the third, Debra Rocks, real name Debbie Stoner, becomes involved with a kind young priest named John Lancaster. Travis murders a man Debbie spent the night with out of simple jealousy and catches a private detective watching Debbie for John. Travis proceeds to horribly torture and murder him before trying to kill John and finally Debbie by drowning her as well.
• Bluebeard: The titular Bluebeard seems to be at first a rich gentleman who wins the heart of a young maiden. In truth, Bluebeard is a Serial Killer who selects his victims by seducing them into marriage before cutting open their throats and hanging their bodies in his mansion. When the young maiden's curiosity leads her to find the one forbidden room in Bluebeard's mansion filled with the bodies of his previous victims, Bluebeard attempts to slaughter her as well in a fit of rage. With little motivation to couple his spree-killing aside from occasionally being depicted as greedy, the original incarnation of Bluebeard defined, and still stands as the most infamously brutal incarnation of, one of the most terrifying modern serial killer tropes.
• "Blue John", by D.K. Wayrd (link): Blue John is a former policeman, with a reputation for "fairness" among the London streets. Taking up residence in the lodging house of young Finch, Blue John develops a new career as a newspaper man known for reporting on the most sensational and gruesome murders. In truth, Blue John murders his victims himself, beginning with a Temperance Union worker and even killing a girl as young as sixteen. After numerous horrific slayings, Blue John savagely kills the retired prostitute Nettie, a beloved friend of Finch, while dismissing her as "nobody important" for when he writes about her death.
• The Boatman's Daughter: A Novel, by Andy Davidson: Constable Charlie Riddle is a potbellied, prejudiced bully who uses his gun and badge to abuse the people of Nash County. Riddle has worked with Father Billy Cotton for years to turn Nash into a crime-infested hellhole, forcing dozens of women into prostitution while peddling drugs across the county. An absolute menace to children, Riddle not only stood by and laughed as Cotton slit the throat of his newborn child, but he also attempted to rape Miranda Crabtree when she was 12 out of a twisted lust for her dead mother. Years later, Riddle decides to cut his ties with Nash through a plan to slaughter all of his prostitutes; decapitate one of his partners; sell the other into slavery; then force the latter's wife to watch as Riddle bashes in her infant's skull before raping and murdering the woman. After pointlessly killing the only woman he ever had a relationship with out of sheer misogyny, Riddle tries to have Miranda killed to pay her back for escaping his past rape attempt. When that fails, Riddle instead decides to torture and tear out the eyes of Miranda's surrogate little brother.
• Body Rides: Leslie Glitt, nicknamed "Rasputin" for his resemblance to the Mad Monk, is a rapist, sexual sadist, and murderer known as The Beast of Belvedere. Stopped by the hero Neal Darden from torturing and murdering Elise Waters with a pair of pliers, his favorite method, Glitt survives and returns to torture and murder Elise anyways. Killing multiple women through sadistic means, Glitt also turns out to be hired by Elise's ex-husband Vince Conrad to eliminate her. When the two turn on one another, Glitt tortures Conrad to death before attempting to do the same with the heroines Marta and Sue.
• Bone Lord series, by Dante King:
  • Bone Lord 1: Bishop Nabu is a grotesque traitor who overthrows his niece, placing the populace in brutal slavery and allowing his men to rape and terrorize the population freely. A brutal monster, Nabu also reinstitutes sex slavery, including with young girls, having them sold in horrific auctions. To show his allegiance to the Blood God, Nabu has other virgin women butchered in dark rituals, even killing a goddess to enhance his own power.
  • Bone Lord 2 & Bone Lord 3: Lord Roderick Chauzec, Vance's uncle, is a follower of the Blood God who has his brother murdered before framing Vance for a murder spree. Roderick kidnaps young virgins and ritualistically murders them, using their blood to appease his master and to gain ultimate power. When confronted by his nephew, Roderick attempts to use the blood of his victims to summon his master's pet Demogorgon and wipe out his entire kingdom out of spite. Later resurfacing after his defeat, Roderick attempts to slowly bleed a goddess to death to allow the Demogorgon to ravish the world and usher in age of Human Sacrifice with the Blood God in charge.
• Boogiepop Series: Makiko Kisugi, the Fear Ghoul, is a psychiatrist and Serial Killer who terrorized the city five years before the pillar of light was created. Finding the evolution drug inside Nagi's room at the hospital, Kisugi tested it on rats and herself, gaining the ability to sense the fear in others. Discovering that she liked the taste of fear, Kisugi began scaring her patients in the worst conditions, and murdered five young, strong-willed girls by removing their brains while they were still alive, and stalked a sixth would-be victim, because "their souls taste better". Having manipulated Pigeon, Kisugi broke Mo Murder's spine and threw him off the hospital balcony, killing him. The anime explores even more of her crimes, as she had injected her patients, and her own pregnant friend with the drug, just to see what would happen.
• The Book of Accidents, by Chuck Wendig:
  • Eligos Vassago is a primordial being who owes allegiance to neither Hell nor Heaven. Seeking to break the wheel, Eligos has Edmund Walker Reese murder several girls in a ritual, plotting to have him kill 99 of them to take all 99 worlds. Failing in this, Eligos corrupts an alternate version of young hero Oliver, having him kill his parents, before murdering alternate Olivers across the worlds to wipe said world out. Having destroyed 98 worlds and closing in on the final, a foiled Eligos simply decides to murder the last Oliver for spite and joy when his plan fails.
  • Edmund Walker Reese is a man obsessed with numbers and death, who murdered his father and grew up lusting to kill anyone who told him "no". Contacted by the demon Eligos Vassago and making a deal, Reese attempts to butcher 99 little girls to usher in Eligos to end all 99 worlds across the multiverse, under the condition that Reese be given his own Earth to reign as a god. Though his spree was stopped only at his fifth victim, Reese found a way to travel between worlds and continued his killings, racking up dozens of victims while turning some into his tortured slaves. Even when he is returned to normality and his powers taken, Reese still tries to murder another 99 girls, still hoping it will ascend him to godhood and doom everything else to annihilation.
• The Book of Lost Things:
  • The Crooked Man is a being who achieves immortality by tricking a child in the real world into sacrificing someone they hate to him, usually a younger brother or sister. He feeds upon their heart and their life for as long as they would have lived, while the corrupted child is crowned king or queen of a world built out of their own nightmares, suffering as the Crooked Man glories in their anguish until they wither and die. Afterward the Crooked Man goes looking for another child that's prepared to have their unwanted siblings horribly murdered, the fate that almost befalls 12-year-old David as the Crooked Man tries to torment him into sacrificing his brother for the Crooked Man's benefit.
  • The Huntress is a sadist fond of Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. Bored with her usual routine 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.
• Book of a Thousand Days: Lord Khasar is a brutal conqueror who, after giving his soul away to the desert shamans, became a bloodthirsty werewolf. Khasar, to fuel his ambition, starts a bloody war across the Eight Realms and terrorizes the teenage Lady Saren, trying to turn her into his bride. Khasar takes over cities by killing the inhabitants in killing sprees to drive the hysteria up before he later sweeps in. After Saren rejects him, he has her entire kingdom burnt to the ground, killing hundreds, to flush her out. Finally, he threatens to execute over two hundred weak hostages should she not become his bride, showing his cruelty as endless.
• Book of Swords: Vilkata, the Dark King, takes the reins of chief villain at the end of the first trilogy. A warlord in possession of the Mindsword, which induces worship of the wielder, Vilkata also deals with demons and sacrifices people to them for his own power, occasionally torturing the unfortunate victims slowly to death. After his initial defeat, Vilkata spends fourteen years wallowing in self pity before he hears of the Mindsword's recovery. Vilkata repays the village that had sheltered him by raping, murdering and possibly partially cannibalizing a young woman before attempting to rebuild his demon army and kill all those in his path, while using the Mindsword to make everyone bow to him.
• The Book of the Dun Cow: Cockatrice is a monstrous servant of the dark being Wyrm. The son of the rooster Senex, Cockatrice swiftly murders his father when he ages and takes over his territory, raping the hens there to breed monstrous basilisks as children. Cockatrice then sends out the serpents to massacre every other animal they can, destroying every animal in Senex's own territory, even Toad, who was truly loyal to him. Cockatrice takes to leading his army of Basilisks personally against the hero rooster Chanticleer, killing Chanticleer's own children with his serpents and aiming to destroy every living thing on the planet to allow Wyrm's domination over it.
• Borderlands: Unconquered, by John Shirley: Dr. Vialle is a Mad Scientist allied with General Goddess Gynella in her plan to subjugate Pandora. Using his SusDrug, Vialle drives entire villages and camps into lustful frenzies, making the males slaves to Gynella while the females are handed off to be raped by her armies. Vialle also performs horrifying experiments on countless people to test his new inventions, resulting in one subject tearing himself apart, and Vialle plans to ultimately betray Gynella herself for his own power.
• The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale: Cecil, the Serial Killer who plagues the Bottoms, is a seemingly-normal, affable member of society with a predilection to raping, torturing, and killing young women. When the first victim is discovered, it is initially ignored by the town at large because the victim is black, which allows Cecil to prey on more women until he finally murders a white women, framing a black man for the crime and seeing him lynched. Cecil is finally caught when he attempts to kidnap and rape the hero's pre-teen sister, interrupted from assaulting her and trying to excuse himself by blaming the girl for being too much a woman to resist.
• "Boys Will Be Boys", by Joe R. Lansdale: Clyde Edson is "a very rotten kid" who catches the attention of Brian Blackwood for his violent behavior. Clyde had previously taken over an apartment complex for the elderly by threatening to rape the caretaker's daughter if he wasn't allowed to stay; abused an old woman and nailed her dog to her door to acquire her home; and pimped out his friends' girlfriends in order to pay for rent. With every resident inside leaving, Clyde converts the building into The House, a brothel where homeless girls are drugged and made into sex slaves for hedonistic clients. Clyde also flooded the basement and used it to drown women he grew tired of, which included his pregnant girlfriend.
• The Braided Path: Lord Weaver Kakre is a sinister member of the magic-using Weavers who, after Weaving, is drawn to immediately skin a hapless victim. Unlike many Weavers, Kakre glories in his mania and prides himself on how quick he can skin a living victim alive. Kakre manipulates the Emperor with visions and terrible dreams to drive him mad and trick him into thinking his wife is unfaithful so she is beaten into a miscarriage, provoking a war between her family and the throne. When Kakre and the Emperor come to blows, Kakre kills him painfully and unleashes a swarm of monsters on the city to exacerbate the situation. It is revealed that Kakre's ultimate goal with the Weavers is to annihilate everything that lives in in the world to make it a grim reflection of the god he and the Weavers worship.
• Bridge of Birds: The Duke of Ch'in is introduced as a tyrant who only cares about money, power, and obtaining immortality. To do so he 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. The Duke then drowned a city just to be able to hide his Soul Jar there, and cursed the three handmaidens to guard his soul jar, essentially binding them to protect their murderer's heart for eternity. Ten Ox declares that the Duke "must have the coldest heart in the world!"
• A Brightness Long Ago, by Guy Gavriel Kay: Uberto of Mylasia, also known as "The Beast", is a vicious duke well known for his sickening appetites. On a near-nightly basis, Uberto has children brought to him, boys or girls, and proceeds to violently rape them, with hundreds of victims. Uberto is also a sadist, sometimes murdering his partners, and when the heroine Adria allows herself to be brought to him to assassinate him, Uberto begins by cutting at her with a knife, something he does to all his victims, so he may take pleasure from their pain.
• Britannia's Fist trilogy, by Peter G. Tsouras: James R. "Big Jim" Smoke is the chief agent of the Copperhead movement in Indiana, hated and feared throughout the Midwest. A man seething with hatred, Big Jim helped to arm and free thousands of Confederate POW to aid in a brief but bloody Copperhead uprising to take the Midwest into the Confederacy. Following its failure, Big Jim flees and joins Lafayette Baker's Secret Service, becoming Abraham Lincoln's bodyguard, plotting with John Wilkes Booth to have Lincoln kidnapped. Later, during the joint British-Confederate attack on Washington DC, Big Jim coldly attempts to kill Lincoln and his family as they comfort one another. Brutally and sadistically killing several men throughout the series and smiling as he did, Big Jim, shown to be a competent, ruthless and hateful thug, is the one character that is never portrayed sympathetically once in a series full of morally complex characters.
