Monster / Literature: N to S

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

N – R

• Nadia Stafford: Wild Justice: Sebastian Koss, a beloved crown prosecutor known for advocating victims' rights in sexual abuse cases, is actually a pedophilic Serial Killer and Serial Rapist himself. Koss uses his job as a guise to procure young victims for himself and cover up his heinous deeds. In his youth, Koss had his friend Drew Aldrich rape a teenage Nadia Stafford while Koss himself raped and killed her cousin Amy. In the present, Koss murders his friend Drew to tie up loose ends, guns down his second-in-command when he begins to have doubts and slits the throat of an eighty-year-old man in order to avoid detection. A sociopath fully aware of what a monster he is and proudly admitting to being without morals, Koss is Nadia's most evil and hated enemy.
• The Naked and the Dead: Staff Sergeant Sam Croft is the Commander of a Recon Platoon, which he rules with an iron fist, during World War II. Croft comes across as a simple martinet jerk before the audience is first introduced to his sadistic side. In one scene, he gives a Japanese prisoner some cigarettes and chocolate and thus the illusion of being spared. Right after he kills the guy despite having just learnt the soldier has a wife and kid back home. From there on it's made increasingly clear that Croft is a cold-blooded killing machine with love of combat and killing. His first kill was not even in the war, but when he was serving in the Texas National Guard, during which he killed a man in a riot just to see what it was like. When newly ensigned Lt. Hearn is assigned to the platoon, Croft resents being placed at second-in-command. Later, after he crushes an injured bird to death to spite a soldier, Hearn forces him to apologize. Croft experiences this as humiliating. He retaliates by misleading Hearn into thinking the path ahead is clear, thus getting Hearn killed by a machine gun. Later, Croft quells a mutiny in his usual manner: He threatens to shoot those responsible.
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: The Cook is one of the leaders of the mutiny aboard the Grampus and the most bloodthirsty member of the crew. Leading a slaughter of the loyalist officers, the Cook hurls a man overboard to drown and kills over twenty others with his axe to knock them into the waves. The Cook plots to go pirate and kill the crews he encounters, while also setting other rivals out to sea to drown.
• Nation: First Mate Cox is described as a man who lives to hurt others. Frequently shooting things just to kill something, Cox murders an old man in a canoe just because he can, later attempting a mutiny to wipe out any crew not loyal to him. Later taking over a cannibal tribe by killing its king, Cox attempts to massacre the other people on Nation before facing young Mau in a Duel to the Death, trying to feed him to the nearby sharks.
• The Navigator Kings, by Garry Kilworth: The elderly Kahuna Ragnu is originally the priest of the king Tutapu, assisting Tutapu in betraying his good-hearted brother Tangiia to rise to power. Upon Tutapu's defeat, Ragnu is consumed with the need for revenge for his humiliation. Sacrificing countless innocents and enslaving their souls, Ragnu uses dark magic to haunt his enemies, attempting to have them damned by the gods, or have an entire expedition swallowed by storms. Murdering his own men at times just to keep them on their toes, Ragnu eventually simply leads his forces on an assault to wipe out all of Tangiia's people, just to feed his desire for revenge.
• Nazi Gut Munchers, by Harrison Phillips: Otto is a cannibalistic Nazi soldier working under Hermann Schultz in a concentration camp. As Schultz's personal butcher, Otto would cut off various body parts of Jewish prisoners and have their flesh fed to the other German soldiers. Taking much glee in his work, Otto would also make sure to torture his victims while they were still alive, both to keep the meat fresh and also to satisfy his sadistic pleasures. Even when Adolf Hitler himself arrives to sample Schultz's cuisines, Otto cares more about tormenting the prisoners for fun instead of prioritizing pleasing the Führer.
• Nazi Hunter: Atlantis, by Jeremy Robinson: Oskar Dirlewanger and his second-in-command Dieter are the leaders of the infamous Dirlewanger Brigade and all the atrocities they committed throughout World War II. Brought back into the modern day as part of the SecondWorld project, a posthumous Nazi conspiracy, Dirlewanger seeks to use Atlantean tech to bring about a worldwide genocide to mold the world into the ideal Aryan state. Dirlewanger doesn't even intend on sparing any other Germans he perceives to be flawed. Dieter merrily aids in this plan while acting as a self-serving Bad Boss to his own men, constantly throwing them into the path of booby traps and murdering one solely because he survived a trap that killed his partner.
• NEED: Dr. Amelia Jain is the seemingly kind school psychiatrist of Nottawa High School, but in truth is secretly behind everything in the novel. Working for the government, Jain set up the social media site NEED to test what ordinary citizens are willing to do by having them do assignments for NEED in exchange for rewards. Using these assignments, Jain arranges things such as a tricking Amanda into eating a cookie she's allergic to, resulting in her death; sabotaging a man's car, causing a fatal car crash; replacing a woman's Tylenol, causing her to be hospitalized; or leaving a girl tied up in the school while having a firebomb set up there. When Kaylee Dunham tries to expose NEED, Jain manipulates people into believing she's mentally unstable and leaves evidence framing her for Amanda's death. Jain then abducts Kaylee's best friend Nate to harvest his kidney before trying to have Kaylee killed as well.
• The Neighbor, a D. D. Warren novel : Judge Maxwell Black, a respected judge, is attempting to recover his granddaughter from his son-in-law Jason, the prime suspect in the disappearance of Black's daughter Sandy. It is revealed that Black has killed two men who may have been Sandra's lovers, but worse, Black had murdered his own wife when she had abused Sandra; this was solely because Black had grown tired of his wife, and Sandra was old enough to "replace" her, so Black didn't want her to damage Sandra and ruin her for Black's appetites. After years of raping his daughter—who had an abortion at 16—Black murdered the other men to frame Jason, and later attempts to kill Jason as well, when it is revealed Sandra is alive and had planned to trap her father with Jason. It is revealed Black intends to take his four-year-old granddaughter to serve as a new replacement for Sandra, the knowledge of which leads Sandra to shoot her father dead on the spot.
• "Neighbourhood Watch", by Greg Egan: The demonic narrator is bound by contract to only prey on lawbreakers after 11 PM in the small, nameless town. Frequently going out and murdering those it finds, from a man robbing a register, a woman spraying graffiti and three teens breaking into a car, the monster plans to let the contract simply lapse without renewal. Once it does, the demon murders its handler Mrs. Bold and goes after a young boy named David that it despises, plotting to go on a savage killing rampage after.
• Nemesis Saga:
  • Project Nemesis & Project Maigo: General Lance Gordon is the man to discover the husk of the kaiju later named the Nemesis Prime. He initiates testing on it while having those he thinks he can't trust killed. When he implants an organ grown using Nemesis Prime's genetic material, Gordon's body changes to reflect his bestial nature. Mentally controlling newborn kaiju, Gordon sends them to attack human areas, with one notable attack being on the Sydney Opera House, while the kaiju wreak havoc and devastation to devour all the humans they can. Gordon then sends them to attack Washington, D.C. and Fort Bragg, intending to annihilate the US's military and government and eventually have the kaiju destroy human civilization so he may rebuild the world in his twisted image.
  • Nemesis Alternate Universe novel:
    • Frankie Robles is a Serial Killer who drugs his victims, coats them in epoxy, and poses them like mannequins to enact various scenes of mundane life. Registering a 9.5 out of 10 on the Hudson Scale, Robles was active long before Nemesis was created, joined Divine Retribution, and claimed dozens—if not hundreds—of victims over the subsequent 13 years—using some of his victims to decorate Divine Retribution's shrine to Nemesis under Martha's Vineyard and hollowing others out to serve as hiding places in case the NSO came calling.
    • Daimon Dunn, aka "Fuck Face", is a narcissistic sociopath who founded Divine Retribution within three years of Nemesis' destruction of Old Boston, cobbling together pieces of various mythologies into a manifesto exploiting people's fear to rally followers by claiming that Nemesis will cleanse the world of the "unworthy". Seeking to supplant Nemesis and become a god himself, Dunn has his cultists combine Nemesis' genetic material with the RC-714 mutagen to create a serum that turns people into Golyat—eternally ravenous monstrosities that grow the more they eat and can infect others through their bodily fluids. Testing the Golyat serum on Martha's Vineyard—killing thousands and leading to the island being wiped out—Dunn retreats to a hidden base under Neo-Boston and turns himself into a Golyat, devouring enough people to grow to be 500 feet tall. Unleashing the Golyat mutagen in the underground city of Beantown, which leads to hundreds of people being killed or mutated, Dunn then attempts to destroy Neo-Boston and devour Nemesis.
• Nemesis Series: Graywytch is a witch and supposed superhero. An ardent TERF, Graywytch worked for the supervillain Sovereign and tortured Danielle "Danny" Tozer for days trying to steal her powers. Using Sovereign's satellite network, Graywytch cast a spell to kill every man in the world, killing millions before she's stopped.
• Neuropath: Neil Cassidy, an obsessive, charismatic neuroscientist playing God with the minds of others, willingly destroyed his own personhood to better demonstrate the fundamentals of the Argument, a complex, nihilistic philosophy ruling everything as a mental construct. After graduating from college by the side of his best friends Thomas Bible, Neil was covertly enrolled in the NSA, where he performed immoral mental experiments on prisoners before going rogue to utilize that knowledge on civilians. Neil demonstrates a sick obsession for Thomas and conducts a horrific mind game with him at the center to realign his thinking back to the Argument. Along the way, Neil uses his power over people's brains to have a porn star cut herself to death with broken glass after rewiring her brain to masochistic tendencies; has a business magnate cannibalize a young girl and forces him to enjoy the experience; steals billionaire Theodoros Gyges's ability to recognize faces and drives him insane, resulting in Gyges becoming a Serial Killer; and torments a televangelist with alternating sensations of divine relief and hellish damnation. This culminates in Neil murdering Thomas's—and possibly his own—four-year-old son Frankie and subjecting both Thomas and his ex-wife Nora to horrific mental and emotional torture that ultimately leaves Thomas broken as a person, all to demonstrate his twisted obsession with both Thomas and his long-abandoned philosophies. Suave, cool-headed, and utterly remorseless, Neil Cassidy took Mind Rape to an art form and left a trail of destroyed lives in his wake.
• Neverwhere:
  • Messires Croup and Vandemar, the Old Firm, are the resident monsters for hire of the story and easily two of the most twisted and dreaded creatures of the fantastical London Below. Croup is an erudite sadist who waxes on the incomparable beauty of a piece of fine China before gleefully destroying it, while Vandemar is a grim, savage, man-eating beast; but both are equally sadistic and cruel. Croup cheerfully admits he and his partner have no redeeming qualities and no moral standards whatsoever, which they prove time and time again by slaughtering entire monasteries; savagely murdering their own minions; torturing the Marquis de Carabas to death; and taking the lives of Door's entire family.
  • Islington, Croup and Vandermar's mysterious employer, is an angel drunk on its own glory and vanity. A vain and unbelievably narcissistic entity beneath its serene façade who has "traveled so far beyond right and wrong [that it] couldn't see them with a telescope on a nice clear night", Islington was tasked with watching over Atlantis. Islington instead destroyed the entire civilization as a testament to its unbelievable ego, shrieking that they got what they deserved when it's exposed. Pretending to be the heroes' enlightened ally in the present day, Islington is the one who commissioned Croup and Vandemar to murder Door's family and manipulated Door to him so she could open the gates of Heaven, allowing Islington to conquer its kin and exact revenge out of nothing more than spite for its exile.
• Newsflesh: In this series set after the Kellis-Amberlee zombie virus devastates the world, these individuals show that it is not just the zombies you need to fear:
  • Feed: Governor David Tate is a slimy, hyper-religious politician who helps fund the corrupt CDC in their endeavors to rule the world, and kill people who develop natural immunities to Kellis-Amberlee in order to do this. Releasing weaponized Kellis-Amberlee in order to kill off or zombify any opponents to secure his nomination as Republican presidential candidate, Tate callously kills dozens and endangers hundreds of people. After the kindly Ryman wins the nomination and Tate becomes his running mate as vice president, Tate callously tries to murder Ryman's young children to shore up support for the campaign, intending to eventually off Ryman himself in an "accident" and become president. Later murdering some of his men after they go against him, Tate assassinates heroine Georgia Mason when she comes close to the truth. Tate, upon being discovered, unleashes live Kellis-Amberlee in his party camp, killing dozens of innocents and unleashing a wave of zombies that put hundreds in danger, even taking Ryman's wife hostage as a way out.
  • Deadline: Dr. Joseph Wynne is one of the head scientists of the CDC and helps them kill those who have developed reservoir immunities to Kellis-Amberlee, as well as helping them develop more deadly strains of the zombie virus in order to keep the world under their grip. Wynne kills off any scientists who discover the existence of these more dangerous strains and set them up as "accidents" or "suicides" to cover up the truth. When Shaun Mason and rest of his investigative team close onto the truth, Wynne unleashes an outbreak of Kellis-Amberlee in their home building which allows him to firebomb their building and the entire of downtown Oakland, California which kills thousands of innocents. Wynne's final act before being mortally wounded is to inject a vial of the live zombie virus which kills one of the heroes, gloating beforehand about all the money and power that he will receive due to his misdeeds.
• The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead: Superintendent Spencer is the most heinous perpetrator of Nickel's racist, violent system of child abuse. Running the Nickel reform school for boys with an iron fist, Spencer subjects dozens of boys in his charge over the years to harsh beatings for the most minor of infractions, and allows his staff to run rampant with further sexual abuse of the children. Not limited to merely beating the boys, Spencer regularly takes particular boys "out back" and whips them to death if they personally fail him, dumping their bodies in a secret grave and silencing any witnesses to his atrocities. When young Elwood Curtis tries to expose his evil, Spencer viciously beats Elwood to within an inch of his life and throws him in solitary for weeks, later having Elwood shot dead when the boy tries to escape.
• Nickolai of the North: Magda, formerly an elf banished for practicing dark magic, is a monstrous witch who craves power and eternal youth. To multiply her magic abilities, Magda absorbs the Light Fairies into her heart, thereby gleefully turning the Elf Kingdom's population to lifeless stone. Magda builds a beautiful golden city that lures people from all over the world, and she makes herself young and lovely over and over again by brainwashing the newcomers' children into dull robotic-minded beings, blindly loyal to her. After completing her quest for ultimate power, Magda intends to install her totalitarian regime everywhere and ensnare all the children of the planet.
• The Night Angel Trilogy:
  • Hu Gibbet is widely considered the second best assassin in the land, but informing him he's second best will result in your own drawn out execution. Unlike the cold, business-like Durzo Bint, Gibbet is a sadistic monster who derives pleasure from his work, and while the former makes every effort to avoid collateral damage, Gibbet goes out of his way to butcher everyone in the vicinity on his jobs. He slaughters Logan's entire family and household and gruesomely strings up the corpses for everyone's viewing pleasure. His apprentice, Vi, fairs no better under him and has been the subject of verbal, physical and sexual abuse for her entire tenure as his student
  • Roth, once known as Rat, is another. The son and Bastard Understudy of God King Garoth Ursuul, Rat was a sexual sadist who had raped children of both genders since he was young. In the present, Roth betrays his home kingdom to his father's soldiers, leading to many deaths, and is fond of killing peasants so he can eat them.
  • God King Garoth Ursuul presides over a legacy of rape, torture, murder and slavery. Garoth attempts to rape or force the submission of any woman he comes across and makes those hes tired of into furniture. Under his reign, widespread war crimes are common, and people are killed or raped at the drop of a hat, all of this For the Evulz.
• Night Chill, by Jeff Gunhus: Nate Huckley is a gleefully homicidal lunatic who schemes along with Dr. Mansfield to harness immortality from the Source. To this end, Huckley began leading his group to kidnap, torture, and brutally murder teenage and younger girls, then feed them to the Source to gain its potent serum that grants temporary regenerative abilities. Spending the past 200 years commiting these murders, Huckley amasses a body count measuring in the hundreds, and is happily continuing his spree in the present while using his powerful psychic abilities to feed off of his victims' terror. After failing to kidnap 6 year old Sarah Tremont, Huckley is plunged into a coma from which he reaches out with his psychic powers, using them to torment then murder various patients throughout the hospital he is residing in, before awakening from his sleep and kidnapping Sarah and her mother, Lauren. Ordering Lauren to be raped by his subordinate, Huckley tries to butcher Sarah, then uses his last minute alive to gun her down when she seems to be assisting the Source in resisting Huckley's orders. A sadist who sought immortality solely to allow himself to keep killing and become a god, Nate Huckley stands out as a wicked beast who makes the other members of his group, even Dr. Mansfield, seem tame in comparison.
• The Night Gardener: Mister Stubbs and Mister Fig are two of the cruelest loan sharks in England. The pair take great enjoyment in psychologically tormenting their debtors, such as the one wealthy but now poor Windsor family, by threatening their loved ones, raising their interest rates to levels that they know cannot be realistically paid back, and demanding their payment at times when their victims aren't expecting or prepared for them. They are fully prepared to follow through with their murderous threats as well, as seen at the climax when they attempt to slaughter the entire Windsor family—including the children, and would have succeeded had a desperate ploy by the heroine Molly not tricked them into arousing the wrath of the titular vengeful ghost.
• The Night in Question: Ashley Henderson, a sociopathic teenage girl and classmate of the protagonists obsessed with becoming a famous actress, discovers that she is the great-granddaughter of Hollywood starlet Mona Moody. After learning this, Ashley ruthlessly attacks those she perceives as standing in the way of the glamorous life she believes she deserves due to her lineage. Ashley seduces a party caterer to help beat her classmate Rebecca into a coma for owning a necklace that once belonged to Mona that Ashley now covets; and frames another girl, being gleeful over sending the latter to prison. Posing as Rebecca, Ashley cruelly exploits her victim's relative, Mona's old doctor, suffering from dementia, pressing him for information, leading to his fatal overdose on medication. Ashley attempts to silence Rebecca by posing as a nurse and inducing life-threatening heart attacks in elderly hospital patients simply as a distraction before nearly smothering her classmate with a pillow, showing no remorse when caught in the act. Driven by pure arrogance and entitlement, Ashley shows no regard for human life and is willing to do anything to satisfy her deluded dreams of stardom.
• A Night in the Lonesome October: Vicar Roberts is seemingly a well-meaning churchman but is in truth the leader of the Openers seeking the end of the world. The murderer of the Monk Rastov of the Closers, the Vicar is a practitioner of Human Sacrifice as well. Imprisoning his own stepdaughter Lynette for a Virgin Sacrifice, Roberts plots to open the gates to the Great Old Ones and condemn all humanity to suffering, death and destruction.
• Night Life: Victor Barna is the owner of a real estate agency in Los Angeles that he uses to cover his dark second life as a vampire and a sex trafficker. Forcing a porn director into selling his assets by feeding on his girlfriend in front of him, he used these assets to provide cover for himself and his fellow vampires, permitting them to rape, feed, and murder for blood as they please. He owns a hotel, where many of his captives are held prisoner to be starved and tortured, with some forced to star in underground porn films. When he catches wind of the heroes' investigation, he orders Casey Owen, Karen Moffett, and Burgess' wife, Denise, abducted and forced to star in his films to erode their willpower before allowing Casey to be killed and Denise released to her husband, utterly traumatized.
• The Nightmare Girl by Jonathan Janz: Patrick Grayman is a cult leader terrorizing the town of Shadeland in search of immortality. Claiming to have lived for centuries, Grayman has used his cult to murder entire families to serve as "heathen" sacrifices before using indoctrinated members to burn themselves alive to complete life-prolonging rituals. Now targeting Joe Crawford, Grayman has the ashes of the man's dead son thrown in his face, stalks his family, and viciously kills those around him. Endorsing his members to torture and cannibalize their victims as well as abuse their children, Grayman tries to burn Joe and the infant Stevie alive, promising to follow it up by killing Joe's wife and daughter.
• Night of the Prowler, by Jon Athan: Eugene "The Prowler" Hodges is a murderous man addicted to killing and sadism. After killing his wife and children one day, the Prowler spent the next few weeks committing various gruesome murders across California. Several years after he's apprehended, the Prowler escapes from custody and goes back to targeting various civilians, torturing and killing over half a dozen people during his rampage. Setting his sights on Zoe Doyle, the Prowler repeatedly harasses Zoe over the phone before assaulting her while she's at work and kidnapping her. While Zoe is held captive, the Prowler tortures Zoe by stabbing and slashing her several times, hoping to see if she'll be able to withstand getting injured over 63 times before dying.
• Night of the Werewolf, by Guy N. Smith: Angus Broon is a savage werewolf who relishes his power over his village. Slaughtering livestock and people alike, Angus kidnaps a woman named Ingrid to become his werewolf bride, though he later uses her as a Human Shield when things are tough. Angus happily murders all in his path when he finds out werewolf hunters are coming for him. The beastly Angus goes on a killing spree in the village to satiate his village and kill his pursuers.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy: Quinn Dexter is a Satanic cult leader who considers himself something of a God and likes nothing more than to inflict as much pain and spread as much suffering as possible. Through his sect he regularly performs human sacrifices to feed off the psychic energies derived from the victims' agonies of being tortured, raped and murdered. After he is possessed by an escaped soul from the Beyond, his will proves so strong that he regains control of his body and sets out to turn as many planets as possible into unlivable Hellworlds. He drops a meteorite on the Nyvan colony to wipe out all life on it, makes it it his mission to destroy every shred of human decency, and will devour the souls of all those he considers too weak to share the new Hell with him.
• No Country for Old Men: Anton Chigurh is a hired assassin defined by his fatalistic personal code. Compared to the Bubonic Plague by his former associate Carson Wells, Chigurh is an emotionless killer with no regard for human life, occasionally deciding his victims' fates with a coin toss. Introduced by strangling a police officer to death with handcuffs, Chigurh proceeds to murder an innocent man to steal his car, repeating this crime later in the film. Employed to recover $2 million lost in a drug deal gone bad, Chigurh murders two of his employer's men and relentlessly hunts for Llewelyn Moss to retrieve the money. Along the way, Chigurh murders several Mexican criminals who are also pursuing Moss, shooting one of them as he surrenders, and later kills a hotel clerk and a random motorist who get caught in a gunfight between Chigurh and Moss. Chigurh later kills Wells and the man who hired them both, intending to keep the money for himself, and promises to kill Moss's wife Carla Jean unless Moss surrenders the money, making it clear that he intends to kill Moss regardless; Wells had previously commented that even if Moss gave up the money, Chigurh would kill him anyway for "inconveniencing him". After Moss is killed, Chigurh murders Carla Jean, attempting to justify this senselessly cruel act by claiming to be keeping his promise. A chilling psychopath devoid of humanity, Chigurh is presented as an unstoppable force of evil, a monster without empathy or remorse.
• No One Gets Out Alive, by Adam Nevill: Fergal is the cousin of Knacker McGuire, landlord of the Edgehill property. Having taken the house from the murderous Bennet, Fergal pressed Knacker into the worship of the house's "God", Black Maggie. Fergal lures in women who are down on their luck, pressing them into prostitution and then feeding them to Black Maggie, though he is not above killing them personally should he be frustrated. After being thwarted by heroine Stephanie, Fergal attempts to gain revenge by having her slaughtered by Black Maggie even as the latter consumes him.
• October Daye:
  • An Artificial Night: Blind Michael, the leader of The Wild Hunt, has his followers kidnap children and painfully transform them into his thralls. Reducing fae children to riders and humans into steeds for his army, Blind Michael's abuse of said children is so severe that many break under the pressure and die as a result, with him than using the magic from their bones to fortify the powers within his land. Blind Michael kidnaps the nieces and nephews of October "Toby" Daye to force them to participate in his latest Hunt, trapping the consciousness of one niece and intending to make Toby his bride. When his plan is foiled, Blind Michael goes into a rage and takes it out on his current wife, Acacia, who he also regularly abuses, scarring her with his knife and stating his intent to keep his current thralls under his draconian enslavement for eternity.
  • Late Eclipses: The assassin Oleander de Merelands is wanted for countless deaths over multiple kingdoms, including the murder of former good-hearted king Gilead. Seeking revenge on Amandine for a previous slight, Oleander nearly kills her infant daughter. Years later she conspires with her pawn, Rayeslene, to have Toby take the fall for her misdeeds, gleeful that she would be executed for it. Oleander has a friend of Toby killed to frame her for it and later poisons the entire court of cats, killing many, including infants, while hoping Toby would take the fall for her crimes. Boasting her killings will make her famous even after her death, Oleander makes one final attempt on Toby's life before being stopped.
• Ogre's Lament: The Story of Don Luis, by Stuart G. Yates: Manfred Kepel is a former soldier driven by his greed. After helping fellow soldiers massacre monks in a monastery, Manfred and the others looted the monastery of its riches. Not content with his share, Manfred went looking for the rest of the riches, and eventually discovered the location in Riodelgado. Posing as baker Señor Garcia, Manfred blackmailed the village's mayor into helping him find the treasure or else he'd murder all the children in the village. In order to satisfy his bloodlust and to prevent others from finding the treasure, Manfred occasionally kidnapped and murdered villagers, including children, and had the mayor lay all of the blame on a monster that doesn't exist. He later killed Luis Sanchez's father to steal his treasure, along with other individuals who nearly exposed Manfred's secret to Luis. After most of the soldiers who knew about the treasure are killed, Manfred threatens to kidnap Luis's mother and sister and recover the information from them, before attempting to kill Luis and the mayor when Luis discovers his true identity.
• Ōkami-san: Shiro Hisujikai is a respected student whose handsome looks conceal a depraved heart. Shiro attempted to rape his girlfriend, Ryoko, in the past and blamed her for leading him on when she told people, manipulating them into ostracizing her and leaving her with mental scars and trust issues. In the present, Shiro returns and tries to entrap Ryoko to force her to be his woman again. Part of his plan involves threatening the lives of seven children, fully intending to harm or kill them. Shiro returns throughout the light novels, eventually aimed at destroying Ryoko and her Love Interest mentally, as well as everything connected to them.
• On Devil's Wings, by M.J. Meade: Lamashtu was once a deity who forced women to miscarry for fun and had children sacrificed in her name until she was bound by fellow goddess Nyx. Awakening as Elizabeth Báthory centuries later, Lamashtu fell in love with murder once again and after her killing spree, took to London as Jack the Ripper to enjoy one anew, targeting prostitutes to avoid attention. Making a pact with another evil goddess against Nyx, Lamashtu makes every effort to torment and kills those around the reborn Nyx, her long life leading her to a body count in the thousands.
• On Stranger Tides: In this classic pirate novel, Leo Friend stands out as the most depraved pirate around, surpassing even the Big Bad, Blackbeard, in brutality and evil. As a child, Friend poisoned a magic user to learn his secrets before killing him—despite promising to provide the antidote—then used his new powers to torture animals and poison candy that he left near school grounds. In the culmination of heinous childhood acts, Friend tried to rape his own mother in a sick attempt to show his gratitude for her recognizing his greatness, ending with said mother's death. Becoming a pirate later in life, Friend perpetrated numerous atrocities, from luring a crew of innocents into a raid where he personally killed many of their number, to sending one of his own crews to die as a distraction before gunning down a man who tries to save them. Friend later betrays his partners, kidnaps one's daughter, Beth, then tries to rape her while casting an illusion to make her resemble his mother, and he fully plans on tormenting Beth into becoming his broken slave. Having garnered immense power by his final duel, Friend raises a crew of undead pirates to assist him in his planned conquest of all he sees after massacring an entire ship of pirates. Showing his truly despicable colors more and more as the story went on, what Friend lacked in manners, charm, and sympathy, he replaced with a sickening god complex with which he proclaimed all of his crimes to be simply his divine right to commit.
