Monster / Literature: T to Z

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

T – V

• Tailchaser's Song: Grizraz Hearteater became jealous of his older and younger brother and grew to hate cats in general. Hearteater summoned a Hellhound to kill as many cats as he could, and also ended up killing one of his brothers. Ever since then, Hearteater has hid underground in Vastnir to avoid being detected and also to avoid the light. Hearteater hates Meercat Allmother and wants to destroy all of Her creations. Over the centuries he's become an Animalistic Abomination and has been rearing monstrous minions to slaughter cats and kidnap slaves while he waits to start the apocalypse. Hearteater sits upon a throne of various tortured and dead animals, where all he does all day is eat the cats that his servants bring him. At the end of the novel, Hearteater decides to show his true power by turning his mound of animals into a deformed, vaguely hellhound-like monster only called "the Fikos" ("terrifying badness"), which slaughters multitudes of cats on both sides.
• Take You Apart, by T.J. Spade: Andrew "Drew" Stephens, real name Robert Fobray, is a maniacal Serial Killer obsessed with playing a game of wits with his perceived Arch-Enemy, Caleb Everett. A perfect example of a psychopath since childhood, during which he tortured animals to death and creepily mimicked others in an attempt to "get" human interactions, Drew grew up to meet Caleb Everett, a psychic police detective who could peer into the minds of killers as they murdered others, and immediately develops a fixation on Caleb and besting his inhuman detective abilities. Drew kicks the novel off by kidnapping, torturing, and murdering a young woman, before sending Caleb her mutilated body parts to taunt him, after which he brutally rapes and beats a prostitute to near death. Realizing this didn't get Caleb's "full" attention, Drew tortures then disembowels one of Caleb's closest friends, also Drew's own girlfriend, then attempts to beat another of Caleb's best friends to death. In the end, after killing a homeless man to send a message and attempting the same on a young teen, Drew kidnaps Caleb's Love Interest, planning to kill Caleb then torture and rape the girl to death as his final victory. Drew Stephens is a classic psychopath with no ability to comprehend human emotions or interactions, having to instead adapt various personalities he runs into throughout his life, earning him the moniker of a "chameleon killer".
• A Tale of Two Cities: The Marquis St. Evrémonde, uncle of Charles Darnay, is the face of the French aristocracy in the novel and the "worst of a bad race". The crueler of the two infamous Evrémonde twin brothers, the Marquis introduces himself when running over a small child with a carriage, tossing a single coin at the grieving father while chiding him for "not looking after" his dead child. Disappointed that reforms prevent him from wantonly abusing and executing the innocent—including his own nephew, whom the Marquis tells to his face that he'd happily have Charles locked away for "treason"—the full heights of the Marquis's depravity come to light only in the last part of the novel. One night, with his brother, the Marquis raped and tortured a peasant girl to death for his own pleasure, slaying the man's entire family as well and dooming the good-natured doctor who tries to expose him to almost two decades in the Bastille. The sole survivor of this massacre is the future Madame Defarge, whose fanatical hatred for the Evrémondes almost dooms the entire family, innocent or not. Ultimately, every misfortune in the book—systemic and personal alike—leads back to or is embodied by the Marquis and his endless lack of regard for the lower class.
• The Tales of Many Orcs duology, by Shane Michael Murray: The Lady of Firebrand Peak is a menacing dragon who enjoys needlessly terrorizing innocents. Asserting her dominance over the various races in the land, the Lady routinely kidnaps innocents and holds them prisoner before cooking and eating them alive. After choosing Talking-Wind to be her next meal, the Lady forces him to sacrifice one of the orcs in his village to prolong his life. Once captured, Talking-Wind watches firsthand as she devours two prisoners; he later performs a Mercy Kill so the orc he chose to be sacrificed won't suffer. Furious, the Lady tortures Talking-Wind and marks him for death, and later chases him across the country as he tries to flee from her. Amassing a huge orc army, the Lady attacks the city of Tooyk just to find Talking-Wind, causing wanton destruction and murdering hundreds of innocents. When the Lady finally corners Talking-Wind on a cliff, she pushes him off, hoping that he'll survive the fall just so he'll break and beg for death.
• Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms: One Good Knight brings us Queen Cassiopeia, who conspires with her adviser, Solon, to summon storms to wrack the coast of her country, sinking dozens of ships and drowning hundreds of sailors so that she can claim the salvage for the crown. When her citizenry become dissatisfied with her rule, Cassiopeia has Solon mind control the (otherwise harmless) dragon Adamant, forcing him to ravage the countryside, so that she may set up a lottery and feed the daughters of her political enemies to the dragon. After her own daughter, Andromeda, begins to suspect that someone is controlling the storms, Cassiopeia arranges (in a move that revolts even Solon) to have her sacrificed to the dragon, and take advantage of the public wave of sympathy that will follow. Totally convinced that the common folk should just put up with her capricious rule, Cassiopeia is plotting to have Solon assassinated when he finally makes his own move against her, ending her role in the story.
• Tales of the Magic Land: Gingema is the tyrannical ruler of the Blue Land, delighting in making her subjects miserable just because she can. She gets angry that humans destroy the habitats of frogs, snakes and other creatures she uses for food and potions, so one day, she decides to deal with the matter in the most radical way possible. She conjures the worst hurricane in world history that, had it not been for good witch Villina's intervention, would have killed every living being on the planet save for the few animal species Gingema needs for her own use.
• "Tallow", from Haunt of Southern-Fried Fear, by Ronald Kelly: Sally McKelley was an old woman who sold tallow candles and soap, leading to her nickname "Soap Sally". In truth, Sally was a cruel Serial Killer who abducted children and boiled them alive to use their body fat for her soap and candles. Having killed dozens of children in life, Sally's ghost haunts her old house in death where she continues to catch children and make new soaps with them.
• "Tamango", by Prosper Mérimée (link): Captain Ledoux—"The Sweet One" in French—is an unscrupulous slave trader who also admits beating his own wife back home. Continuing his business even after the trade has been outlawed, Ledoux regularly put a high number of Black people in a narrow space in his ship, with a significant number of them dying of suffocation during the travels. During his last trade, Ledoux inebriates African warlord Tamango to scam him out of 187 slaves, including children. Apathetic to a drunk Tamango killing a woman in front of him, Ledoux gleefully accepts Tamango's wife Ayché as companion and later enslaves her repentant husband. During the travel, Ledoux forces slaves to dance under his whip and brutalizes Ayché at length when she rejects his advances. It is also implied that he rapes her afterward.
• Tamsin: Judge Jeffreys is a brutal judge whose actions haunted the town of Dorset, England for centuries. Sent down to deal with the Monmouth Rebellion, Jeffreys executed hundreds of people, innocent or not, through brutal quartering and hanging their bodies on pikes and trees, even causing a little girl to die from stress during a brutal interrogation, while selling hundreds of others into slavery. Gaining a fascination with the young Tamsin, Jeffreys murdered her lover Edric and sexually harassed Tamsin, causing her to run out into the cold and catching pneumonia, and he made her believe that Edric stood her up, using her last words to send The Wild Hunt to chase Edric's soul for eternity. Released centuries later as a ghost, Jeffreys plans to infuse Tamsin's soul with him so he can keep her to himself forever, before attempting to sic The Wild Hunt on the teenage Jenny.
• The Tapestry: Astaroth is an ancient and powerful demon (actually a "spore" created by entities called the Starving Gods) who wants the Book of Thoth so he can rule the world with it. Despite how he masks himself, he's really a demon supremacist, punishing David Menlo for summoning demons by biting his hand off. His plan for world conquest involves bringing governments around the world close to collapse before descending on Rowan with his army to seize the Book, leveraging the lives of Max's friends to get it. Upon getting it, he uses its power over truenames to expunge all post-medieval human knowledge from existence and memory, killing the vast majority of the human race. He then sets up demons as the Earth's rulers under him, instituting a vicious regime where a single person being literate mandates mass slaughter. When he loses the demons' loyalty, he loses use for them, and after consistently failing to create fully functional life, he flips out when Rowan gears up to stop him and reveals his true motives: he just wants to play God, and cares no more for demons than for humans. To this end, he attempts to summon the Starving Gods in the hopes that they will devour the universe and give him scraps to live out his fantasies with. A narcissistic psychopath caring only about his fantasies of power, Astaroth exhibits unparalleled evil even amongst demons.
• A Taste for Monsters, by Matthew J. Kirby: Jack the Ripper is a bloodthirsty Serial Killer stalking the streets of 19th-century Whitechapel. Secretly a midwife, the Ripper lures in unsuspecting prostitutes and uses her medical skills to butcher them in increasingly gruesome murders, taking five victims in total with the last four having organs removed. Jack plans to continue the gruesome murder spree forever.
• "Technicolor", by John Langan: The unnamed professor, narrator of the story, is a man who discovered the secrets of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and the power of primal entities of "darkness and decay" that held sway before light entered existence. Piecing together the rituals from one Prosper Vauglais, the Professor spends the story performing them on his captive audience. Tricking his students into eating drugged cookies, the Professor plans to offer them as sustenance to the forces he summons and use said power to completely unmake reality simply because he wishes to make use of the power.
• Teeth in the Mist, by Dawn Kurtagich: Fostos, seeking to live forever, seduces women to sire his children, the Unclosed. Faust later "harvests" them, taking, torturing, and butchering them while they are still alive, in order to replenish his own body, and is even willing to devour them and delivering their souls to Lucifer. Having run a house where he murdered workers and their children for sport and power, Faust also had his wife burnt alive as a witch when she discovered him. In the present of 1851, Faust begins murdering and torturing his way through the cast, nailing one to a torture wheel, keeping him alive in agony even while his organs are removed.
• Tentyrian Legacy: Stavros is the leader of the Dark Coven. Once one of the rulers of the Tentyrians, Stavros looked down upon humanity, viewing them as inferior to Tentyrians and wishing to rule them. Stavros had two of the other rulers assassinated and helped spark a fire which killed dozens, and later threatened to burn down the various covens of the other rulers while threatening to harm their children should they not relinquish control to him—but intending to kill them anyway even if they comply. After the people rebel, Stavros's forces enact a purge which leads to the near-genocide of the Tentyrians. Stavros and the Dark Coven than begin a campaign of terror throughout the world, playing humanity against each other from the shadows and causing conflicts to become far worse and than reaping the profits afterwards. Stavros also uses his blood to transform humans into bloodthirsty monsters that serve him, raising an army in the thousands. Planning on culling humanity, Stavros attempts to corrupt Arianna—one of the last Tentyrians—to his side, and even fatally tortured one of her friends to find information on her whereabouts, intending to rule supreme for all of eternity.
• Teratologist, by Wrath James White & Edward Lee: John Farringworth is a depraved narcissist obsessed with his own perfection. Having always gotten what he wanted in life, Farringworth's ego takes a hit when a pair of beings he dubs the "Angels" refuse to have anything to do with him, leading him to devise a plan to force them to love him by taking the knowledge from God. Attempting to convince God to confront him, Farringworth begins kidnapping mentally and physically deformed people he dubs "freaks", injecting them with a drug that drives them into a sex-crazed insanity, then does the same to religious leaders before recording them doing depraved sexual acts with the freaks. Along with leaking the videos of the relations online, Farringworth often disposes of his victims when through with them, at times raping some of them himself. When, rather than God, the Devil confronts Farringworth, Farringworth demands the Devil give him the power to bring Hell on Earth to destroy all innocence and goodness in the world in order to become the "perfect evil". An egomaniac turned psychopathic monster, Farringworth was so wicked that the Devil himself sang his praises.
• A Terrible Vengeance, by Nikolai Gogol: The Evil Sorcerer is the incestuous father of Katerina. Arriving after she has married the Cossack Danilo and has a baby son named Ivan, the Sorcerer is revealed to have murdered her mother, plotting to make Katerina his and his alone. To this end, he engineers a massive battle between the Poles and Cossacks, murdering Danilo in the confusion, before magically killing his baby grandson. When Katerina attempts to avenge them, the Sorcerer kills her as well, later murdering a holy man when the man refuses to absolve him for his vile crimes. It is revealed his hatred of goodness is so great that the Sorcerer plots to sell out the East to the Roman Catholic Church, all to see the Orthodox church burn and its adherents slaughtered.
• The Terror: Shipman Cornelius Hickey is a ruthless, ratlike man with a penchant for manipulating others. Murdering his rival Irving, Hickey frames the local Esquimax people, resulting in their massacre. Leading a mutiny against Captain Crozier, Hickey slaughters all who oppose him and tortures the ship's doctor Goodsir, so he cuts them up for Hickey and others to cannibalize. Mocking Crozier by killing his second-in-command and presenting Crozier with the man's right arm, Hickey attempts to murder Crozier and keep Goodsir in line via increased torture until the man kills himself to escape. Hickey ends up being so vile that even the monstrous, soul devouring Tuunbaq on the arctic ice finds his soul too unclean to devour.
• The Terror of Living, by Urban Waite: Grady Fisher is a sadistic hitman obsessed with knives and their usage for hurting others. Known and feared throughout the criminal underworld as a loose cannon who can and will rack up an extra body count on even the most minor of assignments, Grady's first recorded instance of this extra cruelty is seen when, after being hired to scare his boss's rival out of town, he befriends the man, gets him drunk, then butchers him while he is using the bathroom. When hired to transport two drug mules to their Vietnamese bosses, Grady decides to simply murder the two teenage girls, then dig the drugs out of their corpses, kicking things off by torturing then dismembering the first one, then trying to blow the other one's head off with a rifle. Grady later begins tracking down Phil Hunt to recover drugs he stole, and in the process, burns Hunt's home down, tracks down and kidnaps his wife, and forces the man to listen as he guns down his prized horses one by one. After his employers turn on him because of his insanity, Grady tracks them down and slaughters them all, brutally murdering two cops in the process, and, once capturing Hunt and his wife, forces them to lead him to the drugs lest he butcher them and sell their organs to make up for his losses. In the midst of it all, Grady tries to murder someone for their car, terrifies a cashier for fun, and callously guns down any innocents who he gets annoyed with. Grady Fisher is ultimately a lunatic who uses his job to facilitate evermore pain and misery to those around him, with profits always second.
• Tess Winnett series, by Leslie Wolfe:
  • The Watson Girl: The Chameleon—Bradley Welsh—is a monstrous Serial Killer who developed his taste for sadism after raping a college student. Fully embracing his depraved nature after murdering his business partner's family, three children included, to cover up a business mistake, the Chameleon goes on to murder entire families, always framing it to look like the active killer the Family Man was the perpetrator. When the Family Man is finally arrested, the Chameleon begins experimenting in various ways of killing to decide which way he enjoys best, until he finally settles for kidnapping women and spending days raping and mutilating her until she dies. Not restricted to killing solely to get his kicks, the Chameleon beats a man to death with a crowbar for cutting him off in a parking lot and slashes the throat of an elderly woman after she sees him kill her granddaughter. A chilling maniac who believes that he has surpassed humankind and can do whatever he pleases, the Chameleon treated each and every one of his murders as nothing but a tasty meal for him to consume, then promptly shrug off until his next kill.
  • Glimpse of Death: Michael Walden is a pathetic coward who manipulates the mentally-deranged Derek Henderson into becoming his partner in crime. Kidnapping women and raping them for nearly a week, Walden then brutally beats and rapes one woman while forcing the other to watch before having Derek strangle his current victim to death, laughing at the horror of the woman being forced to watch. Racking up nearly two dozen women who he rapes for days then has Derek kill, Walden begins tries to commit murder himself, failing only due to his own cowardice and instead just maiming the women in gruesome ways. In the end, Walden breaks down into a crying heap when he is caught, trying to pin everything on Derek and proclaiming that the women deserved it for "rejecting him".