• "Broken Glass", by Harlan Ellison, from Angry Candy: The unnamed rapist, is a cruel man who invades women's minds to mentally violate and torture them, leaving them broken and traumatized in the real world. Invading Dana's mind to rape and taunt her for the sole sake of pleasuring himself, the rapist has Dana's mental avatar raped and tortured, while also forcing her to listen to a friend of hers die in a car accident all for the sake of fun.
• Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, by John Antal: SS Obersturmführer Carl Kodritz is a fanatical Nazi with a severe Hair-Trigger Temper. Leading a joint operation with Wilhelm Graf's Fallschirmjägers to combat the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Kodritz does everything at his disposal to make Graf and his men suffer for their lack of faith in Nazism. While initially treated as nothing but a petty bully, Kodritz shows his true colors by murdering Dutch civilians, solely because they were begging for food. At the height of his cruelty, Kodritz deals with the presence of armed teenagers by having them executed despite their surrender.
• The Brothers Lionheart: Tengil is a cruel oppressor who takes over the Briar Rose Valley in the pastoral afterlife world of Nangijala. Those who refuse to obey him are fed to the dragoness Katla whom he controls. Tengil forces people to work on his grandiose building projects with enormous overload and abysmal work conditions, so that even many of those who try to do their job for him get killed. Tengil is fond of inventing cruel and meaningless laws just to give himself more excuses to execute and terrify his subjects, and he plans to take over the neighboring Cherry Valley to instill the same regime there. Even the fact that one of his main opponents from Cherry Valley is teenaged Jonathan doesn't deter Tengil from ordering his death, so when Jonathan manages to turn Katla on Tengil himself, nobody mourns him.
• Brown Girl in the Ring: Rudolph "Rudy" Shelton is the ruler of the streets of Toronto. A monstrous gangster, Rudy is a devotee of the loa who misuses the power to keep himself young and strong. After his wife Gros-Jeanne left him due to his abusive tendencies, Rudy murdered her lover Dunston and enslaved his soul, imprisoning it in pain and torment. Rudy keeps others as living zombies, wearing them out and replacing them, even flaying one alive as she is completely conscious to prove a point to his posse member Tony who he sends to obtain a heart for a transplant of the province's premier. Rudy is revealed to have turned his own daughter into a malevolent spirit known as a duppy which murders others and enslaves souls to keep Rudy strong, feeding it with the sacrifice of children. After he discovers heroine Ti-Jeanne is his granddaughter, Rudy attempts to carve her soul apart to make a new duppy, treating his atrocities with savage glee mixed with indifference to any life besides his own.
• Bullet Books Speed Reads series:
  • Iron 13, by Manning Wolfe & Billy Kring (Book 2): Fierro is the leader of MS-13, a drug cartel that resorts to extreme violence and rape threats to get what they want. Having a love for murder since he was a young boy, with his first kill being a homeless man when he was eight, Fierro would later join several cartels before starting his own. Moving his operation to America, Fierro is hired by the terrorist Grozny to assist him in assassinating the American and Russian presidents at a parade, with Fierro looking forward to living his life in luxury while the world descends into chaos. Blackmailing Senator Barry Sands into giving Grozny a travel visa by murdering a woman and framing Sands, Fierro later kidnaps Barry's wife Shannon, promising to have her raped if the cops are called on them.
  • Two Bodies One Grave, by Manning Wolfe & Scott Montgomery (Book 9): Whisper is a mute, sword-wielding Italian assassin hired by the Patti family to kill Knucks. Having killed over 60 people back in Italy, Whisper introduces himself by murdering Knucks's girlfriend Beverly, even slaughtering several cops who intrude upon the scene and pinning the murders on Knucks. Finding joy in his murders, Whisper later slits the throat of Knucks's precious daughter Cali.
• "Bungalow 14", by Q.L. Pearce, from More Super Scary Stories for Sleep-overs: The nameless motel owner is an ancient shapeshifting snake creature who sustains herself on human lifeforce, which she claims to have been doing since the desert was still young. The serpent forces her unwilling servant Sam to help her lure passing travelers to be drained, gleefully feeding on even parents and children while Sam can only watch in broken resignation.
• The Butterfly Garden: In this Crime Novel by Dot Hutchison, Avery is the son of the Gardener, but unlike his father, is portrayed as a vicious monster with no morality or empathy whatsoever. Kidnapping teenage girls along with his father, Avery regularly rapes the captive girls, along with torturing and brutalizing them for his own sick pleasure. When Avery first confronts Inara, he rapes her after revealing he has just tortured a girl to death, and later painfully brands Inara to force her to always remember him. Slowly becoming outraged at the fact that all of the captive girls like his younger, kinder, brother, Desmond, more than they like him, Avery eventually kidnaps, rapes, and nearly murders a 12 year old girl, something that disgusts even his father. After Desmond informs the police of their crimes, Avery gleefully helps his father assault Des, and then tries to gun them both down for protecting girls from him. Even when he has lost after failing to once again rape Inara, Avery snaps an innocent girl's neck for no discernible reason as a final wicked act. Even when compared to the Gardener, Avery sticks out as a more brutal, more sadistic, and most of all, more evil monster than his father.
• BZRK: Lystra Ellen Alice Reid, aka Lear, is the enigmatic founder and leader of the titular BZRK, and is the most morally reprehensible of the main antagonists in the series. Lear wishes to drive the world insane, simply For the Evulz. At a young age, Lear murdered her mother, and at the age of 9 got sent to a foster family, who she murdered in a car "accident" 7 years later. Two years later, Lear started tattooing all of her victims to her body with tortured expressions on their faces, covering up around half of her flesh. Lear starts buying out failing medical companies in order to get DNA samples from random people for her plan, getting at least 29,000 samples by the time the series starts. In the third book, Lear starts putting her plan in motion and begins instilling fear into the world by driving various renowned and well-known figures, such as the Pope and the Prince of England, insane, as well as a majority of attendants at big events such as movie premiers, and forcing Bug Man to help her by threatening him with madness. Lear brainwashes Plath into giving the command to blow up the Armstrong Twins hideout, the Tulip, and killing hundreds of innocents. Then she starts mass-producing biots and driving people mad, starting with 15 major cities so they can cause mass pandemonium, then military bases that hold nukes so they can fire them off en masse. Utterly remorseless and psychopathic, treating everything she does as a game, by the end of the series Lear has, either directly or indirectly, killed around 210 million people.

C

• The Call, by Peadar O'Guilin: Conor Geary is a bully at the academy where teens are trained to survive their Call—a day in the Gray Lands of the Sidhe where they will be hunted. Viewing himself as the "king" of his group, Conor becomes obsessed with the heroine Nessa and attempts to rape her. After being driven off, a humiliated Conor plans to kill her before he is Called. Savagely fighting off the Sidhe, Conor makes a pact with their leader Dagda: to, as a King, revoke the treaty banishing the Sidhe and allow them to overrun humanity, subjecting their ancient enemies to torture and death as long as Conor gets to rule the remnants. In return for selling out his people, Conor requests only to murder Nessa himself, and murders several of his supposed friends as school when the barriers weaken. Finally, Conor attempts to kill Nessa, demanding that she kiss him first to show him her submission to him.
• Cal Leandros:
  • Nightlife: The Villain Protagonist Darkling is, in Cal's words, "a nightmare for hire and the Last of His Kind." A mercenary banshee who is in it for money and kicks in equal measure, Darkling's a casual killer who sees murder as a way to relieve boredom. Signing on with the Auphe's plan to travel back in time and exterminate humanity in its infancy, Darkling bodyjacks protagonist Caliban "Cal" Leandros, and takes him on a road trip to Hell. He tries to kill Cal's brother Niko's girlfriend, Promise, hires a pair of werewolves to kill Cal's girlfriend Georgina, then kills the surviving werewolf when they fail. He feeds a captured mugger to Boggle in order to bribe him into attacking Niko, then tries to gun Niko down himself, burns down the shop of a fence who tried to rip him off, and is captured while trying to trigger the apocalypse. Unlike the Auphe, who are doing it to ensure the survival of their species, Darkling is in it for the thrill and the cash alone, and he remains a greedy, swaggering egomaniac to the end.
  • Moonshine: Hobgoblin, better known by all and sundry as Hob, is the oldest living puck, and may be the first of his kind. He's also a sociopathic conman and killer who gloats openly about being "the reason there's no honour among thieves." Orchestrating the events from behind the scenes, Hob arranges for the kidnapping of Georgina, and the werewolf cub, Slay, in order to ensure that Niko, Cal, and Slay's father Flay, will go along with his plans, which involve using a gypsy crown to mentally enslave everyone he comes across. When his agent, Caleb, outlives his utility Hob pins him to the floor with Spanish poniards, cuts out his heart and rams it between his teeth. He then kidnaps Niko and plans to drain him of all his blood in order to activate the crown, while using Georgina's psychic powers as source of energy. When Cal interferes, Hob makes a very deliberate attempt at cutting him to pieces, bragging that: "I can do this as long as it takes. Piece by piece, strip by strip, I'll have you down to dripping bones, and when I'm done draining your gifted girl, I'll beat her to death with what's left of you."
  • Madhouse: Sawney Beane, the main antagonist, is a Redcap Serial Killer resurrected after several hundred years dead. He quickly sets out on a killing spree, leaving his underground lair littered with the bodies of his victims. He assembles an army of revenants and impresses his own personality on them, leaving them mirror images of his own psychopathic mental state, and fills the sewers with corpses, including those of a pregnant woman and a little girl. When Niko and Cal try to stop him, Sawney skins their Boggle ally alive, boasting that her hide is filled with a mother's love and will keep him warm on cold nights. He has a particular interest in Cal whom he tries to devour alive because of his Auphe heritage. "Abide in me traveler. Special boy with with special taste. The taste of madness. The taste of me."
• Call for Corpse Brides—A Brother Henry Story, by Wayne Rogers: Seemingly a respected pillar of the community, Martin Thoben is a callous marijuana dealer and white slave trader who uses marijuana to get women high and helpless before abducting them and faking their deaths. Once he has done so, he instead ships them out of the country into sex slavery, having done this to many unfortunate women while plotting to expand his operation throughout the Five Points to take even more, even trying to murder anyone else who uncovers his horrible business.
• "The Cancer Cowboy Rides", by John Connolly: Buddy Carson bases his name on "carcinogen" as a twisted joke. A vicious killer who spreads cancer with his touch, Carson travels the country, spreading the disease subtly at times and virulently at others. Killing an entire family, Carson murders several other people before picking up a waitress and infecting her during sex to watch her rot up close. Carson continues his travels and murders as he is hunted, even killing police officers while spreading about like a virus himself.
• "Captain Murderer", by Charles Dickens: The infamous Captain Murderer is rumored to be a relative of Bluebeard. A sadistic cannibal, Murderer will take a wife and in a month, he has them roll out pie dough before informing them he is making a meat pie. He then decapitates them and cooks them, having killed numerous women before he kills one of two twins, prompting the other to avenge her sister by poisoning herself upon her own murder to bring him down.
• Carnages, by Maxime Chatham: Christian "Chris" DeRoy and the seemingly kind-hearted janitor Frank Quincey are Neo-Nazis aiming to take over American society. To do so, DeRoy, under the orders of Quincey, would befriend friendless, harmless boys from schools he was expelled from, before luring them to the schools. He'd then knock them out, commit a School Shooting, and upon having only a bullet left, would come back to kill his "friends" while making their deaths look like suicides and frame them for the shootings. Having done so three times through the story, DeRoy and Quincey hoped to influence other teens into committing similar massacres, creating an army which they'd use to take over the country and reintroduce slavery and segregation. When Inspector Lamar Gallineo figures out DeRoy's involvement in the shootings, the latter and Quincey lures him and one of the affected schools' headmasters in an abandoned station to kill them, successfully doing so with the latter.
• Carpathia, by Matt Forbeck: Brody Murtagh was once an Irish gangster who, after becoming a vampire, embraced his evil. When a trip onboard the Carpathia to the Old world is disturbed by the sinking of the Titanic, Murtagh uses the tragedy as an excuse to gorge himself on dozens of struggling passengers. Usurping and killing his master Dushoko, Murtagh eschews his master's pragmatism in favor of sadism, and after the Carpathia rescues hundreds of Titanic survivors, plans to murder them. A monster who even callously kills his own sire Elisabetta, Murtagh eventually intends to take the ship and the vampires onboard to New York City where he's planning to turn the entire city into a bloodbath before warring with humanity to put himself on top.