• Once: Nell Quick is a twisted witch who holds Sir Russell Bleeth in a state between life and death. Thom Kindred, Sir Bleeth's son, stands in the way of Nell inheriting the Bleeth Estate through her lover Hugo. A sexual sadist, Nell attempts to have Thom raped to steal his seed, and takes Thom's physical therapist Katy, drugging her to enjoy sex with Nell before outright raping her. Attempting to murder the others in her way, Nell is willing to throw the balance between worlds out of balance with her only care being what she can gain from abusing and violating others.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Ratched, the "Big Nurse", is the cruel head of the state hospital the story takes place in, using her connections to her superiors to allow herself free rein over the hospital. Ratched subjects her dozens of patients to horrific conditions and abuse, employing brutal lackeys and methods to keep patients in line and under her thumb, uncaring of the countless patients who commit suicide or self-mutilation due to her rule. Believing that her patients have to be perfectly-functioning before allowing them to leave, Ratched often resorts to electroshock treatments and even lobotomies to destroy her patients' minds. When her rule is challenged over and over again by Randle McMurphy, Ratched increases her abuse of the patients to the point that one of McMurphy's friends kills himself. Though Ratched's control over the patients is broken, she spitefully has McMurphy lobotomized in a last-ditch effort to terrorize the patients into falling back in line.
• The One Who Eats Monsters: Mr. Saxby is the worst of the nightmarish Asuras, with his evil exceeding even his cabal leader, Ghorm. A seemingly mild-mannered, average little man in his human guise, Saxby assists in sowing chaos and evil, having people killed and arranging other atrocities and even terrorist activities. A particular fan of experimenting on human beings, Saxby takes others and subjects them to ghastly procedures to slake his curiosity, even stitching numerous human beings together into a horrific, agonized creature to go after the heroine Ryn with only vague promises he may spare it of its suffering. Having homeless people and drifters abducted to kill or to serve as food for dogs, Saxby later tries to target Ryn's lover Naomi before trying to kill Ryn herself.
• Only Kids are Afraid of the Dark, by George R. R. Martin: Prince/Lord Saagael, the Soul-Destroyer, was once a demonic being who ruled over the mortal realm with an iron fist, starting pointless wars and forcing men to give their daughters to be sacrificed in his name. Breaking free from his containment, Saagael's first action upon returning is to turn a man into a still-living but mindless and soulless Empty Shell. Choosing to spare Dr. Weird solely so he could watch the devastation of the mortal realm, Saagael gives him visions of his many atrocities before preparing to consume the soul of a young girl.
• On Stolen Land, by Stephanie Rabig: John Milton Chivington, disgraced colonel in the US Army, murdered numerous settlers to frame the Cheyenne and other Natives. Leading his men to Sand Creek, Chivington butchered hundreds of innocents, mostly women and children, with many of them tortured and savaged, trophies cut from the corpses. So horrific were Chivington's crimes that the land itself rebels against them.
• Orcs: Queen Jennesta, the main villain of the series, is a half-human, half-Nyadd sorceress who rules the religion of the Manifold Path with an iron fist in her drive to recover the ancient artifacts her father Sephraim had created. Under Jennesta's reign, war crimes including mass slaughter are common, and Jennesta herself, a Serial Rapist of men and women alike, has a fondness for using unicorn horns to violate women. She also eats the hearts to replenish her magic power. Jennesta executes subordinates for increasingly petty reasons and murders her own sister Adpar, ruler of the Nyadds, which throws the Nyadds into civil war. When she encounters her parents and surviving sibling, she simply looks forward to murdering them as well, and even "rewards" one of her own spies who had wished his youth restored to him by forcibly aging him into a skeleton. While professing devotion to the polytheistic Manifold Path, Jennesta's only real loyalty was to her own power, cruelty and lust.
• Otherland series: Johnny Wulgaru is a Psycho for Hire whose fierce intelligence allows him to commit depraved atrocities such as torture, murder and rape. Used as Felix Jongleur's attack dog, Johnny decides to eclipse his boss's ambitions and use his Psychic Powers to seize control of the Otherland operating system from Felix. To indulge in his sadistic pleasures, Johnny uses his newfound godlike power to rape, torture and massacre the people of Dodge City. Wanting to branch out his carnal sadism further, Johnny then plans to use the resources of Felix's empire to break into the real world and continue his cycle of torture there. Described by a psychologist as "one of the purest examples of a sociopathic personality that he'd ever seen", Johnny Wulgaru would treat innocent lives as mere hedonistic whims.
• Out are the Lights, by Richard Laymon: Otto Schreck, a sadistic film "star", participates in a conspiracy to create a group of real snuff films. In various roles, Schreck hunts down his terrified "co-stars" and dispatches them in a variety of ways: biting into one woman's neck as a vampire, utilizing an axe as an axe murderer, amputating limbs as a Mad Scientist and torturing them as an Inquisitor. Unlike the others, Schreck is in it entirely for the carnage and when one of the others asks to watch him at work and is sickened by it, Schreck forces her to watch him torture and kill a helpless victim under threat of death. When heroine Connie is captured at the end, Schreck's ideas for the film involve skinning her alive, barely able to contain himself at the thought of further bloodshed.
• The Outcast Chronicles, by Rowena Corey Danielss: Baron Eskarnor is a greedy, warmongering man who seeks to usurp the throne of the brutal King Charald. Cornering Queen Jaraile, Eskarnor rapes her, mocking her after the fact, and later abducts her after murdering multiple people about her. Seeking to murder the king and Jaraile's young son, Eskarnor slits a 4-year-old's throat when his attempt to blackmail the prince's protectors fails. Willing to start a civil war, Eskarnor kills those who cross his path and regularly rapes Jaraile, even using his final moments to taunt her when she is at last able to pronounce judgement upon him.
• Outer Banks Tales to Remember by Charles Harry Whedbee:
  • "The Sea Hag": The titular Sea Hag is a malevolent witch who uses her powers to lure countless sailors into drowning themselves, and enjoys gorging herself on the meat of children. Her home is decorated with the bones of her many victims, while some of her victims' spirits are still conscious inside their decaying bones. When young Veronica shows up at her door seeking light for her dark home, the Hag terrorizes and enslaves the girl, forcing her to perform impossible chores as a game until the Hag eats her. After Veronica completes all the chores, the Hag—terrified of the girl's power—grants her request for light with a dark twist by burning her evil stepfamily alive.
  • "The Tale of the Sea Horse": The Kelpie is an evil ocean spirit who wanders the shores of islands to lure children to it. Once the children are near, the Kelpie seizes them and drags them into the ocean, where it transforms them into animal hybrids who will suffer for all eternity with an insatiable desire to live as human and animal at the same time. When Poseidon tries to find the Kelpie to punish it for its crimes, the Kelpie manipulates the race of Sea Horses to fight Poseidon in its name by tricking them into thinking it is innocent, which leads to the Sea Horses being cursed for allying with the Kelpie.
• Outer Dark: The mysterious trio of terrifying and elusive strangers scourge the Appalachian countryside, killing people at will. Slaughtering their way from one end of the community to the next, the three fixate on Culla, framing him for murder and killing those who come into contact with him, even tricking Culla into partaking in cannibalism. After killing many people, the trio torture and murder a tinker who rescued the baby of Culla and his sister Rinthy before torturing the baby, murdering and possibly cannibalizing it as well.
• The Outlaw Varjak Paw: Sally Bones is a violent gang leader in the city. Not content with ruling only a portion of the city, Bones and her cats start taking over other districts, including neutral grounds. She also unfairly enforces laws that restrict the other cats' hunting capabilities; those who disobey her laws are taken prisoner, or have their tail and ears cut off. After Varjak and his friends cause trouble for Bones's gang, she sends her cats to come looking for him, and they end up taking Jess hostage when no one gives up Varjak. When Varjak and his gang, later known as the Free Cats, rescue Jess and incapacitate more of Bones' gang, she ambushes the Free Cats, kicks Razor out of her gang for failing her too many times, and orders her cats to cut off all of the Free Cats' ears and tails, which sparks a huge fight. Some of the Free Cats are killed during the skirmish, and Bones's gang kidnaps Holly and holds her hostage. Once Varjak and the Free Cats finally confront Bones, she offers Varjak the opportunity to join her gang in exchange for Holly's life, or else all of his friends will die. Sally Bones is such a loathsome cat in the city that many of her own, frequently abused minions fear her, and some cats outright turn against her.
• Överenskommelser: Carl-Jan Rosenschiöld is a sadist who derives pleasure from harming women. Having already gone through two wives, the first of which he murdered and the second he drove to suicide, Rosenschiöld sets his sights on marrying Beatrice, a girl who is over forty years younger than him, solely because he wants a virgin to be his wife. On their wedding night, he rapes and nearly kills Beatrice after he discovers that she lost her virginity prior to their marriage, even though Beatrice had never made a promise to stay a virgin until they got married. He expresses no remorse for his crimes whatsoever, as he spends his remaining days in a brothel, overindulging in aphrodisiac drugs and sexually abusing their women.
• "The Overseer's Soles", from The Malachite Casket collection, by Pavel Bazhov: Severyan Kondratyich, "The Killer", is a merciless, sadistic overseer. Formerly a landlord, Severyan gets stripped of the title and exiled to Siberia for beating a number of peasants to death. In the Ural Mountains, Severyan is quickly appointed as overseer of the mines and factories, and brutally terrorizes the workers, assigning and personally delivering cruel punishments, often for little reason or no reason at all. Severyan starts visiting the mines themselves and gets even more unhinged, eventually beating up everyone in his way. When the Mistress of the Copper Mountain gets angry at this, Severyan tries to kill her and never shows any remorse for his actions, and when he sees she starts turning him to stone, he pathetically pleads for his life. Never caring for the mines' production and only interested in torturing others, Severyan is the most terrible and hated overseer in the mines' history.
• Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun, by Guillermo del Toro & Cornelia Funke:
  • Captain Vidal first shows his nastiness when two poachers, a father and son, are brought to him in the dead of night, his men suspecting them of being rebels against the regime. He beats the younger man's face in with a bottle simply for defending his father against Vidal's accusations before shooting them both with a vague air of boredom and pleasure. When the men are proven not to be rebels, Vidal shows no remorse, only belittling his men to be more careful next time. At one point, Vidal captures a rebel with a horrible stutter and cheerfully shows the man his torture instruments before offering to let him go if he can clearly count to three. He fails. Vidal is married to the young heroine's mother solely so she'll bear him an heir, and shows no concern over the possible death of his wife in childbirth. When the doctor attending her gives the stuttering torture victim a Mercy Kill, Vidal coldly guns him down. At the film's end, Vidal's stepdaughter Ofelia tries to rescue her baby brother, but Vidal catches her and promptly shoots her fatally.
  • The Pale Man is a monstrous Child Eater that has haunted the lands for centuries. Born a seemingly normal child who everyone recognized the inherent cruelty of, he murdered his own brother out of petty jealousy and became a torture practitioner under a Spanish Inquisitor, honing his abilities until he betrayed his master and ate his heart. Becoming a murderer and cannibal of children, he developed into the monstrous "Pale Man", his outside appearance as heinous as his personality. The Pale Man spent hundreds of years luring children to him to feast upon them, loving the sound of their screams and fashioning their remains into furniture, while he kept each and every one of their names written on his walls as trophies of his countless kills.
• Paper Valentine, by Brenna Yovanoff: The Valentine Killer, real name Connor Price is a glory-seeking murderer who bullies his classmate Nick Andelmam into becoming a killer. In the quest to discover what it's like to kill and gain attention from it, the killer and his classmate lure in 13-year-old girls before tying them up and beating them to death. The killer then leaves a Calling Card in a paper valentine on their bodies in order to show the world he did it. When his classmate is arrested and his own downfall nears, the Valentine Killer kidnaps heroine Hannah Wagnor by threatening her sister's life, intending to at least kill her before he goes down for good.
• Paradise Club, by Tim Meyer:
  • Marco Pressley is a wealthy man in charge of a deadly cult that seeks to summon the mysterious, eldritch beings from another dimension. Seeking to utilize a nightmarish and bloody ritual, Marco sends in serial killers to massacre everyone in the area with one previous outing having killed a hundred campers. Having many more butchered at a tropical resort under an ostensible "game", Marco attempts to bond captives as hosts for monsters, using their families as leverage against them, and when his plans fall apart, attempts to kill a young boy for sheer spite so he might be the one winner.
  • Tim Feely is the brutal head of security for the Paradise Club, overseeing the bloodbath known as "the Skirmish" with sadistic relish. Introduced by viciously stabbing a prisoner to death, Feely continues his usual routine of orchestrating the Skirmish and getting dozens of innocents slaughtered while he threatens and abuses his own staff. When his many failures catch up on him and he is betrayed by his employers, Feely attempts to kill his boss and leave everyone else to die, outright swearing off any potential remorse he may have for his many victims.
• Paradise Sky, by Joe R. Lansdale: Samuel Ruggert is a racist psychopath who leads the slaughter of hero Nat Love's family simply because Nat might have looked at his wife's rear. Becoming a violent bandit in the post-Civil War West, Ruggert terrorizes the black, Native and Mexican populations with rape, murder and torment in his quest to hunt down Nat to "avenge" the slight against a wife he didn't even care about to begin with. When he finds Nat, Ruggert has two of his female companions gang-raped with one murdered before he has Nat tortured, escaping to become a murderous bandit before Nat finally tracks him down.
• The Pearl Saga, by Eric Van Lustbader: Shima Neddhu from "The Ring Of Five Dragons" is a truly cruel and hateful bastard. Taken in as an acolyte of Mother, he turns the seven other male acolytes and his lover against her to steal the Pearl, convincing the others that Mother is using their faith to rule over them all. He has the poor woman bound and gagged and leads his cohorts down into a hiding place that holds the Pearl, despite Mother warning them that they will die if they do so. When a monster promptly kills two of the cohorts, Neddhu then orders the others to keep moving, and when they refuse he decides to send his mentally and physically handicapped, very young daughter into the cavern holding the Pearl. When she comes back with the Pearl and tells him he is not worthy, he kills the girl, kills his lover for trying to protect the girl, and throws Mother at the monster currently chasing him. Using the Pearl, he learns that a powerful alien race, The V'ornn, is coming to Kundala, and so plans with his surviving conspirators to trick the V'ornn and use them for their own purposes. The V'ornn end up enslaving the planet and all but destroying the Kundalan culture. He pins the blame for his murders on the Rappa, a more animal-like race, simply because he looks down on them as beasts, leading to centuries of persecution and demonization by the Kundalans onto the poor creatures. Unlike a large portion of the villains, Neddhu's a human being motivated less by racism and more by attaining personal power, despite claiming otherwise. His actions were so terrible that male Kundalans can no longer have a high level of power in most Kundalan societies.
• The Pendragon Adventure: The shapeshifter, Saint Dane, manipulates catastrophes across parallel universes, called "territories", ensuring they result in the worst possible outcome. Manipulating the oppressed people of a territory, Saint Dane causes a catastrophic war to destroy their planet; on another planet, creates a poison to kill the plants in the hopes of creating mass famine; on Earth, gives nukes to the Nazis to help them win World War II; on a jungle planet, tries to use his poison again in the hopes the natives will hunt each other to extinction; on a desert planet, inflames tensions, trying to lead to one tribe being wiped out; and on yet another planet, crushes a rebellion against tyranny, ensuring the people would continue to suffer in the dystopia. Using the Cult of Ravinia to conquer various worlds, Saint Dane has those he deems too weak killed or banished, while trying to become a God.
• Perdido Street Station: Even in the hellish setting of New Crobuzon, this duo manages to stand out:
  • Mr. Motley is a powerful crime lord in New Crobuzon whose name befits his grotesque, multi-faced appearance. Mr. Motley regularly presides over assassinations, murders, and torture, with a knack for awful retribution to those who slight him-—noted to send letters to those whose loved ones he holds ransom, having almost always killed them before he can be paid back. Obsessed with his own image, Motley commissions the Khepri artist Lin to create a statue in his exact likeness, and when he finds out Lin's lover Isaac is responsible for the escape of Motley's slake-moths, Motley kidnaps Lin and tortures her for weeks, possibly even raping her, and sending Lin's severed head-legs in an enclosed envelope to Isaac. Not even Motley's cheerful farce masks the fact Motley is one of the most vicious characters even in New Crobuzon.
  • Mayor Bentham Rudgutter is the corrupt head of New Crobuzon, who inflicts horrific punishments on those he deems criminals, having them "Remade" into twisted forms, while also having them tortured or murdered in huge numbers. Secretly the Eyespy Killer, Rudgutter murders people for their eyes to replace his own pair, and during the Slake Moth outbreak, shows no compunction in having many people rounded up and killed, continuing these activities well after, even for rebel leader Jack Half-A-Prayer, with no amount of bloodshed too high to keep his hold on power.
• Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis, by Yoshikazu Takeuchi: The stalker known only as "Darling Rose" fixates on "saving" pop idol Mima Kirigoe from her increasingly adult-oriented career path by skinning her and wearing it as her biggest fan. To practice, he murders a little girl, skinning her leg to graft onto himself. Finding the flesh of the dead useless, Darling Rose captures, rapes, and flays another idol alive before kidnapping Mima's assistant to lure in Mima and trying to kill them both.
• The Perfect Place to Die, by Bryce Moore: H.H. Holmes himself is the proprietor of the Castle Hotel, which he has turned into a brutal Death Trap. Luring in innocents, mostly women, Holmes murders and tortures them in his walls, selling their valuables and even their corpses for profit. Having murdered the heroine Zuretta's sister Ruby, Holmes also tries to frame his business partner and murders the man himself, before opting to torture Zuretta to death.
• Period 8, by Chris Crutcher: Arney Stack is a charismatic teen psychopath eager to begin his journey into organized crime. Approaching a local pimping ring with a large investment, Arney becomes the ring's recruiter, specializing is getting underage girls from his high school addicted to drugs and then selling them to the pimps. A dangerous chameleon who can go from giving pep talks to his classmates one minute to running over animals crossing the road the next, Arney ultimately has a murderous breakdown when one of his victims threatens to blow the whistle, embarking on a rampage to eliminate any and all witnesses to his crimes in the novel's climax.
• Peter Benchley's Creature: Dr. Ernst Kruger was a rival of Dr. Josef Mengele who sought to create a race of human-shark hybrids for the Nazis. Experimenting on concentration camp victims with ghastly surgery, psychological torture, and further methods, Kruger killed countless innocents in pursuit of his obsession. Taking a doctor from the camps, Jacob Franks, Kruger forced him to participate after painfully mutilating and experimenting on him as well before they discovered a suitable SS officer who was turned into a living shark hybrid via unspeakably painful procedures. Kruger intended to unleash a full armada upon the allies that would tear apart anything in their path, viewing his own genius as the future.
• The Phoenix Files: Noah Shackleton is a charismatic Corrupt Corporate Executive who created the town of Phoenix so he could wipe out the rest of the world with the Synthetic Plague "Tabitha", which boils the skin clean off of its victims. In his first appearance, he uses it to kill Reeve and threatens to paralyze Luke, Jordan and Peter from the waist down if they interfere with him again, while also attaching cameras to them so he can track them 24/7. Shackleton had no reason for doing any of this; it was purely For the Evulz, and for that flimsy reason he would attempt to kill millions if not billions of innocents.
• Die Pilgerin: Otfried Willinger is Tilla's cruel, greedy brother. He kills his own father to inherit his money, and then marries Tilla off to an abusive husband to cement his political alliance with the latter. Otfried eventually succeeds in seizing the power in the town and sells its trading rights to the Duke of Bavaria in exchange for privileges for himself. The thugs that support Otfried and the Bavarian mercenaries under his command terrorize the populace, with rapes, robberies, and beatings becoming a common occurrence in the streets. Indifferent even to the suffering of his closest family, let alone the rest of the townsfolk, Otfried only cares about constantly accumulating power and wealth.
• The Pilo Family Circus: The Matter Manipulatoris, a flesh sculpting "artist" that lives in the Circus funhouse, not meant to be a likeable or funny villain. He "disciplines" poor old Winston by merging a hot coal with the flesh of his stomach and is responsible for the creation of the Freaks including the one, who's constantly melting. It's implied that some people ended up even worse off than that - recycled into living wallpaper and organic furniture for his studio.
• Pine Deep Trilogy, by Jonathan Maberry: Ubel Griswold is an ancient werewolf who was killed by a blues player called The Bone Man after being outed as a serial killing, child-eating werewolf in the town of Pine Deep. His soul surviving, trapped in his grave, Griswold manipulates several followers into helping to bring about his return, creating a horde of vampires by slaughtering all in their path and killing many innocents for food and to join the ranks of the undead. Griswold has one of his chief servants detonate bombs in sensitive places in Pine Deep, killing many innocents. When briefly allowed access to a body in the past, Griswold raped a woman to have her give birth to a dhampyr he could later manipulate, trying to have the boy murdered to empower Griswold. Massacring his own vampire followers to use their flesh and blood to gain a new body, Griswold rises again, proclaiming the beginning of the Red Wave, a tide of undead monsters to sweep across the world and begin the subjugation and extermination of all that lives to feed his hunger for power and death.
• "Pipers", by Christopher Golden, from Four Summoner's Tales: Carlos Aguilar is the ruthless head of the Matamoros Cartel who has been selling drugs to children and has anyone who he feels slighted by him killed off. When Texan landowners end up filming his operation, Aguilar retaliates by staging a massacre, killing several of their children. A ruthless sociopath, Aguilar had the innocent daughter of Enoch Shroud tortured, raped, and killed before having her cut to pieces as a way to pay back her boyfriend. Upon finding the protagonists, Aguilar reveals he intends to use their necromancy to build an undead army for himself and plans to rape the teenage daughter of the main hero.
• Playground, by Aron Beauregard: Geraldine Borden is a rich and elderly narcissist, who loves to cause misery just because. Gaining lust towards her own mother and causing her death when trying to have sex with her, Geraldine adopted Rock Stanley, and proceeded to physically and mentally abuse him for decades, branding his chest to mark him as her as she rapes him regularly. Spiteful over not being able to conceive a daughter to project her sexual fantasies onto, Geraldine works with Dr. Fuchs and forces Rock to help as they construct a torture chamber based on a playground, using Rock to lure children in to force them into being brutally killed in these chambers. After Rock manages to lure three families in with promise of money, Geraldine traps the parents as she forces 8 children into the torture den, forcing them through dangerous and deadly playground themed torture devices, while forcing the parents to watch their children die. A sadist who sees the world as beneath her, Geraldine causes the death of six of the children and attempts to murder Rock when he frees the remaining parents and kids, declaring him a failure who belongs to her only.
• The Pluto Pact, by Guy N. Smith: Balzur is an Evil Sorcerer who practices Human Sacrifice, tormenting countless innocents and sacrificing children in horrible pain to the dark god Pluto. Vowing to return, and doing so years later in the guise of a pharmaceutical executive named Dyne, Balzur continues his gruesome activities before attempting to set off a nuclear apocalypse, intent on making all humanity his sacrifice to his master Pluto.
• Poet Anderson...Of Nightmares & ...In Darkness, by Tom DeLong & Suzanne Young: The evil Nightmare Monster REM is a being that feeds on the fear and negativity of people in the waking world to grow ever more powerful. Seeking the soul of a Poet to allow him to cross realities, REM targets Jonas relentlessly, murdering his loved ones and taunting him every step of the way even when offering "alliances" that'd require Jonas to give up his body and free-will to allow his world to become a nightmarescape. The most powerful entity in the dream world, REM and his Night Stalkers slaughter Dream Walkers by the dozens and also wreak havoc in the human world, unstoppable so long as the dream world itself exists and humans have things to fear.
• The Poppy War: Dr. Eymichi Shiro is a doctor working for the Federation of Mugen, and is driven entirely by his lust for scientific advancement. A Mad Scientist who murdered countless Speerlies to understand their power, Shiro also experiments on the Nikara people, carving and vivisecting them apart while they are still alive to understand the root of their shamanistic abilities. For Speerlies, Shiro takes advantage of an opium dependence, torturing them with withdrawal symptoms, to better control them. Shiro has also refined a plague, plotting to deploy it on Nikara populations to end the war quickly.
• Population Zero, by Wrath James White: Todd Hammerstein is a despicable misanthrope who hates each and every human on Earth, and seeks to cull the population by means of sterilization. Blackmailing a variety of women into getting abortions in exchange for their needed welfare, Todd graduates in his evil by performing a forced vasectomy on a man who has fathered a variety of children, then decapitating him. Later vivisecting a woman and ripping her fetus out of her, Todd continues his insane quest by bludgeoning his pregnant ex-girlfriend with a hammer to make her miscarry, and marches into a house for homeless pregnant women, where he proceeds to murder the owner, beat many of the women, and mutilate them all by crudely and sadistically inducing miscarriages. Despite various crises of conscience and even a shred of guilt, Todd shrugs it all off and continues his descent into depravity until his "humanity is destroyed", solidified as he poisons the water supply for millions of women with an experimental chemical that induces miscarriages and sterilizes all those who consume it.
• Portraits of the Dead, by John Nicholl: Mark Goddard, a university professor, is in truth a sadistic Serial Killer and torturer who derives pleasure from the pain and suffering of others. Goddard first developed his fascination with death at age twelve when he came upon a cat caught in a poacher's snare and, taking joy from the animal's suffering, crushed its head with a rock, an act he declared the best moment of his young life. From that day forward, Goddard spent his childhood and adolescence experimenting on animals, devising increasingly brutal methods of torture and execution, before finally committing his first human murder at age 19 when he poisoned his girlfriend to death. Goddard then made a habit of killing once a year on average afterwards, before developing a chamber in his house for which to capture and entrap his victims, so he could extend their suffering as long as he wanted without fear of interference. Abducting his latest victim, his student Emma Jones, Goddard subjects her to physical and psychological torture for weeks on end, seeking to mold her into his "soulmate", or kill her if she fails to meet his standards. When detective Clive Rankin proves a liability, Goddard kills him and attempts to make it look like a suicide. A psychopath who admits to having no empathy for others, Goddard only lives to pleasure himself at the expense of others.
• Powder Mage Universe:
  • Powder Mage Trilogy: Duke Nikslaus is an arrogant Privileged, a mage, who despises Powder Mages and serves the king of Kez. In the past, when the Powder Mage Tamas's wife, also a Powder Mage, was assisting their fellow Powder Mages escape Kez, Nikslaus murdered her and presented her head to Tamas. Insulting Tamas later when he launches his coup against the corrupt nobility, Nikslaus manipulates him into striking out at Nikslaus so Kez can declare war on Tamas's own nation of Adro and brutally annex it. In the second book, Nikslaus proceeds to attack a neutral nation with his men disguised as Adro soldiers to win them to Kez's side. Nikslaus's army occupies a town with men, women and children brutally executed and Nikslaus planning to immolate the entire city while having his army slaughter any survivors. While trying to paint himself as a soldier Just Following Orders, Nikslaus takes perverse delight in his work, viewing it as a fitting way to exercise his own supposed brilliance, even being petty enough to hire a young noble to seduce Tamas's son's fiancee to publicly humiliate the family.
  • Gods of Blood of Powder sequel trilogy's first book Sins of Empire: Fidel Jes, grandmaster of Landfall, makes it a point to kill several men a day before his morning coffee in duels he provokes. Dedicated to stamping out any hint of resistance from the Palo people, Jes regularly conducts torture and executions and has killed so many in his duels that the stones themselves are stained from all the blood Jes has spilled. A war criminal as well, Jes had a war hero named "Mad" Ben Styke imprisoned for refusing Jes's orders to kill a group of children in war. When Styke manages to confront Jes again, Jes defeats him and orders Ben healed just so Jes can enjoy torturing him again and again. When he is ordered to locate an artifact called the Godstone, Jes takes Landfall's army, but lies to them, claiming reinforcements are coming to defend Landfall from an incoming invasion when Jes knows the city will be helpless and brutally sacked.
• The Power of Five:
  • Chaos, the King of the Old Ones, is the one ultimately responsible for everything in the series. Ten thousand years ago, Chaos and the Old Ones emerged and nearly wiped out all of humanity. Sealed away by the Five Gatekeepers, Chaos would re-emerge to bring more death and destruction with the intent of killing all of humanity as slowly and painfully as possible, with attempts such as trying to poison everyone in Hong Kong; causing massive earthquakes and tsunamis; wide-scale famines; and backing brutal dictators. Chaos also has a special hatred of Matthew "Matt" J. Freeman, seeking to brutally torture him for decades, all because Matt wounded him once.