  • Taker of Lives: The titular "Taker of Lives", Althea Swain, is a vindictive and petty narcissist who blames women around her for ruining her career goals by being more beautiful and attractive than herself. Yearning to break these women down and show the world how useless they are, the Taker starts her spree by drugging a young model, taking pictures of her naked body and posting them all over the web, the ensuring taunts and cruelty from the Taker regarding the photos making the model commit suicide. Drugging and photographing several more women and leaking the illicit photos to ruin their lives, uncaring that the father of one her victims dies from a heart attack in the process, the Taker eventually upgrades her crimes to murder, beginning to livestream herself killing beautiful young women in increasingly brutal ways. The Taker plans to make her newest victim a young teenager and torture her live on the web before killing her, and when caught brags that she had many more victims planned, and all for the most insanely petty of reasons.
• The Testament of Sister New Devil:
  • Zolgia is the first major villain encountered by Basara Tojo and his friends. A hedonistic Demon Marquis who helped overthrow Mio's father, Demon Lord Willbyr, Zolgia desires to restart a war to show how amazing he is on the battlefield, and also murdered Mio's foster parents, a pair of kind demon orphanage owners. Zolgia regularly abducts other attractive young men and women to rape, relishing in the pain from breaking their pacts to other masters and servants while having them and others' minds broken to serve as doll-like playthings for his amusement. Zolgia's loyal creation Zest fails no better, as Zolgia plans to rape her and dispose of her when she ceases to be of use before replacing her with an identical clone to repeat the cycle.
  • Belphegor, head of the demon council, is known as a war hero to the demon realm but is in truth a monstrous killer who masterminded Lord Willbyr's fall using Lord Leohart as a proxy. Having murdered Leohart's foster parents, he threatens the life of Leohart's adoptive sister and lover Liala to force his compliance. Having helped to create the demon god Chaos, Belphegor plans to have his servants commit genocide on the demonic moderates while unleashing Chaos to kill the rest to shore up his own power. A Serial Rapist as well, Belphegor frequently has women brought to him while violating them body and soul, draining their life force until they are broken shells to keep around or until they simply die at which point he simply orders more brought to him.
• The Testaments: Commander Judd is one of the architects of Gilead and a chief designer of the Aunt and Handmaid system, promoting horrific slavery for countless women. A pedophile himself, Judd is known for marrying disturbingly young girls to rape them as he wishes, before clandestinely murdering them, covering up the deaths and observing a "mourning period" before choosing his next victim.
• That Hideous Strength: "Fairy" Hardcastle, one of the chief members of N.I.C.E,and head of their Secret Police, is a former fascist who loves nothing so much as domination. Seeking to tear down and remake the world in pursuit of her group's vicious order, Hardcastle has many people abducted and tortured, often participating herself; it is implied that she even derives sexual pleasure from torturing. Capturing heroine Jane Studdock, Hardcastle tortures her, burning her with a cigar, and threatens to later do the same to her husband Mark.
• Their Bright Ascendancy: Yamai, the Traitor God—real name Umigami—is the first Emperor of Hokkaro. Exiled beyond the Wall of Flowers, all taken by Yamai have their minds hollowed out until they are turned into worshipping shells of themselves to praise him ceaselessly. Sending demons to sow chaos and death and spreading the horrific blackblood plague, Yamai eventually returns on a killing spree, massacring an entire city with intent to reclaim his empire and destroy all in his way.
• There's Someone Inside Your House: The Osborne Slayer, real name David Thurston Ware, is a teenage high school student who grew bored with his small town and turned to murder to make a name for himself. Planning to make himself infamous as a killer, the Slayer targets his fellow students who are talented enough that they will eventually leave the town and has them brutally murdered. The Slayer intentionally traps them in order to drive up their fear before he mutilates them in a macabre parody of their dreams. Eventually murdering his best friend as well, the Slayer plans to kill heroine Makini Young as well before continuing his murder spree and handing himself over to the police to allow him to live in infamy.
• They Thirst:
  • Prince Conrad Vulkan is a vampire who is eternally seventeen and has a giant chip on his shoulder. Arriving in the US, Vulkan turns and corrupts people and sends them to turn and corrupt others. For his meals, Vulkan uses a mentally disturbed serial killer named Roach to commit murder and also bring him living victims. When his vampire hordes are numerous enough, Vulkan has them sweep through entire buildings, killing and turning until Vulkan has an army six hundred thousand strong, with the old and infirm simply being "discarded." Caring nothing for his servants, Vulkan brutally murders one after he decides the man is too old to be of any further use to him. Utterly lacking in morality or restraint, Vulkan is described as a "Black as sin Peter Pan": a Spoiled Brat who has never grown up and wishes to make America his perfect, eternal kingdom with humans extinct or kept as cattle in order to feed his ego.
  • Kobra was an albino biker on a cross-country murder spree, using his Mauser machine gun to mow down entire bars and gangs of people in his path for fun, when he was contacted by Prince Conrad Vulkan to join his legion of evil. Becoming a vampire and given full cognizance and power as Vulkan's military commander, Kobra devours several innocents to turn them into his undead slaves, and uses them to prowl the streets of Los Angeles, turning all in their path who could be useful to Vulkan and killing everyone else. After turning Wes Richard's lover Solange into his vampiric bride, Kobra gleefully parades her zombified form in front of Wes just to taunt him, and tries to execute the young boy Tommy when Kobra finds him inside Vulkan's castle.
• The Thief of Always: Mr. Hood runs a magic house where children can be young forever and gain anything they want. Naturally, it's nothing more than an elaborate spider's web. Hood lures children in under these promises before draining them of life and soul, imprisoning them in the lake forever to prolong his own life. Calling himself the Vampire King, Hood delights in what he does to children and tries to seduce the young heroes to his side. When one of his minions tries to take his place after he believes Hood is dead, Hood seizes him and rips his head clean of.
• The Thin Executioner: Qasr Bint is a cannibalistic, sadistic, religiously fanatic cult leader who believes he alone is the most pure person in the world and that everyone else must mutilate themselves until they die to earn the favor of the gods, and pursues his quest of conversion with a perverse lust and religious fervor. He forces the members of his cult to mutilate themselves, kills them, and eats them if the food supplies are low. He also has entire tribes wiped out if he finds them "irredeemable."
• Thirsty: Chet, seemingly a benevolent member of the Forces of Light, is a ruthless mercenary hired by the vampire god Tch'munga to secure the trapped monster's suicide. To that end, Chet manipulates the reluctant teenage vampire Christopher with false promises of a cure to his condition, savagely killing a true member of the Forces of Light temporarily and blinding Christopher to their influence. Securing numerous deaths in the chaos when Tch'munga's destruction is assured, Chet sadistically mocks Christopher over his lack of future before brutally beating him and then vanishing from his life forever.
• Thirteen Storeys: Tobias Fell is a reclusive billionaire who, upon realizing the consequences of his past actions due to being haunted by their ghosts, attempts to avoid them by passing them on to unlucky victims, one of whom is a little girl. Fell has Banyan Court built using the dead bodies of workers and disagreeable business partners, in order to create a kind of spiritual Faraday cage. Fell has anyone who dares to report anything other than his official company lines suffer either by torture or death. When the party is infiltrated by a journalist, Fell has the journalist beaten by Max, only sparing his life to force him to watch. Fell then has the participants eat part of his own severed leg before attempting to have them murder a member of an impoverished community he ruined, deriding the man as "scum|". When his plans are foiled by the participants overpowering Max, Fell still attempts to have them kill the victim anyway with the offer of money, unable to see how anyone could value a human life over material gain.
• Thorgal: Au-delà des ombres (Beyond the Shadows), by Amélie Sarn: Shardar-The-Almighty, tyrant of Brek Zarith, is even worse than his comic incarnation. Usurping the throne after poisoning the former lord, Shardar led the purge of his family, only sparing Galathorn as a child to mold him as his plaything and kept him imprisoned till adulthood. Once tired of him, Shardar tried to have him executed. Shardar is also a Mad Scientist who regularly uses his subjects as fodder for drugs, poisons and torture devices in his quest of knowledge and power. Holding Aaricia and her son Jolan hostage for years, he would often experiment on the boy for his Psychic Powers. The tyrant also keeps a harem of unwilling young girls and forces Aaricia to watch as he burns the Vikings' longships. Besieged by the rebellion, Shardar poisons his entire court and destroys all his treasures, leaving the kingdom bankrupt, hoping that, to restore it, Galathorn will be forced to become as big a tyrant as him, while he escapes and plans to start a new conquest, using Jolan's psychic powers after getting rid of Aaricia. Outplayed by the latter, he attempts to torture her to draw her son nearby. Unlike his original incarnation who mourns his son, he reacts to his death with indifference instead and is even revealed to have murdered said son's mother while she was giving birth.
• Those Across the River, by Christopher Buehlman: Lucien Savoyard, ancestor of the novel's protagonist, was a nightmarish and brutal werewolf who maimed his wives to render them barren, faking his death to "show up" as his own child. A Confederate slaveowner and general, Lucien would torture countless slaves, murdering them for sport and pleasure while hunting others in wolf form every month. Infamous for the cruelties he inflicted, Lucien killed so many that though he bought countless slaves, it was suspected that he sold them so quickly due to the disappearances and upon death, cursed his killer as a werewolf as well.
• A Thousand Splendid Suns: Rasheed is nasty, violent-tempered, smug and thoroughly heartless, spending the book ruining the lives of the protagonists in a myriad of ways. Marrying a 15-year-old before promptly raping her and tricking a 14-year-old into marrying him immediately after her family dies by paying a man to tell her that her surviving love interest is dead are without counting what Rasheed does to his own family. His nature also comes forth in beating the tar out of his wives on a daily basis, completely neglecting his daughter in favor of his son, forcing one of his wives to eat pebbles because he thought her rice was undercooked, shoving a gun into the mouth of one of his wives and finally trying to strangle her to death. When his wives try to run away, he tells the younger that if she ever tries it again, he will kill his other wife (her only friend) and her daughter in front of her. She knows he's not joking, because he's just put them all in sensory deprivation rooms in the blistering heat with no water for three days. What little sympathy the author tries to create for him by letting us know his first son died is quickly dashed away when it's implied that Rasheed's own drunken neglect probably caused it.
• The Three Musketeers: The mysterious, murderous Milady de Winter is one of the top agents of the visionary Cardinal Richelieu in his campaign to strengthen France and free it of foreign influence, but shares none of her employer's lofty ideals. Coming from humble origins as a larcenous nun, Milady uses her position, resources, and quasi-supernatural beauty and charisma to indulge her limitless appetites for money, power, and indiscriminate, disproportionate revenge on anyone who gets on her bad side. Milady poisons her second husband, goads his brother into a duel in the hopes he dies, and tries to enlist d'Arthanan to kill a young noble for apparently turning her advances down. In her quest to take revenge on d'Artagnan for humiliating her, Milady sends him twelve bottles of poisoned wine, supposedly from his Musketeer friends, and encourages him to throw a party for his comrades with the wine, endangering many lives. When she is imprisoned for her crimes, Milady seduces her jailer to free her; lies to him that Lord Buckingham raped her, so he may kill him for her; and then abandons him to be executed for the murder. Milady's darkest crime comes when she murders the young Constance Bonacieux, d'Artagnan's Love Interest, as Revenge by Proxy whilst pretending to be her dearest friend.
• Threshold: Nzame is an Eldritch Abomination from beyond our world. Finding a way into our world, he turns the portal into an Eldritch Location and murders several people working on this portal in increasingly horrific ways. He uses this portal in the form of a pyramid to breach into the human world and mind rapes the population of Threshold into worshiping him. Once they do, he transforms them into stone golems in constant pain. When the protagonists rise to oppose him, he attacks them through their dreams, threatening bodily harm to them and their loved ones. He pays special focus to the heroine, Tirzah, threatening to possess her unborn child and leave her husband trapped in an Eldritch Location. Twisted and cruel, Nzame does not care for anything but himself and power.
• Tigana: Alberico of Barbiador is a powerful sorcerer and brutal tyrant, unlike the more powerful Brandin. Seeking to dominate all in his path, Alberico responds to an assassination attempt by crucifying his attackers' families, children included, to giant "death wheels", cutting off their hands and stuffing them in their mouths while leaving them to perish of exposure. When feeling slighted by poets, Alberico selects 20 poets at random to give the same treatment to, while frequently having his men commit atrocious war crimes during conquest. When war is provoked between him and Brandin, Alberico marches his forces, burning and slaughtering as he goes. Despised by all, Brandin comments that Alberico is wholly devoid of any human passion, simply wanting for the sake of ambition and nothing more.
• Timeline-191: Commander Roger Kimball is initially nothing more than a sleazy, misogynistic Confederate submarine captain who views women as conquests and non-whites as subhumans. Following the Confederacy's defeat in the Great War, however, an enraged Kimball vents his spite by ordering his submarine, the CSS Bonefish to fire on the USS Ericson, killing everyone on board, and making himself into the worst war criminal of the conflict, a title that he revels in. Unemployed after the war, Kimball becomes a Freedom Party thug, assaulting members of the opposing Radical Liberal Party, scheming to have his former Executive Officer, Tom Brearly, assassinated, and finally trying to rape his ex-girlfriend, Anne Colleton, when she leaves him. At the time of his death he is plotting to avenge himself on Anne by tracking her down and strangling her, cementing himself as the irredeemable bottom-feeder he always claimed not to be.
• Time Salvager duology, by Wesley Chu:
  • Senior Securitate Kuo Masaki-Europa is a cold, ruthless member of the Valta Corporation's special forces who believes that corporations should be the future of humanity. Tasked with capturing Elise Kim for Valta, Kuo clashes with Auditor Levin's more restrained approach, unconcerned with any possible civilian casualties. Kuo later tortures Smitt for information before killing him out of annoyance. After Kuo takes command of the manhunt and realizes that Elise is hiding among the tribes of Manhattan, Kuo decides to systematically conquer the island building by building to search for her, killing dozens to hundreds every building and enslaving the survivors afterwards by using their loved ones as hostages while driving out anyone she can't use to cause a refugee crisis among the other tribes. After learning of Elise's location at the All-Galaxy building, Kuo leads an assault on the building, resulting in thousands of casualties before managing to capture and get away with Elise.
  • Cole Javier-Oberon is Auditor Levin's self-centered nephew. After ditching being a chronman to hide in the past and being arrested and sent to prison by his uncle, Cole became the leader of the Apex gang, where they regularly beat new inmates and rules through fear. Cole is then broken out with Levin, and then joins the unified tribes of Manhattan. Cole then later goes along with Levin to overthrow ChronoCom's administration, Cole uses this as an opportunity to sell out the All-Galaxy building for his own gain, allowing Kuo to lead her brutal assault on the building. Cole then later tries to stop Levin's uprising and tries to kill his uncle, and recklessly attacks his own men during his charges.
• Titan A.E. novelization, by Steve Perry & Dal Perry:
  • Queen Susquehana is the absolute monarch of the Drej and a genocidal nightmare of an alien. Leading the Drej in genocidal campaigns against entire planets, Susquehana's ultimate goal is to spread the light of the Drej all across the galaxy and exterminate all non-Drej life throughout. Learning that the technology of the Titan still exists even after Earth's destruction, Susquehana sends waves of Drej to find and eradicate the technology whilst destroying all those who seek it, eventually making it a point to spitefully obliterate every surviving human colony herself and drive out all those remaining into the deep edge of space to perish. Susquehana also slaughters several of her own kind, some of them upstart assassins—but others killed purely due to Susquehana's own paranoid fits. An Absolute Xenophobe obsessed with establishing her cruel legacy among her species and sinking to depths unreached even by the previous Queens of the Drej, Susquehana perfectly embodies the reasons why the Drej are feared and reviled by every denizen of the galaxy.
  • Preed, a slimy Akrennian barely tolerated even by the others onboard the Valkyrie, makes a name for himself as a backstabbing snake as his true colors unfold throughout the novel. Contacted by Susquehana with the promise of a monetary reward for finding the Titan, Preed and his compatriot Joseph Korso betray the other members of the Valkyrie to the Drej. Preed quickly establishes himself as the viler of the two between him and Korso, nearly shooting his way through an entire crowd of innocent colonists to get to Cale and Akima and displaying open, sadistic relish at the prospect of doing so. Once at the Titan itself, Preed turns his gun against Korso and reveals his intention to simply murder all of his former allies and sell out the Titan to the Drej, dooming any chance humanity has to repopulate—and then kicking back and watching as the Drej massacre everything in their path, comfortable with the death of almost all sapient life in the galaxy so long as he gets to stay alive.