• Carrion Comfort: William "Willi" Borden is the most evil user of the Ability in the story, who values his sadistic fun above all else. Once an SS officer named Wilhelm von Borchert, he was the infamous "Oberst" who traumatized Saul Laski by forcing him to commit murder. Borchert ordered the deaths of thousands in World War II, and would regularly host "games" where hundreds of concentration camp prisoners were routinely sacrificed as pawns in a life-size chess board. Upon reinventing himself as Borden, he created an annual game alongside fellow Ability-users that revolved around committing the most heinous actions to gain "points". Borden created serial killers, family annihilators, and terrorists to rack up the most points, and when he gets bored of such small stakes, he tries to take over the Island Club so as to play his "game" using entire countries as pawns in a world-wide war. Borden tortures, rapes, and kills dozens more innocents in his way to achieve his goals, and betrays multiple allies the second it conveniences him to do so.
• Cassandra Palmer: Cassandra Palmer, as the Pythia, is in charge of protecting the world from supernatural threats, with the following being the worst:
  • Jonathan, first appearing in Touch the Dark, is a leader of the Black Circle who for over 900 years has tortured vampires for days or even weeks, bringing them back from the edge of death, only to resend them to near death over and over again in order to gain power to rejuvenate himself. Desiring to return the gods in order to increase his power, Jonathan, over his long run in the series, attempts to kill the pregnant woman who carries the heir to faerie in order to start a civil war between the fey which could kill thousands; tortures Louise-Cesare to near death; unleashes zombie vampires to kill the North American Vampire Senate; tries to crash magical Hong Kong into normal Hong Kong—which would kill millions—in order to create an energy wave to exterminate the various Vampire Senates which oppose the gods; tries to unleash the Ancient Horrors in order to conquer; grafts the skin and ghosts of creatures and people to himself in order to gain their powers, keeping them in agonizing pain; and later painfully experiments with the souls of hundreds of deceased soldiers, warping them.
  • The wicked god Apollo, first appearing in Touch the Dark, once ruled portions of the world, terrorizing, sacrificing and tormenting mortals en masse while feeding on magic. To escape his prison and resume brutal dominion where few humans survive, Apollo hunts for the Pythia, Cassandra Palmer, to sway her to his side. Secretly arranging for a genocide of magic users, Apollo tries to break free and devastate the mortal world to resume his godhood.
  • Ares, first appearing in Hunt the Moon, has his children, the Spartoi, try to hunt down and slaughter anyone who will be a problem to his return, particularly the traitorous goddess Artemis who helped the mortals banish and bind the other gods. Ares sways Nimue into conflict with her grandson Arthur and kicks off a brutal war between the Fey, funding it with sex slavery to eventually free himself and throw the world into war to establish his own dominion.
• Cassandra's Path, or Adventures with Spaghetti & Lancelot's Pilgrimage, by Yulia Voznesenskaya: The Antichrist is a man who seizes power after Earth is devastated by a series of catastrophes and declares himself a god. Craving absolute might but unwilling to be responsible for too many people, he brutally persecutes all religions—save for the one that worships him—and popularizes involuntary euthanasia, planning to exterminate almost the entire population of the planet and only leave a small group of lickspittles and slaves. One of his last inventions before he is killed by a Bolt of Divine Retribution is a sadistic healing marathon, where the sick and disabled are forced to run up a skyscraper to win the right to get healed by him. Those who can't get to the finish line get crucified, and those who do win find themselves sick again after a few months. Having willingly made a Deal with the Devil, the Antichrist is as close to the embodiment of evil as a human can get.
• The Cellar: Roy Hayes is a psychopathic rapist who was sentenced to prison for raping his own daughter and regularly beating and raping his wife, Donna. After being released, Roy wastes no time in butchering an innocent couple, then kidnapping their child daughter, Joni, using her as his personal Sex Slave while traveling to get revenge on his family for locking him away. Unable to locate Donna, Roy tortures the woman's sister to get information on her whereabouts, promising to let her and her husband go once she tells him; he proceeds to kill her husband after raping and murdering her even after she told him what he wanted. Murdering another couple to steal their car, Roy tracks down Donna and takes up residence in a teen girl's suite, raping her then trying to kill her along with Joni for defying him. In the end, Roy plans to rape and kill both his wife and daughter, and dies begging for the mercy he never sought to give. Despite appearing in such a dark setting with actual beasts and monsters, Roy still made his mark as the most evil figure throughout the story.
• Cellars, by John Shirley: Simon Maguss, the secret leader of the Order of Ahriman, poses as the rich head of Visions magazine and the employer of protagonist Carl Lanyard whilst organizing depraved, ritualistic murder—including of children—throughout Manhattan to appease the sinister "Head Underneath". Playing the strings of every single character through the book, Maguss has rivals and threats to his organization systematically killed in various horrible ways before using Lanyard to wipe out most of the cult and its apparent head Minder, intending to start anew with what remains of the Head Underneath. Smugly laughing off Lanyard's speech against him and his affairs and escaping whilst Lanyard kills his equally-depraved son, Maguss is last seen sobbing crocodile tears as the police arrest the "madman" who killed his son, all while preparing to resume his conduct all over again.
• The Ceremonies, by T.E.D. Klein: The dark entity, arriving on Earth eons before mankind, seeks a return to its full might. Killing, reviving, and corrupting the innocent boy who will become the wicked Mr. Rosebottom, the entity centers on heroes Jeremy Freirs and Carol to birth it into a new and powerful state. Initiating the ceremonies via manipulation, the entity causes numerous deaths from natural disasters and panic while possessing and burning out numerous bodies. Possessing the farmer Sarr Poroth, it tries to rape Carol to impregnate her with its new body.
• Certain Dark Things, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Nicolas "Nick" Godoy is an enforcer, killer, and heir to the "Necros" Godoy family. Nick is a brutal, sadistic vampire who helped exterminate the family of Tlahuihppochtli vampire Atl. Hunting Atl for retribution and intending to torture her to death, Nick tortures a woman to death who simply resembles her and leaves a trail of corpses in "vampire killings" along his way. Disregarding the advice of his pragmatic family servant Rodrigo, Nick happily takes the chance to murder Rodrigo when he can, controlling the police detective Ana Aguirre to have her kill others for him before trying to torture Atl and her lover Domingo to death for kicks.
• Certain Death, by Tanya Landman (Poppy Fields Mystery #6) : Drago Mehic is an elderly knife-thrower in a travelling circus who initially seems harmless and senile. However, he is revealed to in fact be an unrepentant war criminal, having participated in massacring his own village during the Bosnian War. Proud of his actions and believing his victims to have deserved it due to being Muslim, Drago fled Yugoslavia to England, forcing his brother Yuri, who had abandoned the army after being unwilling to aid in the town slaughter, to give him a job there. Years went by until the day the circus stopped in a town where a woman whose children had been killed in the village now lived. When Yuri urged Drago to turn himself in, the latter instead stole Yuri's gun to murder the woman during a trapeze act, delaying pulling the trigger to savour her terror. Mercilessly executing a circus clown who had attempted to blackmail him, Drago next turns his sights on Yuri, intending to kill him for not aiding in slaughtering the village, referring to this as an act of justice. Caught, Drago corners the young Poppy and Graham, boasting of his plans to beat the children to death. With the highest body count of the entire book series and an affinity for remorseless gloating, Drago Mehic is Poppy's most sinister enemy by several magnitudes.
• A Certain Magical Index: Terra of the Left is the most violent, self-righteous member of God's Right Seat. Using an ancient magical artifact to manipulate the people of a French town, Terra sends them after Touma Kamijou and cares nothing when the riot causes the brainwashed citizens to be attacked by an Academy City attack force. Revealing his intent to launch a full-scale attack on Japan, Terra shows disdain for all non-Catholic lives and shamelessly admits to murdering "heathen" men, women, and children to perfect his magic.
• Chain Letter (1986) duology: The Caretaker is a demonic entity who targets a group of teens who believe they had killed a man. She implants Neil with a lethal tumor that manipulates his mind, forcing him to send the group a chain letter telling them to perform tasks that will eventually damn their souls. When Neil fights his possession upon being told to burn down his school, the Caretaker leaves him to die. Targeting the survivors a few months later, the Caretaker gives Fran and Kipp outrageous demands that will never be met, then brutally kills them, with Fran being decapitated and Kipp being lit on fire. Posing as a nurse named Sasha, the Caretaker sabotages Alison's relationship with Tony, who she puts under Mind Control. When Alison discovers the truth, the Caretaker gleefully orders Tony to kill her, gloating that even if Alison stops her, another Caretaker will take her place.
• The Changeover: The enigmatic Mr. Carmody Braque is an uncanny, grinning man followed by the smell of peppermint who, in actuality, is a wicked lemure who gluts himself on the life energy of innocents. Braque cheerfully reminisces on the countless men, women and children he's withered away through the use of his enchanted stamps, favoring happy people who "embrace the world" and even proclaims his enjoyment for a baby "withering at its mother's breast". Braque stamps the brother of the protagonist Laura Chant and slowly sucks away his vitality, gloating to Laura that her brother will spend his last days trapped in the dark with Braque as his only company.
• The Chaos Cycle duology: Velizar was once a God of Creation who sought to control the prehistoric people of Black Hollow through fear and murder. After trying to kill his brother for even considering the idea of being independent from him, Velizar was killed by his brother. Velizar's evil spirit infects and starts to haunt Black Hollow. Velizar became the eons-old Arch-Enemy of his brother's lover The Dreamwalker, and stoked hatred and fear to lead to witch hunts. Even after passing into a reincarnation cycle, Velizar's evil will tainted his later incarnations to keep the cycle of murder against his brother and the Dreamwalker's incarnations going. Eventually using the combined malice of his incarnations, Velizar was able to rise once more as the demon Abaddon. Velizar, as Abaddon, is responsible for corrupting the residents of Black Hollow into murdering their own loved ones in a petty crusade to spite the Dreamwalker. In the modern day, Velizar targets the latest incarnation of his brother, Kai Donovan, and begins systematically killing girls just so that Kai's attempts to save them fail and ultimately plans to break Kai into his subservient puppet. Velizar ultimately plans to finally destroy the latest incarnation of the Dreamwalker, Miya.
• Charlie Small: The Puppet Master's Prison, by Nick Ward: The Puppet Master is a sinister and greedy puppeteer who lures children away from their homes and turns them into puppets to use in his shows. Cruelly forcing the children's families to attend these shows, the Puppet Master forces the children to steal for him, uncaring of what may befall them. Subjecting Charlie himself to the same fate as the other children, the Puppet Master gloats to their faces about how they're all now at his beck and call and will remain that way for the rest of their lives.
• Chasing the Dead, by Joe Schreiber: Isaac Hamilton, following his death and subsequent revival by Haitian holy men, becomes a force of pure evil. Becoming a harvester of souls, Isaac targets children, killing them and blowing out their eyes, the windows of the soul, to gain control of their dead bodies. Taken apart by the parents of his victims and his body parts scattered across the state, Isaac manages to return using the body of his first victim as a vessel, continuing his killing spree for well over a century. Enraged when two of his would-be victims, Sue and Phillip, attack and seemingly kill his vessel, Isaac returns to haunt them in adulthood, killing Phillip before abducting Sue's infant daughter Veda, forcing her to drive Phillip's corpse through the towns his parts are buried to revive Phillip's body under his control. Killing anyone who gets in his way, Isaac finally attacks Sue and Veda via an army of all his resurrected child victims, planning to force Sue to choose who will die first.
• Chasing the Violet Killer, by R. Barri Flowers: Blade Canfield, aka the Violet Killer, is a monstrous Serial Killer who stalks and strangles women to death, with seven victims to his name before the novel. The Violet Killer always leaves a violet flower in the mouth of his victims, and over the book picks off more victims and later murders a cop. In the end, admitting he kills for fun, he attempts to frame someone before trying to murder the heroine herself.
• The Chathrand Voyages has mostly morally ambiguous conflict between decent people trying to do the right thing, extremely ruthless people trying to do the right thing, and bad people who are driven by deep-seated personal trauma. That said, there are two characters, brother and sister Evil Sorcerers, whom everyone else agrees are completely evil:
  • Arunis is an immortal, sociopathic, manipulative sorcerer who set most of the immediate plot (including the coming world war between superpower empires and the retrieval of an extremely dangerous Artifact of Doom) in motion to further his own ends. Those ends turn out to be arranging the destruction of the world as an offering to the Night Gods, so that they will be impressed enough to elevate him to godhood himself. In pursuit of this goal, he kills, tortures, and Mind Rapes his way across two continents, including sacrificing his own (few) loyal minions for short-term advantage, all without the slightest whiff of remorse. His in-universe reputation is well earned. He even manages to make trouble post-mortem, with his ghost mind raping one man to the point of destroying his personality while trying to possess him.