  • Raven's Gate: Sir Michael Marsh is a well-respected nuclear scientist who is secretly the leader of a cult devoted to the Old Ones. Convincing the British government to build an experimental nuclear reactor and then not to tear it down when it closed, Marsh began to slowly rebuild it to use it to free the Old Ones. Marsh then had one of his cultists take Matt in under a foster program, with the intent of sacrificing him in a ritual to free the Old Ones, and engineers the reactor to have the largest possible meltdown it can have to destroy most of England.
  • Nightrise: Susan Mortlake is one of the Chief Executives of Nightrise, and is Colton Banes and Kyle Hovey's direct superior. When they and report back to Susan Mortlake that Jamie escaped them, she concludes that one of them has to die and has Colton strangle Kyle. She then takes Scott Tyler to a Hellhole Prison where she and Colton torture him into helping them assassinate a Senator, analyzing his cries of pain like a symphony. She has him mind control the senator's bodyguard into killing him, so that the death will not be linked back to Nightrise.
  • Oblivion: The new chairman of Nightrise is introduced by holding a press conference with ten thousand members of Nightrise, and says that they will be taken away to have their limbs cut off and replaced with weapons for the battle with the five. When one member refuses, the chairman has him shot dead before sending guards in to beat everyone up and take them away by force. The chairman orders his second-in-command, Jonas Mortlake (Susan’s son), to make Scott do a Face–Heel Turn so that without him, the five will never be united, telling Jonas that if he fails, he will suffer the same fate as the other members of Nightrise. When Matt and Richard are captured, the chairman has Matt crucified and tortured by having his skin flayed and his bones broken. The chairman tries to kill Richard in front of Matt, stating that Matt will be Forced to Watch his best friend die, and will than continue to be tortured forever.
• Powers of Darkness: Dracula, in this Icelandic rewrite, is a Satanist who runs a dark cult and preys on the innocent. Slaughtering many over the course of his unlife, Dracula conducts regular acts of Human Sacrifice where humans are killed so he may then bathe in their blood. Trapping Jonathan Harker in his castle, Dracula intends to feed him to his countess and take over as many of the world's governments as he can to enact his Satanic conspiracy and Take Over the World.
• The Prague Cemetery: "Captain" Simone Simonini is a backstabbing, manipulative, racist mercenary who lives by the motto "I hate therefore I am". Simonini started his career under the apprenticeship of an unscrupulous lawyer and betrayed him as part of a deal with the Piedmont government, selling out dozens of his companions. Planted as The Mole in Garibaldi's Thousand to gather state secrets, Simonini is exiled to Paris after sinking a ship just to destroy some confidential papers. As an agent of the Imperial secret service, Simonini organizes a conspiracy just to uncover it himself in an attempt to impress his superiors, sending his disposable friends to die of malarial fever in the French Guiana. A fervent antisemite who dumps the bodies of his own accomplices in the sewers, Simonini not only strangles a mentally ill woman to death just because he was afraid of having impregnated someone of Jewish descent, but is also revealed to have been the creator of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
• "Prahma The Horned God": The titular Prahma is an eldritch deity from ancient times who runs the Cult of Prahma in the Middle East. Demanding ritual sacrifices on a regular basis, Prahma would have his High Priestess Sharkillah organize mass sacrifices of children through disembowelment and feasting of their flesh. Running his cult for centuries until it was eventually overthrown, Prahma retreats into his bronze idol and has his immortal priestess Sharkillah resurrect him in modern times, by granting his followers Three Wishes in exchange for being restored in the present. After being purchased by the unwitting Professor Rashid and his wife Carmen, Prahma grants the couple's wish for wealth by killing their only son, Adam, in exchange for the insurance and compensation money, and took further advantage of the grieving couple when they wished for Adam's return by possessing Adam's soul to infiltrate the human world.
• The President Is Missing, by Bill Clinton & James Patterson: Suliman Cindoruk, the head of the Sons of Jihad, is in truth in his business more for money than ideology. Suliman assists in terrorist attacks while arranging assassinations to cover his trail. When President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan goes missing, it is revealed Suliman intends to upload a virus to destroy the US's internet and power grid, completely sending the planet to the dark ages and also helping to poison the water supply, with massive amounts of casualties inevitable in the fallout.
• President's Vampire: Zachary Barrows and Nathaniel Cade have faced some nasty villains in their quest to protect the United States with these the worst:
  • Dr. Johann Konrad Dippel is an Evilutionary Biologist and the Arch-Enemy of Nathaniel Cade. With centuries of wicked and painful experimentation on humans, Konrad also harvests people for spare parts to keep himself eternally young, which is showcased when he mutilates a young prostitute he frequents and tricks her into surrendering to death so he may use her life for his. When her pimp comes by, Konrad infects him with an agonizing flu strain he perfected, also intending on unleashing a Zombie Apocalypse on the USA, killing countless people, even betraying his co-conspirator Helen Holt by infecting her with an agent to leave her permanently paralyzed and never aging. Escaping, Konrad begins selling his services to terrorist groups to utilize his strains and agents to kill more people for the highest bidder.
  • Helen Holt is a born sociopath, one of the worst that the Shadow Company has to offer and the nemesis of Zachary Burrows. A vain monster, Helen allies with the vile Konrad and helps in his attempt to attack the United States with a zombie army in return for eternal life and beauty. After Zachary and Cade insult her, she plots her terrible revenge on them due to the perceived slight. Allying with the ancient Serial Killer monster known as the Bogeyman, she helps it in a murder spree that kills countless people in brutal mutilations and horrific murders. Her ultimate goal is to have it murder the U.S. President's daughter and young son as the ultimate way to get back at Cade by seeing him fail at his life's work.
  • The President's Vampire (second book): Colonel Graves, real name Peter Sinclair, is a high-ranking member of the Shadow Company and the man who had President Kennedy assassinated. Finagling a pardon, Graves also subjects many people to horrific experimentation with the Snakehead virus to mutate many others into reptilian monsters which he feeds with innocents and others, kidnapping many people to experiment on, from terrorists to college kids who just wore the wrong shirt. Graves intends to start "doomsday" by unleashing them on the population of the heartland, even taking children and making them into brain-dead incubators for the virus.
• Pressure & Deathless, by Jeff Strand:
  • Pressure: Budding psychopath Darren Rust shows what a budding lunatic he is by dissecting a dead dog before leaving the protagonist Alex's life for years. Obsessed with the idea Alex is a killer like him, Darren tortures a little girl to force Alex to murder an innocent woman. Becoming a Serial Killer, torturing and murdering many innocents, Darren kidnaps and tortures Alex before killing his wife and daughter. Later surfacing one more time, Darren intends to make Alex a killer like him or to murder him should that fail.
  • Deathless: Luna Booth, a deranged fangirl of Darren after his conviction, seduces Alex to get close to something Darren had affected in life. After being rejected by Alex, Luna tries to force him to murder one of his friends or die, said friend dying from injuries she had inflicted. Luna later puts together a cult in Darren's name, killing numerous innocents and forcing any failed members to kill themselves while planning to have the wife and five children of another friend of Alex's butchered. Having captured April, the girl whom Alex saved from Darren years ago, Luna tries to torture them into killing one another before revealing she had freed Darren from prison before finally breaking from him in disappointment over how ordinary he really is.
• Pretty Little Liars: Alison DiLaurentis is the series's wicked Big Bad. Even as a child, she would abuse her twin sister Courtney and even helped get her commited to an insane asylum by lying to her parents that Courtney wanted to kill her. She later murdered Courtney in a fit of rage for simply switching places with her by having her Buried Alive, kills Ian because of his relationship with Courtney, and later on kills Jenna simply because she knew the secret. Besides that, Alison pretends to be Ian in an IM conservation, stalks the girls as the second A, repeatedly blackmails them, and feeds them false information. She then tries to have someone else framed for her misdeeds. In one of her appearnces, she manipulates Emily's feelings for her, and then attempts to kill the girls of the book by having them burnt alive. She also sends Hanna fake tickets and has her sent to a mental institution. Finally, she fakes her own death and leaks a fake trial of evidence to the police which implicates the girls for her "murder", fully intending to have them spend the rest of their lives in prison, just to get her revenge.
• Pretty Little Things, by Jilliane Hoffman: "Picasso"—Mark Felding—is a sadistic serial kidnapper and killer who targets young teenagers online, kidnaps them, and keeps them as his tormented, malnourished "pets" for months at a time. Possessed of a vigorous religious conviction that all women are whores, Picasso eventually butchers the girls in his possession and poses them in artistic fashions for police to find, often torturing and mutilating them before their deaths and raping the corpses. When his crimes are discovered, Picasso murders his "favorite" of the girls by blowing her head off with a shotgun, before trying to kill his youngest victim yet while taunting Special Agent Bobby Dees that one of his victims was Bobby's daughter just to torment him.
• Primal Warrior Draco Azul: Full Metal Chronicles:
  • "A Friend from Afar": Varukan is a notorious extraterrestrial Serial Killer who terrorized the galaxy while preying on sapient life. Arriving on Earth, Varukan claims Guanajuato City in Mexico as his hunting grounds to exploit police corruption and the Diablo crisis. Taming the Rozacdyl—a life-draining plant-like Diablo—with his telepathy, Varukan takes on human form and seduces several partygoers, slaughtering them while revelling in their fear and pain. Hunted down by an alien Bounty Hunter called Star Slinger and Eric Martinez—pilot of the giant robot Draco Azul—Varukan mocks their dedication to justice and scornfully dismisses the Rozacdyl as a mere tool after it's killed. A hedonistic sadist, Varukan cares for no one other than himself, revels in his victims' suffering, and sneers that emotions like love and compassion are for the weak.
  • "Reminiscence":
    • Cizin is a malicious shapeshifting extraterrestrial with godlike supernatural powers. Upon arriving on Earth, Cizin split into the death-gods Hunhau and Uacmitun Ahau, the former devouring the life-force of countless victims to fuel his dark flames. Attempting to usurp control of the Mesoamerican pantheon, Hunhau and Uacmitun Ahau were cast down to the human world and claimed it as their domain, terrorizing the Maya people by preying on travelling merchants and clashing with the alien mech Ya'axkan/Draco Azul. Centuries later, the AI Ekchuah pitted Draco Azul's new pilot Eric Martinez against a virtual recreation of Hunhau, Uacmitun Ahau, and Cizin based on his memories of them—highlighting the dark god's nature as an arrogant and bloodthirsty would-be tyrant who revels in his status as a destroyer and gleefully plays mind-games with his enemies in order to undermine them.
    • The Feathered Serpent—known to the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl—was a member of a species of shapeshifting extraterrestrial entities with godlike supernatural powers fuelled by absorbing the lifeforce of their worshipers. Arriving on Earth and becoming the Top God of the Mesoamerican pantheon, the Feathered Serpent cast the death-gods Hunhau and Uacmitun Ahau down to the mortal realm for daring to challenge its authority. Arrogant and cruel, when the alien mecha Ya'axkan and its human pilots began defending humanity from the tyranny of the gods, the Feathered Serpent—enraged—challenged Ya'axkan to a duel and summoned a hurricane that laid waste to the city of Teotihuacan—its own seat of worship. Mercilessly killing countless innocent men, women, children, and elders out of spite, contempt, and to drive home how powerless mortals were against the gods, the Feathered Serpent was defeated at great cost to Ya'axkan—leading to the mecha going dormant for 800 years.
• The Princess Bride:
  • Prince Humperdinck is a man who loves nothing so much as to kill other things, having a menagerie of animals to hunt and kill at leisure. Applying this philosophy to the real world, Humperdinck plans to start a bloody war so his nation of Florin can conquer Gildor. Forcing the lovely Buttercup into marriage, Humperdinck tries to have her murdered and frame Gildor to give pretense for invasion, having her rescuer and true love Westley subjected to his right-hand-man Rugen's wicked Machine for torture, something he enjoys subjecting their victims to. Deciding upon murdering Buttercup with his bare hands, Humperdinck turns the Machine to its highest setting to give Westley the most agonizing end imaginable.
  • Count Tyrone Rugen, the "six-fingered man" Inigo Montoya has dedicated the past twenty years of his life to hunting, is the Prince's "twin in misery". A cold-hearted Torture Technician who seeks immortality through the science of human suffering, Rugen once offered a noble swordsmith named Domingo to slave for a year on a perfect sword, then offered only a tenth of his original price upon seeing the result. Rugen heartlessly murdered Domingo when he was refused and spared his son Inigo only a whim, leaving the boy with two scars upon his cheek to forever mark the moment. Rugen now writes what he hopes to be the "definitive work" on torture, testing his skills upon the captured Westley for weeks on end. Rugen's crown achievement is a ghastly device he simply calls "the Machine" that he first demonstrates on a dog before subjecting Westley to it, leaving him broken and sobbing.
• Princess Wennie: Tragimor is a wizard who has discovered that stealing others' souls gives him unlimited power. Adopting a kind, courteous façade, Tragimor manipulates several other characters—a little mouse, a poor apprentice, and a little orphan girl—into trading their souls away, and then coaxes them to perform a truly monstrous deed—to send someone to their death or to corrupt another victim for him—which seals the deal completely. The captive souls are kept in the Kingdom of Dreams, held by living snake-chains, and the owners only have a weak, hateful, and miserable Personality Remnant left in their bodies. When Tragimor learns that the wizard Alyosha has come to fight him, he tries to get him killed, culminating in him sending two demonic armies after Alyosha. As the latter is able to escape, Tragimor attacks him in person, attempting to kill him with his Evil Weapon and, when that fails, to chain him up forever next to the souls.
• Prisoner B-3087, by Alan Gratz: Amon Goeth is the Nazi commandant of the Plaszów concentration camp, which is responsible for liquidating most of the thousands of Jews in Kraków. Forcing his thousands of inmates to work themselves to death, Goeth personally murders his prisoners at little provocation, including Yanek's Uncle Moshe, simply for not working fast enough. Goeth particularly enjoys having Jews mauled to death by his dogs or using them as sniper practice every day, refusing to even eat breakfast until he's killed at least one Jew.
• Pteranodon Canyon, by Tim Meyer: Francis Burner is a ruthless poacher with a legacy of violence and murder behind him. Having killed countless people, including the wife and child of Bounty Hunter Charlie Archer, Burner is introduced murdering a card dealer for dealing "improperly". Having numerous people murdered to cover up his dinosaur poaching ring, Burner gleefully tries to murder Archer himself at the end.
• Puppet Combo novelizations, by Regina Watts:
  • Babysitter Bloodbath: Neoklaus Burr is given a more fleshed out personality, establishing him as a horrible sadist. Burr was originally just a normal man until one day he developed a sadistic desire to kill. Burr murdered his wife, daughter, and son, and ate his own son by biting his head off. Burr busted out of the hospital, murdering several of the nurses and staff while doing so. Burr began a murder spree, killing the entire Hugo family and then four other people. Burr would move on to the Johnson house to get the murder weapon of his family back so he could relive the moment he killed his entire family for his own sadism. Burr would several times attempt to kill Sarah and would succeed in murdering a few people in the house, including Sarah's friend Jill.
  • Murder House: Thomas "Tom" Smith, also known as the Easter Ripper, was a manipulative kid who constantly got his twin brother Anthony in trouble. Tom started to kidnap, torture, and murder young children while he posed as a mall Easter Bunny performer, barely feeding the kids and making them cut themselves with razor blades hidden in food. Tom proceeded to imprison his mother and Anthony, killing his mom before he gets the police to arrest Anthony and have him executed. Feeling the urge to murder again, Tom slowly and brutally murders all of his co-workers, including an innocent salesman, and attempts to do the same to the meek Emma, implying to have plans to rape her, while boasting sadistically about his infamy.
• Pure Hate, by Wrath James White: Malcolm Davis is a terrifying, dark-skinned giant with platinum fangs who never managed to get over his former best friend and his girlfriend cheating on him in high school. Becoming a Serial Killer to "practice" his revenge, Malcolm started on gay men, before killing couples and graduating to entire families. Finally attacking his old friend Reed, Malcolm kills his young children before raping, mutilating and murdering Reed's wife, leaving Reed alive to suffer. Malcolm goes on a killing spree of those in his way, killing cops, security guards and anyone who recognizes him before abducting and raping his ex-girlfriend, before allowing his accomplice to do the same, later killing her as well. When he and Reed encounter each other one last time, Reed attempts to talk sense into Malcolm before Malcolm firmly rejects all attempts and blows Reed's head off before being gunned down himself.
• Push: Carl Kenwood Jones, unfaithful husband to Mary and father to the titular Claireece "Precious" Jones, uses the two to fulfill his lust for sex and money. Carl molested Precious—since she was as young as 3 years old—and continued to rape her well into adolescence; verbally and physically abused Mary in the rare moments she objected; and showed no care to the grandchildren he fathered with Precious either.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish novelization, by Cala Spinner: "Robbin' Big" Jack Horner lacks most of the comedic elements of his film counterpart to become something far more sinister. Once a lonely baker's boy who sought true happiness, Jack hopes to use the power of the Wishing Star to acquire all the magic in the world, uncaring that it would incite chaos, mass panic, and total destruction just as long as he can hold the whole world under his thumb. Carelessly killing and abusing his own Baker's Dozen until they're all dead, from burning one alive, to whipping them for fun, Jack proves himself one of the cruelest characters encountered by Puss and friends.
• The Queen of Days, by Greta Kelly:
  • Karanis, the supposed god of the sea, is the Ankaaran tasked with beginning their conquest of humanity. Working with Paasch, Karanis hit the city with deadly hurricanes to help Paasch gain power. Karanis later gruesomely drains the time out of hundreds of people to enter the human world and steals Paasch's body to possess when the ceremony is interrupted by Balthazaar "Bal" Vadalen and his niece Tassiel "Tass" by stealing half of the idol he was going to possess. Karanis then abducts Bal's little sister Mira, threatening to kill her if he doesn't bring him his half of the idol, before ordering them all to be killed anyway after he returns it while Karanis prepares to begin the Ankaaran invasion.
  • Governor Paasch is a smug, ambitious man willing to do anything to gain power. Working for the god-like Ankaarans, Paasch had Karanis hit the city of Cothis with years of ferocious hurricanes, killing thousands. Paasch then claimed the gods had forsaken the city's ruling family the Vadalens and staged a coup against them to make himself governor, and tried to have the entire Vadalen family slaughtered down to the children. Later Paasch arranges at the consecration of a new temple for the temple to drain the time out of hundreds of workers there to allow Karanis to enter his world and begin an Ankaaran invasion to conquer humanity.
• "Queen of the Cloven Heart" (link): The titular Cloven-Heart Queen, assuming the throne after the White Guard assassinates every Queen before her, quickly consumes the entire kingdom in madness and tyranny. Sealed away during the White Guard's first attempts to dispatch her, the Queen reduces the King to her insane pet and forces the kingdom to pay tribute to her, first devouring every virginal woman in the nation and then every woman in general. When her offerings run low, the Queen plunges the world into war so she can steal women from other countries. Some offerings she consumes; others she transforms into hideous things alike to her. When the Captain of the White Guard tries once again to kill her, the Queen breaks his mind and his will before letting the King eat him, alive and screaming.
• Quest of the Gods series, by Dan Hunter:
  • Set, the Lord of Storms, is a wicked and brutal god who is motivated by his intense jealousy of his brother Horus. Having long ago murdered his father Osiris, Set imprisons the gods that protect Egypt and has Horus held captive in the dungeons beneath his temple, slowly draining his life force. This results in Egypt facing various crises, including a great drought that threatens to dry up the Nile, the dead being Barred from the Afterlife to haunt the living, and conflict breaking out at random. After hero Akori thwarts his plans, Set imprisons Osiris and takes over the Underworld, releasing the serpent Apep to swallow the sun and bring about eternal darkness. Intending to build an army of the dead to turn Egypt into a mass grave to spite his brother and the other good gods, Set, unwilling to risk Akori freeing Osiris, finally tries to kill Osiris permanently.
  • Oba is a spoiled, sadistic teenage Pharaoh. Beginning the series by poisoning his own father with cobra venom in order to claim the throne, Oba allies himself with Set to make himself feared. Learning of a prophecy saying that Akori will overthrow him, Oba orders him killed, his soldiers burning down the farm where Akori works and murdering his uncle. Ruling Egypt as a cruel tyrant, Oba does everything in his power to prevent Akori from freeing the captive gods despite knowing full well how Egypt is suffering in their absence. Defeated by Akori, Oba gleefully helps Set end all life in Egypt for a chance to exact revenge on him. Using one of the mystical Pharaoh Stones to bring the monster Ammit under his control, Oba tries to have her devour Akori's soul when the latter journeys to the Underworld.
• A Quiet Belief In Angels, by R. J. Ellory: The Serial Killer who plagues Augusta Falls, in truth Sheriff Haynes Dearing, begins raping and murdering little girls, reaching a total of eight before framing the innocent German resident Gunther Kruger, setting fire to Kruger's house and killing his young daughter Ellie. The killer continues murdering victims, eventually murdering Kruger or pushing him to suicide and framing him of the crimes. Upon the novel's hero Joseph Vaughn moving to New York, the killer murders Joseph's wife and frames him for the crime before continuing to murder women and children under the radar, eventually reaching 32 known victims.
• "The Quiet Boy", by Nick Antosca (link): Frank Weaver is the abusive, terrifying father of Lucas who has performed a demonic ritual to kill himself and his youngest, Todd, and turn their spirits into nightmarish entities that feast on pain. Though trapped in his house for months while using Lucas to scavenge for animals that Frank and Todd torture to death to soak in their pain, Frank soon enough escapes and goes on a killing spree through the town of Rexford, butchering over half a dozen people with sadistic relish for the hunt. After eviscerating the neighbors of Lucas's teacher, Julia, Frank corners her and steals Lucas back from her protection, tearing the woman to shreds and escaping into the night with a fearful Lucas in tow.
• Quo Vadis: Tigellinus is a prefect of the Praetorian Guard and Nero's right-hand man who follows every Nero's order without question, no matter how immoral or cruel. In fact, Tigellinus likes to use Nero's mental instability as a way to get him to give an immoral order so that Tigellinus could enact it. Tigellinus likes to pick beautiful Christian women for Nero so that Nero could use them as his sex slaves. When Tigellinus finds out Nero has a fantasy of burning Rome so history could write poems about him, Tigellinus incites Nero to actually order this, which Tigellinus and his soldiers happily carry out. Afterwards, Tigellinus and Nero frame Christians for the fire, resulting in Christians being rounded up en masse and thrown into the arena where they are brutally killed in many different ways. When Tigellinus finds out his friend, the philosopher Chilon, has converted to Christianity, Tigellinus has the latter's tongue ripped out.
• Rambo: First Blood Part II novelization, by David Morrell: Sergeant Tay is the exceptionally cruel commander of the Vietnamese POW Camp that has haunted Rambo for years. Tay subjects hundreds of prisoners to heinous torture for years, enjoying himself by starving them; flaying them; and tying them in excruciating positions in the middle of terrible weather. Tay's favorite torment is the "slime pit", a deep hole full of worms, leeches, and other painful insects that he lowers prisoners all the way into so they are bitten and suffocated by the insects, then pulled out on the cusp of death. The one responsible for Rambo's 6 months of horrible abuse and the many scars he bears, Tay has filled an entire patch of land with the bones of the hundreds of victims who died under his abuse, and when Rambo tries to save multiple POWs from him, Tay tries to torture Rambo to death once again.
• Raven duology, by Patricia Briggs:
  • Willon the Shadowed one is the true Big Bad who sows the land with discord, chaos and death to eventually harness the powers of the Stalker. Killing countless through the purges he conducts via agents like Telleridge, Willon also gains power via magic plagues, such as one he used on Tier's village that even killed Tier's young daughter. Not satisfied, Willon later wipes out an entire city while trying to overthrow Emperor Phoran and have him and all close to him killed, uncaring of the damage the Stalker's power will have on the world and countless innocents.
  • Raven's Shadow: Telleridge is the power-hungry leader of the wizard group the Masters of the Path. Under the machinations of Willon, Telleridge happily leads the kidnapping, torture and sacrifice of the order bearers in order to gain their powers through their deaths, and upon kidnapping Tier, Telleridge has him mentally and physically tortured. Telleridge also uses his daughter Myrceria as a way to gain the trust of his victims, and after she sides with Tier, Telleridge heartlessly has her tortured to death out of petty spite.
  • Raven's Strike: Ielian is the treacherous guard of Emperor Phoran. Betraying his kingdom to Willon, heedless of the death it will bring, Ielian reveals his only true purpose is being a sadistic Serial Killer who is paid in victims by his master. After betraying Phoran and killing his fellows, Ielian even slits another guard's throat just to savor the death, trying to have his old comrades tortured and murdered so he may live with as much depravity as he desires.
• Raven: Swordmistress of Chaos series, by Richard Kirk: Karl ir Donwayne is a ruthless slaver and Raven's arch-nemesis. Having been her master from a young age, Donwayne had Raven's mother raped and killed by his men before raping the young Raven himself. Donwayne is shown to relish in slavery, being a Serial Rapist of female slaves, keeping locks of their hair as trophies to mark his conquests. After being defeated by Raven, Donwayne returns as an undead monster, trying to kill her friends and even threatening to kill Raven and make her his undead Sex Slave for eternity.
• "Rawhead Rex": Rawhead Rex himself is a monster from the days before Christianity, released from the Earth in a small English village. Rawhead promptly dispatches the man who dug him out and sets about trying to regain his kingdom. The first thing he does is to murder a farmer, eat the man's little daughter alive, and kill the man's pregnant wife before attacking a police car, castrating the survivor of the crash and then burning him alive. Rawhead corrupts the local verger and hideously mutilates the reverend out of contempt for his "weak" religion. At the story's climax, Rawhead attempts to burn down all of Zeal in his fury. Unlike many literal monsters, Rawhead is a sapient being that amounts to a brutish bully who loves carnage, pain and especially eating children.
• Raylan Givens novels, originally by Elmore Leonard:
  • Riding the Rap: Roberto Deogracias, "Bobby Deo", is the worst of the trio of villainous kidnappers. An extortionist and hired killer who earned the nickname "the Gardener" for his propensity of cutting body parts off of victims with a pair of pruners, Bobby uses this and other threats to terrorize people who owe money to loan sharks and bookies. Allying with Chip and Louis to scheme a kidnapping operation that will make them rich, Bobby helps them kidnap and torment Harry Arno for days, planning to do the same to multiple other victims until they pay the kidnappers to let them go lest they be killed. After one hostage disobeys a simple order, Bobby beats and murders him in a raging tantrum, and his impulsive psychopathy leads him to brutally assault a pair of store owners out of racism.
  • Raylan:
    • Layla is a transplant nurse who masterminds an organ trafficking operation out of sadism as much as greed. Working with her lover Cuba, Layla drugs people, cuts their kidneys out, and then ransoms the organs back to the victims for a hefty fee. After using the Crowe brothers as hired muscle, Layla hopes to vivisect them to steal all their organs and leave them to die, and her only response when Cuba impulsively guns them down instead and spares a witness is to sneer that she would have killed the witness as well and harvested all their organs. When Raylan zeroes in on her actions, Layla drugs and tries to steal his organs, and haphazardly murders Cuba while trying to gun Raylan down, an act she immediately notes can be used to her advantage by pinning the whole operation on Cuba alone.
    • Delroy Lewis is an arrogant, abusive pimp who addicts women to Oxy and then uses them as prostitutes, strip dancers and bank robbers to line his pockets. Delroy would further beat the women harshly to keep them in line, and when a snitch turned him in years ago, Delroy blew the man's arm off with a shotgun in an attempt to murder him. When one of his girls is caught during a bank robbery, Delroy hangs her out to dry in prison and murders two of his other hookers when their backs are turned in an attempt to tie up loose ends.
  • Raylan Goes to Detroit, by Peter Leonard: Ramon Quintero, aka "Pelon", is a drug slinger who works for Jose Rindo. Assisting Rindo in carrying out the assassination of a federal agent in his home, Pelon smuggles large quantities of meth through the country and works to addict countless young people to the drug and ruin their lives for profit. When one of his customers couldn't pay for their fix, Pelon took the man's 15-year-old daughter to use as a Sex Slave, further planning to pass her along to Rindo himself and others for fun.