• TodHunter Moon trilogy: Mitza Draddenmora Draa is a treacherous woman who has no concept of friendship and no genuine love for anyone. Envious of her stepsister Cassandra for marrying Dan Moon—despite no longer caring for the latter—Mitza murdered Cassi with an envelope full of Sand Flies, putting Cassi through a lengthy, fatal illness. Allying herself with Oraton-Marr, Mitza kidnaps Dan and leads a pack of Garmin to abduct nearly everyone in the PathFinder village so that Oraton-Marr can make them dive for a submerged Orm Egg, knowing that many of them would not be able to breathe underwater and would not survive the task; Mitza also tries to ensure that her 12-year-old niece Tod would be taken as well. Remaining with her allies as they escape with the egg, Mitza is willing to drown the Apothecary's baby to force the Apothecary to assist them and prevent interference. Mitza later plots to kill Tod with Sand Flies to spite Cassi's memory, at the same time aiding the Red Queen in invading the Castle in hopes that she would cause death and destruction, and nearly succeeding in poisoning her niece.
• To Kill a Kingdom: The wicked Queen of Sirens is Lira's abusive mother and a genocidal sociopath who forces sirens to attack and sink human ships. Trying to force Lira to kill a human prince to indoctrinate her in her ways, the Sea Queen becomes furious when Lira does not rip the boy's heart out and nearly forces Lira to kill her cousin to repent, only waning when the Sea Queen's sister offers to let the Sea Queen kill her instead. When Lira disappoints her again, the Sea Queen renders her mortal and demands her daughter bring her a powerful artifact to exterminate mankind. When Lira turns the sirens against her tyrannical mother, the Queen resolves to boil the entire ocean to exterminate her own army out of spite.
• To Kill a Mockingbird: Robert E. Lee "Bob" Ewell personifies all that was wrong with Dixie in the 1930s. An abusive, neglectful father to his daughter Mayella, Ewell has beaten and is implied to have been sexually abusing her several times. Ewell has Tom Robinson, a disabled Black man, arrested for supposedly raping and beating Mayella, despite the fact that Tom was physically incapable of committing the crime and the fact that Bob caught Mayella making advances on him. Bob tries to kill attorney Atticus Finch's children after a school play as revenge for Finch opposing him, despite Tom having already been sentenced to death.
• To Reign in Hell: Abdiel is a manipulative, smug, and cowardly angel whose fear of death at the hands of the Fourth Wave drives him to commit his atrocities. Using his power of Mind Control, Abdiel controls various messengers to make Yaweh and Satan slowly hate each other, igniting a war between their factions, and sets himself up as Yaweh's second-in-command in the process. Attempting to make tensions worse, Abdiel accidentally kills the innocent angel Ariel, then cuts down Raziel for accusing him of the crime, and uses these murders to frame Satan even more as a dangerous traitor, before ordering the full-scale massacre of Satan's defenseless forces under the illusion of a truce. To ensure his own safety, Abdiel constructs the Plan, an event that will sacrifice one thousand angels to protect the rest from any threat by the Fourth Wave, and uses his position of power and various crimes to make sure he is as far away from the Plan when it takes place. In his crowning moment of cowardice and evil, Abdiel, once his crimes are discovered, decides to kick-start the Fourth Wave himself to cover his tracks, fully aware and knowing of the countless lives it can claim, yet completely uncaring, simply laughing that he'll be remembered through history for his acts.
• Tortall Universe:
  • Trickster's Duet: Duke Roger of Conté, Alanna's Arch-Enemy and the Big Bad, was originally heir of his cousin King Roald before the birth of Prince Jon bumped him down the line of succession, and he stops at nothing to get his place back. He creates a Mystical Plague that kills many in the city of Corus before it reaches its intended target, the royal family, who were deliberately targeted last so that the palace Healers were too weak to save Jon's life. When this fails, Roger's second attempt on his cousin's life involves goading Jon into getting himself killed by exploring a cursed city. Alanna foils this too, so Roger sends multiple Animal Assassins after her, tries to drown her, turns her friend Alex against her so that he tries to kill her while sparring, and helps create a war with Tusaine so he can pull a Uriah Gambit on both of them. After the war is ended without his intended results, Roger casts a wasting sickness on his lawful aunt, the Queen Lianne, using a wax doll of the Queen, being periodically run under a stream of running water that slowly drains her life force; this wrecks her already-poor health enough that she dies little over a year after the spell has been ended. When Alanna uncovers this plot and finally exposes him, she kills him, but that doesn't end it. When Roger returns he has become a full-blown Omnicidal Maniac, who gives up regaining the throne in favor of destroying Tortall with an earthquake out of spite. Not even his own followers, except Alex, are told, most thinking that they're participating in a standard usurper plot and not realizing that he cares nothing for them either.
  • Protector of the Small:
    • Vinson of Genlith was already a bully in Joren's gang, but we learn in Page that he's also a sexual predator, attempting to rape Lalasa. In Squire, the Chamber of the Ordeal forces him to confess to raping two commoner women and beating a third by inflicting on him the injuries he inflicted on them; the text describes numerous ugly cuts and bruises occurring on his body. Even then, he doesn't have any remorse and tries to blame them for somehow inciting him to attack.
    • Blayce the Gallan from Lady Knight is a small, cruel man with a magical aptitude in Necromancy. Booted from the City of the Gods by his superiors out of disgust for the way he used his talent, he turned to Tortall's northerly neighbor, Scanra, and swore himself to the newly crowned King Maggur. Offering his services in exchange for land and wealth, he hires a band of mercenaries to both protect himself and enforce his rule over the village overlooked by the keep Maggur gave him. Revelling in the power his position has given him, he goes a step further by having the villagers' children forcibly taken from their families, and flayed and tied to a wall until death claims them if they try to rescue them. When the children are brought to him, he has them bathed, touching them inappropriately, promises they will be given luxury and kindness under him only to have their souls sucked out of their bodies, entrapping them within monstrous mechanical devices that he provides to the Scanran militia. When Blayce runs out of children in his own backwater village, he resorts to having the Tortallan refugees sheltered under Keladry of Mindelan captured, intending to use their children to continue powering his devices. Blayce's monstrosity is highlighted in the disgust the villagers have for him, knowing that he specifically uses minors not out of pragmatism, but out of the enjoyment it gives him to manipulate their innocent naivety and the pedophilic undertones in his physical intimacy with the children. A remorseless, cowardly and sociopathic murderer, Blayce and the men he employs repulse Kel so much that she leaves their corpses to be desecrated by Stormwings, even when most enemies she'd faced had been given proper funeral rites.
  • Daughter Of The Lioness: Imajane Rittevon is an example of The Caligula being a genetic trait. Anyone she deems rebellious, even former friends or longtime aides, is subject to being nailed to a post on the docks as an example. Hundreds of raka in the countryside are killed by stretching an already awful law beyond its limit, and city raka who gather even under innocent circumstances are violently dispersed. When Duke Nomru politely suggests being mildly less horrible, she throws him in prison. Finally, she and Rubinyan have Dunevon and Elsren assassinated to make themselves the sole monarchs and do so in a cruel, sloppy way that endangers others. Though her husband Rubinyan is her accomplice for many of these actions, and even has the nerve to pretend sympathy over it, he at least tries to restrain her more impolitic cruelties and might have had some genuine friendship for the Balitangs in the past.
  • Provost's Dog:
    • Ammon Lofts (known as "Crookshank"), one of the two serial killers from Terrier, is already a slumlord who forced at least one debtor to sell his wife into slavery, driving her to suicide. He's rich, but when he discovers fire opals under the city, he lures in jobless poor folk to mine them in secret, then kills them all and starts over when each mine is spent. He does this several times over the course of the book, killing seven to ten people each time. When his great-grandson Rolond is kidnaped by the Shadow Snake, he refuses to pay a ransom of opals out of pride and greed, resulting in him being killed, and continues when the same is threatened to his grandson Herrun. When Beka tries talking some sense into him, he threatens to have her raped and murdered.
    • Mistress Deirdry Noll, the other serial killer from Terrier, uses the legend of the "Shadow Snake" to go after poor Lower City families by abducting their children to extort their valuables, usually the only slightly valuable thing they own, such as a family heirloom or a bauble saved up for. If not paid, the Snake will kill the child, and if the family has others, she'll take them until she gets what she wants. She kills Crookshank's great-grandson in part because she has a grudge against the child's mother. When she is finally unmasked and apprehended, she has no remorse and justifies her actions with "I deserve nice things more than they do and that bitch made the success of my business more difficult." While she's being arrested, she shows herself as an abusive parent.
• The Torturer, by Peter Saxon: Conde Pedro Delmorte was a Conquistador who learned the secrets of eternal life from the worshipers of Quetzalcoatl. Savagely torturing countless natives and even murdering his own bride, the Conde returned to Spain and began to endlessly torture peasant girls to death to ensure his own immortality. Returning as a vampiric figure in modern day, Delmorte begins to pick off the film crew at his castle, torturing them to guarantee his eternity.
• Towards Zero: Nevile Strange is a psychopath who feels that anyone who has ever wronged him must die. When his wife Audrey leaves him for another man out of fear, he decides that she has to die, and die humiliated at that, first killing her new husband and making it seem like an accident. With that in mind, he bludgeons his adoptive mother, Lady Tressilian, to death, and lays two overlapping sets of false clues, so that it will look as though Audrey not only committed the murder, but also tried to frame him for the murder. He arranged for the death of lawyer Arthur Treves, who remembered him from a case he committed as a child when he deliberately killed another child with a bow and arrow and might have been able to expose him. His intent is that Audrey be destroyed socially and then hanged; when he's exposed, he screams that he does not care, and starts ranting about how much he wants Audrey to be hanged.
• Tracers, by J.J. Howard: James Miller, alias James Hatcher, is a crooked DEA agent who moonlights as a master thief and fence. Taking a group of homeless teenagers under his wing, Miller trains them in freerunning and uses them to perform daring heists across New York for him. Miller runs his gang with an iron fist, including extorting sexual favors from Nikki, the group's sole female member, threatening to ship her brother back to Florida, where he's fleeing an unjust warrant for his arrest, if she doesn't put out for him. When Nikki falls for main character Cam and the two plan to slip Miller's leash, he rapidly devolves from a mere cat burglar to a murderous madman who repeatedly attempts to send Cam to his death, before finally capping off his rampage with the massacre of a roomful of witnesses to one of his heists.
• Tricky Business: Tark is a low-level driver of a drug boat. Tired of this, he decides to rob his bosses in a major drug deal. In the middle of a tropical storm, he has three of his associates beat up and knock out two guards of the boat. He mutilates and castrates one guard, and decides to force the other guard to swallow his own blood with his hands tied behind his back. When he gets to the drop-off point of the deal, he murders everybody crewing the operation. He then proceeds to betray and kill each and every one of his associates and even tries to kill some innocent people who get in the way. Motivated simply by greed, no one in the novel outshines Tark when it comes to sadism or disloyalty.
• The Troop: Shelley Longpre is a disturbed young psychopath who enjoys torturing and murdering insects and other animals, including his mother's kitten. Taking advantage of the tapeworm infestation to enact his sick desires, Shelley tortures the infected Kent before killing him and gaslights Ephraim to torture him mentally in the belief he is infected before burning him alive and attempting to kill the remaining members of the troop.
• The Troy Saga: Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, is the main perpetrator of The Trojan War and the leader of the invading forces. Having failed to take control of Troy through a coup, Agamemnon rallies the kings of Greece under a false pretence, ravages the lands allied to Troy, and finally lays siege to the golden city itself. Agamemnon's cruel, murderous, and treacherous actions during the siege manage to disgust even his own allies. Utterly unrepentant, Agamemnon causes thousands of deaths and untold suffering in pursuit of personal glory, riches, and power.
• The Tsar's Rage, by Lidia Charskaya: Fyodor Basmanov is a lowborn Royal Favorite of Tsar Ivan the Terrible and uses his high standing and knowledge of the Tsar's mood swings to avenge his own personal grudges. After a petty quarrel with Prince Ovchina-Obolensky that Basmanov himself started, Basmanov tells the Tsar that Ovchina-Obolensky is a traitor, leading to the latter getting killed by the Tsar's men. Not satisfied with that, Basmanov, obtaining the Tsar's permission, leads a raid on the Prince's estate, with the intent to torture and kill everyone who lives there and planning to use especially horrific tortures on the Prince's young widow and 9-year-old ward.
• Twelve Gauge, by Ronald Kelly: Richard McFarland was a man who grew bored with life one day and walked into a church in Cedar Bluff, Tennessee where he proceeded to massacre twelve people, the youngest being a four-month-old baby. Before he was executed, Richard learned to astral project, and escaped his body to slowly corrupt his living son Sonny. Manipulating Sonny into "finishing the job", Richard leads him to murder multiple innocent people in order to hunt down and slaughter the survivors of the church massacre. Having Sonny abduct and murder two college girls as "practice", Richard keeps him in line through vicious physical and mental abuse while trying to force Sonny to simply die, taking down as many innocent people possible at the end.
• Two Can Keep A Secret: The "Homecoming Stalker," whose true identity is model citizen and upstanding lawyer Peter Nilsson, is a sexual sadist who relishes his power to seduce teenage girls, plying them with expensive gifts, sleeping with them, and finally killing them once he gets bored and moving on to the next; Nilsson has claimed at least three victims this way, plus a fourth whom he ran over with his car as a thrill-kill. Nilsson emotionally blackmails his daughter into planting fake clues to cover for him, and when heroes Ellery and Malcolm discover his identity Nilsson cheerfully attempts to gas them to death—though not before taunting Ellery with the fact that the mysterious death of her aunt was actually his first kill, and in fact he thought it was Ellery's mother.
• Unbreakable Machine-Doll:
  • Felix Kingsfort is a power-obsessed Serial Killer, hiding beneath a façade of justice and politeness. A member of the Kingsfort family, a corrupt group closely connected to the House of Lords, Felix uses his privilege to hide his identity as Cannibal Candy, a serial killer that has claimed 26 pairs of puppeteers and dolls. With his doll Eliza, Felix attacks them in the dead of night, taking the magic powers of the dolls to empower Eliza, and then destroying them while making the puppeteers "disappear". Using his position as chief of the discipline committee, Felix tried to frame Charlotte as Cannibal Candy by having Raishin investigate the attacks and leading him to decisive evidence pointing to Charlotte. Luring Charlotte out in a secret meeting, Felix tried to trick Charlotte into attacking him and incriminating herself, but when Raishin saw through his ruse and pointed to him as the killer, Felix decides to drop all pretenses and try killing them to keep them quiet.
  • Bronson the Sword Angel is a science-obsessed madman who would do horrific things to children just to satisfy his curiosity. A man with no boundaries, Bronson originally planned to win the title of Wiseman to legalize his experiments, but after failing, he decided to conduct his experiments in secret through D-Works, the magic company he founded. Scouting children with great potential as puppeteers, Bronson would set up incidents to leave these children orphaned so that he could take them and perform his tests. Taking them to an orphanage under the sponsorship of D-Works, Bronson would subject these children to unethical tests daily, going as far as to replace their hearts with artificial ones. Many of these children didn't survive, and their bodies were feed to his animal dolls as nourishment. After grooming two powerful puppeteers, Frey and Loki, he forced the two to participate in the Night Party to try winning the title of Wiseman for him, threatening a beloved doll of Frey if they failed. When Raishin began to uncover his crimes, Bronson tried to have the two kill him before nearly killing Frey by forcing her to her limit. When Loki defected, and worked with Raishin to stop him, Bronson engaged the two and sadistically tortured them in the fight. When defeated, he was asked if he regretted the things he did to the kids he took, in which he replied that he doesn't at all.