  • Macadra is Arunis's rival, on-and-off co-conspirator, his peer in age, power, and wickedness, and his sister. She wants the same Artifact of Doom he does, though she intends to conquer the world rather than destroy it. Her handiwork is mostly plainly visible in the fate of the Empire of Bali Adro, whose throne she subverted centuries ago, in the process turning it from a prosperous, enlightened society to a totalitarian hellhole (much to the horror of the time-displaced Bali Adrans traveling with the protagonists). Like her brother, she's The Dreaded and a Bad Boss, and she drives her soldiers so hard in pursuit of the heroes across the last book that they end up deserting in droves as soon as they have the opportunity. After Arunis dies at the end of the third book, she takes over as the most visible threat to the Chathrand and the world in the fourth and final volume.
• Cherry Hill, by James A. Moore: Alexander "Alex" Granger, an inmate at the Cherry Hill sanitarium, was a nightmarish cannibalistic killer while he was free, pledging himself to a dark entity known as the Dead God and committing twisted murders in its name while keeping the heads of his victims as trophies of a sort. Finally captured when he was nineteen years old, Alex is forcefully lobotomized by the Cherry Hill staff after his repeated violent fits. Even as a vegetable, Alex continues to affect the world around him, willingly giving his body to host the soul-devouring Dead God itself while introducing it to the concept of godhood and launching its rampage through Cherry Hill in the first place, ultimately regaining lucidity purely to gloat that when the Dead God comes, humanity will suffer as a result.
• CHERUB Series: While many villains in the series have loved ones and/or are well-intentioned, these are neither:
  • The Fall: Abby is the leader of a Human Trafficking ring and, along with her henchman Keith, stand out as some of the most depraved villains in the series. Abby has girls—as young as 11—kidnapped from Eastern Europe and either sold in the UK as sex slaves for willing buyers or forced into prostitution with them severely punished if they attempt escape. After one of her victims escapes, Abby sends Keith to recapture her, and Keith ends up kidnapping Lauren Adams as well. Keith will also rape woman captured by the ring, and later attempts to rape the 12-year-old Lauren out of lust.
  • The Sleepwalker: Hassam Bin Hassam sells shoddy and faulty parts to airlines, leading to dozens of planes carrying hundreds being in danger, and the deaths of nearly 350 people from a large plane crash, something for which he had absolutely zero remorse. He would regularly beat his wife, son, and housekeeper. He abused his son for enjoying Western culture, despite enjoying it himself, and kills his own wife when confronted about his plan to cover up his involvement in the plane crash. When he finds bugs in his house, he brutally waterboards his housekeeper in the toilet and shoots her in the thigh so she can not get help. When cornered, Hassam holds his own son hostage at knife-point and threatens to kill him if he is not allowed to go free.
  • Brigands M.C: Ralph "The Führer" Donnington is a Neo-Nazi in charge of the South Devon Chapter of the titular biker gang. He is introduced trying to assault and possibly kill his son Martin for spitting on a member's patch, only stopping when the member appeases him by having Martin fight the much more skilled Dante Scott. The Führer later threatens to kill Dante's father when he disagrees with his plans to have the clubhouse torn down for new facilities. When Dante's parents kill one of his thugs, he retaliates by killing them and their two older children, and the younger two only live when Dante escapes though the window with the baby, accidentally injuring said baby in the process. To eliminate Dante as a witness he sends a gang member to try to bomb the foster home that Dante was staying at. When the Führer finds an undercover cop in his group he takes him to a field to execute him, until the cop tells him that he doesn't want a murder of a officer on his hands. Instead, the Führer has him cruelly dumped outside the house that Dante's family was murdered to mock him for failing to get justice for them. When protagonist James Adams gets a job as a server for the clubhouse, the Führer threatens to kill him for delivering tepid food as a sick joke, and admits he does this with every new server.
  • Aramov series: Leonid Aramov is a member of an international crime clan that coordinates deals between cartels and criminal organizations, and plans to usurp leadership from his mother Irena. In his introduction in People's Republic, he forces family member Ingrid to transfer her accounts to him by torturing her stepdaughter Ning in front of her, then killing Ingrid; sends hitmen after his nephew Ethan to remove competition for leadership, with said hitmen killing Ethan's mother Galenka and his friend Yannis. In Guardian Angel, Leonid kidnaps Ethan as a bargaining chip to get the Aramov accounts under his control; suggests cutting out Ethan's lower jaw and sending it to Irena as proof; takes him to a poacher's ranch where he is mistreated; and tries to overdose Irena on painkillers to take complete control of the clan. After being exiled from the clan in Black Friday, Leonid moved to Mexico planning to sell weapons to the local cartels, and has his informant in the clan try to kill the current leader, his brother Josef. In addition, Leonid was also a brutal domestic abuser who regularly beat, raped, and mentally tortured his prospective wife Tamara, and threatened to kill their children should she try to leave him. Leonid ultimately had little to no regard for his family, and only cared about being in control of it.
• Chicagoland Vampires: Caroline Merit, as the protector of House Cadogen, has faced several supernatural threats, but a few stand out from the crowd:
  • Some Girls Bite; Friday Night Bites; & Hard Bitten: Celina Desaulniers, the head of House Navarre, started off by murdering her lover in a spiteful act after he rejected her. Celina began a murder spree as an excuse to kill Merit—leading to her siring after an attack—after Merit's father earned her scorn, while framing the deaths on the other vampire houses in order to prop hers up and gain humanity's trust, with an eventual end goal of using this to initiate a bloody war between vampires and humans. Later taking advantage of a supernatural summit, she plans to use said summit to sow tensions and restart an ancient war between vampires and shapeshifters regardless of the death this would cause. Eventually desperate, Celina allies with the corrupt Mayor Seth Tate and helps distribute the drug "V" to vampires all across Chicago starting murder sprees while getting the attention she’s always desired as its distributor. Even Celina's last moments have her temporarily kill Merit's lover Ethan Sullivan as a way to spite her, cementing herself as Merit's most personal enemy.
  • Hard Bitten & Biting Cold: Dominic is an angel of justice better known as Mayor Seth Tate, the identity he stole from his noble twin brother by possessing him. In the name of his warped "justice", Dominic annihilated entire cities in his heyday, before eventually being forcibly bound to his brother Seth by a fairy queen Dominic had seduced and used. As the Mayor of Chicago in Seth's place, Dominic spreads the vampire drug V on the streets to drive them into murderous frenzies, all to "purge" the city of those he sees as contamination. Dominic even deals with the murderous vampire Celina and turns the drug on her to experiment in Mind Control. Finding out how to regain his true form after mind-raping a witch, Dominic engages on his crusade to exterminate the "pestilence" of humanity, murdering several cops and even old minions of his, before attempting to level parts of the city to kill everyone he deems impure, viciously attempting to murder his own brother Seth when he stands in the way.
  • Dark Debt: Julian Burrows is a vile vampire hired by the circle to take the guise of Ethan's sire Belthasor to torment him. Julian is a monstrous rapist who hunts and rapes a woman for the fun of it, even shocking other members of the circle. After being empowered by Sorcha Reid with the ability to violate the minds of his victims, Julian begins a rampage across Chicago, forcing his victims to feel as if they were being sexually assaulted. After being found, Julian, nothing more a slave to his lustful whims, reveals he intends to rape Merit out of lust.
  • Dark Debt; Midnight Marked; & Blade Bound: Sorcha Reed is the wife of Adrien Reed, an alchemist who runs the Circle with him who torments Ethan by transforming the savage Julian Burrows into the image of the vampire who sired him and letting Julian do as he may, and intends to use her powers to enslave the supernatural population of Chicago under her thrall. When she and Adrien are defeated, Sorcha proceeds to kill her own husband and starts to freeze over Chicago, announcing that unless Ethan and Merit are turned over, she'll freeze the entire city to death. When confronted, Sorcha kills one of their sorcerer allies, and uses the magic she's been building to summon a monstrous magical construct with which she intends to wreak havoc.
• Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith: Vasili Ilyich Nikitin is a slimy, power-hungry operative of the MGB during the height of the Soviet Union, having taken his position for no reason other than for the opportunity to hurt others. Getting his start in the Union by getting his own brother thrown in prison for decades for insulting Stalin while drunk, Vasili actively assists the Union in locking up innocent in horrific prisons for minor offenses. Teaming up with Leo Demidov, Vasili tries to undermine the man at every turn before impulsively torturing and executing two farmers, trying to kill their children as well, for being "traitors" to the Union. Once learning that they were seemingly innocent of this perceived crime, Vasili rounds up other people and threatens them to admit to being guilty to cover his tracks. Growing to hate Leo due to his noble nature, Vasili frames the man's wife for treason, gets him demoted, ruins the lives of his parents, and ultimately subjects the man to a torturous drug, all with almost sexual glee. Threatening men's entire families to get them to assist him throughout the story, Vasili, upon learning that Leo and his wife Raisa evaded an assassination ordered by Vasili, executes one of Leo's friends before tracking the couple down, giving his men orders to head into the housing complex they are in and kill everyone in sight if they try to escape again.
• The Child Eater, by Rachel Pollack: The titular Child Eater, real name Federaynak, is an ancient wizard who has prolonged his life by centuries by abducting children and slowly devouring them in a process that lasts weeks at a time, leaving only their heads, alive and fully conscious, as they slowly wither away for decades. Having butchered hundreds of children over his long lifespan, the Child Eater sets his sights on claiming Jack Wisdom's son Simon, in between abducting and killing children tangentially related to them. Tricking Jack into giving up Simon by posing as a child psychologist, the Child Eater pulls Simon into his realm and attempts to devour him, gloating that he will live forever.
• Child of God: Lester Ballard is a necrophiliac Serial Killer who roams Frog Mountain in search of victims. The first crime he commits is attacking a woman and ripping off her dress, for which he's sentenced to a few nights in jail for rape. Sometime after his release, he finds the corpse of a young woman and has sex with it, then takes it back to his house to further indulge in his newfound lust. He seeks shelter in the winter with a young woman and her child, and shoots her to death for rejecting his sexual advances, before burning down the house with the child inside. Later on, he murders a couple in their car, and then a man who's out cleaning his septic tank; It's also stated that he had killed several other men and women within this time frame. Hospitalized when he loses his arm when he failed to kill one of his victims, he tells the nurse that he wishes his victim had died. When a mob of hunters take a one-armed Ballard from the hospital and force him to lead them to the bodies of his victims, he escapes them and returns to the hospital to avoid being killed.
• Children of Chicago, by Cynthia Pelayo: The Pied Piper is a dark entity of fairy tale and myth who makes grim deals and relishes in the murder of children. Having slaughtered countless kids over the years, the Piper makes Lauren Medina a deal that results in her little sister murdered by the Piper, but also allows the Piper to return to murder more children over the years. Using Lauren as a proxy to kill children, the Piper torments her with the disappearance of her mother, claiming he will reveal the truth to her after the deaths of 130 children.
• Children of the Dark, by Jonathan Janz: Carl Padgett, aka the Moonlight Killer, was a former renovator and womanizer before an encounter with one of the Children left him with a scratch that liberated him of his fears and allowed him to act upon his most depraved desires, becoming a child killer and cannibal before being imprisoned. Years later, Padgett senses that the Children are about to awaken and breaks out of prison, seeking to take part in the ensuing carnage. Returning to Shadeland, Padgett continues his killing spree while stalking Will Burgess, his illegitimate son; ultimately abducting Will's sister Peach and her friend, hiding them in the Hollows with the Children; and traps Will's mother in a cistern, where she drowns. Killing one of Will's schoolmates, Padgett then takes Peach hostage at gunpoint, relishing his bloodlust and lack of inhibitions.
• Children of the Red King's Charlie Bone and the Castle of Mirrors: Florence and Usher de Grey are a wicked endowned couple, who share a cold marriage with no signs of affection. Florence's gift allows her to create enchanted "binding oaths", which she makes unknowing victims sign whenever they are indebted, and when the vow is broken will cause debilitating pain. The oaths are never destroyed even when the debt has been fulfilled, while being kept protected by Usher's Force Field endownment, whereby the present day they have repeated this process on potentially hundreds of victims. The de Greys are assigned by the Bloors to be Billy's adoptive parents in order to better control him, where they make him sign an oath to be adopted. After Billy is rescued and steals the oaths, he gets hunted and attacked by the cursed papers.