• Realm of the Elderlings: The Pale Lady is The Man Behind the Man for almost every bad thing that's happened in the Farseer Trilogy, as she purchased the skill scrolls from Regal and learned the art of Forging from them. As The Tawny Man trilogy showed, she relished in the psychological aspects of forging; she loved unleashing mindless Forged ones against their own families and kinsmen. In addition, she would ransom the dead bodies of Out Islanders she'd captured to their families, with the threat that if they didn't pay she'd return them as Forged. She was behind the war between The Six Duchies and the Out Islands, using the Out Island warlord Kebal Rawbread as her Heavy. It was implied that she may have had her hands in the Jamaillian slave trade. She was a recreational Torture Technician as well. When Kebal Rawbread failed her, she chained him to a frozen throne in her ice palace, used magic to keep him alive through what would have been lethal frostbite, and fed him body parts of other Out Islanders she'd forged. Forging was a process that could be done very slowly over the course of weeks. And she tortured The Fool over the course of days for no reason other than the joy of it. Her sole motivation was the complete collapse of civilization.
• Re-Animator: The Novelization, by Jeff Rovin: Dr. Carl Josiah Hill is a scientist and hospital researcher who is also an unapologetic plagiarist who ruins the lives and careers of his victims. When Hill discovers Dr. Herbert West's Re-Agent, he lobotomizes the revived Dean of the college and proclaims his intent to steal West's notes. Murdered by West and revived, Hill takes on new powers and begins reviving and lobotomizing other corpses as slaves with intent to kill and revive countless humans to worship him. Hill intends to kill his rivals, revive their severed heads and keep them in states of unending torment before launching them into space, sexually assaulting Halsey's daughter Megan before proclaiming he'll revive her if she dies in the battle with West.
• Rebel Geniuses: Ugalino, the Big Bad of Rebel Genius, was once Pietro's student until he made a Tulpa, a Golem-like creature with destructive capabilities. Rather than learn humility from being expelled, Ugalino used his Tulpa, which he named "Zanobius," to be a living weapon. He tries to paint himself as meaning well, but he used Zanobius to murder countless people, including Ozo's wife and daughter, regardless of whether or not it furthers his goals. He ripped his Genius Ciro's gem out of his head so that he could use its magic capabilities without needing to perform an act of art, which is shown to physically and psychologically damage Geniuses. When getting information out of Duke Oberta on the Creator's Compass, he repays him by having Zanobius slaughter almost everybody in his castle. With the information Oberta gave him, he went to Baldasarre's villa and he threatens Baldasarre's wife, prompting Enzio to tell him, and he then abducts Enzio so that he could lead them to the Compass. When the first location turned out to be an illusion, he uses Enzio as a sacrifice for a ritual that could lead him to the true location. Zanobius, who had developed a bond with Enzio during his captivity, stops Ugalino, only for him to be subjected to Mind Rape. When Ugalino catches up to Giacomo, he orders Zanobius to kill him and his friends, but Zanobius tries to rebel again, causing Ugalino—not for the first time—to give him Laser-Guided Amnesia. With Zanobius loyal to him again, he threatens to kill Aaminah if Giacomo didn't give him the Compass, and only lets them live because he found out Giacomo was a Tulpa and hoped to use him as a weapon. With the Compass in his possession, he uses it to assassinate Nerezza, not caring who gets killed in the crossfire.
• Rebel of the Sands trilogy: Sultan Oman Al-Hasim bin Izman is the despotic ruler of Miraji who will do anything to maintain control over the country. As a young man, the Sultan made a deal with the Gallan Empire to stage a violent coup, killing his father and many of his brothers to assume the throne. Once in power, the Sultan allowed the Gallan to execute any non-human citizens they found and supplied them with weapons for their wars. The Sultan also began to keep a Royal Harem, buying women from slavers to fill it. Years later, the Sultan finds the powerful Demdji Noorsham, and planning on betraying the Gallans, takes control of Demdji and has him incinerate the entire city of Dassama to kill the Gallan presence and tries to do the same to the city Fahali. Capturing heroine Amani, the Sultan manipulates her into leaking information he wants to the rebellion to allow him to brutally crack down on them while they're distracted. The Sultan then forces Amani to summon dozens of Djinn and kills one to use his soul to power the mighty Abdal constructs, using them to slaughter all of the visiting foreign rulers. After this, the Sultan kills his son Kadir for being an unworthy heir and captures most of the rebellion. The Sultan orders Ahmed to be executed and sends the rest to be worked to death. Despite the Sultan's claims that he only wanted what's best for his country, he was only interested in keeping control over Miraji.
• The Rebel Worlds (Flandry, #3): Imperial Governor Aaron Snelund gets a title and position by becoming the Emperor's lover, before manipulating the drunken Emperor into posting him to some far-off sector, where Snelund swiftly becomes a terrible ruler, instituting an illegal slave trade. In one instance he punishes one alien village for not obeying him swiftly enough by impaling the village's children and forcing their parents to watch for the three days it takes them to die. Snelund later kidnaps the beloved wife of the Imperial admiral of his sector so he can rape and torture her.
• Red Dwarf series:
  • Last Human: The Alternate Lister, apart from being an unfeeling sociopath with no regard for life or property, also murders his "friends" aboard Starbug simply because he didn't want them getting hold of the coordinates of the DNA-Altering machine, even lasering Kryten's head off and jamming a Cuban cigar between the lips as a joke. Then, when the protagonist version of Lister rescues him from Cyberia, he repays this act of kindness by knocking his rescuer unconscious and forcing him to take his place at the prison. As a final atrocity, he even goes as far as shooting Protagonist Lister in the balls with a rad pistol to try and motivate Kochanski into having sex with him.
  • Backwards: Djuhn'Keep, as one of a series of androids dedicated to hunting down the remains of the human race—aka Dave Lister—and torturing them to death, is already vile. Djuhn masterminded the creation of the Death Wheel and the Hub of Pain torture chamber at its very center, stocking it with every single form of weapon that could be used to torture their captives. Djuhn, needing spare parts, infects one of the other agonoids with a paralyzing computer virus and dismantles him while he's still conscious. Then, just to make sure that he'd have the privilege of torturing Lister and the other Dwarfers, he gathers all the other agonoids in the Hub of Pain and increases the gravity until most of them are crushed to death. The survivors are forced into the spokes of the Death Wheel and whittled down by the death traps, while Djuhn listens from the control room, "conducting the symphony of screams and death rattles as if it were the sweetest of sweet music." Then, when it seems that some of them have escaped alive, Djuhn he ejects them into space and goes after Lister.
• The Red Necklace & The Silver Blade: Count--later Citizen--Kalliovski is a serial-killing Loan Shark in the time of The French Revolution. A blackmailer and consummate destroyer-of-lives who always carries a book full of the names of those he keeps under his crushing thumb, Kalliovski is only too gleeful to murder those who don't pay their debts or simply get in his way, ranging from a magician who recognizes him from before his days as nobility, to Romani families he hunts for sport, to the mother of the novel's heroine Sido de Villeduval. Kalliovski deigns to make the underage Sido his bride as well, gloating how he'll have her in his bed whether she wants it or not. Kalliovski also creates magical automata out of the bodies of his victims, a pastime expanded upon in The Silver Blade. Whether from those he's sent to the guillotine or killed with his own hands, Kalliovski seeks to create a being "without the inconvenience of a soul" from these automata; his most prized of them are the Seven Sisters Macabre, each a woman he's murdered and preserved in beautiful undeath. Even love cannot dampen Kalliosvki's evil; when he encounters a woman who "threatened the perfect void of his being", Kalliovski murders her and promptly attempts to kill the child he bore with her as well.
• The Red Queen's War: Edris Dean is a servant of The Lady Blue and masterminds a series of cruel attacks to create the "Unborn", murdering pregnant women to damn the souls of their unborn children to hell, where they will become powerful undead beings to be unleashed on the world, the fate that befalls the wife and unborn baby of the Viking hero Snorri. It is also revealed that when the hero Jalan was young, Edris Dean nearly killed him and murdered his pregnant mother to turn his unborn sister into the strongest Unborn ever seen. Torturing and murdering a friend of Jalan's to obtain the Liar's Key that can help reshape the world, Edris later enslaves the soul of Jalan's sister to get her to kill her brother to help tear a hole through reality which could kill countless people in the cities. Ostensibly on board with the Lady Blue's plan to usher in the apocalypse to become gods, Edris Dean murders the men she assigned to him to turn them into undead slaves, trying to kill Jalan to hijack the plan and become the new god of all creation.
• "Redemption at Knife's End", by Tim Marquitz, from Neverland's Library: Korbitt is a depraved ex-soldier turned bandit who runs the illegal slavery ring of the town he's stationed in, spreading horror to the citizens. Kidnapping a young girl named Vai from a peaceful endangered species, Korbitt has her turned into his Sex Slave and rapes her repeatedly. When Gryl comes to rescue Vai, Korbitt threatens to slit her throat.
• Reef Of Death: The main villain of this violent children’s novel by Paul Zindel is Dr. Ecenbarger, a greedy scientist. She commands a tanker she has parked off the coast of the titular reef where she is drilling and hording all the environment's natural resources while the local Aborigine people starve and grow ill. Having discovered many undiscovered species in the reef, Ecenbarger uses them as monstrously as possible. In the depths of the reef lives a massive carnivorous fish that Ecenbarger drives insane with a sonic signal to devour anyone in the vicinity, which is the fate of a luckless diver in the prologue. When PC teams up with the man's sister Maruul, Ecenbarger unleashes the fish on them, which kills PC's uncle Cliff. When she has them aboard the tanker, Ecenbarger has a guard executed for failure by having a spider-crab eat his brain. It is revealed that Ecenbarger is excavating the treasure of Maruul's people, a fire opal wall, with intent to destroy it and sell the pieces despite the damage it will have on the natives.
• The Reign of Evil: The God of Chaos, better known as King Dosleum, is a tyrannical, sadistic God of Evil that waged war on the nations of Nidavia in hopes of conquering them. He beheaded the kind King Arnstil and sent his soldiers to find the king's heirs—Hawk, Falcon, and their infant brother, Eagle—and kidnap their foster parents. After attacking the city of Noltreydelm, his soldiers manage to capture Hawk, who King Dosleum proceeds to torture, murders his foster parents in front of him, and then imprisons him. Eventually, King Dosleum attempts to groom Hawk, promising him a piece of land in exchange for his servitude, and displays pleasure at when Hawk tells him that he intends to keep a prisoner as his personal concubine. After attacking Fairence twice more, he sends a legion of monsters to kill his own men, thus revealing his intention to rule Nidavia with no human life. Once the heroes confront him, he siphons the life force from his own Dusk Riders to fuel a spell to kill the heroes, and manages to impale an already-wounded Matt.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades Vol. 10: The Patriarch of the Sherwood Clan is the grandfather of Chloe Halford and great-grandfather of Gwyn and Shannon Sherwood and Oliver Horn. Only present in an extended flashback sequence, Mr. Sherwood took in Chloe's widower Edgar Groves and their young son Oliver after her murder, dismissing Edgar as a "stud horse" and used Oliver to play back the Ghost Memory of his mother's Rasputinian Death, forcing him to relive the agony in first person. Sherwood then pushed Edgar to repeatedly train his son to the point of death in order to enable him to perform a Merger of Souls to get the power to avenge his mother, but really only wanted to see how far one could take the Sherwoods' family magic before dying of it. When Oliver hit puberty, in order to keep the soul merge magic "in the family", Sherwood commanded Oliver to sire a child with Shannon, and when Oliver refused, immediately injected him with a near-lethal dose of psychoactive drugs and unleashed him on his cousin to impregnate her by force; when the pregnancy ended in stillbirth, Sherwood jovially promised to keep trying until she carried one to term. A controlling sociopath who ruled over his family with an iron fist, Sherwood went to his grave convinced that everything he'd done had been for the good of the family, heedless of the lasting harm he'd done to his own flesh and blood well into the series' present day.
• Reluctant Immortals, by Gwendolyn Kiste:
  • The ruthless and charming Count Dracula is a predator who takes the life and dignity of others to cover the fathomless emptiness within him. Preying on RM Renfield to turn him into an abused slave, Dracula made his way to England with a series of horrible murders and the corruption of Lucy Westerna. With countless dead women behind him, Dracula was finally destroyed while Lucy was damned to unlife. Upon his return, Dracula resumes preying upon all he can find while trying to force Lucy to embrace the most monstrous side of herself and become a killer just like him.
  • Edward Fairfax Rochester was an unscrupulous landlord who abused his tenants and workers, turning the penniless out to die and using their anguish to become immortal. Abusing his wife Bertha "Bee" Mason by forcing her to immortality and locking her in his attic, he later also tried to enslave the more famous Jane Eyre. Keeping numerous women around to serve his whims in his own cult, Rochester tries to hunt down Bee to ensure she can never escape him again. Helping to unleash Dracula, Rochester ensures the vampire feeds from and kills numerous people.
• Renegades trilogy: Nova Artino is kindest of the Anarchists but as she discovers, these two are far worse than she thought:
  • Ace Anarchy, real name Alec Artino, is an immensely powerful prodigy who founded the Anarchists and once sought to liberate Prodigies by tearing down society, causing such massive destruction that civilization collapsed. When his brother regretted helping and informed the Renegades of his weaknesses, Ace responded by having him and his family assassinated, taking in the only survivor, his young niece Nova, and making her believe it was the Renegades' fault her family had died. After his supposed death, Ace went into hiding for years, waiting for the opportunity to return. After finally reemerging at full power, Ace reveals he no longer cares about liberating Prodigies anymore, instead planning on destroying society again and rebuilding it in his image as he rules over it as a god and Ace plans on starting by leveling all of Gatlon city.
  • First novel: The Detonator, real name Ingrid Thompson, is a reckless, impatient member of the Anarchists obsessed with revenge on the Renegades no matter what. Ingrid goes behind her teammates' backs by sabotaging Nova's first mission after infiltrating the Renegades, by trying to kill Captain Chromium's son Adrian just to hurt him by blowing up a library, unconcerned about the dozens of innocents inside. Afterwards, Ingrid agrees to a plan to fake both their deaths, only to betray Nova and actually try to kill her, before revealing that she has planted bombs all over Cosmopolis park; Ingrid plans on blowing the whole place and the hundreds of people in it up in front of the Renegade Council just to spite them.
• The Replacement: The Lady is a narcissistic Fay clinging to the last vestiges of power and authority. With her pact with the town of Gentry, she reigns over them, and has them sacrifice children once every seven years that she keeps as a pet, torments and eventually kills and devours, with a girl named Natalie the next of her victims. Setting fire to a church which causes a fatality upon being challenged, the Lady also tries to kill Mackie Doyle and others by handing them over to her Torture Technician, the Cutter, to gruesomely murder.
• La République des imberbes, by Mohamed Toihiri: Guigoz, based on Ali Soilih, was already a bully in his childhood, and grew up to be much worse, joining a far-left group who staged a coup against the new Comorian regime. Becoming Comoros's dictator, Guigoz manipulated the youth into joining his ideals, creating the Zazis commandos. Said commandos became known for their sheer brutality against any political opposition, with murders, thefts, public humiliations, tortures and rapes becoming rampant in the country. Despite forbidding witchcraft and brutally punishing any practitioner, Guigoz had appointed several "sorcerers" as his advisors, and upon their recommendation, had no problems sacrificing seven 7-year olds by having them strangled, while a nail is slammed in their skulls with a hammer. When "sorcerers" told Guigoz that spirits required three sacrifices, including one person truly close to Guigoz, Guigoz tricked his friend and advisor Lulé into killing two people, and then had him judged by a kangaroo court and executed. When a group in Iconi tried to rebel against him, Guigoz threatened the entire village, and the resulting onslaught led to over a thousand deaths. Thoroughly depraved beneath his charismatic behavior, Guigoz was appropriately called "Satan in a human's skin".
• Repugnant, by Judith Sonnet: The Sender, real name Gordon Werner, is a vile Serial Killer with a penchant for torture, cannibalism, and necrophilia. After killing his own mother, he randomly murders numerous people before torturing, eviscerating, and killing heroine Sabra Rockford in a gruesome sacrifice to Satan to gain unholy powers. Gaining power not from a revolted Satan but a host of lesser demons, the Sender embarks on a Halloween rampage through the town of Cardin, mutilating and slaughtering well over a dozen people, including trick-or-treaters. By the time Sabra—resurrected by Satan to seek revenge—finally tracks him down, the Sender has unleashed his demonic powers on Cardin's Halloween festival, turning it into an orgy of sadomasochistic violence that sees scores more people killed. So evil that he horrifies even the Devil, the Sender has no motive for his atrocities other than his own insatiable sadism.
• The Resort, by Bentley Little: Jedidiah Harrison is a purely black-hearted sadist with a love for anything that causes others agony. Jedidiah founded the Reata resort hotel solely to turn it into a slaughterhouse of death and agony for countless innocents that he would brutally torture and murder by the dozens, bribing numerous wealthy individuals into assisting him in his crimes in exchange for allowing them to use his Fountain of Youth. After a freak accident destroys much of the Fountain, Jedidiah spends decades preparing a new ceremony that will allow him to restore the Fountain to its former glory, murdering any who might stand in his way in the process. Once the ceremony is ready, Jedidiah turns a nearby, fully-occupied hotel into a hellish Eldritch Location, turning many of the residents into insane savages who rape and murder all they see, while Jedidiah himself hangs, decapitates, and butchers employees and residents alike, children included. With his final ritual being to sacrifice a child to the Fountain to restore its immortality properties, Jedidiah plans to then spend eternity continuing his sadistic ways, causing pain and torment to all he can for nothing but gleeful cruelty.
• The Resurrectionist, by Wrath James White: Dale McCarthy is a childish, self-righteous psychopath with the ability to revive those recently killed from death, and exploits these abilities to indulge in his own twisted desires. After being exposed to violence while witnessing his father violently rape his mother, Dale, starting as a teenager, began using his abilities to first kill small animals, then his own grandmother, over and over again, bringing them back to life each time. Though attempting to keep his mother, the only one aware of his abilities, alive and as his tormented caretaker, Dale moved on to other victims after his mother killed herself permanently. Dale proceeded to go on a horrific killing spree across the country, always targeting one specific woman for a short amount of time to torture, rape, and kill as many times as he wants before going to another victim. Once confronting the only woman he deems worthy of his "love", Sarah, Dale commits truly horrifying atrocities against her, from raping her and her husband in front of each other to flaying her alive, all things he has done on countless others. In the end, Dale brutally murders two police officers standing in his way, and, once beaten, causes all those he has ever revived to drop dead, seemingly for good this time. Dale McCarthy was a spoiled, disgusting, and despicable lunatic who justified his wicked acts as not truly evil, seeing as he always revived his victims, and constantly blamed others for his pathetic state in life.
• Return of the Living Dead (John Russo's 1978 novel): John Carter and Flack are a pair of sadistic psychopaths and former convicts who use the Zombie Apocalypse as an excuse to indulge themselves. Having killed officers to steal uniforms to disguise Carter, they later take refuge in the Miller house, where Flack rapes the young woman Sue Ellen and reveals they intend to use the Miller sisters as "zombie bait." The two shoot a police officer, leaving him tied up so when the victim reanimates, he'll devour his former friend. Upon fleeing, Flack throws a young man named Billy to the zombies and he and Carter storm a mansion, killing the guards inside and taking the family hostage. Carter and Flack then throw them, mother, father and a 10-year-old to the zombies, gleefully watching as the zombies tear them apart while keeping the Miller sisters to rape at their leisure.
• The Riftwar Cycle:
  • The Riftwar Saga: Murmandamus is the Big Bad of Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon. A Pantathian serpent-priest who plans to bring the long-banished Valheru back into the world, Murmandamus disguises himself as the reincarnation of the moredhel's (dark elves) greatest leader, uniting the mountain, forest, and hill clans in a campaign of genocide against their human and eledhel enemies. He sends assassins after the Prince of Krondor, which gets numerous people caught in the crossfire. He steals the souls of his human servants in a ritual that involves sacrificing a nine-year-old girl. He creates the Black Slayers, soulless moredhel, bound in service to him forevermore. He murders a seer who gave him the information he wanted, and massacres hundreds of slaves when he realizes that his campaign isn't going to start when he wants it to. In A Darkness at Sethanon, he destroys the cities of Armengar and Sethanon, lines his headquarters at Sar-Sargoth with a thousand human heads on pikes, kills hundreds of his own men in a fit of rage, tramples his right-hand serpent-priest, Cathos, to death, consumes the souls of all those who have died aiding him, and in the end, tries to activate the Lifestone, an Artifact of Doom that will slay all life on Midkemia from bacteria to humanity, in order to loose the Valheru. Believing that he will attain demigodhood when the Valheru return, Murmandamus dies laughing about how "I am a thing of death, Lord of the West. I am ever the servant of Darkness."
  • The Riftwar Legacy: Bear, the Big Bad of Krondor: Tear of the Gods, is a vicious mercenary pirate initially employed as muscle by the sorcerer Leso Varen, aka Sidi, to gain the Tear of the Gods, quickly becoming something far more uncontrollable and ambitious. With the power of a dark amulet making him impervious to all forms of harm, Bear forces a pirate crew led by Knute to join him under the threat of death—making good on his threats by torturously murdering two men for slights—and massacres the Ishapian ship carrying the Tear. Once he loses the Tear and is further betrayed by Knute, Bear resurfaces and comes down on Krondor in a vicious fury. Bear slaughters his way into a tavern, pleasuring himself with Sir William's fiancée before murdering her, kills his way into the city jail and vengefully cuts Knute apart, and indiscriminately murders his way out of Krondor and through the sewers, lining dozens of bodies behind him and setting a populated orphanage on fire purely as a diversion. Once he's finally tracked down by William and a score of Krondorian soldiers, Bear gleefully tosses his own men to die in his stead even despite his own invulnerability before single-handedly ripping apart the Krondorian guard and attempting to slay all those who stand before him and the Tear, proclaiming he'll be nothing more than a god. A barbarian too much even for the sinister Leso Varen, Bear is little more than animalistic wrath and savage fury on legs.
• Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark: Butcher Clyde is the leader of the "Ku Kluxes," the eldritch horrors from beyond who have allied with the Klansmen. Leading them to racial lynch mobs, Clyde inspires them to butcher innocent Black people to spread even more hatred so that he may summon his master, the Grand Cyclops, to cleanse the world after revealing the meat he fed his followers was that of monsters to force them to be bound to the Grand Cyclops in permanent agony.
• Riordanverse:
  • The Serpent's Shadow & Demigods & Magicians: Setne, son of Pharaoh Ramses the Great, was a murderer and blasphemer who escaped oblivion to return to Earth and sow chaos, being responsible for massive amounts of destruction, including The French Revolution and World War I. While initially assisting the Kane siblings against Apophis, Setne betrays them to instead try to seize control of the great serpent, intending on feeding it many souls in the afterlife, his father included, before unleashing Apophis to destroy most of the world whereupon he will proceed to rule the rest. Upon failing in this, Setne later returns to attempt to devour the gods of every pantheon to make himself the supreme one god who will dominate the entire world.
  • The Sword of Summer:
    • Surt, lord of the Fire Giants who also appears in 9 from the Nine Worlds' "I Play with Fire", seeks to bathe the entirety of the Nine Realms in flames and despises the god Frey for his compassionate, healing nature. Previously responsible for the Great Chicago Fire, Surt causes explosions throughout Boston as he hunts Magnus, threatening to incinerate nearby civilians if he isn't given the Sword of Summer and eventually killing the demigod with molten asphalt. Despite being weakened by their fight, Surt confronts Magnus and his friends again on the island of Lyngvi, slaying the Valkyrie Gunilla and attempting to claim the sword once more so he can free Fenris Wolf, start Ragnarok, and finally kill Frey before burning down all of existence.
    • Fenris Wolf, the monstrous son of Loki, was forced to be restrained by the Aesir due to the danger presented by his savage nature. Managing to loosen his bonds over the years, the Wolf causes havoc throughout the Nine Realms using his far-reaching Compelling Voice, manipulating events to secure his freedom. When confronted, Fenris Wolf gloats that he had Magnus's mother killed so he would become strong enough to retrieve the Sword of Summer—additionally noting that he ate Blitzen's father and countless other adventurers—in an effort to enrage the group so they will come closer to his confined circle and be devoured. Acting as the mastermind behind Surt's plan to claim the Sword of Summer, Fenris Wolf hopes for the blade to be used to cut away his remaining bonds, despite knowing full well that his release will usher in Ragnarok.
  • The Trials of Apollo: Nero, aka "The Beast", is an infamous Roman emperor and one of the three leaders of Triumvirate Holdings. Having helped Kronos and Gaea with their attempts to end the world by supplying their forcers with equipment, Nero strikes a deal with Python to find the Grove of Dodona, and to this end has his adopted daughter Meg spy on Apollo. Having killed Meg's birth father, Nero regularly abuses Meg to keep her in line. In his attempt to find the Grove, Nero has a group of Demigods kidnapped, threatening to burn them alive, before attempting to have the Colossus Nerosis destroy Camp Half-Blood. Nero later has his adopted Demigods attempt to burn New York to the ground and, when one of his allies Lu betrays him, Nero has her hands cut off, making Meg think it was her fault. Later attempting to have Meg use Sassanid Gas to kill the heroes at the threat of killing Apollo, Nero orders his minions to kill her when she refuses.
• The Rising and City of the Dead, by Brian Keene, take place in a bleak and miserable setting, but still manages to have two villains who stand out:
  • Ob is the King of the Siqqusim, the race of demonic zombies that serve as the antagonists of the series. Distinguishing himself from the mindless hatred of his followers through his persistence, sadism, and hounding of the protagonists on their journey across America, Ob aims to exterminate all of humanity, paving the way for something even worse. Angered by Jim's constant success at staying alive, Ob makes it his personal mission to end Jim's life, even as he arms his zombies with stolen human weaponry so that they can more efficiently wipe out all human and animal life on Earth. He takes great pleasure in his task, gloating as he uses a fake "all clear symbol" to lure hundreds to their deaths, mining each corpse he possesses for memories that he can use to hurt those his host cared about and taunt new victims with, and sharing information about his world in order to drive people to despair. Towards the end, he smashes the last remaining human stronghold with heavy artillery, and laughs in Jim's face during their final confrontation, noting that it is his pleasure to end Jim's journey.
  • Colonel Schow is proof that some humans can be every bit as vile as Ob and his ilk. Taking command of a unit of the Pennsylvania National Guard, Schow teaches them to Rape, Pillage, and Burn with the best of the undead. He forces the women and teenage girls that he rescues into service as brigade whores, under the pretext of keeping up morale. Those who refuse, along with the men who are too unfit for physical duty, end up as zombie bait. The men who he does deem fit enough become slave labour for his construction projects, working in hellish conditions for no reward beyond the dubious safety that Schow and his men provide. Over the course of the novel Schow has deserters crucified and/or used for target practice, a would-be assassin castrated-by-zombie-jaws, Token Good Teammate Skip beaten and then fed to zombies for trying to escape, Frankie gangraped, and a harmless homeless man shot down simply for being found in Frankie's company. Towards the end, he throws a handicapped man out of his Hummer while driving at top speed, so that he can make good his own escape. Enjoying the situation far more than he should, and unconcerned about the very people he is supposed to be protecting, Schow is an affront to the rest of humanity.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero Light Novel:
  • Malty S. Melromarc is the sociopathic daughter of Queen Mirelia. Happily playing at adventuring, she routinely betrays those with her, accusing Shield Hero Naofumi of rape to ruin him and possibly see him executed while also selling female companions to slavery or brothels. Later assisting with a potential coup to assassinate her little sister Melty, Malty inspires several coups and armed uprisings while repeatedly double-crossing all in her path, causing untold bloodshed and even seeing her mother killed so she can take the throne herself.
  • Raphtalia's former owner is a sadistic bigot towards demi-humans. After the first Wave of Calamity, he has a village of surviving demi-humans attacked, slaughtering the adults and enslaving the children. Rabier regularly tortured his slaves, causing several of them to die from his treatment of them. Seeking to kill the wanted Naofumi to look like a hero, Rabier tortures Van Reichnott to try and find Naofumi's location, and attempts to do the same to Princess Melty afterwards. With the last of his strength, Rabier releases a monster sealed within the town and orders it to destroy everything in sight, willing to put countless lives at risk all to gain glory by killing Naofumi.