• Uncanny, by David Macinnis Gill: The Shadowless, real name Malleus the Deceiver, has murdered hundreds of people with magical talents called "Norns" and then consumed their souls to add their powers to her own. Kidnapping a boy named Harkon, she molds him into a killer, with Malleus being the architect behind the Salem Witch Trials in a bid for more power through murder, even killing a 5-year-old child when her attempt to escape is foiled. Eventually killed, Malleus returns from the dead hundreds of years later to seek out an uncanny—a person with special magical talent—named Willow Jane, whose soul would give Malleus unlimited power. Killing the friends of Willow, Malleus twists them into her servants to use her in her hunt for Willow and even uses Willow's 7-year-old sister as hostage to draw her out, fully intending to kill both of them.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin: Simon Legree is a chilling reminder of the evils of slavery in human form. Legree is brutal to his slaves, working them to death because he considers it a financial boon to himself. It's also made clear he'd do it solely for fun. Legree endeavors to break their spirits and make them despair as he breaks their bodies and minds. Legree is a torturer, rapist and murderer whose only frustration is the good-hearted slave Tom will simply refuse to break, spurring Legree on to greater cruelties to force his submission.
• Uncle Victor, by Jake Wiklacz: Chris is Kara's ex-husband, who manages to be a far worse person than the titular boogeyman. A warped psychopath with a womanizing streak, Chris believes that in order to truly move on from a marriage, he needs to literally destroy all ties he has with it, starting by burning down his and Kara's house while both their daughters are inside, ignoring their cries for help all the while. His second wife eventually finds out that he's having an affair with an escort, and he responds by murdering her and setting up her death to look like a suicide. Confronted by Kara when she discovers the truth, he kills her as well.
• Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle:
  • Hayes Vi Arcadia is a former royal of the ancient Holy Arcadia Empire obsessed with nothing less than the annihilation of the New Kingdom of Atismata and the return of the Empire's tyrannical ways. Kicking off her war against Atismata by selling weapons and information to their enemies, Hayes makes her first formal move by leading an assault on Cross Feed academy, killing anyone in her way. Forcing Lux to assist her in showing her the way to an ancient ruin by infecting the boy's friend Phi with Ragnarok cells, Hayes goes back on her word and orders a corrupted Phi to slaughter Lux and her other friends, planning to cure the girl only after her friends are dead so as to drive her to killing herself. In her most despicable move, Hayes uses the colossal Gigas to lead a full-scale invasion of Atismata, ordering the capital and its countless inhabitants be wiped out to pave the way for her new coming order. After being revived by the Lords faction, Hayes attacks the academy with two Ragnaroks and later electrically tortures Lux to whip and rape his friends, nearly killing him when he refuses. On the verge of death, she fuses with Ragnarok Sacred Eclipse and betrays her eldest sister out of jealousy for her position, intending to control the Ruins and convert the masses into Elixir. Despite seeing herself as a victim of usurpation by the founders of the Old Arcadia Empire^note  Not to be confused with the Holy Arcadia Empire that she hails from, her actions establish her as an irredeemable sadist motivated by envy and overblown, misplaced spite.
  • The King of Vices is the mysterious figure responsible for turning the Republic of Heiburg into a de facto military dictatorship. Taking advantage of Hayes's arms trade with her country, the King increases the military's political influence and uses this power to sadistically enslave her citizens and empower the worst of Heiburg's soldiers. In need of a secret identity, the King sexually abuses and brainwashes Rosa, and then orders her to blind Stefa, allowing the dictator to Kill and Replace Stefa's cousin, Calensia. After a failed joint operation with Hayes to destroy the New Kingdom of Atismata, the King kills Heiburg's commander, replaces him with Rosa to act as her new proxy and scapegoat, and tries to have Lux and Celestia assassinated out of spite for their virtue. Anticipating that Lux and Philuffy are in Heiburg, the King sends Rosa to kill them, and then tries to convince Lux to kill a defeated Rosa in order to frame him as an assassin and traitor. Moving her plan into the final stages, she sends Rosa on a suicide mission to unleash Ragnarok Metatron to devastate Atismata. Unrepentant to her dying breath, the King of Vices mocks the heroes for their ideals while taking pride in being a predator rather than prey.
• The Underland Chronicles: These two are responsible for Pearlpelt/the Bane being so bad:
  • Twirltongue is the true mastermind behind the Bane, and a vicious, manipulative xenophobe. Taking advantage of the Bane at a young age, Twirltongue uses her persuasion abilities to convince the unstable Bane that he will one day lead the Gnawers, with her as his adviser. Once setting the Bane up as king of an army of Gnawers, Twirltongue continues her manipulation and advising of the Bane, convincing him that every species that isn't a rat deserves to die, and to this end, the Bane's forces proceed to round up thousands of adult and children mice alike, then either force them to jump to their deaths by the hundreds, or shove them into horrific chambers and gas them by the thousands with volcanic ash. Twirltongue then has the Bane lead a full-scale war on Regalia, hoping to slaughter every man, woman, and child inside, then reign supreme over all other species of Underland.
  • Snare, despite his limited appearances, sticks out as the nastiest Gnawer in the story alongside Twirltongue. Once a general in the wicked King Gorger's army, thus facilitating the numerous atrocities committed by Gorger, Snare later gave birth to a litter of mice with his wife, Goldshard. Realizing that one of his newborn mice pups, Pearlpelt, is the legendary "Bane", a being prophesied to one day take over all of Underland, Snare promptly murders the rest of his litter to ensure Pearlpelt doesn't have to share his mother's milk with them. Snare takes to beating Pearlpelt and driving his hateful rhetoric into the baby, fully hoping to one day use his son to wage war on Regalia and ride the coattails to victory, and, when Goldshard finally has enough and tries to escape with Pearlpelt, Snare attempts to murder her in a blind rage. Though dead before Pearlpelt became the monstrous Bane, Snare fully facilitated his son's transformation into a psychotic monster, and would only laugh at the destruction he went on to inflict.
• Undertaker's Moon, by Ronald Kelly: "Squire" Crom McManus was a squire in ancient Ireland who embraced a Deal with the Devil himself to become the Arget Behir, the Silver Beast. A vicious werewolf who spread his curse, roaming the land and slaughtering or turning all who crossed his path, Crom would attack an abbey near Kells, killing all but a single priest in one bloody night. After centuries of murder, Crom realized his survival depended on a low profile and turned innocents to help him conceal himself, eventually destroying them. After converting the O'Shea family and moving to Old Hickory, Tennessee, Crom eventually decides he's through lying low and decides to move to the city where he can feed on the homeless and runaway children. When he tries to flee when the O'Sheas are destroyed, Crom runs into a woman he was briefly dating as a diversion and decides to rape and murder her on the spot, gleeful to embrace the Beast once more.
• Underworlds series: Loki, the wicked Norse Trickster God, seeks to wage war against Asgard to take Odin's throne for himself. Kidnapping Dana Runson for her knowledge on the whereabouts of the Crystal Rune, the key to Odin's throne, Loki then starts releasing monsters into the human world, having entire towns and villages destroyed, seeking to burn the world to ash in his quest for power. Even after learning using the key on Odin's throne will destroy all worlds, Loki persists, and upon being beaten, sends his wolf Fenrir to keep Dana imprisoned in his underworld permanently out of spite.
• Unholy Night, by Seth Grahame-Smith: King Herod is a twisted tyrant who rules via fear and oppression. Having anyone who opposes him murdered in brutal and torturous fashion, Herod also rapes attractive women he has brought to him, including girls as young as their early teens. Upon the escape of the infamous thief Balthazar, Herod goes ballistic when he learns of a prophecy and orders the massacre of any child in his domain to catch the young messiah. Succumbing to paranoia and rage, Herod routinely slaughters all around him in his quest to be more than a petty Puppet King of Rome.
• The United States of Monsters series, by publication date:
  • Eldritch Ops: Vlad Dracula is the most powerful vampire in history and is single-handedly responsible for converting them into the most dangerous species on Earth. Having already been a dangerous pirate in his human life, Dracula immediately began consolidating his power upon his transformation into a vampire. Dracula began mesmerizing every vampire that was sired, creating the Vampire Nation; massacred his daughter's entire family in revenge for her leaving his side; raises humans from birth to be addicted to blood, leaving them his mindless slaves; trafficks humans to the Vampire Nation and moves slaves on six continents; and intends to destroy the House so he can Rape, Pillage, and Burn across the world. With the crimes of every vampire ultimately happening because of him, Dracula lives up to every terrifying legend that has ever been spread in his name.
  • Straight Outta Fangton: Renaud de Bures was once a fanatical member of The Knights Templar before becoming even worse as a vampire. Desiring to exterminate vampires despite being one himself, Renaud began a centuries-long crusade across Europe, killing anyone he deemed guilty, raping any woman who crossed his path, and releasing draugr onto human populations. In the modern day, Renaud seeks to destroy the vampire government, and does so by recruiting the Human Rights League to blow up the Aphosis, knowing that it would kill thousands of innocent people along with his own forces. After murdering the families of the HRL when they fail, Renaud then forces Melissa Morris into his harem with mind control, and forces her to drink David Treme's blood, all while David's best friend Peter Stone is Forced to Watch. Despite the suffering he endured in his backstory, all it proves about him is that Renaud has always been a hypocritical and narcissistic sadist who will gleefully wipe out both humanity and vampires in a mad devotion to a God he doesn't honor.
  • The Bright Falls Mysteries: Marcus O'Henry is the Ulfric of the werewolves and directly responsible for all the evil that has occurred in Bright Falls. Coming into power by killing his father, Marcus began abusing the rest of his family, even forming a lynch mob when his sister married a Native American; this mob killed his sister and her children, and when the Red Wolf then massacred the mob in response, Marcus left them all to die. Across his horrible reign, Marcus raped any shifter he wanted, producing children with many of them; massacred the Drake clan, including civilians; kidnapped Yolanda's son and raised him as a wolf before sending him to die; and eventually led his own granddaughter to the Wolf, getting her killed. After being arrested, Marcus backs Dr. John Winston Jones's genocidal plans from behind the scenes, and at the height of his depravity, sells out his entire people to the Red Sky just for a shot at returning to power.
• UNSUB series, by Meg Gardiner:
  • UNSUB (first book): The vicious Titus Rhone, nicknamed "the Prophet" by the public, bases his murders around Dante's Inferno. Having killed a woman in his 20s for being a "tease", Rhone suffocates a professor of Eastern religions; stabs a woman with multiple marriages; feeds a couple to attack dogs; tortures and drowns other victims; and burns an atheist couple alive, all for the sadistic thrill he gets. Returning later for a new killing spree after laying low, Rhone kills multiple innocents, even twisting two victims' heads 180 degrees with his bare hands while they scream in agony. Rhone then targets the heroes with more torture and murder, even attempting to detonate bombs to collapse San Francisco's infrastructure and kill hundreds of thousands while educating a new disciple to carry on his gruesome work after he is gone.
  • Into the Black Nowhere: Kyle Detrick is a Control Freak whose pattern involves kidnapping women to torture and rape for weeks before killing them, acting out a fantasy of revenge on his college crush Dahlia for rejecting him. Spending his free time working at a suicide hotline just so he can get off to women on the cusp of taking their own lives, Detrick is captured by law enforcement for only a limited time before causing a traffic pile-up to enable his escape, nearly killing dozens of drivers. Corrupting his secretary into killing others for him, Detrick hunts down Dahlia and tortures her to death before targeting the woman's teenage daughter, hoping to slaughter an entire sorority of dozens of women as a final romp of fun before finishing off Dahlia's daughter.
• Until They Bring the Streetcars Back, by Stanley Gordon West: Otto Lutterman is the abusive father of Gretchen. He routinely beats her, and is later revealed to beat the rest of his daughters, as well. At one point, Cal Gant breaks into his house and finds the corpse of an infant in his refrigerator, and Lutterman chases him with a knife. When Cal successfully frames Lutterman for bootlegging, he testifies at his trial, and Otto's wife reveals that the child was his, and that he had raped Gretchen. Otto then flies into a rage and tries to strangle Cal.
• Unwind Dystology:
  • Dr. Roberta Griswold is a high-ranking member of Proactive Citizenry and is the one in charge of the Rewind project. She has Camus "Cam" Comprix created and uses him as a puppet. Having Risa Ward brought to her, Griswold gives her the choice of becoming Proactive Citizenry's puppet or having her friends' compound raided. After selling Cam off to the military, Griswold plans to mass produce an army of Rewound slaves for them, before trying to kill Cam for turning against her.
  • UnBound's "UnNatural Selection": Dr. Rodin is a seemingly polite member of the Burmese Dah Zey and is in charge of the "Magic Kingdom" harvest camp. There, Rodin horrifically experiments on and modifies countless people into monstrous forms of "art", such as grafting extra limbs onto them or combining them with animals, leaving many of those who survive in constant pain, something other members of the Dah Zey find disturbing.
• Up Schitt Creek: Remington Ralph is the leader of a group of malicious outlaws. Looking to get rich quick, Ralph led his outlaws into the town Big Blossom, killing the sheriff and various deputies before kidnapping several women to sell to a Comanche tribe. When the Comanche tribe is eventually wiped out by Glen Doyle, Jessie, and a group of deputies, Ralph leads his gang to attack a train so he can kidnap Missus Cantrell in exchange for more money. Even though his plan fails, Ralph and his gang end up killing dozens of deputies and civilians during the assault.
• Utopia 58:
  • LE905, also known as Ellie, is actually the Father, the person behind Isonomia's horrific state of condition. After the previous Father died, Ellie took up his mantle, keeping herself disguised so that the country's culture and ideology would survive, and the White Army would be able to hunt down Zionites and other scapegoats Ellie created for the country. Posing as an innocent civilian, Ellie befriended Kay and several other rebels who defected, all so she could gain their trust and build up their hope, only to crush it later on. While working alongside the rebels, she secretly led the White Army to them, thus causing the deaths of many rebels along with soldiers from the White Army—many of whom she personally killed. After faking her death, Ellie allows EQL61 and his soldiers kill off the rest of Kay's allies, before Kay himself is captured. While Kay's imprisoned, Ellie visits Kay in person and reveals who she truly is, all so she can gloat about how everything he did was futile, and that she'll be free to continue leading Isonomia with no one left to stop her.
  • EQL61, also known as the White General, is a prominent member within the Isonomian White Army renowned for slaughtering hundreds of thousands, as well as personally torturing Kay for eight years in a reeducation camp. In his debut, EQL61 buries several Zionite prisoners up to their necks in sand, and watches as thousands of Isonomians stone them all to death. After learning that his wife, Ellie, was "stolen" by Kay, EQL61 crucifies hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, leaving a note on all of their bodies for Kay to return Ellie back to him, or else he'll kill more innocents. When EQL61 learns of Kay's location, he and his battalion of soldiers hunt down Kay and his rebels, where they massacre most of them with no hesitation. Once EQL61 finally captures Kay, he keeps him alive just to torture him in his prison cell, before watching as he and his remaining allies are publicly executed several days later.
• V: The Second Generation, by Kenneth Johnson: The Leader, military dictator of the Visitors, won her place at the head of the Visitors via her charisma, but eventually simply resorted to outright murder and jingoism to keep control. Initiating brutal intergalactic conquests, the Leader approved Diana's cruel schemes and infiltration of Earth with intent to genocide humanity and turn them into food for the Visitors. Arriving on Earth herself, she has one young volunteer to the Visitors murder an alien Zedti POW before trying to use humankind as shields against the Zedti fleet before wiping them out as well.
• The Vampire Chronicles: Queen Akasha was the first vampire ever made and also the evliest, being a selfish, nihilistic predator with a desire to dominate everyone else. She orders the massacre of Maharet and Mekare's village down to the last woman and child all so that she could obtain their spirit-summoning powers for herself, has them publicly raped and humiliated before her court, and finally sentences them to be mutilated and burned because she unfairly blamed them for the accident that turned her and her husband King Enkil into the Mother and Father. It is worse in modern times, as she plans to execute almost every human male in the world in order to set up a paradise over which she will rule over as a goddess, flying around the globe and hypnotizing hundreds of women at a time into committing these murders while she watches. She massacres most of the vampires in the world and threatens to do the same to the lone survivors if they refuse to join her New World Order. She even drains her husband to death to take his powers and have Lestat as her new mate. Among the actions of countless morally gray characters that appear within The Chronicles, her crimes are a stark contrast that make it all the more apparent.