• The Child Thief by Dan Smith: Yuri Grigorovich is a former soldier turned Serial Killer who is loathed by all who are familiar with his work, including the novel's other villains. Missing the thrill of hunting other men, Yuri kidnaps children from their villages, then stalks and picks off the hunting parties that come after them, before killing and mutilating the children. At the start of the novel, huntsman Luka finds Yuri's most recent victim, mortally wounded by Yuri, dragging the bodies of his two children on a sleigh. During the chaos that ensues, Yuri kidnaps Luka's niece Dariya, and makes off with her. He kills Dariya's father when he gives chase, shooting him in the gut and leaving him to die painfully. He slices a strip from Dariya's thigh, smokes and salts it, and plans to eat it later, kills Luka's son Petro with another shot to the gut, and tricks Luka into killing an innocent conscript who was trying to get home to his wife and child. Fatally wounded by Luka, Yuri uses his last breath to gloat about how good Dariya would have tasted had he gotten the chance to eat her.
• Cholito and the Gods of Chavin, by Oscar Colchado Lucio: Huallallo is the god of the Huancas. Attracted by the maiden Wandy, who rejected him, Huallallo becomes a bird to poison the food of her boyfriend, the god Huantar, just as he did with his own brother to steal his lands. After Cholito manages to save Huantar and Huallallo is sealed by a rival god, Huallallo manages to use his remaining influence to threaten to free the giant snakes from the the lakes of Ganchiscocha and Yanachocha if Wandy isn't offered as a Human Sacrifice to him. Unwilling to fulfill his part of the deal, Huallallo was fine with allowing the snakes to devour all humans, stopped only thanks to the intervention of a even stronger deity.
• The Chosen One, by Carol Lynch Williams: "Prophet" Mark Childs and Brother Felix are the Brains and Brawn behind the Chosen Ones polygamist commune. Inheriting the commune's leadership after the death of his father, Childs transforms it from an enclave of harmless eccentrics to a pedophilic Breeding Cult steeped in brainwashing, abuse, and murder. Childs enjoys arranging marriages between the commune's young girls and old men—implied to be a personal fetish—and crushes all dissent via breaking up rebellious members' families or simply having them outright killed. Brother Felix, the local sheriff, ensures the law can't touch Childs, while thoroughly enjoying serving as his deadly enforcer. When heroine Kyra Carlson tries to escape the commune with her friend Patrick, Felix offers to spare Patrick's life if Kyra surrenders, and then kills Patrick anyway.
• Christian Nation: President Steve Jordan is the dictator of the theocratic regime that has taken over the United States of America. Starting his career as a member of the Republican far-right, Jordan worked with other fundamentalists to reshape America into a "Godly Kingdom" for the second coming of Jesus Christ. Hired as a consultant for Sarah Palin's crumbling administration, Jordan ensured her second term by taking advantage of terrorist attacks to declare Martial Law. Once in power, Jordan replaces the Constitution with the Fifty Blessings, carrying out assassinations and forced disappearances on political rivals and dissidents. When the Secular Bloc decides to secede from the Union, Jordan starts the Second American Civil War and leaves his mark on the conflict by firebombing the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, massacring 12,000 people. More of Jordan's atrocities include: Using his elite Joshua Brigades to kill tens of thousands in California alone; killing half of the population in Greenpoint; and taking the surviving Secular Bloc fighters to a POW Camp, where their leader is stoned to death on live TV. After winning the war, Jordan proves his victory with the Purity Web, a system that eradicates privacy and controls all aspects of society.
• The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness: Thiazzi, from Soul Eater and Oath Breaker, is the Oak Mage and the most sadistic of the Soul Eaters. Seeking total domination, Thiazzi and three other Soul Eaters attempt to unleash a demonic horde on the human world to subjugate the clans to their will. Reemerging later, Thiazzi instigates a war between the Deep Forest clans and kills both the Deep Horse and Auroch Mages to impersonate them and manipulate both sides. Using his newfound power, Thiazzi reintroduces dead customs such as cutting off hands as punishment and kidnaps several children to turn into Tokoroths, a torturous process which renders them empty husks possessed by demons. Desiring to obtain the final Fire Opal piece, Thiazzi murders the young Bale to steal it and then tries to manipulate the Deep Forest clans into declaring war on the people of the Open Forest, so he can conquer everything. Thiazzi also takes advantage of a mentally ill woman to use as a servant and orders her to start a huge fire to frame Torak for it and have him executed. He then kidnaps Renn and traps her in a hollow tree to slowly suffocate to death. When Torak submits to his will, Thiazzi immediately breaks his promise to spare Renn's life and tries to kill them both.
• The Chronicles of King Rolen's Kin:
  • Warlord Palatyne is a vicious overlord who took over of several holdings by force and seeks to Take Over the World. Cunning and manipulative, he tries to arrange for first Pirola, and then Isolt, to marry him. Whenever he can't get what he wants fast enough he always resorts to force and murder, such as by murdering Rolencia's king under a flag of truce and ordering his entire line murdered when he cannot marry Piro, and then by trying to rape Isolt when her father delays the wedding. He is also very petty, keeping Byren in an animal cage to be mocked and shamed by the populace.
  • Cobalt is the son of the former king's bastard and desires the crown for himself. To that end, he betrays his family by making an alliance with Warlord Palatyne to take over Rolencia. To gain the King's trust, he plays a Wounded Gazelle Gambit by claiming raiders killed his wife on the way to Rolencia. In truth, he had her murdered to make a sob story for himself. He divides the royal family and blackmails Orrade into becoming his spy by threatening to reveal he's gay. He also tries to threaten Queen Myrella into becoming his lover by threatening her daughter. Once he is king he threatens another innocent girl into pretending to be Princess Piro to legitimize his claim to the throne, and murders her sister once she escapes, taking great glee in the girl's death.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • Jadis, the White Witch, was born in Charn. Fighting with her sister over her universe, she employed the Deplorable Word, killing all life in it aside from herself. Putting herself into a slumber out of boredom, she is found by Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, the former who she seduces and both of whom she threatens to physically harm, forcing them to take her to London. Finding herself powerless, she decides to commit petty crimes like theft until she is dragged into the nascent Narnia. There, she eats a silver apple, restoring her powers, and seduces Digory again, first with promises of power and then with the ability to save his dying mother. When this fails, she mocks him and leaves to the north, where she spends centuries amassing magical power and creating a tradition of evil witches that would plague Narnia much later down the line. She then marches south and wipes out human beings from Narnia and forbids any from coming there. Installing an Endless Winter, Jadis formed a totalitarian government where dissenters would either be turned into stone or killed outright. On coming across Edmund Pevensie, Jadis seduces him with Turkish Delight as means to rat out his siblings; when he does, she takes him prisoner and even attempts to kill him once she learns Aslan has returned. When Edmund is saved, Jadis appeals to an ancient law stating that traitors are her property, prompting Aslan to sacrifice his own life. Jadis responds by setting up an extremely painful and humiliating execution, immediately reneging on her deal.
  • The Silver Chair: The Lady of the Green Kirtle, or the Green Lady, is a powerful witch with a specialty in Mind Manipulation, a desire to rule over Narnia, and not even an ounce of morality. After arriving in the country, she assassinates the beloved queen. When Prince Rilian comes to avenge his mother, the Green Lady captures him and mind rapes him for six years until he is nothing more than her brain-dead servant and forced husband. In addition, she performs the same dark magic on gnomes from the Deep Realm, forcing thousands of otherwise good people into being her slaves who are allowed to do nothing but build her underground castle for years. When the heroes arrive in Narnia to try to rescue the Prince, she misdirects them into a pack of man-eating giants, fully intending for the three heroes, two of whom are children, to be brutally murdered and eaten. After the heroes manage to escape and confront her in her lair, she attempts to brainwash them too, only to go ballistic when the hypnosis fails, at which point she tries to kill them and thousands of gnomes and other innocent creatures living underground.
  • The Last Battle: Shift convinces his "friend" Puzzle to wear a lion skin so he can pass Puzzle off as Aslan. When Calormen invades, Shift is too eager to switch sides and sell out Narnians to mass slavery. Helping to facilitate Calormen, Shift is responsible for the deaths of countless Narnians, including the massacre of the dryads, while plotting to see all of Narnia rot under Calormen as long as he profits.
• The Chronicles of Prydain: Arawn Death-Lord was once the evil master of Prydain before being driven back. Returning to power, Arawn uses the Black Cauldron to create the Cauldron-Born, nightmarish undead warriors caught between life and death, even if Arawn has to have hosts of living warriors killed to do it. Sending them to wipe out entire cities, Arawn plans on the complete conquest of Prydain and attempts to have one castle destroyed with all inhabitants to claim the lives of his destined foes.
• Chronicles Of The Bitch Queen trilogy: Prince Yuebek, the Emperor's fifth son, is a powerful mage and sickening Serial Killer and rapist who has used his position to murder numerous innocent people, even killing his own wife to free himself to marry the object of his lust, Talyien. Waging war on the lands, Yuebek has no compunction against numerous brutal war crimes, capturing Tali's husband Rayyel and trying to have him eaten by his own hounds. Later forcing Tali to marry him, Yuebek rapes and kills her friend in front of her to send a message, even later using his last moments to mock Tali's true love Khine about how much he delighted in Tali's supposed death.
• Chronicles of the Kencyrath: Gerridon, in the distant backstory, was the greatest leader of the people, Highlord of the Kencyrath and Master of Knorth, but he would go down in history as their greatest traitor. Desiring immortality—in a Martyrdom Culture—and bitter that the absent Three-Faced God wouldn't grant it to him, he sold the souls of his race to their ancient enemy, Perimal Darkling, in exchange for eternal life and manipulated his twin sister Jamethiel Dream-Weaver into reaping them for him. This betrayal would not only destroy two-thirds of the Kencyrath, but leave scars in their collective psyche that would linger for millennia. When Gerridon's immortality began to fail him he sought out various means of sustaining it, including attempting to create a child of his or Jamethiel's blood to take over as Dream-Weaver—by rape if necessary—and taking command of an ancient religious sect and whipping them into a fanatical fervor in which they brutally tortured hundreds of Kencyr prisoners of war, including Gerridon's own nephew, in an attempt to force them to convert. Driven solely by his selfish desire for immortality, Gerridon will sacrifice anyone and anything—including his own blood-kin—to save himself and prolong his life. Not not only did he betray his people and his god, but he plans to do the same to his "master" Perimal Darkling, if he can find a way to maintain his immortality outside of its control; his pride rankles at the thought of being subordinate to anyone or anything. As his niece Lady Jamethiel Priest's-bane of Knorth (Jame) observes, there is nothing Gerridon won't do to keep on living and to avoid paying the karmic price for his long-ago betrayal, and his remains a unique and infamous position in the long annals of the Kencyrath's history.
• Chronicles of the Necromancer:
  • Jared Drayke, the evil elder half-brother of hero Martris "Tris" Drayke, is introduced when Tris stops him from raping a servant. Later making a dark pact with the Vayash-Moru mage Foor Arontala, Jared launches a coup against his own family, killing his father and destroying his soul, as well as Tris's mother and Jared's own younger half-sister. Becoming a vicious tyrant, Jared has his men slaughter entire villages for insufficient payment of taxes, while leading purges of magic users in the kingdom. Jared has members of the Sisterhood of mages slaughtered and tortured, while also butchering the other Vayash-Moru. Having others abducted, tortured and slowly impaled, Jared also becomes a Serial Rapist who abducts, tortures and rapes women regularly before murdering them. When he finally confronts Tris, Jared boasts that he will take Tris's beloved, Jared's former arranged fiancée, and rape her endlessly, killing the first child she has to remove any issue with paternity.
  • Foor Arontala assists Jared with everything listed above, torturing members of the Sisterhood and also leading purges of his own race, the Vayash-Moru. In addition, Arontala enslaves the souls of his victims, holding them in agony, while regularly using the spirit of Tris's dead sister to torment him. Holding the trapped spirit of the evil mage the Obsidian King, Arontala feeds it the captive souls while intending to revive him at a certain time and become his new host, bringing a wave of death and destruction to the world, claiming that if the Obsidian King does annihilate everything, Arontala will simply rebuild it in his own image.
  • Malesh is a particularly vicious Vayash-Moru who savors the hunt. While at first he has to limit himself to vile criminals due to treaties and laws, Malesh is fond of tormenting them and draws out their fear at death. Deciding that it's time for vampires to reign over humans, Malesh brutally slaughters the population of multiple villages while attempting to provoke a battle with the goddess The Dark Lady's chosen Vahanian. Malesh attempts to turn his lover Carina and promises that if Vahanian delays in challenging Malesh—while knowing that to kill Malesh might doom Carina, as a Vayash-Moru fledgling's life is linked to its makers—then Malesh will continue butchering villages. Intending to spark a war between humanity and vampires and make oceans of blood flow, Malesh attempts to flee Vahanian by using a child as a Human Shield, only to reveal he had already drained the child to the point of being impossible to save anyways. Even his own maker is horrified at Malesh's actions, at which point Malesh declares him a weakling before intending to create a slaughter so great that Malesh believes he will be raised to serve as the consort of the Dark Lady and reign over a new kingdom of undeath and destruction.
• Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne:
  • The Emperor's Blades: Sami Yurl and Balendin Ainoa, a pair of sadistic cadets with the Annur military, are both involved with a plot to overthrow the royal family. Torturing a prostitute to death, they use her hatred and fear of them to fuel Balendin's magic, allowing him to collapse a pub on the Emperor's son, Valyn, endangering dozens of others in the process. When Valyn survives, the two of the lure his friend Ha Lin out to a secluded place and beat her to a pulp, using her emotions to power another assassination attempt on Valyn, for which they frame cadet Annick. During their graduation trials, they take the opportunity to capture Ha Lin and torture her to death, and following graduation, try to assassinate Valyn and his brother. Upon capturing Valyn's squad, the first thing that Balendin brags about is how he will have them handed over to Sami to be raped; Sami himself meets his end at the hands of Valyn while trying to cut him to pieces.
  • While Yurl is killed, Balendin reappears in the other two books, branching off from the conspiracy to overthrow the ruling dynasty and impressing the Urghal people with his penchant for cruelty and causing pain. With his powers relying on drawing emotions toward himself, Balendin begins taking prisoners and torturing them viciously to draw out their hate and fear, further strengthening him. Becoming the de facto leader of a massive army of Urghal warriors, Balendin leads them to slaughter all in their path, taking hundreds upon hundreds of prisoners while he personally tortures and skins them alive in front of horrified city walls to draw out more and more power for himself, revealing his only loyalties are his complete devotion to his own ego and hunger for power.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:
  • Lord Foul the Despiser is Thomas Covenant's ultimate enemy. An ancient being who revels in being pure evil, Foul aims to completely annihilate the magical land, sending out terrifying armies to crush and destroy all that live while recruiting the monstrous Ravers to his side, facilitating and ordering countless atrocities including the genocide of the Seareach giants and having Sheol Satansfist establish a dark cult that runs on blood sacrifices. After the death of Thomas's daughter, Foul corrupts her soul to his side, using her against Thomas as a twisted parody of herself, and later corrupts Thomas's son Roger into an agent to use against his father. Not satisfied with simply destroying life, Foul aims to completely annihilate all hope from the universe, learning from each of his defeats to return with new schemes that inevitably cost countless lives.
  • The three Ravers, Samahdi, Moksha, and Turiya, are Foul's Co-Dragons who were formerly three human brothers whose sheer evil ascended them of their mortal bodies. Serving their master, the Ravers would massacre countless innocents, including their own troops, while also having a tendency of possessing people. Individually, each Raver has their own depraved crimes under their belt: Samahdi had countless people sacrificed under the pretence they would bring a better world; Moksha infected Covenant with venom to force him to use his power, intending for the ring's might to destroy the world; Turiya had committed the atrocity of wiping out the Giants of Seareach, with them refusing to fight back. Sharing their master's abhorrent sadism, the Ravers committed horrific atrocities to free Lord Foul and ascend to godhood.
• The Chrysalids:
  • Joseph Strorm is protagonist David's father and the worst of Waknuk's intolerant society. Out of fanaticism and bigotry towards those deemed "mutants" for abnormalities, Joseph brutally whips David for so much as making a joke about a third hand being useful to compete a complicated task. When a young David's childhood friend Sophie Wender is exposed for having a sixth toe, Joseph whips David until he denounces Sophie before exiling her to the dangerous Fringes. With decades of purges behind him, when Joseph discovers both David and his younger sister Petra are telepaths, he rallies a posse to hunt down and kill them, even going to war with the mutants of the Fringes when his children are taken captive by the denizen—not because he cares about them, but because he feels they belong to him.
  • Gordon Strorm is Joseph's older brother, exiled to the Fringes for his long limbs making him deemed a mutant. Determined to feel powerful, Gordon attacks Waknuk with mutants to take it by force. In the Fringes themselves, Gordon regularly forces child-aged mutant girls to breed with him, and captures the heroes to provoke an all-out war with Waknuk.
• Chung Kuo:
  • Howard DeVore is at first the security chief of the T'ang, which stands in opposition to the Chung Kuo civilization. DeVore manipulates the two civilizations into war with the aim of wiping out as many humans as possible and eventually replacing them with his own chosen artificial race, "The Inheritors." Though thwarted, DeVore returns again and again to craft new wars, using people as pawns all the while. Eventually, DeVore is revealed as an inhuman being whose only desire is to utterly exterminate humanity and enjoys nothing as much as the suffering of others.
  • Wang Yu-Lai is a member of the Chinese version of the KGB/Gestapo, which uses Cold-Blooded Torture without any hesitation. Wang is very sad that he doesn't get to commit wholesale genocide against the population of the conquered territories (basically kill anyone, who isn't Chinese) and likes to rape prisoners and forces their husbands or lovers to watch. He also enjoys executing prisoners.
• Circleverse:
  • Street Magic: Lady Zenadia doa Attaneh is a noblewoman in the senior years of her life who, finding nothing in her regal life stimulates her anymore, turns to lording over a gang full of street orphans for her own amusement. Zenadia wins the loyalty of the children with money and clean clothing, dubs them the "Vipers", then sends them off to start causing gang wars regardless of how many people die in the process. Those she deems lacking "discipline" or who otherwise bore her are strangled to death by her mute assassin and used as fertilizer for the plants in her enormous garden, who are delighted with how well fed they are. Zenadia elects to kill herself rather than face justice at the end of the novel, dismissing all the orphan children she murdered as tools without value.
  • Battle Magic:
    • Emperor Weishu, ruler of the current dynasty of Yanjing, is a superficially-pleasant man whose charms fly out the window when he has a score of gardeners burned alive in their own garden for the crime of a single wilted rose. Weishu visits cruelties like these on his servants readily and often, keeping his torture chambers readily stocked with anyone dissenting against his rule as well as generations of their family members. Weishu keeps a man he purchased from another noble as his twisted pet who grimly relates that he's seen Weishu torture people to death himself and even once sends a poisoned gift to an elderly old woman simply because she'd been a vocal critic of his regime. Weishu visits a massive war upon the neighboring nation of Gyongxe and openly fancies himself their new god when he briefly conquers the nation.
    • Jian Jiu, one of Weishu's imperial mages, befriends the 10-year-old stone mage Evvy during her time among Weishu's court before revealing herself chapters later to be one of Weishu's most twisted soldiers. Jian Jiu leads the total slaughter of a hugely-populated fortress during the war on Gyongxe, not just of the soldiers but of every innocent within the walls down to the infants and all the animals as well. Jian Jiu personally tortures Evvy days after they seemingly bonded, using the knowledge gained from this friendship to try and force Evvy to watch as Jian Jiu starts torturing Evvy's cats to death. When Evvy escapes, Jian Jiu murders two of her own men to save face.
• The Circus of Hungry Clowns, by Caesar Ruell: Crooks, leader of the circus, is a carnivorous monster who gleefully preys on the flesh of children. Leading the circus with powerful illusions, Crooks regularly murders kids as part of the show and kidnaps others for later consumption. Ringmasters are kept in life by their loved ones held captive and threatened with death should they not help the clowns prey on children.
• La città vuota (The Hollow City): Riccardo and Caterina Rovatti embezzled a huge sum of money through the former's building materials company, endangering more than 50 construction sites, including residential ones. When their son Alessandro accidentally caused the death of his classmate Federico, the Rovattis used their influence to sway the inquiry, although only to save their own image and not out of love. When Giada finds out about their misappropriations and blackmails them, the Rovattis have their goon Moataz kill her in front of Alessandro, whose death they arrange shortly after to avoid being caught, uncaring that an innocent is heavily wounded in the shooting. To eliminate any potential witness, the Rovattis send Moataz to kill Daniele and, once arrested, they only worry about a chance to escape justice. Never shown to have even a trace of marital love, the Rovattis are willing to terrorize the whole city of Modena to satisfy their own greed.
• The City Beautiful, by Aden Polydoros:
  • Mr. John Whitby is a rich, well-respected gambler in Chicago who's secretly a rabid antisemite. Whitby looks down on the Jewish population of the city and wishes to purge it of them, which leads to him allying with the like-minded, insane Serial Killer Grigori. Whitby helps Grigori in his murders of innocent Jewish boys while planning to take their evil even bigger. Whitby plans to burn down the Jewish Corner of Chicago, and when confronted about how this could destroy the entire city and possibly kill thousands, Whitby only smugly sneers that as a gambler he doesn't care.
  • Factory owner Mr. Katz is a wicked industrialist who uses child labor with few safety concerns, working those in his factories to injury or death without remorse. When hero Alter is possessed by the dybbuk of a dead boy named Yakov, it is revealed Katz also pimps out young boys, raping many himself in the factory while callously excusing it as giving them what they "really want".
• City of God: The prison gang leader only known as "Sheriff" stands out as a despicable monster despite not even being affiliated with Lil Zé. Ruling over his unit of the Lemos de Brito penitentiary with an iron fist, the Sheriff has implemented a system of sexual slavery where weaker inmates are made to serve his gang as their "wives". A thuggish Serial Rapist himself, the Sheriff spends years raping and torturing his personal slave for sadistic pleasure.
• C.J. Townsend series, by Jilliane Hoffman:
  • Retribution: Dr. Gregory Chambers is a seemingly kind psychologist who, in truth, is the sadistic creator of a worldwide snuff club that he contributes to by kidnapping, raping and torturing women to death. Upon realizing that his most prominent patient, attorney C.J. Townsend, has trauma thanks to the Serial Rapist William Bantling, Chambers decides to play a "game" by vivisecting several women and killing them by tearing out their hearts, then framing Bantling for the "Cupid" crimes, eager to see if Townsend ignores the law and seeks her own justice against Bantling. Once his little game ends, Chambers kidnaps Townsend, planning to torture her to death and continue his murder spree, bragging that he'll help Bantling escape prison just to allow him to torment more women.
  • Retribution & Last Witness: Chris Masterson is the sadistic partner of Dr. Chambers, and is known by his snuff club members as the "Cop Killer" thanks to his public mask of a law enforcement officer. Assisting Chambers in the Cupid murders—entailing the rape, vivisection, and murder of many women—Masterson frames William Bantling for the crimes. After Chambers's death, Masterson, in a panic to cover up his atrocities, begins murdering a variety of police officers and lawyers who could incriminate him, often by slashing their throats and ripping their tongues our while they're alive to frame it as gang murders. Once seemingly ensuring his safety, Masterson takes C.J. Townsend hostage, hoping to "finish what Chambers started" by torturing her to death, and, when finally captured, Masterson gleefully brags that he'll rat out all of his snuff club partners just to escape justice.
  • Plea of Insanity: Dr. David Marquette was a seemingly jovial, polite man who was supposedly afflicted with schizophrenia that drove him to murder his entire family. Truthfully, Marquette is faking his schizophrenia, hoping to use the insanity plea to get a lighter sentence for his brutal massacre of his wife and toddler children—including a newborn daughter-with a knife and blunt force object. Marquette's motives are never divulged, but as truth of his past comes to light, notably his attempted murder of his mother and his possible connections to a variety of serial killings, Marquette's reasons for the crime are declared a combination of greed and cruelty, the latter capped off as he flashes a smug smirk to his prosecutor after she helps him get his insanity plea, giving her a cold glimpse into the real person he is.
• Clive Barker's Tortured Souls: Talisac is a Mad Scientist repugnant even by the wretched standards of the Primordium. A man so devoted to science for its own sake that he genetically engineered himself with a womb so he could give birth to monsters, Talisac is the one commissioned by General Montefalco to create monsters for the Primordium's army. Talisac regularly kills enough people for his experiments to pile their bodies in mountains in his lab, sometimes merely so he can take an eye or a lip from them to use in his constructs. Talisac is behind the misery of two of the other figures in the toyline: the Venal Anatomica, a being sculpted entirely from corpse-flesh, and the Mongroid, his twisted "child" whom Talisac decided to vivisect minutes after it was born.