• The Ritual, by Adam Nevill: Loki is the leader of a band of Black Metal delinquents who hope to bring about the end of the world through their music and cruelty. Boastful of how evil and wicked he is, Loki is a Serial Killer who has claimed nine lives in the past, all fueled by bigotry and prejudice. Having found the land of Moder in the isolated Swedish forest, Loki works with his band to reawaken Moder and unleash it onto travelers in the area, getting innocents gored and butchered. Capturing the hiker Luke, Loki forces him to witness one of his friend's disemboweled bodies before tormenting and terrorizing him, Loki planning to sacrifice Luke to Moder in the hopes it will unleash more Old Gods onto the Earth and bring the apocalypse Loki has dreamt of.
• River Of Stars, by Guy Gavriel Kay: Bai'ji is an Altai warlord, and third-in-command after his brother, Wan'yen, and kaghan Yan'po. Generally regarded as his brother's Evil Genius, Bai'ji helps Wan'yen betray and murder the Xiaolu Emperor and his First Minister, burying them both up to their necks and then having them eaten alive by ants; he keeps their skulls to drink wine from. Bai'ji then persuades Wan'yen and Yan'po to invade Kitai, to the south, destroying the Twelfth Dynasty, and reducing city after city to rubble. When Wan'yen sends him after escaping prisoners, Bai'ji objects, because he was getting ready to rape a number of Kitai women in front of their husbands. At the time of his death in the swamps of southern Kitai, Bai'ji was plotting to avenge this "insult" by murdering both Wan'yen and Yan'po. A sadist with imperial ambitions, Bai'ji left the world a better place by leaving it.
• Rivers of London: Albert Woodville-Gentle, the original Faceless Man, was a charming but vicious East End gangster during the 1970's. Albert cemented his position through brutality and corruption, terrifying the local gangs into submission by presenting them with local thug Larry the Lark's still-living decapitated head, begging for someone to kill him. Kidnapping numerous innocent people, Albert used experimental and unreliable techniques to transform them into Beast Men, imprisoning and forcing them to work at his club "The Garden of Unearthly Delights", offering all manner of sexual depravities to anyone who could afford it. Following being forced into early retirement—leaving most of his victims to starve to death—Albert, upon being found by the second Faceless Man, happily tutored his successor in all he knew about magic as well as providing him with his old criminal contacts, enabling all his horrific crimes to occur.
• Road to Perdition novelization, by Max Allan Collins: Harlen Maguire is a death-loving hitman who spends his free time photographing murders, many of which he himself perpetrates. Introduced killing a wounded man in a street alley, Maguire is then hired to track down Michael O'Sullivan and his son, Michael Jr., happily hoping to murder them both and add them to his massive "gallery of death". Slaughtering an entire cafe, murdering one of his own partners, and killing an innocent couple along the way, Maguire mortally wounds O'Sullivan and attempts to photograph his dying moments before moving onto Michael Jr., even after the contract on the duo has been called off.
• Röd måne ("Red Moon"): Ylva Svensdotter wants her own brother to die in war so she can claim the right to his wife's farm. When he does die, she feigns sadness over it. She accuses her sister-in-law and her two maids of witchcraft after and since this is the 17th century, they're sentenced to death. Ylva also gladly planned for her brother's six year old daughter Indra to die as well, but Indra was rescued. When her daughter Maja lost her ability to speak from the shock of being flogged, Ylva actually accuses her of being a witch as well and has her sent to a family where she is raped and abused for many years. And when Indra returned to claim her mother's farm, Ylva accuses her niece of witchcraft. At this point, Ylva even loses the support of her husband, who had only obeyed her until then.
• Roll Over and Die:
  • "The Girl Who Wanted to be Boring" & "Flum's Blessing in Disguise" (Episode 1, Chapters 1-2): The unnamed slave merchant was a greedy, sadistic coward who would indoctrinate babies into believing that their only purpose was to be sold to others and make him money. The merchant showed no regard to who he sold his slaves, and if he couldn't make a profit off of his "merchandise", he would have slaves eaten by ghouls and would turn their deaths into a spectacle for his sadistic pleasure. The merchant would trick the slaves into feeling false hope by offering them a cursed sword to defend themselves against the ghouls that would in reality melt them into a puddle if they touched it. When heroine Flum begged for mercy, the merchant blamed her for "tricking" him into losing a lot of money and told her the only way she could make up for the sin of being useless was to die or she could take her chances with the cursed sword. When Flum turned the tables by being able to wield the cursed sword and killed his ghouls, the Slave Merchant begged Flum for his life. despite condemning her and others to death for his entertainment mere moments ago.
  • "The Lies and Losses of the Necromantic Memories" (Episode 4): Satils Francois was a noblewoman who appeared to run legitimate businesses, but it was all a front to hide her dealings with the slave trade and the Church of Origin. She had Susy Chalmers tortured and murdered, then proceeded to fund the necromancy research of her widower, Dafydd. She had dealings with the slave merchant, who provided her with beautiful girls, such as Milkit, to take delight in breaking them. When her subordinates built her a private torture room, Satils murdered them to hide the secret. Resurrected after her death at Flum's hands, Satils gained control of the Necromancy Focal Core that allowed her to turn all the dead people revived with Origin cores in Shoel Village into monsters, including Dafydd's family. Without hesitation, Satils forced the dead to murder their still living relatives, eventually fusing them into a monster. She proceeded to absorbed Dafydd because he outlived his usefulness while mocking him about how she was responsible for his misery. Capturing Flum, Satils tortured Flum using the Voice of the Legion of all the dead people to the point Flum briefly forget everything, including her own name, before Satils proceeded to go on a rampage to kill Flum's friends and any of the remaining survivors.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms:
  • Li Ru, the son-in-law of Dong Zhuo, is a mastermind behind his master's rise to power and complicit in his many atrocities. Convincing the warrior Lu Bu to betray and murder his own adoptive father to join Dong Zhuo's side, Li Ru intends to poison the Emperor and his family. Enraged by their death poems, Li Ru throws the Emperor's mother from a window; has his consort strangled; and personally forces the Emperor to drink poison wine. When coalition forces approach the capital, Li Ru has the city ransacked, killing thousands and forcing millions on a perilous march while pillaging, killing, and raping all they find.
  • Sun Hao is the last emperor of the Wu dynasty, as well as its very worst. Revealing himself to be a brutal and hedonistic tyrant not long after taking power, Sun Hao would kill many of his own ministers for speaking out against his cruelty. Hao's excessive hedonism would result in him abusing Wu's treasury to host lavish parties where guests that displeased him were Flayed Alive or had their eyes gorged out, all while his people suffered from thirst and starvation. Sun Hao's actions would lead ultimately to the collapse of Wu, with the depopulated and destitute kingdom being easily swept aside when the kingdom of Jin made its final push to reunify China, with no one left to fight for him.
• Room: "Old Nick"—the otherwise-unnamed man who garners his appropriate title from a title of Satan—kidnaps and locks away a young woman in the titular "Room", using the woman as a means of pleasure by raping her almost every night on end for seven years. Old Nick accidentally impregnates Ma and forces her to give birth right in front of him without the use of painkillers or any medical equipment whatsoever, leading to the baby's death. Once Ma gives birth to Jack, the young narrator of the novel, Nick keeps them both as his prisoners with threats to leave them both to starve to death if they ever try and escape, acting good on his threats by cutting the power and heat to the Room once Jack obliviously wanders outside.
• The Round House, by Louise Erdrich: Linden Lark is a violently misogynistic racist emblematic of the people the US government fails to prosecute due to its negligence of Native Americans. Spurned by the affection of Native American woman Mayla Wolfskin, Linden kidnapped her and her infant child before raping and kidnapping the social worker Geraldine Coutts after Mayla briefly escaped to report him, planning to kill her and Mayla while using her infant child as a prop to collect child support and threatening to kill Mayla's infant if she misbehaved. After Geraldine narrowly escaped, Linden burnt Mayla to death and buried her, smug in the knowledge that Geraldine and her family, including her 13-year old son Joe, would be easy pickings for him in the future after he was let off with a slap on the wrist.
• Royal Bastards, by Andrew Shvarts: First Novel: Razz Gaul is a vicious brute with a murderous hatred of his brother Zell. After Zell spared his life in a duel to the death, Razz repaid him by murdering Zell's first love and leaving him to cover it up to avoid starting a war. Razz would later hunt his brother and his friends for Lord Kent, butchering everyone at a random farmhouse on the way for fun. Razz later tries to force himself onto Princess Lyrianna.

S

• Sabriel: After Kerrigor, aka Prince Rogirek, became one of the Greater Dead, he tricked his half-brother into helping him murder their mother and their sisters in order for Kerrigor to use their blood to shatter the Charter Stones protecting the kingdom from the dead. Defeated and driven deep into death, Kerrigor's actions nevertheless destroyed The Old Kingdom, allowing all manner of The Undead free access to the world over the next several hundred years, while he waited for the chance to break free. Kidnapping the infant Sabriel, Kerrigor took her deep into death as part of a plot to blackmail her father, The Abhorsen, into freeing him. Years later, he traps The Abhorsen himself in Death and breaks free into the world of the living. He then tries to capture Sabriel and his revived half-brother as part of a plan to shatter the remaining Charter Stones. When this fails after The Abhorsen's heroic sacrifice, Kerrigor re-emerges from Death and leads a massive army of undead across the wall and into a girl's school, killing soldiers and students alike, before devouring Sabriel's Friendly Enemy, Mogget, alive and finally forcing Sabriel herself into a mutual kill. Obsessed with power and staying alive no matter what the cost to others, Kerrigor is the worst that the realm of the Dead has to offer.
• The Sadist's Bible, by Nicole Cushing: "God" is a sadistic entity who rules over a hellish dimension of eternal suffering, where countless souls are sent purely for its own enjoyment. Siring hundreds of corrupted children to spread misery across the world, "God" took a woman called Lori as its concubine and tortured her sexually every night for many years, driving her into insanity. Angered when Lori planned to thwart it by murdering their baby and committing suicide with another woman called Ellie, "God" transported both into its realm and then corrupted Ellie into becoming one of its torturers and having her defile Lori for the rest of eternity, before sending the baby to Lori's grandparents to reap more souls for "God" to claim.
• Safehold: Vicar Zhaspahr Clyntahn is the Grand Inquisitor of the Church of God Awaiting, as well as the Big Bad for the series so far. In A Mighty Fortress, his response, to learning of a group of reformers within the Temple itself, is to have them, their families, their aides, and their families arrested, subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture, and executed, this eclipsing a delcaration of Holy War that had been stewing in the background since By Schism Rent Asunder. In How Firm a Foundation, he launches the Sword of Scheuler, an operation which instigates a civil war in the Republic of Siddarmark that kills hundreds of thousands in both the initial attack and the aftermath, which features a winter full of starvation as well as atrocities and counter-atrocities committed by and against Temple Loyalists, vis-à-vis those who remained loyal to Siddarmark's Lord Protector. His penchant for the torture and painful death of his enemies has resulted in multiple instances where armies aligned with the church Leave No Survivors out of a sense of mercy, as to spare any would be to leave prisoners of Clyntahn's wrath.
• The Saga of Darren Shan:
  • Desmond Tiny is a sadistic time traveler (and Darren's father) who is revealed to have manipulated almost all the terrible events in history just for his own personal pleasure. He brags about the way he likes to drink the blood of children, claiming "it's so sweet", and on another occasion claims he is excited to witness a volcano that will kill thousands. He pitted Darren and Steve against one another, insisting that the vampires only have three chances to kill Steve before he overthrows the Vampires. Whichever boy won-Darren or Steve-would become the Lord of Shadows, kill all of their friends, and became the ruler of the world. When Darren decides to Screw Destiny and let both himself and Steve die, Mr. Tiny instead creates dragons which results in the Post-Apocalyptic world as seen in The Lake of Souls. His motivation is he looked into the future and saw that things were going to be too peaceful for his liking, so he set the stage for a lot of chaos to amuse him.
  • The Vampenze Lord, aka Steve "Leopard" Leonard, is an unstable tyrant who starts up a war with the vampires to get back at Mr. Crepsley for turning Darren into a vampire and not him. Among his actions are seducing the hero's sister in order to get her pregnant; using his own son as a bargaining chip against Darren; and snapping the neck of Evra's eight-year-old son just for his own sick joy. Even the other Vampenze dislike him and only serve him because they have to.
• The Saga of the Noble Dead is set in a borderline-Crapsack World, so it has a couple of these:
  • Warlord Darmouth is a paranoid and psychotic tyrant who runs his lands with fear and intimidation. People are killed on a routine basis if he gets the wrong idea about them. He keeps his followers in line with blackmail, emotional manipulation and fear to keep them too weak to resist. Trying to leave his service results in swift death for all involved, even their families.
  • Ubad, a Necromancer who worships the Big Bad, Il'Samar, manipulated a vampire ally of his into raping a human woman to father a dhampyr on her. The result was said ally's death as his energy was drained and Ubad gaining the dhampyr he badly wanted. The reason was so he would have a champion to lead an army of the dead to purge the world of life. Unlike Il'Samar's other followers, Ubad is simply in it to see how far he can push the bounds of his own powers as far as he can go until the world burns.
• The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw: The Three Saints are a trio of mysterious mad scientists obsessed with the limits of human experience. Having found the heroic Plague Doctor as a child, the Saints subjected them to all manner of horrific experimentation. Finding them after the destruction of the kingdom, the Plague Doctor and their mermaid companion see the Saints have set themselves up as gods, turning children into abused feral beasts who butcher one another and are agonizingly experimented on in turn. The Saints simply intend to experiment on the mermaid herself, not even recognizing the Plague Doctor from the old days, as they do not remember "meat".
• Sardines (In the Dark): Jackie Merriweather is a member of the youth group who secretly orchestrated the massacre. Believing that the group is full of hypocrites and naysayers, Jackie decided to appoint the monstrous Ezra to follow her to camp so he could slaughter everyone in the group. After Ezra brutally murders a dozen teenagers and young adults, Jackie personally knocks out Kylie, her supposed best friend who did nothing wrong but allow her and Harold drink alcohol, and ties her up to a chair. Once she wakes up, Jackie explains how she intends to use the massacre as a means to convince more people to convert to Christianity, moments before she attempts to murder Kylie.
• Satyrday: The owl is a powerful and megalomaniacal tyrant who rules over his army of ravens and the other animals of the forest with threats of torture and death. The animals who live under his rule exist in constant terror, as he's known to make dissenters disappear. In one instance, he has a young bird's wings broken and leaves him for dead. In the past, he massacred almost all of the humans in what became the Deadwood Forest, forcing the few survivors to live a wretched existence underground. Fourteen years ago, he sent a powerful whirlwind across the forest that killed thousands of the animals within and displaced many others. In the present day, the owl kidnaps the Moon from her proper orbit in the sky and cages her, causing the world to fall into turmoil with strange creatures and vegetation appearing that attack on sight. His ultimate plan is to rid the world of the Sun to create an endless night. When a group of dissident ravens manage to free the Moon, the owl becomes completely deranged and orders his falcons to kill the animals of the forest indiscriminately.
• Savage: Roderick Whittle's manner is a mere Mask of Sanity, hiding the fact that he is in fact the infamous Jack the Ripper. We are first introduced to Whittle when 15-year-old Trevor Bentley, trying to escape some robbers, spies him killing a prostitute and mutilating the body. Trevor manages to escape, but ends up on the same boat as Whittle, bound for the United States. Whittle attacks and kills a few more people, and plans to continue his spree in the US, making it seem the work of "savages". Eventually, Whittle also kills some more people, including a teenager; Trevor's Love Interest—-later mocking Trevor about how he used her corpse, unbeknownst to him, as a shield against Trevor's bullets; a posse of men sent to capture or kill him and placing their corpses in macabre positions; and numerous women. He finally tries to kill Trevor and his new love interest, but not before revealing that he has become a sheriff's deputy named "John Carver". With over 20 brutal murders to his name, as well as a taste for torture and possibly even cannibalism, Roderick Whittle is easily one of the most psychotic and sadistic versions of Jack the Ripper ever put into fiction.
• Savage Species, by Jonathan Janz: The Old One, also known as the Wendigo, is the progenitor of the monstrous "Children" lurking beneath the campgrounds of the so-called Peaceful Valley. Disturbed by human activity, the Old One disperses his followers to begin slaughtering and torturing people by the hundreds. The Old One isn't a mindless Eldritch Abomination but a cruel, gloating sadist who intends to twist the innocent baby the heroes are protecting into another one of his monstrous Children and who regrets at the end of the book that he wasn't able to torture the heroes who sacrificed themselves against him even more.
• Sawkill Girls, by Claire Legrand: The demon known as the Collector is a wicked creature sealed on Sawkill Island. Hungering for prey, the Collector makes a pact with one family to serve him, dominating and even mentally or physically raping the one he selects as a "queen", terrorizing them into his subjects. The Collector has them bring him prey, young women he kills in agony while devouring them. With his latest queen Val, he has her bring him the sister of novel heroine Marion, and the other heroine Zoey's best friend Thora. When Val grows too independent, the Collector marks her as well, savagely twisting her mind to hurt all of them as much as he can.
• Scarpetta Series, by Patricia Cornwell:
  • Cruel and Unusual & From Potter's Field: Temple Brooks Gault proved to be a sociopath ever since childhood, tormenting his twin sister Jayne and killing her puppy over perceived Parental Favoritism. Growing into a volatile narcissist with no qualms about killing a man who has insulted his looks, he resolves to become a Serial Killer in a twisted search for fame. His victims, whose bodies he degrades in various ways, include a 13-year-old boy; a pregnant woman; and a prison guard who was offering him a hideout. After escaping capture, Gault announces his return by murdering Jayne, then murders three cops to further taunt Kay Scarpetta and her team. When the police corner him in the subway, Gault electrocutes Detective Meier to death and takes Lucy hostage before trying to kill Kay.
  • Unnatural Exposure: Phyllis Crowder—aka Deadoc—after being made a scapegoat for the Birmingham smallpox outbreak, secretly spliced the virus with monkeypox to get her revenge through a pandemic. She starts testing the new virus on her own mother, ultimately killing and dismembering her to hide the traces of the disease, before sending contaminated beauty samples to the residents of Tangiers Island, causing three more deaths. While acting as a helpful assistant to Kay Scarpetta, Phyllis taunts her online with grisly photos of the crime scenes and eventually infects her staff, resulting in the death of Kay's assistant Wingo. When confronted by Kay after her sixth murder, a drifter she shot after he broke into her caravan lab, Phyllis coldly dismisses her actions as a "tit for tat", uncaring that she could have threatened the whole world with a new bioweapon.
  • Point of Origin: Newton Joyce is a British entrepreneur who uses the inconveniences of his teenage acne as an excuse to indulge in serial killing. Moving easily from UK to the USA thanks to his wealth, Joyce murders young and beautiful people to remove and keep their faces, only leaving mutilated torsos to be found. After teaming up with Carrie Grethen, Joyce starts using fire to cover his traces, uncaring of the collateral damage. One time, Joyce sets fire to a whole farmhouse, leaving eighteen horses to a slow and agonizing death. With a body count of 27 and an absolute disregard for the pain he causes, Newton Joyce is the most prolific serial killer faced by Kay's team.
• Scavenge the Stars duology:
  • Scavenge the Stars (first book): Captain Zharo is warden of the debtor ship known as the Blackfish. Zharo is in charge of forcing the child workers to pay off their debts, and delights in breaking them psychologically by stripping them of their humanity, even removing their names. Zharo subjects them to hellish conditions and starvation onboard and will even increase the time they have to spend paying off their debt with the flimsiest of excuses, often leading these kids to their deaths. As a cruel personal attack, Zharo rubs into Amaya Chandra's face that her mother has been dead the entire time Amaya was working on this ship and Amaya wasn't aware.
  • Ravage the Dark: André Basque is a powerful nobleman in charge of a fleet of debtor ships in which prisoners are enslaved and forced to work off their debt. Basque is behind a counterfeiting scheme which involves creating fake gold coins to increase his wealth, but it comes with a horrendous price. The coins are laced with a toxin which induces a deadly illness known as Ash Fever, of which Basque is aware, but doesn't care. A greedy, hateful man, Basque already has the cure to Ash Fever but is content to let it spread and Kill the Poor he despises.
• Schwarzesmarken: Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Axmann, one of the highest figures in The Stasi of East Berlin, is a selfish, sadistic officer who keeps a hold on Berlin with an iron fist. Any hint of dissent is ruthlessly quelled, with Axman ordering purges of entire families. The hero of the story, Theodor Eberbach, was tortured by the Stasi with his family murdered, except his sister Lise. Axmann has young women, including Lise, raped, tortured and broken to make them into agents who use their bodies to seduce targets and murder them. During Lise's training, Axmann even had her execute civilians, before forcing her to murder the last children with a rock to "save bullets. " Throughout the series, Axman is willing to slaughter whoever he has to in order to keep his grip on Berlin and rule it through the Stasi, caring nothing for the state of the country he wants to rule.
• The Schwarzschild Radius, by Gustavo Florentin: "The Webmaster", Hector Brazos, is a sadistic torturer and killer for hire, whose signature style is recording his victims' deaths. Originally an assassin for the Mexican Cartel, the Webmaster slaughtered dozens of people, including entire families, inflicting horrific acts of torture, rape, and murder on every one of them, children included. Wanting to earn his money easier, the Webmaster turned his child pornography website into a hub for individuals worldwide to bid on the torture young teenage girls the Webmaster had kidnapped would endure for the following weeks. This torture included everything from electrocution and bone breaking, to being raped by either the Webmaster or his trained dogs, and, when the girls eventually wore out, the Webmaster would hold a final bid for the excruciating way each girl would die. When any of his partners try to turn on him, the Webmaster wastes no time in torturing and slowly killing them. After failing to sadistically torture 3 teenage girls, the Webmaster kills one, along with an innocent homeless man, opens fire on police officers before setting a bomb off on top of them, and tries to rape and murder two of his only surviving victims. Caring for money above all else, the Webmaster would commit any and all depraved actions to make a quick buck, and would enjoy every minute of it.
• Second Apocalypse: Iskiak, better known by the name of "Aurang", prince of the Inchoroi and bad even by their standards, was one of the final Inchoroi after their wars with the inhuman Cûnoroi, or "Nonmen". Desiring to escape his own damnation, Aurang participated in the annihilation of entire worlds before the Inchoroi arrived on Earwa. At the end of the war with the Nonmen, Aurang assisted in giving them immortality, but also introduced a plague to kill every female of their species, leaving the Nonmen to look forward to nothing but eventual madness and extinction. Later forming the Consult, Aurang initiates the Apocalypse by unleashing the No-God. As the Horde-General of the Consult, Aurang takes the field, committing countless atrocities and massacring entire cities with his and his people's own creations the Sranc, beings so filled with lust and rage they can only interact with other species by killing and raping them to death. Aurang is also a Serial Rapist, boasting of this to Kellhus, and manipulates the Holy War to help bring about the deaths of all but a fraction of beings on Earwa to not only keep himself from hellfire, but to continue the monstrosity that damned him to begin with.
• Secrets Not Meant to be Kept: Martha Plunkett is the head of Treehouse, a reputable preschool which is, in fact, a toddler sex ring. For nearly twenty years, Plunkett has molested and exploited preschoolers for child pornography, both directly and by having her staff do the same. To terrorize the children into silence, she assigns the children live rabbits to care for, then kills the rabbits right in front of them.
• The Secret of Kells novelization, by Eithne Massey: Harald Redtooth is the Chief Northman, savage leader of the band of Northmen raiders currently plaguing Ireland. Redtooth has the Northmen invade several villages, cities, and monasteries for the purposes of slaughtering most of their populations, enslaving the survivors, and looting all of the treasure possible to satisfy Redtooth's greed. With even children not exempt from death or slavery at the Northmen hands, Redtooth wipes out the monk city of Iona, then makes his way to Kells, where his Northmen lay waste to the city and set it aflame as they kill everything in their path. After severely wounding Abbot Cellach, Redtooth orders the man's close friend Aidan and nephew Brendan executed after swiping all their belongings and wearing them as trophies. Showcasing a cruel grin while committing his actions and even going so far as to name his sword "Monk Mincer", Redtooth is presented as a far more uniquely evil force than his movie counterpart.
• Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror's "Direct Report", by Leigh Perry: Claudio Mendoza is a vampiric Serial Rapist who preys on potential employees. After presumably killing his previous manager, Claudio kidnaps and infects a woman, Taylor, locking her in a room for six months, where she is drugged, starved, chained to a bed and raped daily by him and a variety of fetishists, having done this to countless of his "children" before. After Taylor escapes, Claudio congratulates her for regaining her senses so soon and threatens to leave her exposed to the sun until she is destroyed.
• Senseless and Merciless, by Mary Burton: The Other, aka Josiah Cross, hailed from the wealthy Cross family and was known for his sporadic acts of violence before his serial killings. The last night at university, he battered and raped protagonist Eva Rayburn. When Micah died, the Other took his name and avoided jail time but continued his violence by targeting people for serial killings. Knowing from the start that his mother was behind a series of murders, he chose not to inform the police, enabling her to kill many people. The Other got into a partnership with James Dixon where his partner would beat and rape women he abducted and The Other would prolong his victim's misery by mocking them until he kills them and watch them die in front of him for his own pleasure. He would dissolve his victim's bodies in chemicals to keep their bones as trophies and use their femur bones to create chess pieces. Having done this to at least six women, he intended to do more to get police and media attention and managed to kill two more women. When James slipped up in their partnership again, the Other brutally murdered him and then killed James's partner and tried to pin the murders on them. Blaming and harboring spite towards Eva for his own perceived problems, he attempted to murder her half-sister, Angela, to emotionally hurt her.
• The Sentinel (1977) & The Guardian, by Jeffrey Konvitz: Charles Chazen appears a friendly, eccentric old fellow who is, in truth, Satan himself. When the new potential guardian to the gates of Hell, Alison, arrives at the apartment that rests over the gateway, Chazen attempts to kill those she loves and torture her mentally until she breaks and kills herself. When Alison takes her place as the new Sentinel, Chazen sets his sights on the next Sentinel, Father McBride, starting a web of murder and destruction to break him. Tricking McBride into suicide and damnation, Chazen prepares to lead the legions of Hell and the damned into the world to bring about the apocalypse, gloating about his intent to dethrone God and take over all creation.
• Serafina and the Black Cloak, by Robert Beatty: The Man in the Black Cloak, Montgomery Thorne, is the terrifying apparition stalking the grand Biltmore Estate. Originally a rich man who lost his fortune, the Man gained the ability to devour the souls, along with the talents and knowledge, of anyone he wanted by using a mysterious black cloak. When the Man consumes someone's soul, they are left trapped in his cloak in constant horror and agony, and the Man has no compunctions regarding who he devours, be they adult or child, and will outright murder anyone who gets his way. After he begins rapidly aging due to his use of the cloak, the Man begins devouring the souls of as many children as he can to preserve his life force, and, when Serafina tries to steal his cloak to save his victims, the Man sadistically tries to suffocate her for irritating him. A greedy sociopath who would harm anyone and everyone to become wealthy and powerful once again, the Man in the Black stood out in this children's novel as a truly dark and twisted man.
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: The man only known as the footman is a Psycho for Hire working for Daniel Coleridge. Tasked with hunting down Aiden's various hosts and Anna, the footman stalks them while sadistically taunting them before killing Aiden's hosts, including his host Constable Rashton, taking his time to kill them slowly if possible. The footman threatens to painfully kill both Aiden and Anna if they don't cooperate, only to try to kill them anyway once they do.