• The Vampire Files: We learn about Helen Tielli posthumously. She repeatedly tries to give her children up for adoption after her husband's death so she'd be free to party. When state authorities refused to take them, she brings her kids to an isolated area for a picnic. She takes her six-year-old son into the woods, cuts his throat and sets him on fire. Not quite dead, he screams in agony as she watches him burning. Helen then slits the throat of her three-year-old daughter and walks away, leaving them both for dead. Arrested soon afterward, the only time she says a word to the police is to ask how long her questioning would take, so she could go home and get dressed up for a date. Though her brother-in-law has been more than willing to adopt both kids, she wouldn't let him, because she can't stomach him being gay.
• "The Vampyre": Lord Ruthven, the original aristocratic vampire, is a sexual and psychological predator who befriends protagonist Aubrey and uses him as bait to draw in women. He murders Aubrey's Love Interest Ianthe, and then fakes his own death, making Aubrey swear to tell no one. When Aubrey returns home, he finds Ruthven engaged to his sister, whom he plans to kill. Aubrey finally violates his oath, leading to his death; the warning comes too late, and the servants find Aubrey's sister the day after the wedding, drained of blood.
• Van Helsing: The Novel, by Kevin Ryan: Dracula is a predator devoid of any qualities but malice and cruelty. Seducing Victor Frankenstein into making his monster, Dracula murders him and later unleashes his young to wipe out a Transylvanian town. Attempting to turn Anna Valerious into his monstrous bride as he's done to other innocent girls, Dracula intends to awaken his children and feed them much of the world out of spite towards God.
• Velocity, by Dean Koontz: Steve Zillis and his accomplice Valis are a team of serial killers known as "The Freak", who send Billy Wiles a letter detailing a Sadistic Choice: if the victim goes to the police, they'll kill someone, but if the victim does not they'll kill someone else; the two proceed to kill a friend of his. Their second victim is tortured to death and the third is shot, while along the way, they torture Billy by jabbing a fishhook through his scalp. At the end, Billy finally catches on to them when his wife in a coma is the final intended victim.
• Very Bad Deaths: Allen is a wealthy hyper-sadist who considers himself an artist and a scientist, specializing in human pain. With an encyclopedic knowledge of the most horrendous and painful ways to kill a man, Allen carves a legacy of torture, rape, and murder of the most twisted kinds over years, leaving at least 150 victims behind him. Allen considers it a test to keep his victims as alive as long as he can—his personal record being twenty-two days—and devises a variety of drugs ranging from those that promote fear and panic to those that amplify pain far beyond the usual, planning to continue murdering until he's able to catalog an entire book on the ways he's killed people. Allen's intended masterpiece is his intended fate for a happy family of four in Heron Island, BC: Allen intends to torture each member of the family to death over a course of days one at a time, the children included, before rendering the wife permanently aphasic and paraplegic, sending her off to an institute and visiting her regularly to continually remind her of what he did to her. Allen captures the protagonist, Russell Walker, and puts him through a round of torture to extract information from him, planning to visit as much of a month of torture on his associate Nika, and responds to the information that Russell's friend Zandor is psychic by gleefully sending unspeakably horrible mental images towards him and planning to keep him as his own pet, forcing him to bear the agony of every victim Allen murders for the rest of his life. A "one-in-a-billion freak" and a madman more vile than any other serial killer or sociopath the world has ever seen, Allen cheerfully admits he's a sociopath and revels in every minute in the marathons of agony he orchestrates.
• Victorian Horror Stories' "Let Loose": Sir Roger Despard was a mass-murdering psychopath who enjoyed terrorizing the people of Wetwaste. Nearing the end of his life, Despard is asked to repent for his many sins, only for him to refuse to and instead say that his only "regret" is not being able to kill more people. To rectify this, Despard cuts off his hand and instructs it to murder and maim in his place before he dies. Fifty years later, said hand eventually escapes its confinement and proceeds to kill a little girl, the local blacksmith, and very nearly kills the protagonist himself. The latter ends up protected by his dog, who dies in the process, and ends up needing to wear a high collar, even in hot weather, to hide the bruises.
• The Village of Eight Graves, by Seishi Yokomizo: Yozo Tajimi was the psychopathic head of the Tajimi family whose atrocities still haunt the titular village 26 years after his death. Growing obsessed over a young Tsuruko, he kidnapped and imprisoned her, raping her daily as he intimidated his and her families into silence. His arrogance and depravity only growing when Tsuruko gave birth to a baby Tatsuya, Yozo would later physically abuse Tsuruko upon discovering she was in love with someone else, torturing her child of spite by branding it with fire tongs. When Tsuruko at last escaped with Tatsuya, Yozo took his frenzied wrath out on the village, massacring 32 innocent citizens including his wife, injuring countless others, and permanently traumatizing the survivors.
• Virtus Draconis: Meredith Staunton is the self-serving, self-assured princess of the kingdom of Shaddhai. Unhappy with the societal progress the world has seen in comparison to her kingdom, Meredith launches an all-out campaign to subdue the world into following her kingdom's brand of conservative order. The first of her misdeeds is ordering one of her men to use a forbidden, incurable poison on protagonist Claude Virtus. Upon receiving word of the man's failure to kill Claude, Meredith promptly offs him without hesitation; she then commits blasphemy against the magical world by forcefully extracting the soldier's soul from his body and banishing it to Hell. Among Meredith's more despicable crimes is the use of Child Soldiers, trained at a young age to kill; making use of black ops squads to carry out murders in the dead of night, without care for collateral damage or innocent lives lost; and regularly disregarding the counsel of her inner circle. Towards the end, Meredith primes a magic missile with the souls of her personal warship's crew—extracted with their bodies literally torn apart—and propelling it with the souls of her warlocks, thus firing it at Prelid, a nearby village that is not a threat to her, just to get to the protagonists.
• Le Visiteur du Futur: La Meute (The Visitor from the Future: The Pack): Loup (Wolf) is a former friend of the Visitor and fellow member of the Pack. Taking over the band after the death of the previous leader, Loup recruits and arms over 40 children, indoctrinating them with a false promise of travel to a better world. Planning a bloody rebellion to take over Neo-Versailles, Loup almost tricks a little boy into detonating himself in order to kill the Visitor and his friend Belette. When the Visitor and his ally faces him, Loup attempts to have them publicly executed, successfully murdering Taureau. Cornered and defeated, Loup tosses a grenade at the children to cause a distraction. Burning to death, he makes one last effort to take the Visitor with him.
• The Voice of the Mountain: Ruel Harpe is the descendant of Micajah Harpe. An egotist who dwells on top of Cry Mountain, Ruel forms a group of witches that he manipulates while also seeking to corrupt the hero John to his side. Ruel reveals that he intends to find the Gospel of Judas and, seeing most of humanity as nothing but parasites, will use it to kill almost every human being on the planet, sparing only a million people per continent while he builds Cry Mountain into a temple where he will be worshipped by them. When John finally refuses, Ruel shows no remorse in attempting to murder him as well.
• Volle: Dereath implicitly caused the downfall of the preceding Lord Fardew and he discredited and displaced anyone else who could have taken the job. He also unrepentantly engineered two deaths and framed Volle and Streak for the murders. When confronted over the deaths he ridicules Volle for clinging to the past, with regards to Volle's first love, Xiller, in the first book and confesses that he was planning to kill his accomplice as well. What's more, the only reason he targeted Volle in the first place was that Volle rejected his sexual advances.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • Baron Ryoval stands out as one of the worst villains of the series, and is viewed as a monster even on the Wretched Hive of an Outlaw Town planet in which he lives. Ryoval started his evil early in life, murdering his father and then proceeding (with the exception of two siblings who escaped) to either murder the rest of his siblings or else subjecting them to torture/body modification before condemning them to a Fate Worse than Death in brothels he runs catering to sadism and sexual perversion. Ryoval is obsessed with torture and sadism both as his primary business and as a hobby, and employees a large staff of Torture Technicians, who like the rest of his staff, don't like the work, but are too afraid of what he would do to them if caught to flee. Ryoval is actually 70 years old, but looks like a young man because like some other particularly depraved people on his planet, he has had clones of himself produced (who are normal, sapient individuals) and then when they've reached a certain age, he had their brain ripped out and his implanted. He has this "procedure" done several times.
  • Ges Vorrutyer gets about twenty pages of screen time, and is still a memorable skin-crawler. His creepy obsession with tormenting and torturing his ex-boyfriend Aral takes him from "academically interested in watching a psychologically destroyed Bothari raping Cordelia Naismith on his say-so" to "willing and eager to do the deed himself" in a way that leaves even the normally very calm and balanced Cordelia absolutely terrified. According to Aral, Ges broke Bothari in the first place, and did it twice: once before Bothari arrived at the Leper Colony, and again after only a few scant months when Bothari was reassigned.
• Vortex: Big Bad Karl Adriaan Vorster, a member of a Neo-Nazi Afrikaner movement, arranges the death of the moderate Haymans government in South Africa, and reinstates full apartheid, arresting and killing those who oppose it. He then tries to re-conquer Namibia, taking South Africa into a war with Cuba and Angola in the process. When the war turns against him, Vorster uses a nuclear bomb on an advancing Cuban brigade, and then plans to nuke Maputo (capital of Mozambique) and Bulawayo (second largest city in Zimbabwe). When the Cubans start basing their headquarters inside of South African cities and towns, Vorster orders that they too be subject to nuclear attack. American intervention takes this option out of his hands, so Vorster instead tries to ruin South Africa and the world's economy by contaminating the nation's mines with radioactive dust as part of a last, mad bid to take everyone down with him. Hateful of anyone who isn't an Afrikaner, and responsible for thousands of deaths, Vorster personifies all the worst aspects of The Apartheid Era.
• Voyage of Slaves: "Al Misurata" is a Libyan corsair and slaver who freely deals in the trade of flesh, be they young or old. Al Misurata tries to have the eternally childlike Ben and a group of slaves killed to prevent them from talking too much about the load he intends to sell to the corrupt Count Dreskar. Along the way, Al Misurata cons a traveling circus troupe and tries to have them sold into slavery; abuses his minions; and shows no care toward their deaths; and tries to sink a ship full of people for the purpose of getting Ben. Routed time and time again, Al Misurata finally demonstrates his bloodthirsty reputation in full by murdering Count Dreskar's liaison and all of the liaison's servants in a fit of pique, before having his corsairs descend on a convent of nuns to kill everything in their way of getting to his escaped slaves.

W – Z

• Waif, by Samantha Kolesnik: Cal "Mince" Mincciola is an underground plastic surgeon who specializes in off-the-books surgeries. In truth, Mince runs underground pornography rings that deal in snuff, necrophilia, slavery, and more while he mutilates patients on camera or has them raped while anesthetized. Taking in protagonist Angela, Mince uses her in films and eventually plans to murder her and her friends, known as the Waifs, with his dying words being to sneer that people would have paid good money to see his own death.
• The Walking, by Bentley Little: Isabella is a monstrous, ancient witch whose sick sadism drives Wolf Canyon, and nearly the entire world, into complete destruction. Having kept herself alive for centuries by feeding on the life force of innocent witches and magic users, Isabella shows up in Wolf Canyon to seduce the town's leader, then become his second-in-command, slowly instituting her own depraved law where ordinary humans are slaughtered alongside any witches who defy her. Spending her free time torturing children and stabbing infants to death in front of their mothers, Isabella cursed the town of Wolf Canyon to be swept away by a flood and all its inhabitants drowned when they finally turn on her and seal her away in a cave. Finally escaping from her entombment in the present by murdering and feasting on the life forces of several dozen people, Isabella reveals her new plan to use all her magical powers to create an apocalypse across the world, annihilating all life she can for no other reason than her own enjoyment and as a petty "revenge" for being sealed away. A profound psychopath whose only joy in life was hurting others, Isabella is easily the worst witch in the entire story.
• Waltz Of Shadows, by Joe R. Lansdale ("Lost Lansdale" series): The killers known as Snake and Fat Boy are a pair of ruthless thugs who introduce themselves by murdering a group of thrill seekers after horrifically torturing them. When one of the group escapes to his uncle, the duo murder the escapee and menace his uncle and family as well, sexually assaulting his wife and attempting to burn his children alive. It is revealed that Fat Boy and Snake also run a child pornography ring where they have kids murdered after participating, with Snake even keeping photos of the children as trophies on his wall.
• Warchild Series: Vincenzo Marcus Falcone demonstrates the worst of the setting's already explicitly evil piracy. Falcone slaughters everyone on the ships he boards before blowing the ships to pieces; the only survivors are the children he captures to then sell as slaves, although some of them he keeps for himself and abuses in horrific fashion, while turning others into Tykebombs. Even after his death, flashbacks show him reveling in his atrocities.
• The Wardstone Chronicles:
  • Elizabeth of the Bones, commonly known as Bony Lizzie, is a sadistic child-killing witch who harvests bones for rituals. Posing as Alice Deane's aunt, she's actually her mother, having conceived with the Fiend. She once had a brain-eating familiar, and Lizzie didn't interfere when it targeted her daughter. She first plots to free her dreaded grandmother Mother Malkin by tricking Tom into giving her blood cakes and abducting a little boy as a meal. She inflicts Tom with nightmarish hallucinations, before she tries to take his thumb bones. After taking over the isle of Mona, she murders a miller who challenged her authority, trapping his soul in limbo, sentences John Gregory, Adriana and Commander Stanton to be fed to the Buggane, drinks the blood of a yeoman and leads raiding parties slaughtering entire families. When Alice ruins her plans of world domination, she attempts to take her life then successfully kills Adriana and her fiancé. The flashback of the twelfth book reveals that she killed a Spook before torturing his soul and attempted to kill thirteen children for a ritual, while in the present day, her ghost ambushes Alice and Thorne to be interrogated and tortured by the daemon Beelzebub. In The Dark Assassin, Lizzie treacherously delivers the witch assassin Grimalkin and Thorne to another daemon.
  • The Fiend is the master of the dark and main antagonist of the series who tries to bring the world to a new age of darkness. Having control of practitioners of the dark, he sentences his enemies as well as people who make deals with him to eternal torments. Fathering many children with witches, he kills those who are neither humans nor witches, as he killed Grimalkin’s baby son, earning her hatred. He prevents Bill Arkwright’s ghost parents from reaching the light, condemning them to haunt their mill. When the witches release him from his plane, his mere presence on Earth causes many wars. He murders and takes the appearance of the bargeman Matthew Guilbert in order to lure Tom and his master into a trap. After failing to convert Thomas Ward to his cause, he challenges him to face his daughter Morwena with the threat of killing his friends if he refuses or gets killed. He later tricks Tom into selling his soul and when his other daughter Alice prevents him from claiming it, he curses her to share her friend’s fate. He submits her to unspeakable torture and allows Tom to hear her cries. When Grimalkin takes one of his eyes, he threatens his followers with eternal damnation. Finally, he sends the Vampire God Siscoi against Tom and sends his agents to murder Tom’s brother James out of spite.
• The Warlord Chronicles set out to provide a grim version of Arthurian Legend and introduces several monstrous figures in it:
  • Gundleus is one of the first villains of the series. Initially a lord sworn to King Uther, Gundleus is also wicked and ambitious and has no intent of honoring his vows to serve his dead king's infant son Mordred. After the death of Uther, Gundleus approaches the baby with its young mother and then murders her after demanding she kiss his sword for protection, before stabbing the infant as well (unknown to him, the infant Mordred was swapped out with a decoy). He then proceeds to rape Merlin's disciple Nimue in retribution for her attitude towards him and rips out one of her eyes for spite. Even his affection for his lowborn lover proves to be a farce as he abandons her when he gets a better betrothal offer.