• Clown in a Cornfield:
  • Sheriff George Dunne, one of the leaders of Kettle Springs, came up with a scheme to put the town back on the map; finding the younger generation of the town hateful, with their emphasis on social media, Dunne puts together a conspiracy to have the adults dress up as town mascot Frendo the Clown and murder the teens. Slaughtering a large percentage of the town's population in one night, Dunne escapes to return as a kindly authority figure as he plans to kill any survivors and also frame them for the killings, while hanging the hero Cole Hill to make it appear a suicide.
  • Alec Murray is one of the three masterminds, alongside Dunne and Arthur Hill, of the Frendo conspiracy. A "terminally basic" man who keeps his wife in the dark about his murderous appetites, Murray personally and brutally kills his way through dozens of innocent teenagers, and knowingly allows his stepdaughter Janet to get swept up in the Frendo hordes and die.
• Cobalt Blue: The Fury of Russia, Sgt. Nikolai Furin, was a Russian soldier who, when both he and American scientist Dr. Christine Cobalt came back from a joint mission to Venus, they inhaled gas that gave them superpowers. While Cobalt worked with other scientists and lived modestly, the Fury became The Unfettered, killing people just because, along with other horrific acts. Thirty-five years later, when Cobalt dies of natural causes, the Fury attacks the United States, beginning by killing Cobalt's superpowered offspring who lives in Washington, DC, by his favorite method, tearing the latter's head off; the Fury then destroys the Pentagon, killing hundreds. The Fury continues murdering other offspring of Cobalt and destroying landmarks, possibly killing hundreds if not thousands. The Fury's ultimate goal, according to Cobalt before she died, is to "rape [the First Lady] in front of [the President] on national television...to...traumatise [the US] in front of the world every single day"; he also plans to make heroine Cassie Cassowitz, Cobalt's only naturally-born daughter, his Sex Slave.
• Code Lyoko Chronicles (Alternate Continuity): Hannibal "The Magician" Mago, born Mark James Hollenback, was a soldier from a poor background who became the founder of a terrorist organization, Green Phoenix. He kidnapped Anthéa Hopper to force her husband Waldo Schaeffer to restart working on Project Carthage. When this failed, he brainwashed Anthéa for 20 years, abusing her in the meantime. Introduced shooting a horse on a racetrack so that he can win a bet, Mago has his henchman kidnap Jérémie to force him to work for him, or he will kill Anthéa. He has no empathy for his men, merely lamenting that they lost their usefulness when they became insane upon virtualization. When X.A.N.A. offers to help Mago in exchange for helping X.A.N.A. become human, Mago accepts, while having no intention of keeping his promise, planning to keep X.A.N.A. as his weapon to Take Over the World, uncaring about the innocent lives lost in the process, and even planning to send France into chaos should it refuse to submit. He has X.A.N.A. attack Kadic Academy, so that he could retrieve taken a file containing part of Waldo's Code Down. Despite his friendly demeanor, Mago stood out as a perfect foil to X.A.N.A., who obtained the humanity Mago had long lost.
• Codex Alera:
  • Kord is a brutal and sadistic thug who turned his steadholt into a Wretched Hive. Practicing slavery in a region where it's illegal, Kord sees his slaves as animals and prefers them, particularly the females, broken, so that he can prove his power over them. In a bid to assert his dominance over Isana, he forces her to watch his men gang rape Odianna. When that doesn't work, he reveals his preferred method of breaking slaves: the discipline collar. These devices force slaves to feel intense pleasure or agonizing pain based on whether or not they obey their masters. After showing off the collar on Odianna, he tells Isana that the next night he'll rape Odianna, using the collar to make her like it, then do the same to Isana. Violent and short-tempered, not even Kord's flesh and blood is spared from his wrath. Disgusted with his son, Aric's, natural kindness, Kord physically abuses him, forces him to assist Kord in his crimes, and threatens him with death should Aric refuse.
  • High Lord Kalarus is a despicable despot who built his realm upon slavery and maintains it by keeping his subjects perpetually impoverished. Cruel and power-hungry, in his quest to conquer all of Alera, Kalarus commits one atrocity after another. He keeps his top intelligence agent in line by regularly having her raped and holding her child, Masha, captive, despite the fact that Masha is probably his granddaughter. Kalarus built up his army by attaching discipline collars to children, then conditioned them with the collars for all their lives, ensuring that they would be a mindlessly loyal killing machines once they reached adulthood. When he decided to launch all out war on Alera, Kalarus had his legions slaughter most of the female Citizens in the Realm, and personally carried out attacks on orphanages to draw out defenders. Crippled and defeated in war, Kalarus retreated to his realm and rigged up a Taking You with Me scenario in the case his lands were conquered. He began provoking the great, volcano-dwelling fury, Kalus, and then bound the fury's wrath to his life. His plan was that if he died, the volcano would erupt and kill millions upon millions of people within the region. Unable to disarm the fury, Gaius Sextus is forced to set it off to minimize the damage, killing everyone within Kalarus's realm.
  • Invidia Aquitaine is a Machiavellian plotter that desires to obtain as much power as she possibly can. When she found out that Princeps Septimus was marrying a commoner instead of her, she arranged for his assassination, triggering the entire conflict of the series. Devoid of empathy, Invidia has a habit of betraying anyone if it suits her needs. In order to oust a beloved military officer from his command, she orders her pawn, Senator Arnos, to have a town filled with innocent people executed for the crime of peacefully complying with a more powerful, nonhostile enemy force. She ordered this believing that the commander would refuse, allowing her to label him a traitor and have him removed, thus eliminating him as a potential political threat. Afterwards, the civilians were going to be executed anyway to "set an example." Invidia later joined the Vord in order to save her own life, and voluntarily aided them in their mission to exterminate all non-Vord life on the planet. Hundreds of millions died due to her efforts and, when offerred the chance at redemption by teaming up with the remaining High Lords, Invidia threw it away by attempting to kill her allies the literal second it looked like the Vord Queen had been killed. She did this in order to seize complete control over the wasteland she had helped create.
• The Cold Moons: Kronos desires to be leader of his large group of Cilgywn forest badgers, but only because he likes ruling over others. Kronos makes friends easily and is liked by many, but it's all an act as he needs support to get to the top of the council. Kronos also has a god complex, and he convinced his brother Zoilos that he'd one day be a god. Kronos weeds out any badger that gets in his way of his goal. He is involved with the deaths of over four badgers, with two being leaders, but he tries to make the deaths seem accidental: He "accidentally" trips Buckwheat into a river, has both Dandelion and an entire family of foxes killed while making it was a skirmish, and then has a boulder crush the current leader Eldon—while there were cubs around. Kronos ends up splitting the badgers into two groups, but he keeps his deserters in line by force. Those who try to escape are captured and tortured to death by Kronos and Zoilos. Oftentimes, even those that just behave in ways that Kronos dislikes are tortured and killed by his underling Vulcan.
• The Coldest Girl in Coldtown: Lucien Moreau turned Gavriel into a vampire on a whim, as he did to his sister out of a twisted obsession, the horrific transformation causing her to commit suicide. Brought to trial by the vampire council for turning humans, Lucien manipulates Gavriel into taking the fall for him, nearly leading to his death, had the Spider not chosen to spare the latter, instead appointing him to destroy new vampires to stop their kind from spreading. Spitefully creating more new vampires, Lucien chooses victims who resemble Gavriel's deceased siblings, delighting in the torment destroying them causes him. Behind a massive spread of vampirism, Lucien's actions force vampires to live in the walled-in, titular "Coldtowns", apart from humanity to avoid all the death and destruction. Becoming the ruler of his own Coldtown, Lucien lures in innocent teenagers as a seemingly-friendly figure, throwing lavish parties to ensnare them before draining them of blood in his dungeons and in his parties and finally killing them after months of torment. When Gavriel tracks him down for revenge, Lucien feigns regret, promises him "vengeance" against the spider and murders his own loyal right-hand woman to fake friendship. Tricked by Gavriel, Lucien despicably tries to make his escape by taking Gavriel's Love Interest hostage, trying to save his own miserable life after his plan to rule over all vampires is shattered.
• Colony Of The Lost, by Derek Cavignano: The demonic Trell is a being from the Land of Demons driven by perpetual lust for power and a thirst to kill for the sake of it. Slaughtering thousands across countless worlds and keeping their souls bonded for all time in its amulet, Trell sets its sights on Earth by slaughtering the vast majority of a native colony before it was stopped. Centuries later, Trell awakens again, turning various people into its unwilling thralls and having them corral several children for the purposes of viciously murdering them and empowering itself. Trell viciously slaughters countless people in its way—often making its thralls butcher their own loved ones and raping a mother to death after making her murder her own six-year-old child—Trell rapes and impregnates the mother of the nine-year-old Sarah Connelly with a monster meant to agonizingly eat its way out of her before attempting to make her murder her own child. Vying to decimate the entire town and all within before continuing on to whatever else it can manage, Trell's sole reaction to its child being killed is to simply gloat that it will rape Sarah next, with the gloating assertion that she'll enjoy it the whole while. A being with a vicious fondness for killing people in the most sadistic ways it can manage and likening it the whole while to a "game," Trell is a ravenous monster who ultimately kills more for the fun of it than anything else.
• The Color Purple: Alphonso, better known as "Pa", is Celie's stepfather. Having taken advantage of Celie's mother's mental deterioration to marry her and gain access to her mother, Alphonso savagely mistreats Celie, regularly beating her for real or imagined reasons. Worse still, he also regularly rapes her, resulting in two pregnancies by the time she is 14, with him simply selling the children. Tiring of Celie, Alphonso sells her in marriage to a widowed man, even citing the damage he's done to her as a selling point, before continuing to mistreat others as he will, even a new teenage wife later.
• "The Colossus of Ylourgne", by Clark Ashton Smith: Nathaire is a wicked, diminutive sorcerer with a huge chip on his shoulder. Faking his death and stealing countless corpses from the graveyards, Nathaire fuses them into a gigantic colossus to house his soul before going on a rampage. Ravaging the countryside, Nathaire tortures, rapes and murders everything he finds, plucking people apart when he catches them and leaving nothing but ruin and death in his wake for miles. Attacking the chief city of his wrath, Nathaire tramples over countless victims, slaughtering everything he sees before focusing on the church, intent on leaving no survivors.
• The ColSec Trilogy: Lamprey is a former Crusher turned gangster who was exiled to Klydor alongside the protagonists. Repeatedly trying to assert dominance over the group, Lamprey was driven out after he murdered several of the forest aliens for being ugly—thus starting a war—and tried to kill Cord. Returning to stalk and harass the group, Lamprey nearly beat Jeko to death and tried to kidnap Samella, who led him into the woods after making her getaway. Encountering the aliens again, Lamprey killed four dozen of them before they overwhelmed him and brought him down. A clear demonstration of what happens when a petty sadist is given elite combat-training, Lamprey was the only exile who actually deserved to dumped off on Klydor.
• The Consultant, by Bentley Little: Regus Patoff, the titular Consultant, is the manipulative, arrogant, and cruel mastermind of BFG Associates, whose ultimate goal is to create a company able to be run by a single person. To this end, Regus hires himself out as a consultant to large businesses, then slowly and methodically makes the business more productive and profitable, while simultaneously eliminating the employees one by one, be it by forcing them to quit with unreasonable rules, or by murdering them and framing it as tragic accidents. To further along the process, Regus organizes mass shootings of employees, framing other employees for the killings; arranges company-wide vacations that turn into wretched survivalist training; and stalks and torments workers' families, threatening their lives at every turn. Having performed this same ritual over and over again on numerous companies, Regus's latest scheme, his target this time being the company CompWare, ends with him driving several workers into insane frenzies and having them slaughter their co-workers, but not before Regus rapes and murders a secretary who stood up to him, and traps the wife of CompWare's CEO inside a snow globe for all time.
• Conviction, by Richard North Patterson: Eddie Fleet, though initially coming across as nothing more than a petty criminal and domestic abuser, is revealed to be something far worse. Fifteen years ago, he raped and murdered 9-year-old Thuy Sen, and than sold both his accomplice, Payton, and the accomplice's innocent and mentally-handicapped half-brother, Rennell up the river to save himself. Afterwards he continued his practices of hurting women and children, three of whom he abused to get revenge on Payton for trying to kill him for his betrayal. When Theresa Paget learns the truth from Payton and tries to expose him, Eddie becomes enraged and threatens to hurt her and her daughter, failing to act on his threats only for fear of getting caught. After going on the run following Theresa cornering him in his deposition, Eddie proceeds to beat and rape another woman, who shoots him in the mouth while he's asleep. Sadly, the innocent Rennell is still put to death. Narcissistic, selfish, and cruel, Eddie Fleet showed that even the pettiest of criminals could be among the worst of humanity.