• Shade's Children: Silver Sun is a member of the extradimensional Overlords, and is bad even compared to her evil companions. Silver Sun sets up the transfer for the Overlords' invasion to start with, exterminating ninety-percent of humanity with all survivors under the age of fourteen herded away. Silver Sun and the other Overlords then set up a horrific regime where teenagers are pumped full of sterilizing drugs and horribly conditioned before being carted en masse to the Meat Factory, where they're chopped up and converted into Creatures whose sole purpose is to kill—retaining a vestige of their humanity and remaining fully aware the entire time—and females are raped for years on end to produce more fodder for the Creatures before being killed too. Once Silver Sun is finally confronted, she personally tortures two of the young heroes herself while boasting of her responsibility of setting the entire system up to begin with—and cheerfully notes "it's what you're there for" when confronted on why she did so.
• "The Shadow (Fairy Tale)": The Learned Man's first shadow is a selfish, manipulative being. Abandoning its master, the shadow spends years spying on people and blackmailing them with their darkest secrets to purloin their goods. Returning to the Learned Man, the shadow convinces its ailing former master to journey with it to a health retreat while swapping roles. Destroying the Learned Man's sense of self, the shadow fixates on marrying a princess and when the Learned Man refuses to live as its shadow forever while it rules, manipulates the princess into imprisoning and executing the Learned Man.
• Shadowdance Trilogy: Leon Connington, the head of the Connington family, made much of his vast fortune running a prison to hold anyone the Trifect wants to disappear. In a world of Black-and-Gray Morality and depraved villains, Connington stands out for personally heading much of the vicious torture of these victims and for being a Serial Rapist, torturing and raping Melody Gemcroft for years and convincing the Gemcroft family she was long dead to continue assaulting her. He also threatened to do the same to Alyssa Gemcroft. In addition, he dressed up and raped Stephen Connington, his heir, driving him insane and making him into the Widow, a butcher and Serial Killer. Utterly unrepentant of these crimes, he is directly responsible for the creation of many of the villains in the second half of the series.
• Shadow Form, by Edmund Hughes: Emanuel Jacques proves that in a world of supernaturals, sometimes the worst of monsters can be all too human. Emanuel tricks girls from impoverished countries into believing he'll give them a better life abroad, but instead he has them stripped and turned into sex slaves. After two of his employees escape out of fear, Emanuel tracks them down, intending to have them both killed for daring to defy him. Emanuel is also a terrible boss who'll gladly kill his own minions if they get in his way, writing off everyone as expandable. Before his defeat, Emanuel threatens to gun down the best friend/lover of Jack Materson should Jack not let him go, while still in reality planning to kill her anyway.
• Shadow Man, by Cody McFadyen: Keith Hillstead is the father of Jack Jr., and is the one responsible for starting his path of destruction. As a young man, Keith believed himself to be a descendant of Jack the Ripper, and murdered his parents for trying to hide it from him. After seducing a young woman into becoming his wife, Keith spent weeks torturing and raping her until she gave birth to a son, who he then began to teach how to torture and kill. Claiming close to 100 victims over the years, Keith photographed the tortures, rapes, and deaths of his victims and kept them in an album. When his wife attempted to murder him, Keith violently raped and pummelled her, before trying to slit her throat.
• Shadow-Maze, by Mark & Julia Smith: The blue-robed Knifeman is the true source of the atrocities the so-called Knifemen of Bali have been perpetrating across the continent of Levindre. The Knifeman has his six magical proxies exterminate entire villages all across the nation, sparing only the fit and able-bodied while leaving the rest for a torturous death. The Knifeman preserves all those he captures in constant agony entombed within ice, subject to the constant pain of the cold, and when the Knifeman promises their freedom if they only kill the heroes, the Knifeman's victims advance on the heroes with such desperate ferocity that none of them can be saved. The Knifeman aspires to render all life in the mage-garden of Nevern cold and dead all for the purpose of becoming a god and subjecting the entire world to death or enslavement, and subjects the sorceress capable of making his dreams a reality to such pain he has to hold himself back from torturing her to death.
• Shadow of the Fox: Lady Satomi is a sadistic Blood Witch in service to the Master of Demons, Genno. A childish psychopath, Satomi regularly kills her serving girls for fun and pleasure. To serve Genno, Satomi has an entire village of hundreds of innocents torn to pieces by demons as a mass sacrifice to summon the demon Yaburama, and uses him to massacre a group of monks guarding the scroll containing a wish her master requires. Revealed to be plotting to use the wish to usurp and betray Genno, Satomi admits she knows he intends to cause mass destruction and death upon his return and is fine with it if it gives her a chance at godhood itself.
• The Shadow of the Wind: Francisco Javier Fumero, the corrupt chief of police in Barcelona, relishes the power his position brings him. As a boy, Fumero tortured small animals as an outlet for his sadism, and when he discovered Julian Carax, the one boy to treat him kindly, and Penelope, who Fumero lusted after, were together, he attempted to murder Julian and devoted his life to destroying him and Penelope alike. Fumero sent his men to kill Julian and personally murdered a woman who loved Julian for helping him. In the years that passed, Fumero terrorized the populace of Barcelona as a uniformed thug, torturing those who caught his ire. One luckless man named Fermin was held and beaten before Fumero tortured him with a blowtorch. When the young hero of the novel, Daniel Siempre, closes in on the buried story of Julian Carax, Fumero wastes no time in attempting to kill him and all who know the truth as well. Cruel, sadistic, violent and insatiably power-hungry, Fumero represents how far a once almost pitiable boy can fall.
• Shadow Police series: The Smiling Man is the new God of Evil for the city of London and the series's overarching threat. A smarmy, soft-spoken, yet greedy and sadistic deity, the Smiling Man murdered Lucifer and took over hell, with him personally overseeing all the tortures. The Smiling Man then kidnapped the souls of everyone who ever lived in London back to the very beginning and broke the metaphysical rules, ensuring that everyone who stayed in London, even for a single night, was condemned to hell upon death. Still hungry for more, the Smiling Man spreads chaos and fear through the city, subtly pulling the strings from behind the scenes in the murder sprees of both Mora Losley and the New Ripper, and orchestrating the Sherlock Holmes Murders. The Smiling Man also enabled Rob Toshack's ten years of conquest and rule of London's underworld; engineered the destruction of the city's mystical Council unleashing all the trapped horrors upon the citizens of London; spent years possessing and torturing Rebecca Lofthouse's husband Peter; and attempted to drive Inspector Quill to insanity and despair, all feeding into his overall plan to have Hell grow until it devours London.
• Shannara series:
  • The Heritage of Shannara: Most of the Shadowen are bad, but their leader, Rimmer Dall, is in a class of his own. From his position as The Federation's First Seeker, Dall enforces the state's xenophobic, expansionist policies, enslaving the Dwarves, suppressing resistance, and arresting magic-users, whom he drains of their magics and then, should they survive, throws into The Pit. When Quickening gives the Dwarves hope by healing the Meade Gardens, he sends Pe Ell to assassinate her. When the Elves return to the Four Lands, Dall dispatches the Creepers to wage a war of extermination against them. He personally tries to murder Walker Boh and Cogline, then sends the Four Horsemen after them, resulting in Cogline's death. He plays a long psychological game with Par and Coll Ohmsford, aimed at shattering Par's mind and making him susceptible to a Grand Theft Me. Dall’s crowning achievement, however, was the construction of Southwatch, a living tower that drained the life from the world itself, and would have, if left unchecked, resulted in the Four Lands becoming an apocalyptic wasteland, inhabited by nothing save a few, maddened Shadowen. Concerned only with his personal power and desire to feed on the strongest magics available, Rimmer Dall wreaked more devastation on the Four Lands than any villain before or since, inflicting damage that has taken centuries to even begin recovering from.
  • The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara:
    • The Morgawr is the Big Bad of the trilogy. He's a half man, half lizard freak who slaughters Grianne and Bek Ohmsfords' family, kidnaps Grianne, tells her Bek is dead, and convinces her that Walker, the Druid, and his Arch-Enemy is behind it, then raises her to be as bad as himself. He's also a magic-draining leech who feeds on the souls, minds, and magics of his victims and turns people into People Puppets by pulling their brains out through the back of their heads and eating them, leaving them with their skills, but no free will. In the opening pages of Morgawr he drains two-hundred fifty men onscreen, scarring witness Sen Dunsidan for life, and driving the latter's Torture Technician to suicide. He later does the same to the crew of Grianne's ship, Black Moclips after she betrays him, before hunting her down and trying to kill her because he considers her life his property to dispose of how he wishes. Completely comfortable with his evil, The Morgawr takes pride in having brought Grianne down to his level, and finds her desire to better herself completely laughable.
    • Cree Bega is The Dragon to The Morgawr. A Smug Snake of a Mwellret with a penchant for murder, Cold-Blooded Torture, Kick the Dog, and Fantastic Racism, Cree Bega is contemptuous of all the little peoplessss, and develops an unhealthy obsession with Ahren Elessedil, making it his personal mission to transform him into The Woobie. He forces Ahren to watch The Morgawr feed on the crew of Black Moclips for no other reason than traumatising him, and upon Ahren's escape, is given custody of his crush, Ryer Ord Star. He and his Mwellrets proceed to strip her, beat her, break all of her fingers, slash the soles of her feet, defile her until she faints, and then after she wakes up, tie her to a yardarm, lash her with a rawhide whip, and leave her to bake in the sun, leading to her suicide. During his final confrontation with Ahren, Cree Bega stabs Elven Hunter Kian In the Back, and then gloats to Ahren about what he did to Ryer Ord Star ("She took ssso long to die little Elvesss. Ssso long it ssseemed it would take forever."), before trying to kill him. The cumulative effect of all the trauma that Cree Bega puts Ahren through is an eventual psychological implosion that leaves him utterly shellshocked and broken into the next series.
  • The Defenders of Shannara: Mischa is the secondary antagonist of The High Druid's Blade. A sadistic old witch, Mischa is an ally of Arcannen, for whom she works as a Torture Technician. She uses her illusions to torment Chrysallin Leah for weeks on end, convincing her that she has been permanently disfigured and crippled by torturers working for Aphenglow Elessedil. She then pretends to befriend Chrysallin and helps her to "escape" before having her illusory Aphenglow track them down, faking her own death to further ruin Chrys's psyche, and convince her that Aphenglow is her enemy. When Grehling helps Chrys escape for real, Mischa goes after them, intending to dissect Grehling, and shatter Chrys's mind.
• Shardik: Child slave-dealer Genshed specifically deals in unwanted and deformed children so he can gain a greater profit and use methods that are more barbaric. Instead of grown-up overseers, he grooms the cruelest of the boys to be his overseers, replacing them only when they kill or damage too many of the slaves (or learn too much). He prides himself on being able to drive children mad without even touching them, though he isn't above physical abuse — chains through the ears, knife blades under the nails or across the eyes, a device called a "flytrap" that keeps the mouth open. He castrates the boys and it's implied that the children in his possession (mostly young ones, under fourteen) are sold as sex slaves of one kind or another. When he learns one boy will be used for begging, he cuts off the boy's hands to make him more valuable, then charges the new owner for the job. The only regret he ever shows is at the loss of a profit.
• The Shards: The Trawler is a depraved Serial Killer who targets Los Angeles teenagers to satisfy his twisted obsession with Robert Mallory. Behind a string of break-ins and assaults across the city, the Trawler uses these attacks to select victims for his murders. He stalks and psychologically terrorizes teenage girls by killing their pets before ultimately kidnapping them, at which point the Trawler spends days torturing and mutilating them to death by "remaking" their bodies into hideous chimeras via their own slaughtered pets' corpses. The Trawler then leaves their bodies on display as "art" for the public, inspiring and enlisting the Riders of the Afterlife cult to become "his friends" and commit further torture-murders in his stead. Once Robert dies and the Trawler claims one last victim in LA, he proclaims the city was just his latest spree in a "continuum" he will carry on elsewhere, and before departing he has Bret's beloved lover—and later, his dog—kidnapped, tortured to death, and pictures of the results sent to Bret.
• Shark Wars series, by E.J. Altbacker:
  • Battle of Riptide & Into the Abyss: Finnivus Victor is the spoiled leader of India Shiver, who believes that it is his birthright to conquer the Big Blue. In contrast to his more benevolent predecessor, Finnivus's reign is filled with pointless cruelties, in which he wipes out entire shivers to enslave their pups as Child Soldiers; consumes the heads of his enemies; and murders his own subordinates for little reason. Moving into Gray's territory, Finnivus sends his forces to wipe out every shiver there. When his first invasion fails, Finnivus angrily demands the extermination of every shiver in the Atlantic Ocean and becomes even crueler, such as sending assassins after his enemies; forcing his servant Velenka to consume poison after being accused of being a traitor; using his own sharks as target practice for himself; and torturing his former marine prime by cutting all of his appendages and making him helplessly witness the destruction of his home.
  • Kingdom of the Deep through The Last Emprex: Hokuu is a vile frilled shark who sought to orchestrate the extinction of every shark so that his own species can reign supreme. When the Fifth Shiver's leader King Bollagan declared his intention for peace with the Big Blue, Hokuu helps Drinnok murder him and his supporters to incite war against the other sharks. A master of dark kata, Hokuu uses his powers to steal the life force of other creatures to make himself more powerful, which he demonstrates by wiping out every resident in Riptide territory. After assassinating Seazarein Kaleth, Hokuu massacres all of his mako minions and uses their life force to free Drinnok and his Fifth Shiver from the Underwaters, planning to restart his genocide against the Big Blue. When Drinnok expresses interest in making peace with Gray, Hokuu allies himself with Grimkahn and his prehistores to kill Drinnok and directly participates in his attacks throughout the Big Blue, ultimately planning to betray him eventually. After Gray emerges victorious, a frustrated Hokuu tries killing him personally, taunting that he'll murder his friends afterward, saving his mother for last.
  • Enemy of Oceans & The Last Emprex: Grimkahn is a psychotic mosasaur who leads the prehistores in Drinnok's Fifth Shiver and participated in his coup to murder King Bollagan and his supporters. Snubbed by him for promotion, Grimkahn agrees to Hokuu's plan of overthrowing him, planning to wipe out the other sharks in the Big Blue so that the prehistores can rule. After his first attack fails, Grimkahn begins culling any minion that protests his rule and initiates attacks to exterminate whole shivers, including the children. Engaging with Gray's forces a second time, Grimkahn first tries asphyxiating them in a cave and, upon their escape, tries killing Gray himself, while sending his frilled sharks to maul his shiver sharks, innocent or otherwise.
• Shelter In Place, by Nora Roberts: Patricia Jane Hobart is a vengeful psychopath bent on taking her anger out on the world in the most destructive ways she can. As a teenager, she planned a mass shooting at a mall in her home town of Rockpoint, Maine, and convinced her brother and two of his friends to carry it out, leaving over ninety people dead and hundreds injured. Offended by the attention survivors of the massacre received, she began hunting them down and murdering them, along with killing her own mother and grandparents simply because she didn't like them. After failing to kill shooting survivor and police officer Reed Quartermaine, she goes on the run, continuing to kill survivors in increasingly cruel ways while mailing Quartermaine locks of their hair to taunt and threaten him. While a fugitive, she abducts a reporter famous for her coverage of the mall shooting and has her record a manifesto showing off Patricia's "genius", murdering her at the end of it despite promising she would not. By the end of the novel, Patricia's spiteful narcissism has ended over a hundred lives and devastated countless more.
• The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes: Harper Curtis is a former drifter who uncovers the time traveling House. Using it to become a Serial Killer, Harper seeks out the "shining girls", those with potential in the world, so he may murder them throughout history. Hunting down many young women, Harper gruesomely murders them, with only heroine Kirby escaping him. Curtis revels in the pain he causes, killing one woman as she begs for the sake of her children and another who dedicates her life to helping others as a social worker, even murdering his occasional lover Etta when he's bored with her. A complete nothing of a man, Curtis attempts to find fulfillment in his existence by stealing the lives of those better than him.
• A Shiny Can of Whup-Ass (from the After The Burn collection), by Ronald Kelly: Rott, the singular most evil human to ever walk the post-apocalyptic hellscape of the post-Burn world, is the most prolific Serial Killer in American history, with a legacy of indiscriminate rape, torture, and cannibalism against potentially over 600 victims—most perpetrated whilst they were still alive. After the Burn, Rott escapes from death row and takes advantage of the chaos to rile up a gang of murderous thugs and return to his hometown of Watkins Glen to savage his way through the town. Rott savagely executes his own men one after another for things as minor as "laughing without my permission"; cuts apart and eats the entire stock of the local pet shop after coldly murdering its elderly owner; murders and cannibalizes random people across the town; and attempts to have his goons gang-rape a young woman and torture her to death for thrills. Eventually, Rott proposes he and his gang go from door-to-door and slaughter their way through town, intending to turn the church into a whorehouse and keep the women of Watkins Glen as sex slaves; and round up the children of the town with implied intention of raping and torturing the lot of them for fun. Reviled even by his own father and appropriately referred to as the "new Satan", Rott lives by one twisted creed: "If it feels right, do it. That's what I always did."
• Shivers' Weirdo Waldo's Wax Museum: Mad Mac, The Keeper, is an eldritch entity who owns a Wax Museum Morgue, luring entire families into touring his museum before tormenting his guests psychologically using chilling, lifelike wax displays depicting past atrocities of mankind. Slowly eliminating families throughout the tour, The Keeper has them encased in wax and unable to move, conscious of their surroundings until their deaths, having claimed thousands of victims—including children—over several decades, as revealed when a few older wax statues turn out to contain nothing but powdered bones. When protagonist Billy Miser and his family tries to escape, the Keeper had the family trapped in a sealed room and tries drowning them in boiling wax.
• A Short Stay in Hell, by Steven L. Peck: Dire Dan is an egotistical madman who claims to be a "prophet of God", and proves to Soren Johansson that even in Hell, humans are capable of the most evil. Claiming to have been asked by God to turn the boring, mundane library of Hell into a pit of suffering and torment, Dire Dan amasses a cult and leads them in torturing, raping, and killing thousands of fellow inhabitants of Hell. Taking advantage of the fact that everyone revives within one day of their death, Dire Dan subjects his countless victims to years of constant torture until their minds eventually break into new members of his cult. Any of said members who don't cause enough pain for Dire Dan's liking are themselves turned into torture subjects for the rest.
• The Shotgun Arcana: Ray Zeal, the angel Raziel, is a corrupt angel who aims to become the god of torture and murder. Invading Golgotha in pursuit of the skull of the first murderer, Raziel slaughters those about him, swaying others to cannibalism and bloody depravity. Having many killed, including children, Raziel also has a kind schoolteacher tortured to death and intends to raze much of the world to the ground by infecting them with the Hate Plague from the skull, all for an ascent to his own godhood.
• Shotgun Nun Vol. 2: The Wrath of God:
  • Nathan "Nate" Robinson is the leader of a Human Trafficking ring. After a botched shipment results in him losing most of his "product," Nate quickly auctions off the five survivors to his customers to be sex slaves, including the 12-year-old Sophia. When Nate finds out Sister Eloise murdered one of his customers and rescued Sophia, Nate repeatedly sends his thugs to try and murder her; he succeeds in kidnapping Sophia and has Eloise captured and nearly gang-raped. When Nate encounters Eloise again as she tries to rescue Sophia, Nate has Eloise knocked unconscious and tied to a chair. He waits until Eloise wakes up before gloating that he's going to torture her to death and sell Sophia off again, fulfilling his promise when he cuts off five of Eloise's fingers and right hand.
  • Dr. Thomas Edwards is one of Nate's best customers. A pediatrician by day, Nate secretly makes illegitimate money buying children from Nate's auctions and having them raped and killed in snuff films he produces and sells on the Black Market. After purchasing Sophia, Edwards takes her to his mansion with the intent to have her raped and butchered for one of his videos.
• Shutter, by Courtney Alameda: Luca, real name Vlad the Impaler, is the ghost of the vampire king, Count Dracula himself. After his death in the original novel, Luca gained an undying hatred against the Helsing, Stoker, Seward and Harker families for stopping him. To this end, Luca has had female members of those families who find his mirrors killed and tortured before turning them into his vampiric brides. Murdering the brothers and mother of the heroine Micheline Helsing, he has her mother's spirit captured and tortures her until she breaks, brainwashing her into thinking that her daughter was responsible. Together the two start a torture and murder spree across the city, brutally killing dozens before turning their corpses into puppet soldiers, and even ripping the eyes out of the youngest member of the Stoker family, permanently blinding her. Luca intends to release all the various Necros monsters that the families have captured on the city, killing thousands, in order to spite the families. Near the end of the novel, he tries to force Micheline to be one of his brides before boasting how he will return to life and begin his brutal conquest of the world anew.
• The Silver Kiss: The vampire Christopher is a centuries-old monster who resembles an innocent child. Orchestrating the death of his sire and mentor, Christopher murdered his own mother when she rejected him before turning his brother Simon. Fleeing a vengeful Simon, Christopher leaves a trail of murder and bloodshed behind him, relishing in the fear and agony of his victims. Christopher plays an innocent child to lure people into trusting him before killing them, sometimes torturing them first. Resuming his activities in America, Christopher creates a string of corpses as Simon tracks him. When Simon finally corners him with his love interest Zoe, Christopher decides to murder Zoe before he escapes, just to give his brother more pain.
• Silverwing trilogy:
  • Goth is the chief servant of Cama Zotz, a mighty bat from South America who becomes the greatest nemesis to Shade. Having escaped captivity, Goth lures Shade into a fake friendship so he may consume Shade's entire colony, murdering others in the way and devouring a host of innocent bats. Upon being recaptured, Goth intends to cause mass murder and chaos with bombings as a sacrifice to his God, ending the series with several other murders and escaping to spread his dark lord's faith and unleash him on the world.
  • Cama Zotz himself is a demonic bat-god worshiped by the cannibalistic Vampyrum Spectrum, and the ultimate evil of the series. The creator of the Underworld, Zotz is the one behind all of Goth's atrocities, ordering him to commit slavery, genocide, and mass sacrifice. Zotz intends to extinguish the Sun and wipe out all life; enslaves the souls of the dead and denies them a proper afterlife; and punishes anyone who displeases him—even his devout followers—by eternally torturing them within his stomach.
• Sin, by J.M. Leduc:
  • Folsom Westcott, the cantankerous head of Homeland Security, is secretly the head of a child Snuff Film ring. Going under the name "El Presidente", Westcott uses his power, fortune, and connections to traffick young girls from Central America and have them raped and murdered on a livestream for him and his friends' viewing pleasure. Having several FBI agents killed when they try to expose his ring in Tumbleboat Key, Westcott manipulates the broken Maggie to do his bidding under the guise of affection, while sending Sinclair "Sin" O'Malley to Tumbleboat with hopes of getting her killed.
  • Ezekiel Miller is the Chief of Police at Tumbleboat Key who secretly assists Westcott in his child snuff operation. The one who gave Westcott the idea to partner with Reverend Jeremiah Heap to use his church and orphanage as his hideout, Miller brutally rapes, tortures, and murders countless children for Westcott and his friends' viewing pleasure, having signed on to indulge in his sadistic love of violence. Killing several FBI agents who attempt to investigate the ring, Miller shows zero care for his own son's death, killing Heap himself to clear up loose ends.
• The Sinister Mr. Corpse, by Jeff Strand: Richard Brant, the seemingly avuncular head of Project Second Chance, is in truth a cold, remorseless man solely dedicated to profit. Resurrecting the unfortunate Stanley Dabernath from death to make the man a wealthy celebrity, Brant tortures Stanley behind locked doors to force his compliance and cheerfully threatens to murder him should he ever stop being useful. Passing off his revival of Stanley as the act of unexplained science, Brant in reality routinely kidnaps young virgins, has their families slaughtered, and the virgin flayed and torturously bled out over a course of three days to inject their blood into Stanley. Once Stanley discovers this, Brant decides to cut his losses and stirs up a mob to cannibalize Stanley whilst watching with a manic grin on his face.
• The Siren and the Specter, by Jonathan Janz: Judson Alexander of Lancaster, a grim giant with an interest in the occult, was evil from his boyhood when he murdered a slave just because he could. Later killing his infant sister, Judson grew to terrorize the town while killing and raping at will. Enslaving the souls of his concubines and regularly raping a 14-year-old set up as a "sacrifice", Judson was especially fond of turning children into monsters, corrupting them to steal their life force, a practice he continues as a malevolent specter. Trying to turn 4-year-old Ivy Shelby into a heartless monster and massacre everyone about in his return to life, Judson views everything about him as a tool to use, corrupt, or destroy.
• Six of Crows & Crooked Kingdom:
  • Jan Van Eck is a seemingly-respectable merchant who turns out to be an egotistical sociopath obsessed with his own glory and reputation. Callously disowning his son Wylan for his dyslexia that has made him illiterate, Van Eck divorces his wife, throws her into an asylum and tells Wylan she's dead so he can steal all her assets. When his new wife is pregnant, Van Eck tries to have Wylan murdered. After enlisting Kaz Brekker for a job and learning Kaz has Wylan hostage, Van Eck later attempts to betray Kaz and have Wylan murdered via having his ship sunk. It turns out Van Eck is behind a scheme to cheat his fellow merchants and distribute jurda parem to enslave the Grisha, or those with magic, subjecting them to addiction or death, all as long as he profits from the chaos he inflicts.
  • Heleen Van Houden, or Tante Heleen, the cruel owner of the brothel the Menagerie, buys teenage girls from foreign nations and cruelly trains them to be Sex Slave prostitutes. From Inej Ghafa's backstory, we see this involves horrific abuse, both physical and psychological with Heleen repeatedly having her whipped and beaten, even having a girl who kept some money from a client cruelly murdered in front of the other girls as a lesson. Even after being freed by Kaz, Inej is intensely scarred by her time at the Menagerie, and Heleen gleefully taunts her of it when they meet, even trying to have Inej killed later. Utterly reprehensible and dedicated to making a fortune from the sexual enslavement of countless young women, Tante Heleen is one of the worst that Ketterdam has to offer.
• Six Rooms, by Gemma Amor: Charles Lester III is a selfish, entitled aristocrat who believes everyone exists to serve him and his whims. Catching his valet trying on his cufflinks, Charles murders him and then the housekeeper Anna as a witness. Murdering the gardener after the latter sees him place the still-living Anna in a tomb to suffocate, Charles is then disturbed by the distraught scullery maid Isabelle who is pregnant from his drunken rape of her. Charles proceeds to murder her as well, finally deciding to kill his pregnant wife Rose to complete the cover up.
• Skeleton Man & Return of Skeleton Man, by Joseph Bruchac: The titular Skeleton Man is a selfish, cannibalistic figure who stands out in this book series for children. Originally an organic lazy uncle, he grew to love the taste of human flesh and proceeded to eat all the skin off his body until he was nothing but a skeleton; ate his brother and sister when they arrived home; and gave chase to his young niece. Years later, he kidnaps Molly's mother and father and, posing as her great-uncle, attempts to fatten Molly and eat her. When Molly uncovers his identity, he chases after her and, when dangling off a cliff, attempts to take her with him. Returning a year later, he follows Molly and her family to the Hudson Valley, where he kidnaps Molly to once again try and eat her.
• Skin Medicine, by Tim Curran: James Lee Cobb distinguishes himself as a brutal killer who rapes and slaughters his way through the old West before he awakens the Wendigo by cannibalizing his own comrades. Seeking to learn the power of Spirit Medicine from the old shaman Spirit Moon, Cobb is instead sealed away, but returns and regains his strength by becoming a vicious Serial Killer of prostitutes, eventually closing in on Spirit Moon and massacring his entire tribe. Turning others into monsters like him, Cobb leads the slaughter of an entire town before taking over a second town called Deliverance where he boasts he has devoured all the souls there, intending on sweeping over the West in a flesh-eating tide of bloodshed and slaughter.
• The Skin Trade: In this werewolf novella by George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Harmon is an elderly alpha werewolf whose only son cannot shapeshift. Harmon attempted to awaken his transformation by kidnapping six children and forcing his son to eat their flesh. In reality, Harmon continued this because he enjoyed the hunt. When one police officer got too close, Harmon tore him apart, threatening his partner that it would be his children to die next if he did not cover it up. When the officer's daughter Randi Wade and the kind werewolf Willie Flambeaux get too close, Harmon tries to kill both and threatens to return for Randi later. Prideful, ruthless and utterly concerned for all life, werewolf or human alike, Harmon is a perfect example of the worst the lycanthropes have to offer.