  • King Dwirnach of Ireland is a vicious tyrant aiming to conquer and kill. What sets Dwirnach apart from the other warlords of the series is his love of Cold-Blooded Torture as a hobby. Dwirnach prefers to take his enemies alive, so he can spend his time slowly flaying them. He even keeps the skins as perverse trophies and threatens to both rape and flay the hero Derfel's lover Princess Ceinwyn solely to satisfy his lust for pain.
  • King Mark of Cornwall is well known for marrying much younger women and killing them later when he's tired of them. When one of his betrothed, the young Isolde, escapes Mark with his nephew Tristan, Mark hunts them to Arthur's lands and demands satisfaction. Unable to break the peace Arthur is forced to compromise his morals by allowing Mark's "justice," allowing Tristan to engage in a fight he cannot win against Mark's champion who reluctantly kills the valiant knight. With Isolde back in his clutches, Mark immediately has her burned alive on the beach by where her beloved died before returning to Cornwall with smug satisfaction to continue his practices.
• The War of the Flowers: Nidrus Hellebore, Lord of House Hellebore and the shadow dictator of the Faerie lands, maintains power by murder, torture, labor camps and treachery. Having usurped power from King Oberon and Queen Titania, Hellebore keeps them in an induced coma to leech off their energies and keep the kingdom functioning. With human belief in the supernatural waning, Hellebore uses numerous faeries in power plants to drain them of their magic. Ready to cement his rule, Hellebore unleashes dragons he had secretly kept to annihilate a rival house, resulting in massive casualties. When his co-conspirator's daughter Poppy allies with the hero of the novel, a changeling named Theo, Hellebore has her arrested and tortured, and reveals that his ultimate plan involves sacrificing Theo's soul to be devoured. He also offers a blood sacrifice of one of his own men, and when he hears the goblin race is rebelling against his rule, he furiously orders the slaughter of an entire generation. Wanting nothing more than to rule as a brutal autocrat, Hellebore considers no crime, no matter how heinous, too great to achieve his selfish goals.
• W.A.R.P. trilogy, by Eoin Colfer: Albert Garrick, the Forever Man, is a ruthless Victorian era assassin who murdered Jack the Ripper out of jealousy. Having killed his wife for possible infidelity, Garrick later becomes an assassin, using his magician abilities to escape capture and kill hundreds, at one point killing a time traveling FBI agent and adopting his son Riley, who he raises in his own image with psychological torment and beatings. Upon finding the modern day, Garrick proves happy to slaughter whoever stands in his way to go after Riley and Riley's friend, Chevron "Chevie" Savano. Defeated, Garrick is deposited in the past where he becomes a Witchfinder, using his talents to frame innocent women as witches where he has them tortured and burnt in rigged tests, making a point to target those he knows are innocent. Uncaring his actions might eventually destroy most of humanity with a torn timestream, Garrick intends to murder Riley while capturing Chevie and attempting to have her burnt as well.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Brokenstar is a ruthlessly ambitious warrior and the cruel leader of ShadowClan. Rising to power by killing his own father, Brokenstar sends kits under six months old to fight full-grown warriors, making up the losses in both battle and training by kidnapping kits from other Clans. Dissatisfied with the marshy wetlands ShadowClan calls home, Brokenstar wages a war of aggression against WindClan and forces them out of their territory. After forcing RiverClan to bow to him, Brokenstar went to war against ThunderClan to force their submission. Fleeing with some of his most loyal followers when ShadowClan turns on him, Brokenstar later gets blinded after leading his rogues in a failed attack on ThunderClan, who take him in. To repay them for their mercy and protection, Brokenstar conspires with Tigerstar to kill Bluestar and take over the clan. Returning as the ruler of the Dark Forest after his death, Brokenstar continues his cruel machinations against ThunderClan and eventually takes part in the Great Battle against the living and StarClan. Bloodthirsty, power-hungry, and uncaring of anyone but himself, Brokenstar serves as a terrifying reminder of what one person with a little power is capable of.
  • Ashfur is a seemingly normal ThunderClan warrior during the second arc, but after his advances were rejected by Squirrelflight, he begins to spiral, and in the third arc, he reaches a boiling point, trapping Squirrelflight's children in a forest fire with the intent of making her watch them die, although he does ultimately move out of the way. After his death, he is allowed into StarClan despite his actions, under the reasoning that he "loved too much", but in the seventh arc, Ashfur possesses the body of Squirrelflight's mate and current ThunderClan leader, Bramblestar. With this newfound power, Ashfur begins to mistreat the members of ThunderClan, particularly Squirrelflight, even throwing her off the Highledge. At one point, Ashfur drags Squirrelflight down into the Dark Forest with the intent of holding her captive there until she agrees to be his mate or suffer like he has. We later learn that his true intentions are to destroy the Clans and their afterlives completely—even causing the evil residents of the Dark Forest to work together with the heroes to try to put a stop to his plans, showcasing how much damage that Ashfur's pettiness and psychosis can bring once he has the opportunity.
• "The Washingtonians", by Bentley Little: George Washington himself is exposed as a monstrous and wicked cannibal who skinned and ate children alive, as revealed from a letter the hero finds along with utensils made from the bones of his victims. Washington slaughtered men for his meals, forming the Washingtonian cult to continue the practice of devouring innocents, commissioning a portrait of him and his concubines ripping a victim apart while alive and screaming. Especially fond of the flesh of young virgins, Washington's legacy survives through the Washingtonian cult to modern day, who continue the practice of brutal cannibalism.
• The Wayfarer Redemption:
  • Artor, The Plow God and the God of the Acharites, was once a Sufficiently Advanced Alien who saw the Land of Tencendor and decided he wanted it for himself. To that end, he imprisoned the Star Gods and led the humans, whom he called Acharites, into a racist war against the Icarii and the Avar. When the Acharites won the war he proceeded to have them cut nearly all of the Avar's forests down to reduce the power of a competing goddess, the Mother. When a prophecy threatens the destruction of his people, he does nothing, not seeing it as his problem and blaming rival gods when naturally his people's belief in him begins to fade. He shows no care at all for the well-being of his worshippers, enjoying torturing one to give him power, stepping on another, and brainwashing a village to perform blood sacrifices in his name before he is killed.
  • WolfStar SunSoar, Ninth Talon of the Icarii, may present himself as well-intentioned, but is actually one of the most monstrous characters in the entire series. After getting his wife to murder the previous Talon so he could take the throne of the Icarii, he began experimenting on the Star Gate and started throwing children with magical potential through the gate, including his niece, pregnant wife and unborn child, before he is killed. However, he returns Back from the Dead through the Star Gate, writes a prophecy that will result in the deaths of thousands of people, and sets out to ensure this prophecy can come true. To that end he tricks the last remaining of the Charonite race into dying in a horrific way, trains The Antichrist in dark magic, and mind rapes a teenager into making a Deal with the Devil, among other crimes. In the second series he rapes an impregnates his granddaughter and assists in having her grandmother's soul possess her body, and when she regains control of her body he manipulates her into a relationship with him.
  • Sheol, the Demon of Despair, is one of the six Timekeeper demons and The Dragon of the group. While the body of her boss, Qeteb, remains incomplete, she is in charge. In the past she along with her fellow Demons destroyed hundreds if not thousands of worlds, including the Earth. When her and her fellow demons first break through the Star Gate into the land of Tencendor she demands the honor of sowing madness through the land first. Under her influence, thousands of people lose their minds, including a woman who strangles her toddler with a clothesline and then kills herself in despair. Leading the demons, Sheol then proceeds to rebuild her boss's body, fouling the five sacred lakes of Tencendor in the process. When she and her Demons capture WolfStar trying to use their magic against them, Sheol orders each of her fellow demons to rape him repeatedly for their amusement. When her trial happens, she is offered the choice to repent or choose to be evil, and she freely chooses evil and torments Faraday, the one giving her the test.
  • Qeteb, the Midday Demon, is the boss of the Timekeeper Demons. In the past he and the other demons ended life on thousands of worlds, including the Earth. When he is reformed in Tencendor after sustaining mortal wounds that destroyed his body, he immediately drives every creature and being not under magical protection insane. He is a Bad Boss, frequently beating his own demons and grabbing Sheol by the hair and throwing her into a wall minutes after his resurrection. He repeatedly rapes a soulless woman and later has one of his demons possess her, and taunts Faraday about raping and dismembering her. His ultimate goal is the cessation of the Star Dance, which would end all life in the universe.
• We Are The Dead, by Mike Shackle: Darus Monsuta is one of Ergil's Chosen and the vilest servant of the brutal Emperor Raaku. Seeking to advance in the view of his liege, Darus leads the hunt for rogue mage Aasgod upon Ergil's conquest of Jia and the defeat of Jia's elite Shulka forces. An accomplished healer, Darus is fond of taking captives and torturing them before healing their wounds magically, only to torture them to the point of death to do it all over until he is given his answers. Upon receiving them, he tortures his victims to death anyways. Darus seemingly kills Aasgod and tortures the rebel leader Jax until he breaks by regrowing Jax's lost arm and cutting it off multiple times before even murdering his own sister in a fit of paranoid fury.
• Welkin Weasels:
  • Castle Storm: Grand Inquisitor Torca Marda is an elegantly vicious stoat who once vied for the throne of Welkin in rivalry to his cousin Prince Poynt, outdoing even his cousin in evil by advocating weasel genocide throughout Welkin and founding a corrupt religion that enforced mass torture and execution for all perceived heresy. No less dull in his technique as a Torture Technician after being banished, Torca Marda takes residence in Stormtown where he continues to torture animals for pleasure and imposes the new religion across the entire town. Seeing the potential to assassinate Poynt and take the throne after he gets back into his good graces by handing him Sylver and his outlaw band, Torca Marda murders Sylver's second-in-command Icham by sabotaging a fair tournament and tries to hinder the heroes' efforts to stop a man-eating dragonfly from devouring all of Stormtown, eagerly throwing away dozens of lives in his attempt to either execute or capture Sylver and his friends.
  • Flaggatis is a relentless stoat who longs to take over all of Welkin. After amassing a colossal horde of rats, Flaggatis and his minions roam around Welkin pillaging surrounding nations and laying siege to Castle Rayn. Flaggatis repeatedly torments Prince Poynt and his entourage with his magic spells while his rats continue to ransack the country and kill Lord Ragnar in the ensuing chaos. When his plans fail, Flaggatis attempts to kill Sylver and his gang out at sea, not caring about the sheer amount of rats he loses during his voyage. Centuries after his alleged death, Flaggatis reappears in Welkin as a vampire named Count Flistagga. With several vampire voles at his disposal, he sends multiple groups of voles to Welkin in hopes of turning everyone into a vampire; Flistagga himself turns or kills several innocent civilians, including Mayor Poynt's sister, Sybil, and a young child in the streets. Fueled by his hatred, Flaggatis devoted his entire life to causing as much turmoil in Welkin as possible.
• WerewolveSS by Jerry & Sharon Ahern: Dr. William Stein is an SS colonel turned werewolf fanatically devoted to restoring the Third Reich. During World War II, Stein captured a werewolf by using captive villagers as bait, then experimented on it for years. Stein then turned himself and his men into werewolves and gleefully slaughtered dozens of Allied soldiers the one time he got the chance, leaving only two survivors. When one survivor recognizes him, Stein murders the man before sending his men to kill his daughter Dannie, both to cover loose ends and out of sheer spite. When he's finally found out, Stein simply proceeds with his plan—having infected thousands of unwitting victims with his werewolf serum, he remotely transforms them and looses both his Nazi werewolf troops and the unwilling werewolves on the towns surrounding his base, killing and burning indiscriminately while turning yet more people into werewolves against their will. Murdering tens of thousands of people and more than happy to kill millions more, all in the name of building a global Nazi empire, Stein proved himself an irredeemable beast even in human form.
• Wereworld:
  • Prince Lucas the werelion is Drew's half-brother and everything Drew is not. An apprentice Necromancer, he began to lose his sanity after he murdered Lord Broghan in front of his cousin, and former fiancée, Lady Gretchen, under Opal's instructions. He goes downhill the moment he murders his father Leopold under the other Catlords' orders. His interest in Black Magic leads him to work with the Wylderman Darkheart to create the Wyld Wolves, who slaughter the Sturmlands' army, an act that disgusts the other Werelords. He then murders Duke Henrik to "save" Lord Onyx after he honorably accepted his defeat at his Combat by Champion. When he finds out that Gretchen's in the Dalelands he leads his Wyld Wolves in a bloody campaign to get her, killing several innocents in the process. He later kills Lord Milo in front of Trent, partially eating him. When his grandfather Leon punishes him for killing his father and tries to get him to regain some honor, he murders his grandfather as well. When he arrives to Icegarden to kill Hector for killing his mother, Vincent of Redmire retorts that he's only here to settle a petty grudge towards Hector for always being smarter than him.
  • Vincent the wereboar, the twin brother of Baron Hector, begins by inadvertently causing his father's death and then killing himself in an attempt to murder Hector. Capable of remorse and hesitation in life, Vincent's redeeming qualities vanish when he becomes a vile. Vincent slowly corrupts Hector into a murderer and torturer of innocents, selling out the Dalelands to the wicked Prince Lucas and seizing Icegarden through Hector. Vincent devours the spirit of Hector's old mentor, torturing Duchess Freya for weeks on end, and accidentally but remorselessly pushes Hector into murdering the totally innocent Queen Amelie. Finally sick of his brother's hesitance, Vincent overtakes and fully possesses Hector himself, rechristens himself Lord Blackhand, and begins systematically murdering and resurrecting all of his own allies as the undead. Vincent starts resurrecting the dead by the thousands to slaughter all in their wake, decorating Icegarden's walls with the bodies of those he's slaughtered and driving his legions in a crusade to destroy whatever cannot be dominated. The series's finest demonstration of From Nobody to Nightmare, Vincent of Redmire eventually dies as one of the greatest threats to have ever scourged the Seven Realms.
  • First 2 books & fourth book: Vala the wereserpent is the self-proclaimed goddess of the cannibalistic Wyldermen, who offer her human and werecreature alike. Defeated by Drew, she plotted her revenge against him and those he cares about. First she killed and impersonated the crone Baba Korga, pretending to be an ally of Whitley and using her to enter Five Oaks unnoticed. During her "friendly talk" with Whitley, she revealed her biggest atrocity: During the journey, she devoured innocent Romari children when no one was watching. She then explains her intentions of turning the Dyrewood into her realm, where she and the Wyldermen can kill and eat with impunity. She also mentioned her plan of using Whitley as bait to attract Drew, and in an act of "mercy", she promises to kill Whitley quickly after she had dispatched Drew. Prideful, petty, and convinced that she had the right to kill and devour whenever she wanted, she saw humans as nothing but food and other Therianthropes as weaklings.
  • Storm of Sharks: Deadeye the wereshark, the captain of the Hellhound in the employ of Lord Ghul, makes a name for himself on the White Sea as a practitioner of brutal violence and rampant cannibalism. Attacking the smuggler ship Lucky Shot upon learning of the presence of werelords on it, Deadeye slaughters many of the crew himself and eats its captain alive before taking those who remain as his prisoners and slaves. Holding a special affinity for the werelord Whitley, Deadeye subjects Whitley to his perverted attentions whilst keeping her collared, informing Whitley's intention to make her his bride in between subtle hints of violence. Upon being attacked by the Maelstrom, Deadeye snaps and starts massacring both enemy soldiers and his own men, brutally tearing apart Captain Ransome's young friend Hob shortly before his own death.
• Wetbones, by John Shirley:
  • Ephram Pixie is a chuckling little fat man and a rogue of the Akishra cult, a group of twisted hedonists who use the power of the Akishra to sate their twisted impulses. Unwilling to be fettered by the Akishra, Ephram severed his ties with the cult, pledges himself to a being known as the "Nameless Spirit", and instead uses his powers to control the minds of his victims and murder them in a variety of horrific ways, even having the Spirit itself occasionally tear his victims apart itself. Coming across a young woman named Constance, Ephram is captivated by her innocence and puts her under his thrall, keeping Constance as his Sex Slave and tool while forcing her to have sex with people against her will before having Constance hack them apart in a bid to completely destroy her purity. Even without the resources of the cult, Ephram is a jovial psychopath dedicated only to the satisfaction of his personal desires and fashions himself the "master of his own destiny", intent on murdering and raping at his own will forever with no one and nothing to stop him.