• The Copper Cat trilogy, by Jen Williams: The dragon goddess Y'Ruen was a monstrous being imprisoned a thousand years ago by the mages. During her imprisonment, Y'Ruen devoured her fellow gods, and upon being released, she combines her blood with that of a human knight to create the Brood Sisters, half-human warriors who form an army. Y'Ruen burns down an entire city and has her army sweep all over the nearby lands, slaughtering everything in their path to the last child. When she learns some of her children have begun naming themselves, Y'Ruen takes the only one she can find, tortures her and murders her in front of the army as a lesson on independence. When the armies of the human kingdoms come against her, Y'Ruen happily incinerates her own children just to get at the enemy, willing to stop at nothing to destroy all in her path.
• Coraline: The Beldam, or the "Other Mother", is a sinister temptress who lures children to her otherworldly lair under the promise of a better life. The Beldam spoils them with a world tailored to their fondest wishes in order to keep them with her, before convincing them to sew buttons on their eyes to stay in her realm forever. After this, the Beldam murders them and locks away their souls to replenish her own energy. Intending on making the eponymous heroine her fourth victim, the Beldam kidnaps Coraline's parents to force her into a horrifying game of finding the dead children's eyes. The Beldam also turns her own servants into hollow monstrosities to sic them on Coraline, or for their defiance.
• Corum: Earl Glandyth-a-Krae is the archenemy of Prince Corum and leader of the Denledhyssi. We first meet Glandyth when he is having several of his human prisoners tortured to death. We subsequently discover that he has been responsible for committing genocide against the Vadhagh, with Corum's family among his victims—his father and uncle cut down by Glandyth, his sisters and cousin gang-raped by Glandyth's men while he looked on. Capturing Corum, Glandyth puts out his eye and severs his hand, planning to leave him with no hands, no eyes, no tongue, no feet, and no genitals. Corum is saved by The Brown Man of Laahr, whom Glandyth subsequently captures and murders, and taken to Moidel's Mount; Glandyth unites the local Pony Tribes and tries to kill everyone there. He later participates in his king, Lyr-a-Brode's invasion of Lywm-an-Esh, sacrificing prisoners in order to summon up the army of his gods, The Dog and The Horned Bear, and planning to use Corum's body as a vessel for the soul of Arioch, The Knight of the Swords. When Corum manages to resurrect the Vadhagh, Glandyth, now acting on his own, makes a Deal with the Devil with Mabelrode the Faceless, The King of the Swords, inflicting the Vadhagh with a disease that causes them to go mad and slay one another; he intends to use Mabelrode's power to Take Over the World. A mass murderer, a rapist, a xenophobe, and a cheerful participant in genocide, Glandyth-a-Krae is finally killed while trying to cheat his way to victory in a Duel to the Death with Corum.
• The Cosmere:
  • Mistborn:
    • Original trilogy: Lord Straff Venture is introduced in The Final Empire as a brutal noble ready to commit all manner of atrocities to cement his power. He systematically abuses his children to force them to conform to his standards, even trying to have his son Elend assassinated. He sires illegitimate children to use as loyal assassins and spies, and discards his mistresses when they get too old—too old being late teens. In The Well of Ascension, he allows an army of monsters, known for their ruthlessness and utter lack of mercy, to attack an enemy city, regardless of collateral damage. He later decides to allow the city's destruction, concluding he only cares about the Atium rumored to be hidden in the city. Caring for nothing but his own power and advancement, and seeing others as nothing but tools to use or obstacles to be destroyed, Venture stands out as one of the only humans in The Cosmere completely devoid of sympathy.
    • Wax and Wayne: Telsin Ladrian/Sequence is a ruthless manipulator driven by an endless desire for more. A rule-breaker since childhood, she became much worse as she grew older, rising to be a high-ranking member of the Set, who recruited her similarly high-ranking uncle Edwarn. Found overseeing the torture and experimentation of Malwish, Telsin fools Wax into thinking that she was an unwilling participant forced by Edwarn, even killing one of her own men to maintain the guise. Telsin ultimately uses this opportunity to shoot Wax, her own brother, when he's off guard. When things begin to go poorly, Telsin promptly flees leaving Edwarn and all her subordinates behind. Resurfacing six years later, Telsin masterminds a plot to destroy the city of Elendel, inhabited by millions, claiming that it is necessary to stop a more destructive invasion from the god Autonomy, yet Telsin ignores less violent solutions, with the plan actually intended to impress Autonomy enough so that they will make Telsin a god. When it appears her plan will succeed, Telsin reveals to Wax that she has always hated him since childhood, and gloats about her success, revealing her to be nothing more than a petty and callous individual who only cares about proving herself superior to others, indifferent to the countless lives that her actions take.
  • The Stormlight Archive: Rayse, the Vessel of the Shard of Odium, is a stern, tyrannical man who made it his mission to hunt down and sunder the other Shardborn. Heedless of who gets in his way, Rayse is willing to burn entire worlds to shatter the rest, having murdered those seen as "The Almighty" in the process while sowing his dark influence on worlds to create war and bloodshed until he can conquer or raze it to nothing. On the world where the series is set, Rayse's influence is responsible for the mental lobotomies and enslavement of the Parshendi race, the massive wars and the corruption of many others with his own Fused being little more than slaves he will send to eternal damnation for failure. Arriving himself, Rayse intends to slaughter everything in the world until all that is left are him and his own twisted armies, a process he will repeat through the cosmos.
• The Cotton Candy Massacre, by Christopher Robertson: Buster Bonkins, better known as Bonko the Clown, is a depraved mobster behind pancake makeup. In his mortal life, Bonko killed numerous innocent people for real or imagined slights, while sexually extorting women of the circus when they failed to make enough rent. Upon his return from the dead, Bonko infects people with a cotton candy-like substance to turn them into monstrous clowns, luring in victims to torture, rape, and murder, with his favorite being his former fortune teller whom Bonko repeatedly mocks about their old "relationship".
• Countess Dracula novelization, by Guy Adams: Elizabeth Sasdy is a selfish movie star who, after she starts to age, resorts to murder to keep her looks. After accidentally striking a maid and discovering that the maid's blood reversed her aging, Elizabeth, inspired by the crimes of the infamous Countess Elizabeth Báthory, decides to bathe in blood to regain her youth. Bullying her husband Frank Nayland into helping her, the two murder dozens of prostitutes to gain their blood, all in Elizabeth's selfish search for eternal youth.
• The Crescent Moon Kingdoms: Throne of the Crescent Moon gives us Orshado, ghul-of-ghuls. Having sold his soul to the Traitorous Angel, Orshado aims to gain absolute mastery over the world, unleashing ghuls in the streets to prey upon innocent people, and sending Mouw Awa (who actually seems to be devoted to his "blessed friend" Orshado, who doesn't seem to return the favor) to devour the souls of an entire Badawi tribe. Capturing a palace guardsman and torturing him into madness, Orshado cuts off the man's head and animates it as his Mouth of Sauron, then works his magic through the guardsman so that he might transform every guard in the palace into a ghul servant, slaved to his will. Aiming to become the Traitorous Angel's Regent-on-Earth, Orshado hopes to achieve ultimate power, and drown the world in blood.
• The Croning:
  • "Bronson Ford" is one of the Children of the Old Leech, a cult dedicated to a monstrous Dark One. Having been on Earth for centuries, including as Rumpelstiltskin, Ford sows devastation, chaos, and murder simply because he savors the taste of human pain and anguish. When hero Donald "Don" Miller is on his trail, Ford makes clear that there is nothing Don can do and forces a horrific choice on him: to become one of the Children with his wife Michelle forever, or Ford will kill and torture his entire family. The pact is to be sealed with Don's baby grandson, as Ford and the Children find children to be a delicacy. Ford admits he could take whatever he wants, but he enjoys the suffering of humans too much not to make the bargain.
  • Connor Wolverton is the "grand Poo-Bah" of The Conspiracy revolving around the Dark Ones and Bronson Ford, serving as Ford's chief human agent amidst mankind. For years, Wolverton has overseen the routine sacrificing of hundreds, if not thousands, of small children to the Children of Old Leech in exchange for power, and it is Wolverton who is helping Michelle with the corruption of her family. Fully enabling the Dark Ones to infiltrate the planet, Wolverton has sold out his world to one day by decimated, simply so he can rule alongside its conquerors.
• "The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell", from A Universal History of Iniquity, by Jorge Luis Borges: Lazarus Morell is a Southern preacher and criminal who runs a horrific scheme. Convincing plantation slaves to trust him with their freedom, Morell arranges their escape, only to sell them into slavery to another plantation and do it twice over before leaving the slaves broken and lost in horrible labor. Upon being exposed for his crimes, Morell tries to raise a slave army and drown the South in blood to save his own skin before murdering a man for his horse to escape.
• Cruel Summer, by Wesley Southard: Cetus is a Greek Sea Monster desiring to control the world. After stumbling upon a drowning Hoyt Rainey, Cetus possesses his body to use it as a vessel to regain his powers. He repeatedly allows Hoyt to torment Melissa Braun, Hoyt's ex-girlfriend, and her preteen son, Patrick, and even goes as far as trying to drown both of them. After Cetus fails to capture Melissa, he kidnaps Patrick instead, tying him to the back of an unmanned yacht and dragging his body through the sea to lure out Melissa. When Melissa and paramedics save Patrick and try to escape, Cetus, now at full power, unleashes the wrath of the sea upon New Smyrna Beach, creating a tsunami that kills hundreds and opting to do the same across the planet once he's finished killing Melissa and Patrick.
• The Culture series:
  • The Player of Games: Emperor-Regent Nicosar of Azad is a master player of the ruthless game of Azad that determines everything in the empire's society. A sadistic psychopath, Nicosar rules via torture, murder and brutality while broadcasting regular videos to the population with the "losers" facing mutilation, death or rape. Women are also seen as second-rate citizens, with abuse and violence towards them accepted, and any females who assault a male are summarily tortured to death. Despite his seemingly benevolent and passive façade, Nicosar rules over the Empire with an iron fist, regularly executing any who would try to rebel against him, and subjecting his own men to terrible torments should they cross him. When Nicosar plays the novel's hero Gurgeh, Nicosar is bested in Azad and orders his guards to massacre all the spectators, deciding if he has to go down, he'll simply kill every single one of his own subjects in the process.
  • Use of Weapons: Ethnarch Kerian, the decadent despot of Youricam who serves as the introductory Asshole Victim for mercenary protagonist Cheradenine Zakalwe, has kept himself alive and youthful for decades through "retro-ageing" technology, harvesting the organs of dissidents for himself. Kerian obtained this technology by brokering a deal with Zakalwe, promising to stop his genocidal killings—which he promptly started up again as soon as Zakalwe was off-world, having his undesirables rounded up into "death trains" and gassed, entire villages at a time.
  • Surface Detail: Joiler Veppers is a wealthy playboy who once ruined the life of a supposed friend of his to get rich and take the man's daughter Lededje as his own. Regularly raping Lededje, Veppers murders her when she tries to escape, unaware her mind survives thanks to a neural race. Veppers also gets richer by selling and running artificial hells where the minds of countless victims on multiple worlds are tortured in horrific simulations for eternity. Worried that the anti-hell factions will win, Veppers arranges for an alien race to raze his estates into ashes with most of the innocent staff still there, all to avoid a loss in profits.
• The Cursed Among Us, by John Durgin: The Cannibal Demon, summoned years ago and implied to be named Atahsaia, inhabited the body of Jessica Black. Preying on the townspeople by devouring their hearts, the demon was imprisoned by Jessica's husband Henry, who was framed as the Black-Heart Killer. Later unleashed, Atahsaia begins to butcher everyone it can get its hands on, torturing, killing them, and eating their hearts. Atahsaia dominates a boy named Todd, mentally tormenting him and relishing in making its victims suffer, going on a mass killing spree to enjoy its freedom on Earth.
• The Curse of Chalion: Dondo dy Jironal is the evil younger brother of Martou, is a spoiled, corrupt nobleman, who has no compunction using his position to take advantage of those beneath him or to avenge slights against him. Dondo was responsible for the hero Cazaril being sold into brutal slavery, an experience that left him broken and despondent, while also taking advantage of his position to sexually abuse women. Having at one point convinced Chalion's impotent ruler to allow Dondo to try to get a child from his wife, Dondo raped her and humiliated her for a full year before she threatened suicide over the affair. When he manages to convince the ruler to betroth Dondo to his sister, Dondo gleefully describes to her how he plans to rape and abuse her all he wants.

---