• Skinjumper: Alex Snowdin, despite lacking the supernatural powers of his partner Terry, manages to stand out as the most evil man in the story. As a child, Alex accidentally killed his brother's dog, and, to avoid trouble for it, arranged to sacrifice another dog to bring his back to life. When this failed, it succeeded only in giving Alex's friend Terry the ability to jump into the bodies of others, while Alex spent his time growing up assaulting and abusing others. Once teaming back up with Terry years later, Alex immediately murders rival drug slingers before raping one's girlfriend, leading Terry to accidentally jump into the girl's body, after which Alex makes numerous attempts to rape Terry to sate his lust. After brutally murdering two more men, Alex betrays Terry, holds him and a woman at gunpoint, then boasts his plans to kill a nearby child for fun after torturing the duo to death in an insane attempt to replicate the ritual that gave Terry his powers.
• Skyhunter & Steelstriker, by Marie Lu: General Caitoman Tyrus is Premier Constantine's bastard brother and general of his armies. Leading the Kerensan Federation's brutal conquests, Caitoman also personally tortures and interrogates prisoners, enjoying every moment. Caitoman harasses his brother's skyhunter Talin, even after she saves his life and later tortures her mother. Caitoman pretends to care for his brother when he actually trying to make him look weak so he can overthrow him and make himself Premier.
• Slasherback Series, by Brian G. Berry:
  • The Sleepover Massacre: Anthony "the Mad Dentist" Ulrich is a Serial Killer with a penchant for mangling his victims' teeth. Before the story, Ulrich murdered his wife and her lover after he caught her having an affair; he enjoyed killing her and breaking her teeth so much that he became a dentist and started targeting children. After murdering 15 third graders and being locked in a mental institution for years, Ulrich escaped and targeted more civilians. Refusing to be caught again, Ulrich kills a dozen innocents, including a police officer and a young boy, before attempting to murder Jessica Sadie and her brother.
  • Thanksgiving Day Massacre: "The Father" is the patriarch of his cannibalistic surrogate family and the man responsible for corrupting Travis and turning him into a Serial Killer. As part of a sadistic tradition, the Father would slaughter a young child's entire family on Thanksgiving, force the child to eat their remains, and then recruit them to be part of his family. As they aged, the Father twisted their minds and broke them, turning them into cannibalistic killers and making them participate in the same tradition. When the Father comes across 5-year-old Travis, he and his minions massacre Travis's whole family before forcing him to watch as his mother is raped and murdered; Travis is later converted to become part of the Father's family. Even after the Father dies, Travis and the remnants of the Father's family carry on with executing more massacres.
• Slasher Girls & Monster Boys: In "A Girl Who Dreamed of Snow", by McCormick Templeman, after a plague which kills most young girls and women hits their land, Sain and his brothers kidnap women in order to give the residents wives in order to keep the population alive. In truth, Sain cares nothing for his land and is simply using this as excuse to fulfill his sadistic fantasies by secretly butchering the woman they capture. Sain bullies his kindlier brother Mowich and forces him into this. After discovering the young shaman girl Nara, Sain plans to kill her for fun despite knowing her death will mean the plague will continue, as she is the only one who can stop it. Sain is willing to doom his entire people to genocide, including his little sister, just to satisfy his love of hurting others.
• Slayers' Next & Volume 8: Hellmaster Phibrizzo is the oldest of the Mazoku who wants to destroy the world and return it to the Sea of Chaos. A sadistic demon who views death and the suffering of others as nothing but a game, Phibrizzo in the past had staged several massive wars between humans, dragons, and demons that led to countless deaths, all to awaken his master's spirit. Using Garv as his pawn in the future, Phibrizzo easily kills him once he's through with him and snatches Gourry away, brainwashing him to become a loyal servant out of sheer boredom while keeping him inside a crystal that drains him of his life-force. Once Lina and the gang encounter him, Phibrizzo proceeds to murder them all by crushing a death orb tied to their life supports, gaining an immense amount of pleasure the more lives he literally shatters one by one. After Lina finally casts the Giga Slave and is possessed by the Mother of All Things, Phibrizzo attempts to kill Lina and set Mother free, preparing to die as long as rest of the world goes out with him.
• Sleeping Beauty (link): The Ogress Queen Mother is left to look after her daughter-in-law and grandchildren when her son, the prince, is called away to war. For no apparent reason, she decides to cannibalize them, starting with her four-year-old granddaughter, Dawn, ordering her chief steward to kill and cook her. The Steward hides Dawn away and kills and cooks an animal instead, repeating the process with the three-year-old grandson, Day, and the princess. When the queen realizes the trick, she gathers the princess and her children along with the steward and his wife and servant girl, deciding to drop all six into a vat full of snakes and poisonous toads.
• Sleeping Murder: Dr. James Kennedy, obsessed with his half-sister Helen, was furious when she opted to marry the father of young Gwenda Reed, and eventually murdered her, which a young Gwenda saw. Covering his crime by murdering Gwenda's nanny and drugging Gwenda's father, Kennedy framed him for murder, gaslighting him and hiding the body as to make him appear insane and have him sent to an asylum where he died. In the present, Kennedy murders the former maid when he fears she will implicate him and tries to poison Gwenda's household as well. Finally uncovered, he attempts to throttle Gwenda before Miss Marple herself intervenes.
• The Slob, by Aron Beauregard: The Slob is a corpulent, cannibalistic killer secretly working for an organ harvesting ring. Per the request of his employers, the Slob would kidnap women and then chop up their bodies in a meat grinder, selling their remains for others to consume. While held captive, the Slob would repeatedly torture and rape his victims, and even go as far as forcing them to eat human flesh. When heroine Vera Harlow arrives on his farm to sell him a vacuum cleaner, the Slob lures her into his home before beating her and locking her inside his bedroom. He later abuses Vera's stomach so she'll miscarry and force-feeds her human remains. After Vera botches an attempt to escape from the Slob, the Slob punishes her by locking her inside his barn with several of his other victims and raping her on a daily basis.
• Smaller & Smaller Circles: Isabelo Gorospe is the vile figure who drove Alex Carlos to his murder spree. A gym teacher and pedophile, Isabelo lured impoverished boys by offering them scholarships, before forcing himself on them. Calling 8 boys in the gym after school, Isabelo would rape them and force them to do sexual acts together for a school year, with Alex, as his "favorite boy", the prime target of his worst acts; all this while always reminding them of how helpless they are to his authority, later rescinding the scholarships regardless.
• Small Town Monsters, by Diana Rodriguez Wallach: The demon known as the "Angel of Tears" once ran a cult that practiced Human Sacrifice. Sealed off by the parents of Vera Martinez, the Angel later returns by forcing a man to cause an explosion that kills 17 people, and later possesses a woman while rebuilding its cult. Causing numerous deaths and destruction, the Angel of Tears plans a mass suicide of its followers to enhance its power and sweep over the world to repeat it again.
• Smash TV novella, by Matt Yeo: Jasper Powell is the host of—and the brains behind—the game show, SMASH TV, the most popular television show in the world, where contestants have a chance to win untold riches...if they manage to survive, which nobody has so far. In truth, Jasper, the final obstacle faced by contestants, is an enormous mutant, the failed attempt by the military to create Super Soldiers. Jasper had the idea to start a game show to test experimental weapons on people, claiming "Who's going to miss a few gung-ho macho idiots? It's certainly cheaper than waiting for a war to happen!" In addition, besides owning the studio, Jasper also runs most of the gambling in the city, which is what caused one of the contestants to become a contestant.
• SNAFU anthology series (by publication date):
  • Survival of the Fittest's "Sucker of Souls", by Kirsten Cross: Vlad Dracula himself is a terrifying, monstrous vampire who, when awakened from his prison, promptly slaughters a young research assistant and tries to kill the rest of the group he arrived with. In the past, Dracula massacred and impaled countless innocents, feasted upon children, and stores the souls of his victims in the cave to suffer forever as long as he lives. Plotting on killing or turning the rest of the group in the caverns, Dracula intends on raising a new army and running rampant through the world.
  • Unnatural Selection's "Vermin", by Richard Lee Byers: Ibrahim is a wicked Imam who takes advantage of a siege occurring between the Franks and Turks over a city to unleash monstrous scorpions. Committing Human Sacrifice to create these monsters, he unleashes them on the Franks before revealing to his employer that he intends to use the victory here to transform his entire religion into worship of his master, an Old One who would grant Ibrahim great power. Upon being caught, Ibrahim tries to massacre the entire city with every man, women and child in it out of spite.
• Snow, Glass, Apples: "Snow White" is the unnamed, vampiric princess who is opposed by the supposedly "wicked" stepmother. Showing her inhuman nature by feeding on her new stepmother's blood, Snow begins draining her own father over years, sexually and physically abusing him until he dies a wasted skeleton of a man. When the new queen attempts to have Snow killed, Snow enslaves the dwarves in the forest and begins hunting travelers, killing many for their blood. While being temporarily defeated by a poison apple, Snow returns later to usurp control of the kingdom from her stepmother, having the queen cooked alive as the main course at Snow's wedding, free to terrorize the kingdom how she desires.
• The Snuff Network: Andy "Mr. Snuff" Wu is the leader of a Black Market organization specializing in Human Trafficking and creating snuff films. With billions of dollars and dozens of thugs at his disposal, Wu has thousands of men, women, and children around the world kidnapped and either raped or tortured to death to appease his clientele. When his business becomes under attack by two vigilantes seeking vengeance against him, Wu tries to have them murdered, not caring how many of his men he must sacrifice and punishing those who fail him by having them tortured or killed as well. After Bradley Anderson, one of his most loyal filmmakers, tries to retire and refuses to kill three teenage witnesses who could incriminate Wu, Wu responds by having Bradley's wife and child murdered in front of him. As Bradley and the vigilantes start destroying Wu's enterprise in Tokyo, Wu continues sending more of his men to try and kill them, regardless of the collateral damage. Even when Wu is finally cornered and moments away from death, all he can do is smugly announce that other members of his family will continue his legacy and keep his business running.
• "Sob in the Silence", by Gene Wolfe: The unnamed horror writer is a pedophile hosting his friend Dan along with Dan's wife and child. Taking a lust to Dan's daughter Kiara, the writer murders Dan's seven-year-old son and kidnaps Kiara to drop her down a well after beating her. Intending to leave her there for weeks or months with little food, the writer states his intent is to turn her in to a pliant and grateful Sex Slave for himself.
• Sold: Mumtaz is the repulsive madam in charge of the brothel known as the Happiness House. Ruling her brothel through fear and intimidation, Mumtaz has grown rich by forcing her child prostitutes to lay with her customers, and traps them in a never-ending cycle of debt so they can never leave. When the thirteen-year-old Lakshmi refuses to service a customer, Mumtaz starves and beats her for days on end before losing her patience and drugging her into complying. When one of her older prostitutes named Pushpa grows too sick to work, Mumtaz doesn't care in the slightest and forces her to continue servicing customers on threat of throwing her and her children out on the street, a threat she eventually makes good on. When Mumtaz really wants to punish someone, she "will smear chilies on a stick and put it inside the girl". Motivated solely by greed, Mumtaz embodies every rotten aspect of the horror that is sex trafficking.
• Soldiers of Earthrise:
  • The Red Cardinal, also known as Clement Taylor, is the tyrannical ruler of North Bahay. After being excommunicated from his church in America, the Red Cardinal formed his own sect with Filipinos and headed into outer space to escape the Americans. Once the Red Cardinal found the planet Bahay, he banished two-thirds of his followers into the ocean for not abiding to his laws. As decades went by, the Red Cardinal eliminated anyone who wasn't Bahayan, along with any Bahayans who refused to conform with his ideals. During the Earthling/Bahayan war, the Red Cardinal and his armies slaughtered hundreds of thousands of soldiers and prisoners of war; he later bombed the city on Mindao, murdering countless South Bahayan civilians for allying with the Earthlings. After donning the new moniker "Papa Dominus," he used his guerilla fighters known as the Crimson Claws to force Bahayans into intergalactic prostitution and drug dealing, while Papa Dominus built hundreds of concentration camps where his enemies were beaten, raped, starved, or murdered on a daily basis for multiple years. When hero Jon Taylor, his heir, refuses to join him even after being threatened to, Papa Dominus convinces Jon to confront him one final time by threatening to murder Maria and their four-year-old daughter Lily instead.
  • President Henry "Hank" Hale is the Earthling leader longing to exterminate the Bahayans and Santelmos. As President, Hale used his resources to spread anti-Bahayan propaganda across Earth and had all civilians drafted as soon as they turned eighteen. With General Ward as his primary contact, Hale was able to sanction countless bombings and attacks across Bahay, leading to the deaths of millions. When protestors against Hale's presidency began to interfere with his plans, he repeatedly sent the police to attack the protestors, not caring about the collateral damage that ensued. After killing Lizzy Pascal, the protestors' ringleader, he sent the police after the protestors again, indirectly causing a massacre that got over three hundred civilians killed. Even after the truth about the war is exposed to the public and his presidency is ruined, he sends an assassin to try and kill Kaelyn Williams and Etty Ettinger out of petty spite.
  • General Charles "Chuck" Ward is the leader of the Earthling army on Bahay. Eager to eradicate all of the Bahayans, Ward uses his soldiers to commit genocidal crimes, such as routinely bombing villages; occupying South Bahay and forcing a portion of the population to be slaves; gassing Bahay with poison that causes deformities and monstrous transformations; and slaughtering over three million Bahayans. Ward also has his own soldiers subjected to weeks of savage, abusive training, not caring when hundreds of thousands of his soldiers are killed during the conflict. When Maria tries to get Ward to confess to his crimes over a recording device, he destroys the device before admitting that he's killing Bahayans solely to profit from the war, and later tries to rape her.
• Solomon Kane:
  • "Red Shadows": The vicious bandit Le Loup ("The Wolf") is a scourge on the French countryside where he rapes and murders at will. Attracting the attention of Solomon Kane when he slaughters an entire village and keeps the women to gang-rape before killing them as well, Le Loup pursues one wounded girl, catching and raping her before leaving her for dead when Kane finds her. Sacrificing his men to Kane when he needed to escape, Le Loup flees to Africa where he allies with a ruthless chieftain named Songa and assists him in oppressing his own people, complete with blood sacrifices, before attempting to have Kane killed at last.
  • "The Moon of Skulls": Queen Nakari, "The Vampire Queen of Negari", is the worst member of "a people with whom blood is cheaper than water." A tyrannical, wantonly violent Dark Messiah whose ultimate goal is to conquer the entire world, Nakari overthrew the legitimate ruler and made herself Queen, before torturing or killing the priests, leaving her the only one who knew how to perform the ceremonies, thus assuring her dominion. Nakari turned their already-brutal religion into one where they only worshiped the god of death, with Nakari personally sacrificing a kidnapped virgin each full moon. During her reign she became known and feared throughout much of Africa for her cruelty, regularly sending her warriors to raid and attack the nearby tribes. Nakari first appears having one of her loyal followers brutally executed simply for following her orders to kill anyone who arrives in her domain without any tributes, taking obvious pleasure out of watching the man die. Such executions occur so often that the floor of her throne room is covered with bloodstains. Nakari also enjoys horribly abusing her slave Marylin Taferal, having her hung by her arms naked then whipped until unconsciousness for even the slightest disobedience, all the while waiting until Marylin is old enough to be sacrificed.
• Something Dark and Holy trilogy:
  • Chyrnog, the fallen God of Chaos and Entropy, desires nothing less than the end of all things. Concocting a series of events to revive himself, Chyrnog possesses High Prince Serefin Meleski and forces him to kill his magically enhanced brother, Malachiasz Czechowicz. Chyrnog then possesses and revives Malachiasz and forces him to go on a serial killing and cannibalism spree to force him to submit to his control. Chyrnog sends his minions to attack and wipe out populated areas, planning to increase the carnage for his pleasure. Ultimately, after breaking Malachiasz's will, Chyrnog intends to use him as a host to wipe out the entire world, leaving nothing but an empty darkness.
  • Wicked Saints: King Izak Meleski, Serefin's father, is the tyrannical leader of Tranavia. Izak despises the idea that his people view him as weak and ineffectual, and now plans to prove them wrong by achieving godhood. To this end, Izak has thousands of his own citizens experimented on and killed for the ritual to achieve divinity. Izak is also cruel to the enemy nation of Kalyazin, which he's fighting in a war, sending countless prisoners to be worked to death as slaves in the salt mines. Izak despises his son, Serefin, to such a degree that he plans to kill him as his final act to achieve godhood itself.
• Something Wicked This Way Comes: Mr. G.M. Dark, lord of the Autumn People and master of the carnival, is a devilish figure who tempts his victims into ruin and damnation. Sweeping from town to town, Dark makes bargains with those he encounters, but cruelly exploits them to destroy the victims' lives and force them into the carnival where he and the rest of the Autumn People feast upon their life force, Dark filled with the victims he tattoos upon himself as trophies. Seeking to cause pain and discord wherever he goes, Dark intends to force Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade to his carnival in his never-ending quest to glut himself upon agony and nightmare.
• The Sorcerer's Daughter: Count Gottwald Limerich is a proud, ambitious nobleman who secretly practices magic. He uses his magic powers to frame The Good King for sorcery and send him to the stake; the widowed queen soon goes mad with guilt and dies. In the castle Limerich inherits from his wizard mentor, there is a dragon's egg that will soon hatch, and Limerich sees the chances it gives him. So fifteen years after sending King Roberto to the stake, Limerich arranges the poisoning of his own nephew Prince Siegfried to inherit his throne and then, magically disguising himself as repented sorcerer Rothbart, kidnaps Siegfried's cousin Odette. Unless she agrees to marry him and lets him ascend to the throne, Limerich will have the now-hatched enormous dragon eventually destroy and burn down the entire country. After Odette manages to steal the arrows and escape his castle, Limerich starts brewing a potion that would make all his enemies kill each other in a fit of madness.
• The Sorrows & Castle of Sorrows, by Jonathan Janz:
  • Gabriel Blackwood, first appearing as an innocent boy adopted by the Blackwoods in the Sorrows, is in truth the sadistic god Pan. After having slaughtered most everyone in the region, Gabriel waits until the arrival of others at the Sorrows. Seducing the women there, Claire and Eva, Gabriel sleeps with both of them before violently raping Eva and mutilating her. Torturing and killing everything in the castle he can get his claws on, Gabriel later has his daughter with Claire returned to him and proceeds to massacre everyone who comes to the island, using their sins and guilt to torture them further when he can. Even taking control of one woman to kill the baby, Gabriel ends the sequel possessing Ben's father-in-law—Claire's father—to murder Ben's family out of spite at being thwarted.
  • Ray Rubio is a two-bit thug unconnected to Gabriel or any of his machinations who manages to match the Humanoid Abomination in savage evil. A gangster on the payroll of Marvin Irvin, Ray Rubio is a Serial Killer, a Serial Rapist, and a torturer who introduces himself in the second book working at an unfortunate man with a mandolin slicer. Ray proceeds to slaughter numerous other people as he goes on, in one case raping and murdering an unfortunate jogger after she witnesses him offing a pair of FBI agents, and even after being trapped in the castle within the bowels of the Sorrows, all Rubio can think about is his intent to rape and kill everyone he comes across.
  • Castle of Sorrows only: Troy Castillo was a rapist through his teen years who gained a love of killing after beating a prostitute to death to sate his own ego. Becoming an FBI agent to mask his rapes and killings, Castillo murdered an entire family by first executing the father, then gang-raping the mother and daughter with his goons. Upon arriving at the Sorrows, Castillo arranges for the deaths of several of his compatriots, and ultimately plans to rape his partner Jessie then hand her off to be tortured to death.
• The Soulkeepers series, by G.P. Ching: Lucifer himself is behind all the evil in the series. Lucifer would have his Watchers abduct hundreds to be used as food or slaves, before trying to invade to bring Hell on Earth. After making a deal with God to see who could win more human souls, Lucifer would release a plague while making the only cure, have his Watchers go on killing sprees with him selling "protection", and finally try to kill every human aligned with God so he could win.
• Soultaker, by Bryan Smith: Lamia is a an ancient demon goddess who keeps her life by devouring the souls of her hosts, often young and attractive women. Corrupting others into depravity, Lamia regularly tortures, dominates and murders those under her control while setting up the Harvest where she has dozens of followers slaughtered to feed on their lives and send their souls to eternal torture.
• The Sound of his Horn, by Sarban: In a twisted dystopian future where the Nazis won World War II, Count Hans von Hackelnberg is the Reich's Master Forester and a cruel sadist who reigns over a vast forest. Obsessed with hunting, von Hackelnberg has women released in bird costumes to be captured, raped and abused by his guests, while having other women turned into feral crosses between leopard and human. Others are released onto his hunting grounds so von Hackelnberg can hunt them down personally for sport, which he relishes in, calling out his victories on his hunting horn.
• The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires: James Harris is a handsome, seductive vampire who uses a real estate scheme to charm communities while molesting and feeding off their children, warping their minds and eventually driving them to painful suicide before leaving the population economically devastated. When forced to stop feeding on a child by heroine Patricia Campbell, Harris covers his tracks by killing her mother-in-law by having her attacked and eaten by rats when she recognizes him, and convinces Patricia's husband she's mentally unwell. Resuming her investigation of him, it becomes apparent Harris has remained alive for four hundred years by feeding, keeping trophies from the children he kills, and later reveals he's been feeding off and grooming Patricia's daughter, and also grooming Patricia's son. Even while dying, Harris goes out a spiteful monster, raping Patricia's best friend and infecting her with a deadly immunodisease, which painfully kills said friend.
• "Sparhawk Universe":
  • The Elenium trilogy: Azash is a horrible, sadistic Eldritch Abomination who manipulates his followers into performing rituals that involve Human Sacrifice, torture, cannibalism, necrophilia, engaging in sexual perversions until they collapse dead from exhaustion, and the like. He plots to extend his worship over the continent, and to that end backs a conspiracy to poison the Queen of Elenia, tries to subvert the Elene Church by placing one of his agents on the throne, has a mercenary army under Martel destroy much of the Holy City of Chyrellos, and uses The Seeker, a child-eating insectoid freak, as his Mouth of Sauron. He uses his final moments to kill other subordinates, just because they failed him.
  • The Tamuli sequel trilogy: Zalasta, Sephrenia's childhood friend, is revealed to be an Evil Sorcerer and traitor par excellence. Having arranged for the massacre of his and Sephrenia's hometown when they were children—resulting in the slaughter of his own family—Zalasta went onto become Styricum's most powerful magician and an integral, behind-the-scenes player in Azash's scheme to conquer the world. Years later, he joins forces with Cyrgon to instigate revolution in the Tamul Empire, and persuades the Elene peasantry to commit genocide against the Styrics-—his own people—-in order to harm Sephrenia's goddess, Aphrael. Eventually betraying Cyrgon in order to serve Klæl, Zalasta is responsible for not only tens of thousands of deaths, but for endangering the very existence of the world; when everything falls apart, he makes two final attempts on the lives of Sephrenia and her lover Vanion. Driven by lust for Sephrenia, and loathing of Aphrael, Zalasta is guilty of every crime from high treason to "consorting with ye powers of darkness," and is content to damn the entire world, so long as he gains possession of the woman he wants.
• Speak: Andy Evans is a senior at Merryweather High School who has a reputation for sleeping around. Upon meeting a drunken Melinda Sordino at an end of the summer party, he rapes her; this results in a spiral of events which culminate in Melinda becoming traumatized to the point of nearly becoming mute. Since then, Andy made a habit out of psychologically tormenting Melinda out of sadism. Fearing that Rachel might become his next victim, Melinda attempted to warn her about Andy's true intentions, but she doesn't believe her. It's also revealed that Andy had a prolific history of sexually assaulting female students; this is shown by the multiple entries that were written on the wall in the restroom. Enraged that Melinda had ruined his reputation, Andy confronts her in the janitor's closet, and he attempts to rape her again out of spite. Egotistical and sadistic, Evans would stop at nothing to get what he wants.
• "(The) Specialty of the House", by Stanley Ellin: the mysterious Sbirro is the owner and proprietor of a little restaurant in New York with a small clientele and very restrictive rules. Beloved for the finest dish, Lamb Amirstan, the truth is a terrifying thing. Sbirro in fact runs his restaurant where patrons are eventually "replaced" by being cooked into Lamb Amirstan, the fate that eventually befalls protagonist Laffler when Sbirro finally invites him into his famed kitchen.
• Spellfall: Hawk may not be responsible for that many deaths, but compensates for this with sheer ruthlessness. Some of his actions include: driving his wife to suicide by killing her bonded animal, forcefully "bonding" with other Wizards which means placing them under Mind Control, threatening to both of those to his son, forcing the wizards under his control to commit atrocities, including kidnapping other victims for "bonding" one of these is the heroine, a 12 year old girl, forcing them to kill the heroine's mother, intending to "bond" with the heroine, gleefully exclaiming that, after that, she "won't be so shy", after she demands privacy for changing clothes, intending to slaughter the Tree of OQ, possibly killing hundreds of wizards, making their ancestors—including the heroine's mother—Deader than Dead and depriving the survivors of their home and living, just so he can get some mana, casually leaving a Muggle—the heroine's stepbrother—to his death, and when his plan fails, he tries to kill the heroine, along with his son.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles: Mulgarath is an arrogant, cunning Ogre who was directly or indirectly responsible for nearly all problems that befell the Spiderwick and Grace families. Desiring Arthur Spiderwick's field guide to conquer mankind and the other fairies, Mulgarath had Arthur's daughter, Lucinda Spiderwick, kidnapped, then tortured and later crippled when she couldn't give it to him. In preparation for his plans, Mulgarath built himself an army held together by intimidation, including press-ganged goblins; acquired several dragons; and played on the dwarves' love of metal and craftsmanship to convince them to build weapons for his army and to swear their eternal allegiance to him. Mulgarath rewarded this service by massacring all the dwarves the moment they gave him the weapons. Upon learning that Jared Grace had found the guide, Mulgarath turned his attention upon the Grace siblings, happy to kidnap and kill the children to gain the guide, his plots climaxing in him destroying their family home and kidnapping their mother. Ambitious and vain as he was, Mulgarath was also a sadistic beast, as inside his palace the Grace siblings found multiple fairies he had imprisoned in honey and left to struggle futilely as they slowly drowned.
• Spinning Silver: Chernobog is a fiery demon with a ravenous hunger for lives. Chernobog lives inside Tsar Mirnatius and possesses him, forcing him to find people so he could drink up their lives. Chernobog then makes Mirnatius marry Irina so he could taste her Staryk blood, and he agrees to let her live in exchange to capture the Staryk King so he could feast on him forever and force him to allow him into his kingdom. Once there, he begins to devour everything there, planning on consuming all of Lithvas as well once done, all to feed his insatiable appetite.
• The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, by Andrew Joseph White:
  • Ernest Forrester is Headmaster of Braxton's Finishing School for Girls, where rebellious young female and feminine-presenting mediums are send to be "corrected" into obedient wives for the Royal Society of Speakers, the British government's official organization of mediums. An extremely powerful spiritualist himself, Ernest is revealed to be a prolific murderer who binds his victims' souls to the Creepy Souvenirs he takes off their bodies, as well as a sexual predator who allows his friends to abuse his young students. Worst of all, Ernest is in league with Bedlam House in a scientific study to perform live dissections to prove the biological basis of mediumship, and happily offers up his own students to go under the knife if they prove too much of a bother.
  • Dr. Bernthal is Ernest's quiet but deadly partner in his vivisection experiments. Unable to get adequate results studying cadavers while researching mediumship, Bernthal decides to team up with Ernest to carve up his most rebellious students while they're still alive in hopes of a breakthrough, something he indulges in with a cruel glee belying his soft-spoken nature. Bernthal is also one of Ernest's aforementioned sexually predatory friends, raping and impregnating 14-year-old Agnes and forcing her to marry him to legitimize the child.
• Splatter Western books:
  • The Magpie Coffin, by Wile E. Young (Book 1): Sgt. Earnest Craft, one of the American soldiers that Salem Covington seeks vengeance upon for the bloody murder of his Comanche mentor, is a sadist and a rapist with a secret cave he stashes his victims in. A racist who justifies his cruelty to others as the right of a white man in a white man's world, Craft tortures dozens to death, even little children and the elderly, while keeping their mangled or still-living bodies in his personal torture cave. Among Craft's victims include his own insane, sadomasochistic mother.