  • Samuel Denver, known better as the "More Man", is an enigmatic producer from Malibu who secretly runs the Akishra cult and all of the atrocities that happen through it. Luring in droves of victims for the purpose of the cult's rituals, Denver forcefully infests them with the Akishra worms and rewires their brains to associate agony with pleasure through them, before forcing them to engage in twisted rituals of rape, torture, murder, and debauchery to feed off of their pleasure. Already responsible for countless acts of unwilling mutilation and violation through the victims of the cult, Denver personally decorates the ranch from which he bases his operations with furniture made from the bodies of his victims; forces a couple to have violent sex until they simply collapse of exhaustion; kidnaps the friend of one of his victims before having him tortured to death and stitching his face into bedding; summoning the Akishra Magnus—the "Nameless Spirit" Ephram worshiped—and watching as it tears the traitorous Pixie apart; and finally revealing his ultimate intention to bring the Akishra all the way into physical reality and spread them all across the world.
• Whale Talk: Rich Marshall is a thuggish hillbilly whose abuse has left his wife Alicia a Broken Bird and rendered his five-year-old biracial stepdaughter Heidi a psychological wreck. Already a racist, sexist, ableist pig who perpetuates prejudiced attitudes in high school students through his alumni group and shoots animals just for the pleasure of killing them, Rich convinces Heidi that in order to win his love, she needs to scrape off her colored skin. This results in Heidi taking a steel-tipped Brillo pad to her body and attempting to skin herself simply to win Rich's approval. When Alicia finally presses a restraining order against him, Rich decides the appropriate course is to try and shoot Heidi in a crowded baseball game, forcing the father of protagonist T.J. Jones to take the bullet.
• The Wheel of Time has the worst of the Forsaken:
  • Ishamael—aka Elan Morin Tedronai, Ba'alzamon and Moridin—is a scholar and philosopher who determined that the Dark One was destined to triumph over good at the end of time. With that in mind, Ishamael signed on with the Dark One's forces, eventually driving his former friend, Lews Therin, to suicide. Sealed in Shayol Ghul, Ishamael managed to free his spirit, and eventually his body. Ishamael makes the life of Lews Therin's reincarnation a living hell while in his Ba'alzamon identity, tormenting him with nightmares and doing everything in his power to make him miserable, while sending his troops to lay waste to the world. Following his apparent death, he is resurrected in a new identity—Moridin—and takes over leadership of the Dark One's armies, brutally punishing the rest of the Forsaken when they fail. Unlike the rest of the Forsaken, who think they will rule the world when the war is over, Ishamael believes that the Dark One is an Omnicidal Maniac, and is perfectly fine with this.
  • Semirhage, one of the most terrifying of the Forsaken, was once the most gifted healer of her age, but also a cold sadist who enjoyed torturing those she healed as "payment". Eagerly joining the Dark One, Semirhage's territories were marked by hideous torture, with Semirhage experimenting with ways to cause agony, such as replacing human blood with similar substances. Semirhage massacres the court of the Seanchan Empire, personally torturing the Empress to death, and tries to emotionally destroy Rand Al'Thor before the last battle.
• When Autumn Bleeds Into Winter, by Jeff Strand: Gerald Martin and his accomplice Griffin are a pair of brutal serial killers who murder children in rural areas and move on to continue their activities in areas where there will not be much scrutiny. Killing the friend of 14-year-old protagonist Curtis, Martin makes an uneasy truce with Curtis on the basis of mutually assured destruction, only to murder another young boy to frame Curtis for it. When Curtis moves against him, Martin and Griffin kidnap Curtis's parents to torture them to death and plan to murder the kids as well before moving to the city for easier hunting grounds.
• Whistling in the Dark, by Lesley Kagan: Bobby Brophy is a playground counselor who, underneath his charming facade, is actually a disturbed child molester and murderer. Having kidnapped, raped, and murdered the niece of a local police officer the previous summer, Bobby returns to the neighborhood and quickly returns to his old habits. Abducting a third grader, Bobby molests the girl before strangling her to death, leaving her naked body outside for the authorities to discover. Setting his sights on his latest victim, Sally O'Malley, Bobby makes numerous attempts to kidnap her, barely failing each time. When Sally and her friend, Mary Lane, search Bobby's cabin and find evidence to incriminate him, Bobby captures her and drags her off to the lagoon where he murdered his previous victims, threatening to kill Sally's younger sister, Troo, if she does not cooperate. Once they reach the lagoon, Bobby immediately attempts to molest Sally, taunting her during the act and boasting that he will send her to join her deceased father in death.
• Whitby Witches trilogy: Nathaniel Crozier, described as "the most evil man in the world", is High Priest of the Coven of the Black Sceptre, a polygamous cult consisting of lonely women whom he controls through dark magic and persuasion, while abusing them and treating them as nothing more than pawns. A glutton for power, Crozier learns of the Guardians of Irl, three magical talismans with which he could Take Over the World. Later, arriving in Whitby in person, Crozier uses his dark powers to bully a married couple into letting him be their lodger whilst he searches Whitby for the Guardians. To this end, Crozier makes the 12-year-old Jennet Laurenson fall in love with him so that he can use her as yet another pawn in his schemes; mentally tortures and kills the elderly Ernest Roper; and gains control of the terrifying Fish-Demon to slaughter countless Aufwaders, the tribe that guards the final Guardian. Having released the horrifying Morgawrus, Nathaniel intends to enslave it but is thwarted by Miss Boston, whom he attempts to throttle to death. After being brought Back from the Dead, Crozier attempts to make Jennet kill herself in front of him, purely to demonstrate his power, while planning to release Morgawrus again to pursue his goal of world conquest.
• White Knuckle, by Eric Red: Roy Tremble, aka "White Knuckle", is a Serial Killer trucker active for four decades. Killing dogs as a child and graduating to people, Tremble begins to abduct women in his big rig, torturing them to savor their screams and pain before he kills them and keeps pieces of them as trophies. Often targeting prostitutes, Tremble abducts anyone he can get away with, killing multiple women over the course of the book. When finally killed by Special Agent Sharon Ormsby, it is revealed that Tremble had claimed at least 500 victims in his years of murder.
• Who Fears Death: General Daib is the true ruler of the Nuru and the father of heroine Onyewonsu by the rape of her mother. Having promoted a strategy of weaponizing rape against the Okeke people to destroy their culture, Daib also leads brutal genocidal and ethnic cleansing to destroy the Okeke, using Child Soldiers as well. Daib, upon meeting Onyewonsu, attempts to kill her, promising to find her mother and rape her again to obtain a son and heir he can train as a sorcerer to continue the extermination of the Okeke.
• Widdershins Adventures:
  • Thief's Covenant: The Apostle—Claude—is a follower of Cevora, and seeks every opportunity to increase his god's, and his own, power. Summoning a demon, Claude orders it to massacre the followers of Olgun, a god who Claude plans to use to make Cevora stronger. When a teenage girl named Widdershins survives this incident, Claude ensures she is framed for the killings. After assassins fail him, Claude painfully uses them as sacrifices to summon another demon who he sends to kill Widdershins. Killing a prominent noble and the Archbishop, knowing it could cause riots, The Apostle frames Shins for the crime, forces her to bring him to anymore Olgun worshippers, then orders his demon to kill any potential worshippers in the area before making one last attempt to cut Shins down.
  • False Covenant: Iruoch stands out as monstrous even among his fellow Faeries. Attracted to the fear the city of Davillon was experiencing, Iruoch began killing and eating anyone he came across. Having a sweet tooth for children, Iruoch finds a small group of kids, eats most of them, then kills the rest before repeating the process on an even larger group of noble children. Iruoch later kills a thief who he had strong-armed into helping him, then attacks Widdershins and her friends, murdering numerous bystanders in the scuffle. Before being beaten, Iruoch murders Shins' Love Interest, Julian Bouniard, and happily taunts her about it afterwards.
• Wild Cards: The Astronomer was an old man with powers based on ritualistic magic, having willingly erased all the memories of his own life and starting a search for power which would lead him to the cult of the Egyptian Freemasons where he would become a high ranking member. Using his position to kidnap several women and use them as human sacrifices in depraved sexual rituals to empower himself, the Astronomer unwillingly gained the attention of heroic Aces that raided the Freemason temple. Leaving the cult leader to die in the raid to take the leadership himself, the Astronomer plans his revenge against the heroic Aces. He carries this out on the 40th anniversary of the Wild Card Day—where his servants injured and killed other Aces—in a murder spree while he personally dismembers Kid Dinosaur in front of his father and the general public. An Ace whose powers are literally based on his own depravity, the Astronomer was the first Big Bad of the series and one of its more monstrous.
• The Wild Ones: Sixclaw is Titus's brutal mercenary who enjoys killing for sport. After torturing and eating an innocent woodpecker, Sixclaw leads the attack on Kit's home, where he kills Kit's parents and nearly Kit himself. Upon finding out that Kit has arrived in Ankle Snap City, he assaults a few animals inside the local bakery, before nearly killing Kit again, along with his uncle, Rik, and his best friend, Eeni. Later, after the city's religious leader, Martyn, is taken hostage, Sixclaw assaults some of Martyn's acolytes and forces them to print out an eviction notice for the residents of the city, or else he'll kill Martyn. During the battle between Titus's forces and the Wild Ones, Sixclaw nearly eats Martyn, drops Eeni into the sewer hoping Gayle will eat her, and physically beats up Kit once more, taunting him about the death of his parents. Once Titus gives him the order to kill Kit and massacre the whole town, Sixclaw is more than happy to comply.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Boris Gromov, better known under his chosen epithet "Boris the Manskinner", is a well-spoken, well-mannered NKVD officer and right-hand to Lavrenty Beria himself. In his chosen profession, Boris is responsible for the mass liquidation, torture, and execution of political dissidents, earning his namesake from his proclivity for having men slowly Flayed Alive by his silent Mongolian aide. Tossed under the bus for torturing a communist politician to death through the application of red-hot irons to the man's every orifice, Boris finds himself in a Siberian gulag and quickly starts manipulating his way into power, having people tortured and killed in giant numbers, even a seven-year-old child killed with his parents Forced to Watch. Boris finds himself confronted by Lt. Mamiya, a Japanese man whom years earlier Boris had flayed the comrade of and forced Mamiya to watch before tossing Mamiya to languish at the bottom of a well, and allows Mamiya to have a shot at killing him, only for the bullets to pass through empty air. Boris exits the novel with one final spiteful gesture, placing a curse upon the already war-ravaged Mamiya to live the rest of his days in misery, unable to love and unable to be loved.
• Wings of Fire series:
  • Queen Scarlet is the demented ruler of the SkyWing tribe. After she gained power, Scarlet ensured she remained queen by killing off various members of her family who could acquire the throne, using animus magic to turn her daughter, Tourmaline, into the submissive Ruby, and killing or threatening her loyal minions just to keep them under her control. As queen, she opened a gladiator arena where dragons fought to the death—sometimes on a daily basis—under the false promise of being freed. After adopting Peril, she forces her to kill seven dragonets while they were still in their eggs, before raising her to become a remorseless killer who murdered anyone Scarlet wanted. When Scarlet is wounded by Glory and is dethroned by Ruby, she uses her remaining resources to exact revenge on the Dragonets of Destiny by manipulating Icicle and Winter to kill them or else she'll murder their brother Hailstorm. When her plans for revenge fail and Scarlet reunites with Peril and her father, the three of them attack the SkyWing Palace and take Ruby's son, Cliff, hostage in order to make Ruby surrender, with Scarlet intending to turn Cliff into a weapon like Peril after she kills Ruby.
  • The Dragonet Prophecy arc: Princess Blister is an ambitious, sociopathic dragon who is largely responsible for starting the War of SandWing Succession. When Blister's mother, Queen Oasis, goes to hunt the scavengers who stole some of her treasure, Blister refused to send her backup, thus leading to her death. She later hid all of Oasis's treasure, pinning the blame on scavengers, and started arguing with her sisters, Burn and Blaze, over who would be the next SandWing queen. After Blister began to amass an army in secret, Burn and Blaze gathered their own forces and fought each other, resulting in a war that led to the deaths of thousands. During the war, Blister frequently manipulated other dragons into fighting her battles or assassinating her foes, wasting no time betraying or even killing her allies the moment she deemed them useless. She even tried to have the five Dragonets of Destiny murdered simply because they hindered her plans and refused to select her to be the next queen. When the Dragonets try to force Burn, Blister, and Blaze to have a peaceful meeting with each other to end the war, Blister kills Burn, and attempts to kill Blaze minutes later.
  • The Lost Continent Prophecy arc:
    • Cottonmouth is a human being who's secretly the brains of the Othermind. Thousands of years before dragons ruled the world, Cottonmouth desired to eliminate opposing empires by stealing dragon eggs and raising dragonets to be weapons. After too many eggs were stolen, the dragons retaliated by destroying various human settlements and cities, with Cottonmouth sneaking away with an egg as thousands perished. When Cottonmouth discovered the Breath of Evil could control animals' minds, he tested it on various subjects—including some of his followers—before attempting to use it on the dragonet "Lizard". When his plans failed and he and Lizard became part of the Othermind, Cottonmouth spent the next few millennia plotting revenge and using his new powers to kill any dragons he saw. Once Queen Wasp unknowingly was exposed to the Breath of Evil and gained the same powers, Cottonmouth let Wasp take control of most of Pantala, all while he manipulated various dragons into spreading the Breath of Evil around Pantala. When finally confronted by the protagonists, Cottonmouth uses his powers to possess various dragons, opting to infect the entire planet until every living creature is either dead or under his control.
    • Queen Wasp is the tyrannical ruler of the HiveWing tribe. Believing other tribes will eventually try to usurp her, despite none showing any hostility towards HiveWings, Wasp manipulated the HiveWings into going to war with the LeafWings, which nearly drove the tribe into extinction. Having been exposed to the Breath of Evil, Wasp used her newfound Mind Control powers to possess thousands of HiveWings in her tribe to act as her warriors and peasants, even going as far as poisoning dragonets while they're in their eggs so they can serve her the minute they hatch. She also drove the SilkWings tribe into submission, using them all as slave labor and punishing anyone who went against her with imprisonment, death, or being paralyzed for days while still fully conscious. When various dragons expose Wasp's misdeeds and try to dethrone her, she possess every dragon possible to use as soldiers so they can slaughter the heroes and their companions. Even after discovering Cottonmouth is secretly controlling her, she uses her resources to try and finish off the remaining LeafWing tribes and their allies just to maintain her power.
• Witch & Wizard: The One Who Is The One, deciding all life was meant to cow before him after being shunned for his affinity of magic, established the New Order, became its brutal dictator, and quickly turned his new kingdom into a hellish realm for all the inhabitants, executing anyone who practices any form of magic or art to kick off his reign; this despite using magic and owning works of art himself. Massacring and vivisecting men, women, and children by the hundreds for both experimentation and fun, The One simultaneously bombs and unleashes plagues onto civilian populations to wipe out any rebels against him. His own minions and son Pearce faring no better, The One sadistically executes those who fail him, has no concern for them getting caught in the crossfire of his plans, and abuses and eventually turns the latter into a vessel for his own soul. As the Arch-Enemy of the Allgood siblings, The One tortures and murders their friends and parents in front of them and torments them throughout the series. When his plan to "purge" the world of those unwilling to worship him fails, The One attempts to unleash the undead souls of his victims onto humanity to wipe it out then rule over the ashes that remain. A psychopath who hated everything that he wasn't in full control of, The One is one of the most wicked young adult fiction villains to have ever been conceived.