  • The Thirteenth Koyote, by Kristopher Triana (Book 8):
    • Glenn "The Dreadful" Amarok is one of the last Koyotes left. Having betrayed and murders his parents as a boy, Glenn spent his youth on a plantation murdering, torturing, and raping slaves before he became a Wolfen under Jasper Thurston. Leading a charge of murder, rape and slaughter across the West, Glenn seeks his mentor's heart to empower himself with a host of new atrocities. Murdering the family of heroine Delia, Glenn has her baby brother cooked alive, before having entire towns massacred. Participating in greater and greater acts of evil, Glenn intends to tear open the gates to hell and let demonkind overrun humanity so he may indulge every sadistic whim that comes to him.
    • Hiram Zeindler, Glenn's right-hand, is a sadistic Wolfen and vicious pedophile who refers to his victims as his "delights". Hiram enjoys giving his victims hope, coming in to "save" them before raping, torturing and mutilating them. One luckless boy is rendered a crippled, eyeless husk when Hiram is done, Hiram leaving him alive for pure sadism. Upon attacking a homestead, Hiram rapes, murders, and partially devours a young boy alive, mocking his father later for the boy calling for him as he died. Helping Glenn unlock the gates to hell, Hiram intends to form a harem of the world's children so they may perpetually beg for his favor by allowing him to molest them at will.
    • Jasper Thurston, the founder of the Koyotes, is known as the blackest soul to ever walk the earth. Recruiting and corrupting his soldiers, Thurston led them to horrific massacres, killing and raping innocents all over the West while happily burning others alive in torches to indulge his and the others' whims. Caring nothing for his own, Jasper simply revives one as a brain-dead zombie upon death. Jasper locates the dark artifact, the Menhir, and to fill it with evil, he plans to burn down an entire orphanage with the children inside, an act so repugnant it finally inspires one of his own, Luther Byrne, to stand against him. Jasper tries to kill him without any regret, intending on opening hell itself to destroy the world at the end.
  • Ballad of the Werevixens, by Kristopher Triana (Book 8.5): Flora, in life, was a woman wicked enough to murder her baby children and feed them to her husband. Returning as a vampire, Flora becomes the bride of Balthazar Rott, roaming the West and killing many people she finds. Opening the novel by luring a little girl to be drained and eaten, it is soon revealed Flora regularly kills children and tortures her victims. Turning on Balthazar and killing him with her allies Inez and Josie when Balthazar refuses to let her keep a baby she's taken a shine to, Flora spurs Josie to greater atrocities and finally attempts to end the entire world, tossing aside the child with no sentiment whatsoever.
  • Human-Shaped Fiends, by Chandler Morrison (Book 11): David Brown is a vile racist and sexual sadist who prides himself on his reputation of being an Indian killer. Brown has killed dozens of people, whose ears he keeps as trophies, and is introduced brutally torturing and raping a hooker half to death for no other reason than spite towards the local sheriff asking Brown to go easy on her. Later kicking up his gang and the local town into a frenzy, Brown kills a harmless Indian pleading for peace before shooting his own employer and imploring his men to kill and rape their way through town.
  • The Devoured and The Dead, by Kristopher Rufty (Book 12): Lassiter is a scarred bandit who comes upon the lost gold rush party after the adults are infected with the curse of the Wendigo. Lassiter is revealed to have murdered the hero William Coburn's father; executes their Native guide Ahote; and proceeds to try to take the women and girls as sex slaves, having become obsessed with William's sister Lenora. Upon learning of the Wendigo curse, Lassiter simply tries to feed the children to their own parents and takes Lenora, later interrupted by William in the process of raping her.
  • Last of the Ravagers, by Bryan Smith (Book 13): Doyle, the final member of the Ravager cult, is a depraved necromancer with the blood of billions on his hands. Having slain even fellow Ravagers to escape the judgment of Raven Decker, Doyle has reaped the souls of entire worlds, slaughtering countless innocents before arriving in Snakebite. Corrupting a housewife named Eleanor, murdering her family and having her torture a woman to death, Doyle raises others from the dead to be his servants while having innocents gruesomely massacred for fun and to increase his power. Seeking to claim ultimate power with the world's ruin, Doyle intends to make himself the god of all existence to fulfill every monstrous whim he can muster.
  • No Guilt of Bloodshed, by John Baltisberger: Dragan Risti is a fanatical priest who inspires a violent pogrom against the Jews of Ostropol, Ukraine. Fleeing to the Western United States, Risti takes over Brodie, California, where he doesn't even let the Jews there flee, but forces them to remain in their homes and starve to death, lest his men shoot them. Risti enslaves a succubus named Agrat and lets his men prostitute her as they will, while enacting his justice upon anyone he deems sinners. Using demons and men alike, Risti tortures and kills numerous innocents, with plans for an ultimate genocide of the Jews.
• A Splendid Chaos by John Shirley: Harmon Fiskle was an arrogant professor who preached Social Darwinism on Earth. When mutated by "The Current" on the alien world of Fool's Hope, he names himself Emperor Harmony and uses the mutants to brutally subjugate the humans there, killing many of them in the process. Torturing and murdering those who do not accept his rule, Harmony proceeds to decorate his new throne room with hanged bodies, having a resistance leader raped and throws her into a cage that slowly impales her while her lover is made to lay underneath the cage so the blood falls all over her. Harmony reveals his intent to harvest portions of humanity for food, enslaving the minds of most of the rest and is seen entertaining himself by having people randomly thrown through a device that can launch them anywhere, finding it amusing when they teleport hundreds of feet into the air or become fused with nearby stone. Intending to exterminate all alien races on Fool's Hope, Harmony shows the utter depravity an unfettered ego can achieve.
• Stalking Jack the Ripper series, by Kerri Maniscalco: H.H. Holmes himself is a monstrous killer who constructed a murder hotel so he could murder and torture innocents at his leisure, racking up a body count in the triple digits. Later becoming Jack the Ripper, letting a patsy die and take the blame for it. Continuing a murder spree in multiple areas, Holmes tries to corrupt the heroine into being a murderer like him, gloating that he fully embraces his inner darkness and the devil within.
• Stardoc: Joseph Grey Veil deliberately took advantage of Terran xenophobia to get anti-alien laws passed. He also endeavored to pass anti-cloning laws solely for his own gain. His intent was to do whatever he wanted to innocent clones. Veil engages in a series of rapes with as many clones as he can, and deliberately infects them with syphilis just so he can see the results of the disease on the Designer Babies he fathers.
• The Star of the Guardians: Abdiel is the leader of the Order of the Black Lightning, a rogue faction of mind-rapists. He uses his abilities to build an army of mindless followers by promising them exquisite pleasures, but actually uses his followers as toys to torment for kicks. Abdiel is revealed to have orchestrated the old revolution against the monarchy, murdering the whole royal family to seize power before his gamble was exposed and his Order destroyed. In revenge, he proceeds to hunt down and wipe out every member of the Blood Royal genetic line. Later, he tries to sell a doomsday device that could destroy all life to a rival empire for profit. When his enemies finally put him down for good, he ensures that his final blow will drive his slayer Maigrey insane, forcing her soulmate Sagan to kill her to spare her the pain.
• Star Quest, by Andrew Dixon: Lord Glaxx was once a simple alien playwright on Planet Bliss who was blacklisted for charging admission to shows that were intended to be free, a serious crime in his species' culture. Swearing revenge, Glaxx departed for deep space, then returned years later as a pirate king armed with a laser weapon that drains heat from stars. Glaxx thus plans to avenge the slight against him by sucking the life from Bliss' star, condemning all life on it to slowly freeze to death.
• Station 16, by Hermann & Yves Huppen: Professor Tretiakov is a sadistic Russian scientist who sought to create the ultimate Super-Soldier to serve the Soviet Union. Based in Novaya Zemlya, Tretiakov conducted horrid human experiments, cutting out the sensory organs of his patients without anesthesia and confining them to the point of insanity. To test their endurance, Tretiakov strips them outside in the cold, with many perishing from hypothermia. When Grigory and a squadron of soldiers accidentally enter his base, Tretiakov captures them to experiment on. Escaping through a time rift into the modern day, Tretiakov is revealed to be working as an asylum doctor, conducting his same experiments there and intending to make Grigory his next test subject.
• Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes: Virgil Byrnes, the father of the book's title character, is a monstrous abuser who constantly beat his wife and child, attempting to drown the former in the kitchen sink during the one night she fought back. When 3-year-old Sarah walked in, Virgil pressed his little daughter's face onto the top of a red-hot stovetop and held it there until she was disfigured forever. Virgil refuses to let Sarah have her face medically reconstructed, promises her he'll "burn the rest of her" should she ever tell anyone else what happened, and tries to make good on his promise at the end of the story while violently stabbing Sarah's high school friend. The only reason Virgil does what he does is simple; it's his nature.
• Stephanie Plum series: Benito Ramirez is a violent boxer who absolutely loves to torture, rape, and mutilate women both because he can, and because he likes to make a point that he's so powerful that he can do whatever he wants, to whomever he wants, whenever he wants. In the first book, One For The Money, he stalks Stephanie, even, at one point, calling her in the middle of the night and leaving a taunting voicemail that's being recorded as he assaults a pleading, screaming woman. Later, he rapes and brutalizes Lula, a prostitute whom Stephanie had spoken to about Ramirez earlier that day, and leaves her bloody, unconscious, naked body tied up on Stephanie's balcony. In the fifth book, High Five, he goes on parole claiming to having reformed, only to resume stalking Stephanie and trying to break into her apartment.
• Stinger by Robert R. McCammon: The titular "Stinger" is an alien Bounty Hunter in service to the House of Fists who follow a twisted creed that anything that isn't one of them should die. Chasing a freedom fighter to Earth, Stinger lands in the town of Inferno and entraps it in a force field, while he kills humans he encounters to learn more about them and recycle their biological material into his personal drones. Stinger tells the people to surrender his quarry or he will annihilate the town, and when he captures several humans, Stinger decides he has a better idea: to take them back to the House of Fists so the House will bring their wrath on Earth. Stinger constantly shows he is alien only in appearance: his true nature is a scheming, amoral sociopath willing to facilitate genocide for a quick payday.
• Stones of Power (Sipstrassi) series:
  • Lion of Macedon & Dark Prince: The Demon God Kadmilos manipulates events so he may possess the body of the young future-king Alexander. Trapped in Alexander's body, Kadmilos's influence traumatizes the boy by causing his touch to kill people and creatures around him. As Alexander grows, Kadmilos's influence steadily becomes stronger: he arranges the murder of Alexander's father King Philip, and while Alexander is proud to fight in war and conquer, Kadmilos takes pleasure only in senseless murder. Arranging brutal massacres as he attempts to seize control of Alexander, Kadmilos steadily eliminates those in his way and promises Alexander that when he is done, Alexander will be remembered with hatred and terror once the demon turns the empires of man into blood and ash.
  • Last Sword of Power: Wotan, aka Molech, is one of a group of humans who found the mysterious stones of power that elevated them to practical godhood, Molech differed from his fellow deities in cruelty and depravity. Demanding sacrifices of children, infants and innocents during his time as God of the Canaanites, Molech viewed suffering and torture as the sweetest of pleasures. Having survived to Roman-era Britain, Molech sets about on a brutal war of conquest as Wotan, subjecting civilians to brutal conquest, as his armies torture, rape, and kill. Wotan defeats the king Uther and then enslaves his soul, intending to torment it for as long as gives him pleasure. In the final battle, Wotan attempts to weaken the fabric between the worlds in order to allow hordes of demons to come through and devastate humanity.
  • Jon Shannow Trilogy: Sarento, the Big Bad of the trilogy. initially wanted to restore the Earth of the past in the post-apocalyptic setting, but willingly became corrupted and eventually absorbed the power Bloodstone, giving him a hunger for human souls. Forming armies known as Devourers, Sarento leads genocidal crusades against humanity, massacring so many people humanity faces extinction. Eventually devouring his own followers, Sarento goes after the last survivors and eventually comes against one of the final cities on Earth, while revealing that devouring souls leaves them trapped in agony within him, something Sarento gleefully laughs about. Sarento only deigns to spare the cities when hero Jon Shannow uses a spell to send Sarento and himself to the Earth's past, with millions more people to devour. Sarento gleefully accepts, mocking Shannow how he'll feast on everyone he can, before it's revealed Shannow had chosen to send them to the first testing site of the atomic bomb.
• The Store, by Bentley Little: Newman King is the sociopathic CEO of the wicked Store company. King establishes Stores in small towns with no major competition, having The Store built using the blood and corpses of animals and humans alike. Once a Store is built, King has any competition bought out or run out of business, murdering any store owners who stand against him. Once blackmailing the local mayor into granting The Store power over the law, King has the city council slaughtered and institutes a Police State onto the town, rounding up any vagrants or rebels against The Store, then brutally torturing and brainwashing them into becoming the horrifying Night Managers, zombie-like slaves who serve King. King also uses The Store to sell everything from drugs to child pornography to snuff films, all manufactured by The Store itself. When Bill Davis attempts to subvert King's evil, King manipulates Bill into sleeping with a woman, hiding the fact that it is Bill's own daughter Sam, then uses the recording of the event to blackmail Bill. King then proclaims he's going to turn Sam into a prostitute to be used and abused, and King ultimately plans to expand The Store's reach until he alone controls the entire world.
• The Strain: The Master is one of the seven original vampires. While his six brothers are content to rest in their homes and avoid conflict with the world at large, The Master has been a sadistic tyrant, ever since ancient times. Crossing from Europe on plane, he kills and turns every passenger so when they revive, he sends them to feed on their loved ones, slowly building a vampire army. When the time is right, the Master initiates through his minions multiple nuclear explosions by destroying silos to kill the six other ancients, and blots out the sun, establishing a vampire kingdom where humans are cattle for his kind, locked in camps and used for blood. The Master shows a penchant for murder and torture for his own amusement as well, even keeping a minion he turned back in the second World War from the Nazi ranks to torment his Arch-Enemy, a vampire hunting concentration camp survivor.
• Strange the Dreamer & Muse of Nightmares: Skathis, god of beasts, was a smith who used the gifts of others to become a powerful god and leader of the Mesarthim. Taking over the city of Weep, Skathis torments it with his fellow Mesarthim, abducting countless young men and women to rape and magically convert into sex slaves, letting one man be taken by Skathis's own consort to rape and mentally dominate while Skathis violates his wife. When the children inevitably result, Skathis decides to profit by selling them as slaves and weapons to other worlds, caring for nothing but his own pleasures and dominions.
• The String of Pearls: While later given sympathetic qualities in the retelling of the legends, the original Sweeney Todd was a monster whose only motivation was cruelty and greed. Sweeney would lure customers into his barbershop and proceed to drop them down a tunnel to break their skulls or necks, before 'polishing them off' with his straight razor if they still lived. Coming up with another plan to make more money, he and his partner Mrs. Lovett cooked the bodies into meat pies to sell with a hefty profit. Hundreds of corpses are seen in the preparation room, and Sweeney keeps a kidnap victim to work the furnace to keep the meat coming, with full knowledge that he'll eventually join the pies when Sweeney decides he's been there too long.
• Such A Pretty Girl, by Laura Wiess: Charles Shale is a horrible excuse for a father and a serial pedophile responsible for the heroine Meredith's plight throughout the novel. Having begun molesting and raping his own daughter Meredith as she grew up after he tricks her into watching himself and his wife have sex, Charles's abuse reached its peak when he raped her to the point of bleeding when she was 12. Following this, 5 other children reveal that Charles has done much the same to them, always forcing them to beg for him to stop while he does it, with one in particular attempting to kill himself because of the molesting. Years later, once released from prison for his crimes, Charles immediately begins picking out new victims to restart his spree, and decides to kick it off by violently raping Meredith once more to show his "love" for her. A disturbingly realistic depiction of a child predator, Charles Shale was defined by his horrifying, disturbed nature of sexual lust.
• The Suicide Motor Club, by Christopher Buehlman:
  • Robert "Rob" Odom is the sole member of Luther Nixon's vampire gang that lacks any of his compatriots' good qualities. A rude, cruel murderer of dozens, Rob personally kidnapped five-year-old Glendon Lamb from his parents' vehicle, mocking the parents the whole time before he and his gang fed on the boy, turned him to a vampire, then left him to die in the sun. Continuing to assist his partners in murder sprees across America, Rob abandons his allies when he's endangered, murders a blind old man for mildly annoying him after killing the man's dog, then spends his last moments gleefully mocking Judith Lamb over her son's fate. Rob is considered by Judith to be the most hated of the vampires she had ever met due to his hand in her son's awful trauma.
  • Woodrow "Woods" Fulk is a death-loving sadist who allies with Luther Nixon's vampire gang as their human servant, just so he can witness the carnage they bring. Transporting, protecting, and guiding the gang on finding dozens of new victims, Woods regularly uses one of the many corpses they leave behind as his personal sex toy while ensuring the gang is never caught. Woods murders several members of the Bereaved when they track down Luther's gang, and later viciously stabs the Bereaved's elderly founder Tracy to near-death after a failed attempt to strangle him for the sexual thrill of it.
• The Summoning, by Bentley Little: The Cup Hu Girngsi is an ancient, evil vampire that has grown tired of living in the shadows, and schemes to bring death and suffering across the planet to satisfy its sadism. Invading the town of Rio Verde and corrupting its townsfolk into fanatics willing to torture their own children to death, the Cup Hu Girngsi devours dozens of townsfolk as it increases its power and influence, eventually decorating its lair with butchered infants, gutted women and countless murals to the Cup Hu Girngsi's vile centuries of atrocities. The Cup Hu Girngsi plans to Take Over the World and turn all of the Earth into its feeding ground to torture and devour humanity for all eternity, and uses its final moments to brag that it had Rich Carter's wife and daughter raped before it killed them just to mock the man.
• The Sun and the Void: Ursulina Duvianos is a witch who has seemingly loyally served the noble Águila family for decades, and is Reina's abusive grandmother. 42 years ago during Rahmagut's Claw, Ursulina and Feleva Águila sacrificed the 9 damas del Vacío to the god of the void Rahmagut to weaken his prison in exchange for a wish. When Feleva didn't share the wealth her wish brought, Ursulina plotted her revenge against her entire family. Years later, Ursulina manipulates Enrique Águila into helping her find the new damas by promising to bring back his dead wife. Abducting women she believes to be damas, Ursulina testes this by having them bless babies and leaving them out to see if they are eaten by tinieblas or not, uncaring if the babies are killed. When the last two damas escape, she has Reina hunt them down, taking away the iridio heart she needs to survive to ensure she does. When confronted by Reina at the sacrifice site, Ursulina reveals she plans on releasing Rahmagut into the world to cause mass destruction while she uses his power to destroy everything the Águilas have ever built, before trying to kill Reina when she tries to stop this.
• Sundered Lands:
  • Grinder Prickleback is an ambitious hedgehog who desires the Six Crowns of the Badgers of Power. Jealous over the Badger Lords refusing to share their magical powers, Grinder tried to create a spell that would control their minds so he could acquire their power. He inadvertently ended up blowing up the entire world, killing millions in the process and turning the Sundered Lands into thousands of floating islands, while the Badger Lords dispelled their power into six separate crowns. When Grinder, now donning the name Herald "Percy" Pursuivant, comes across Trundle and Esmeralda on their journey to find the crowns, he helps them on their quest solely so he can take the crowns from them and use their power to Take Over the World. After all six crowns are found and taken to the altar that will unleash their power, Grinder immediately betrays Trundle and Esmeralda, threatening to kill them if they don't surrender the crowns to him.
  • Captain Grizzletusk is the leader of a group of corsairs who plunder and murder at their own leisure. After being contacted by Millie Rose Thorne, the two conspire to work together to retrieve the six crowns and relish in their power. Grizzletusk and his crew constantly chase after Trundle and Esmeralda, going from island to island robbing and/or killing anyone in their path. He also attempts to attack and pillage the island of Swallowhaven just to needlessly fuel his greed, slaughtering dozens of soldiers in the process. When the heroes acquire all the crowns and head to Sunsett to unleash their power, Grizzletusk forces his crew to keep pursuing them, not caring as his crew is gradually slain from various booby-traps. When Razorback tries to convince what's left of the crew to cut their losses and run, Grizzletusk simply threatens to kill him if he tries to leave.
• Sun, Moon, and Talia: This short story from the fairy tale book The Pentamerone has the nameless queen. When she had realized that her husband has cheated on her with another woman named Talia, she ordered her secretary to bring the children to her. She then gives her royal cook the job of cooking the children into several dishes, and then to serve said dishes to her husband. When it seemed like her husband was eating his own children, she continually mocked him for his mistake, and was blissfully unaware of the fact that her royal cook had cooked the King two lambs instead of the two children. The Queen later gives her guards the task of bringing the young woman to her palace, and so, Talia is brought before her. She condemned Talia to to burn in a huge bonfire that she had set up for her, and she then asked her to remove her clothing because she thought they were too valuable to be burned with such a lowly woman.
• Survivor, by J.F. Gonzalez:
  • Jeff Sheer, better known by his stage name "Animal", is the star of numerous snuff films who delights in violence, death, torture, and rape. Having been introduced to the scene by an ex-lover whose greatest wish was to be tortured to death, Animal embraced his monstrosity and frequently violates and tortures innocent people to death. When given the chance, Animal even slaughters an infant on camera and cannibalizes the remains. After the director unwittingly allows heroine Lisa Miller to escape, Animal rapes him to death with a bladed toy and attempts to find and torture Lisa to death.
  • Rick Shectman is a depraved porn producer who has found his niche in sadistic child pornography and snuff films. Responsible for countless amounts of child abuse being filmed, Rick even pimps out his own 10-year-old son for bestiality films. Taking to filming the torture, rape, and murder of people who "won't be missed", Rick uses the services of the vile Animal in his films, and punishes a minion that fails him by having Animal kill him with a bladed sex toy. Rick spends the story trying to catch and use Lisa as a special victim for his films, and hires other vile killers to murder the men who are protecting Lisa.
  • Mabel Schneider is a seemingly-kind old woman who is actually a rapist, killer, and cannibal. Having gained a taste for death when she accidentally murdered a client during a BDSM session, Mabel began luring men, women, and especially children into her clutches to be horribly assaulted and tortured to death by her, their bodies then used as food; her "favorite snacks" are eyes and genitalia. In one case, Mabel sexually groomed a teenage girl for months, before tying her up and eating her eyes right out of her skull. Mabel has killed so many people over the years that she has lost count, estimating she has slaughtered at least 60 people, and her depravity is so fierce that she earned a spot in multiple snuff films. When she is hired to help capture Lisa, Mabel murders multiple men to entrap the woman, and gleefully tries to watch as she is raped to death, Mabel's only desire being to consume Lisa's eyeballs when the latter is dead.
• The Survivor's Club: David Price is the personal nemesis of Detective Roan Griffin. An imprisoned pedophile and serial child killer, David cuts a deal with wannabe rapist Ron Viggio, giving Viggio a way to rape women with impunity, as long as his first victim is Meg Pesaturo, a girl that David seduced and impregnated when she was thirteen. Using the method that Price worked out, Viggio rapes Meg, Carol Rosen, and Trisha Hayes, killing the latter when her latex allergy kicks in, and assaults and tries to rape Trisha's sister, Jillian Hayes. When things become too difficult, Price arranges for Viggio to frame a man named Eddie Como, then hires an assassin to kill Como on the steps of the courthouse (drawing Griffin onto the case), and has Viggio blow up the assassin's car to cover their tracks. Price then claims to know the identity of the "College Hill Rapist", saying he will reveal it in exchange for a visit with Molly, his daughter by Meg. When this doesn't get him the attention he wants, Price has Viggio rape and kill Sylvia Blaire and kidnap Meg. Price is given his trip, and proceeds to break out of the transport van, killing three police officers in the process. He takes Meg to his old house, intending to kill her and bury her in the basement alongside his other victims; when the police try to interfere, he shoots Griffin's friend Detective Waters, and finally dies trying to knife Griffin. A pathological narcissist obsessed with being the centre of attention, David Price is about as low as even a paedophile can get.
• Swan Song:
  • The man with the scarlet eye, aka "Friend", who may be The Devil himself, has been wandering the Earth in different guises, arranging and committing a multitude of massacres and other evil deeds. When Friend helps to arrange nuclear war, he ends up massacring a group of other survivors in his pursuit for the woman known as Sister and an item she carries to lead to the girl Swan. When Friend discovers Swan's power to bring life back to the dead Earth, he brings the information to a militia known as the Army of Excellence, leading to attacks on settlements and more death. It is revealed that Friend, annoyed with Swan offering him forgiveness, is attempting to help the now-insane former President of the US trigger a doomsday device to wipe out the world and the remainder of humanity while he watches, enjoys the show, and then dances on their graves.
  • "Lord" Alvin Mangrim is a homicidal psychopath with a love for decapitation and chaos. Escaping an insane asylum following the nuclear holocaust, Alvin leads his fellow inmates in a killing spree across the land, luring dozens of innocent men, women, and children to them to be tortured before carving their heads off with a chainsaw for Alvin to keep as trophies. Murdering Leona while trying to slaughter Swan and Josh, Alvin later butchers his way into a position at the AOE, where he assists the leadership in wiping out opposition and gleefully encourages the monstrous Friend's new leadership of the AOE into further villainy.
• The Switch: Hubert Spencer is the evil father of the main protagonist. When the Ambarayans refused to sell him their moonfruit so he could profit off of it, he had them wiped out and ordered his men to Leave No Survivors. Later, to test his product, he created a Fake Charity for homeless children so he could take them off the streets and experiment on them with no remorse. Later he attempts to murder one in cold blood, with his son next to the child, and laughs coldly during the event.
• Swordbird, by Nancy Li Fan: Lord Turnatt is a ruthless hawk warlord who uses the teachings of the Book of Heresy to lay waste to the forest. Turnatt has his soldiers—of which he is not averse to killing for virtually no reason whatsoever—wreak carnage to kill all they can, once having his birds attempt to slaughter a large audience gathered for a theater performance, and manipulates the cardinals and the blue jay tribes into constant war by framing them for stealing each other's eggs. Turnatt himself is responsible for stealing the eggs, consuming them in a deranged attempt to make himself immortal as per the Book's word.
• Sword of Truth: Darken Rahl has made a deal for power with the demonic being, The Keeper of the Underworld. Darken keeps the people enslaved, banning fire and launching brutal extermination campaigns on the orders that have resisted him. Rahl also continues the order of Mord-Sith: girls raised to be vicious torturers who have their mothers murdered in front of them and are forced to torture their fathers to death. He also sexually abuses the Mord-Sith and especially enjoys tormenting a lesbian couple amongst them. A Serial Rapist as well, Rahl forces himself upon many women, and if ones with him consensually are repulsed at the scars under his clothing, he tortures them to death. Viewing children without the gift of magic as worthless, he has any ungifted offspring disposed of, while also sacrificing other children to the Keeper for power. Rahl's ultimate goal is to plunge the world into The Keeper's domain, where all that lives will suffer eternally.
• Swords and Fire series, by Melissa Caruso: Prince Ruven is the son of the Wolf Lord of Vaskandar and an ambitious, cruel mage in his own right who grows into the role of The Heavy and eventually the Big Bad. As a skinwitch, Ruven wields a form of magic that can only be mastered by those with a profound Lackof Empathy and happily uses it to dominate and literally torture those under his authority. Though most Vaskandrian mages care little for the lives of muggles, Ruven treats his fellow mages as equally worthless, manipulating and tossing aside those who serve him and using a combination of potions and his skinwitch powers to enslave foreign mages against their will. Driven to expand his power at all costs, Ruven seeks war with the Serene Republic to the south, planning to weaponize a volcano in such a way as to cause staggering civilian casualties and gleefully forcing the entire population of his domain to act as human shields to protect his scheme. Vaskandrian culture allows its witch-lords near unlimited power within their own domains; Ruven is a sterling example of the extent to which that power can be abused.

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