• Witch Hunt, by L.R. Deney: Karl Dunkelstein is the would-be ruler of the ascendant Fourth Reich. Devoting himself to the Black Sun, Karl initiates a kidnapping of "undesirables", people of color, gays, and lesbians, etc. and has them subjected to mistreatment and torture to prepare for a mass sacrifice. Intending on murdering them in ritualized pain, Karl prepares to bring about the dawn of a new Nazi regime where he will exterminate all who stand in his way.
• The Witches: The Grand High Witch is the ruler of the child-hating witches, and the most malevolent of them all. A vicious demon with a propensity for abusing and murdering her own underlings, the Grand High Witch has spent decades teaching her followers ways to dispose of as many children as possible. Unsatisfied with her followers' progress, the Grand High Witch schemes to wipe out every child in England by utilizing a potion to transform them into mice, then watch as they are killed by their own oblivious parents and teachers. Demonstrating this on one hapless boy, the Grand High Witch follows this up by kidnapping the main character and inflicting upon him the same fate. With a cruelty unmatched by her underlings, the Grand High Witch instills terror in everyone who knows of her, friend and foe alike.
• Witchlight: Azhdeha is an ancient dragon who tried to destroy the world with his fellows before being sealed off. Returning, Azhdeha plots to kill Illiana, the child of wild magic and condemn the world to death and rebirth. To this end, Azhdeha brings the shapeshifters under his control, has the witch matriarch killed and disguises himself to kill the heroes, while having shapeshifters initiate uprisings across the nation to kill many, many people, not caring who throws their lives away in pursuit of his goal.
• Without Warning, by David Rosenbelt: The Predictor of the capsule killings, real name Randall Dempsey, was once a journalist accidentally left behind by Jake Robbins in Afghanistan during The War on Terror. The Predictor escaped from the Taliban but harbored hatred for Jake as a war hero and devised a plan to ruin Jake's life. The Predictor set a fire to a building in a low-income part of town, killing 11 people, and went on to kill Jake's ex-wife, Jenny, framing a man he had killed in prison to cover his tracks. He created a cryptic message on a capsule he buried alongside a man he murdered. When the capsule was dug up, the Predictor starts his killing spree by murdering people connected to Jake, working alongside the media to try and pin the murders on Jake. The Predictor abducts Katie, Jake's friend, and continues his killings until he murders the mayor. When Jake finds Katie, the Predictor holds them at gunpoint and gloats about his plan to fly a plane containing C3 explosives into a nuclear plant to spread waste across a nearby river to kill millions and frame Jake. Before initiating his final plan, he suffocated an elderly man to death to cover up loose ends. The Predictor only cared about making Jake into an infamous person, despite cementing himself as a monstrous individual.
• Wizard's Hall: The evil wizard Nettle was one of the founders of Wizard's Hall, eventually getting kicked out due to his aggressive behavior. In retaliation, Nettle created a beast made out of the founders' strongest emotions, plotting to eventually have the beast devour the entire school. When Nettle returns, he hypnotizes the teachers and students into walking over to the beast one by one and letting themselves get devoured while they are fully aware and powerless to do anything.
• The Wolf and the Woodsman, by Ava Reid: Prince Nandor is the wicked bastard brother of Prince Gaspar who hungers for the throne of their father King Janos. With a sickening hatred towards the Pagan and Yehuli groups, Nandor kills and tortures them whenever he can get away with it. Murdering his father to take control, Nandor plans an ethnic cleansing where the Yehuli are sent away to their fates as he leads a crusade to exterminate the pagans and attempts to even murder his own brother.
• Wolf Creek prequel novels:
  • Origin: Jerry "The Fiddler" is an obese pedophile Mick confronts while seeking to reclaim his knife. To protect his vile lair, Jerry sets up the surrounding mine with booby traps to kill any intruders. Introduced to Mick raping a little girl, Mick finds Jerry's place littered with trophies and corpses of prior victims. When Mick's own victims are discovered by authorities, Jerry allies with a group of other killers to murder Mick and attempts to rape Mick's restrained girlfriend when attacking Mick's home.
  • Desolation Game: Sergeant Atkin was Mick's superior in The Vietnam War and a fellow killer who helped mold him into a "professional" murderer. Agreeing to give a village scraps of food in exchange for being allowed to rape their women, Atkin has Mick join him in a series of assaults and both enjoy torturing their victims as they violate them. The two even shoot a couple of friendly soldiers who happen to witness their attacks. Teaching Mick the "head on a stick" technique by severing a man's spine, Atkin lets Mick torment and kill the paralyzed man. Accosted by the village elder for their murder of their own two soldiers, Atkin and Mick go on a spree, raping and killing all the villagers they can before Atkin attempts to kill Mick for fear of him talking.
• Wolf Land, by Jonathan Janz:
  • Divna Antonov is the queen of werewolves and their monstrous progenitor. Centuries old, Divna coerced her sisters into joining her before slaughtering their village and slipping into legend. Killing at will, Divna occasionally emerges to massacre towns and settlements, enjoying preying on children especially. Returning in the town of Lakeview, Divna arrives to cull any werewolves acting without authority before forcing newly-made wolf Weezer to submit to her and leads a slaughter at a bar before attacking an amusement park to kill hundreds. Focusing on heroine Savannah, Divna gleefully stalks her for sport after killing the cops with her, planning to rend her apart after the hunt is done.
  • Weezer, as a human, is considered a nasty piece of work. As a werewolf, Weezer embraces his change and tears apart two innocent women before slaughtering other innocents and terrorizing his friend Glenn into being an accomplice. After being rejected by a recently widowed former fling, Weezer kills her and her six children, saving her newborn baby for last. Tracked down by Divna, Weezer helps her slaughter a bar and then helps with the attack on the amusement park, gleefully killing any human he finds. Upon encountering his former friend Duane, Weezer expresses a willingness to rape his Love Interest Savannah to death and ends by attempting to find and massacre a group of surviving children.
• "Wolf of the Steppes", by Greye La Spina: Serge Vasilovitch is a murderous werewolf who lusts after the young heroine's mother. Enraged at her marrying her husband, Serge murders a child and gaslights the man into believing he is responsible, so Serge may lure him into suicide and then place mother and daughter in his power with intent to groom or molest young Vera. Killing her mother when she tries to flee with her daughter, Serge later tracks Vera down to murder her and anyone who assists her.
• The Wolf Road, by Beth Lewis: Kreagar "Trapper" Hallet, the adoptive father of the heroine Elka, teaches her to survive in the wilderness of British Columbia. In truth, Kreagar is a violent Serial Killer who targets women and children before butchering them and eating them, keeping their scalps as grisly trophies. Elka, now seen as his accomplice, attempts to escape with Kreagar hounding her through the novel. When she comes upon civilization again, we discover Kreagar continues to be active in his "hunts"' of murdering children and is targeting the son of the love interest of Elka's best friend Penelope before kidnapping the boy and murdering him as well. It is revealed Kreagar fed his victims to Elka as well and even had her shoot a little boy herself, something she had repressed from the trauma, in an attempt to turn her into a twisted reflection of himself. A man who lives by no code save the savage law of the wild he invents, Kreagar informs the hunter Lyons that it was Elka who murdered her son instead of him, dooming her to a life on the run, as a last act to deny her any comfort of civilization ever again.
• The Woman: Chris Cleek, his family's patriarch, is an extreme misogynist and Domestic Abuser. Upon encountering the titular woman in the woods, Cleek kidnaps and imprisons her within a fruit cellar, under the guise of civilizing her. In reality, he intends on dominating her, whether it be through several types of torture, such as using a high-pressure power washer to bathe her, or by raping her. It's revealed later on in the novel that Cleek had raped his daughter, Peggy, each night, which culminates in her being pregnant with his child. When Miss Raton, Peggy's teacher, confronts him on this, he knocks her out, and feeds her to his dogs; it's also revealed that Cleek had a daughter, who was born eyeless, imprisoned in the barn, thus causing her to revert to an animalistic state.
• The Women in the Walls, by Amy Lukavics: Mother is a supernatural being who demands Human Sacrifice in exchange for immortality. Prior to the events of the novel, Mother manipulated a woman named Clara into sacrificing all the children she was taking care of to her. When Clara was murdered by her fellow cultists, Mother plotted revenge, manipulating deaths over the years to make Clara's body more powerful. When Clara's body becomes powerful enough in the present day, Mother, using her body, slaughters the cultists and has her loyal follower Penelope bring Lucy to her in exchange for becoming her "daughter". However, when she does so, Mother declares Penelope too weak and forces her to cough up her own organs, before making Lucy her daughter, enslaving her to the house forever.
• The Word Eater: Archibald Mack is the head of Mack Industries, who is revealed to be using the children of Bellitas Island as slaves to work in his factory. He also breeds exceptionally vicious dogs known as Attackaterriers by torturing the dogs from birth by sticking thumbtacks into their paws, then selling them to the public once he deems them vicious enough, showing no concern when this results in several toddlers being mauled by them. When one of the children, Lucia, tries to rebel against his authority, Mack tries to have her killed, locking her in an Attackaterrier enclosure so that she can be ripped apart by twenty of them.
• Worlds of Power series (by publication date):
  • Blaster Master: The Plutonium Boss is a sadistic Planetary Parasite who feeds on a planet's radiation. Ingraining itself into a planet's core and slowly killing it as it feasts on the core's radiation, once the Plutonium Boss has had its fill, it arises from the ground and annihilates everyone on the planet. Doing this to Eve's home planet Signar-el before moving on to Earth, the Plutonium Boss experiments on organisms to make them its mutated warriors, including a teenage human named Alex. Kidnapping Eve to lure Jason Frudnick and Alex to its lair, the Plutonium Boss reveals to the trio the Psychlotron machine, which will speed up both the feeding process and the destruction of Earth at a much faster rate.
  • Metal Gear: Colonel Vermon CaTaffy is the dictator of the small, but wealthy, country of Nouria. CaTaffy always hated "the free world" and wanted to bring it to its knees. Constantly committing atrocities, like the bombing of civilian aircraft and the torture of civilians and non-combatants for fun, CaTaffy decided to build his own Weapon of Mass Destruction, kidnapping Doctor Pettovich and his daughter Ellen to force Pettovich to build him Metal Gear, threatening to kill his daughter if he refused. When the US military sends nearly all Snake Men to Outer Heaven to stop CaTaffy, he managed to capture them and torture them all, some fatally. After his Metal Gear is complete, CaTaffy tries to launch the nukes at Washington, London, Tokyo, Canberra and Paris to "destroy the free world".
  • Ninja Gaiden: (The) Jaquio, real name Guardia de Mieux, is a demonic being who seeks to use the light and dark statues to awaken a powerful demon, harness its energy, and gain world domination with his demon army. Kidnapping Ken Hayabusa and making him his mind-controlled fighter after he and Dr. Wimpleton steal the statues, Jaquio sends thieves out to regain the statues, uncaring of the casualties. With the teenage Ryu Hayabusa, Ken's son, inside his personal temple, Jaquio promises to kill CIA agent Irene Lew should he not get his dark statue back, forcing Ryu to fight his monsters after he complies. Seething with glee over forcing Ryu to fight his mutated, mind-controlled father, once he finds them reconciling, Jaquio attempts to kill them both and continue his world domination plan.
  • Bionic Commando: Generalissimo Kilt is the leader of the terrorist organization BADD who steals the plans for the Albatross, a deadly weapon which he'll use to destroy the world and rule over the remains. Kidnapping Super Joe and damaging Jack Markson's arm enough to have it amputated, Kilt plans to give Joe a slow, painful death. Once the Albatross is completed, Kilt and scientist Master Destructo decide to have it destroy North America as a way to test its power. After the Albatross perishes, Kilt leaves his men behind to escape with Destructo, but despite dying at the hands of Jack, Kilt posthumously reveals to have programmed his lair to self-destruct should he perish, gleefully preparing to take his own men with him to the grave.
• Wrath Goddess Sing, by Maya Deane: Helen of Troy is a ruthless, callous, immortal demigoddess alleviating her boredom by enjoying The Trojan War. Engineering countless deaths in the struggle, Helen happily declares she will only belong to the strongest and takes delight in tormenting the heroine Achilles. Delighting in Achilles's pain, Helen eventually sacrifices Troy itself, feeding on the death to condemn the ancient world to annihilation in a final battle with Achilles, vowing that when the world is reborn Achilles will be remembered as a man, her history forgotten.
• Yashakiden The Demon Princess, by Hideyuki Kikuchi: The ancient Chinese Vampire Biki, or Princess, is a picture of beautiful cruelty. In the past, Princess has been responsible for countless deaths, swaying others into war and slaughter, even having pregnant women disemboweled by the hundreds when she was the infamous Da Ji. Arriving in the Demon City of Shinjuku, Princess slaughters and converts countless people to vampirism, starting a vampire civil war coupled with an attempt to break the hero Setsura Aki, even slaughtering her own minions on a callous whim.
• The Year of the Witching, by Alexis Henderson: The Prophet, ruler of Bethel, is a misogynistic tyrant who has women tortured on suspicion of being witches and binds the town to a stringent moral code he does not bother to attempt himself. A lecherous monster, the Prophet murdered the father of heroine Immanuelle by burning him alive, a punishment he uses to keep control of the town, while having raped her friend Leah at the age of 12 before forcing her to marry him later and become one of his many wives. After the newly empowered Immanuelle is caught in witchcraft with the Prophet's son Ezra, the Prophet blackmails Immanuelle into marrying him before trying to have Ezra burnt alive anyways to stave off a potential rival.
• Yellowjacket Summer, by Robert R. McCammon: Toby is a psychotic teenager with the unusual gift of speaking the language of yellowjackets. Using them, Toby murders everyone in a small town save for a few he keeps as slaves while intending on enslaving the people who stop in the town. The only survivors are those Toby keeps to cook for him or a girl that he takes a fancy to, who he regularly abuses and beats. Upon the heroine Carla learning what Toby is, he attempts to murder her and her two young children before killing the other survivors of the town as well.
• "The Yougoslaves", by Robert Bloch: Le Boss is a grotesque gang leader who traffics in children, having boys kidnapped and addicted to drugs to slowly strip them of humanity until they are nothing but murderers. The girls are trafficked for sex or to be provided to his soldiers to be gang raped as entertainment and reward. Running a thieving and murder ring, Le Boss shows his lack of regard for the children when he murders one simply for bringing him bad news and tries to kill a seemingly helpless old man for seeking a stolen item back.
• "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper'', by Robert Bloch: Psychiatrist John Carmody and Englishman Sir Guy Hollis are on the trail of the elusive Jack the Ripper. It is revealed Jack has claimed dozens of victims over the years, mutilating them horribly as he did the women in London. It is further seen that Jack is not a mortal killer: instead, his murders are done to appease dark gods to grant him immortality and power, and there is no sign he will stop anytime soon. Hollis reveals that he and his father had tracked the Ripper together, but the Ripper had gotten to Hollis's father first and murdered him. Upon realizing the depth of Hollis's conviction, Carmody reveals his true identity as the Ripper and ends the story about to murder Hollis.
• You Were Never Really Here: "The Boss" Novelli is an elderly crime lord who is approached by politician Votto for funding in his political career. Novelli, a vile pedophile and sex trafficker, agrees to help Votto so long as he gets to pimp out Votto's daughter Lisa. Doing this simply out of spite for Votto's dad being a rival to Novelli, Novelli convinces Votto to take the deal before raping Lisa and turning her into a prostitute for his organization. Novelli goes on to ensure that no one discovers the truth, killing Votto's wife when she gets suspicious of Lisa's whereabouts and sending his goons to eliminate several loose ends tied to Votto and the hired gun Joe.
• Zero Saints, by Gabino Iglesias: Indio, head of a Mara Salvatrucha outfit seeking to move into Austin, is known for his dark powers and the immense amount of blood he has spilled to get his way. Introducing himself to hero Fernando with an "offer" to Fernando's employer Guillermo, Indio has his friend Nino slowly mutilated before sawing his head off and later leads a massacre of Guillermo's closest, killing the man himself and opening the throat of Fernando's kind mother figure Conseulo.
• Zofloya: or The Moor: The titular Zofloya is the servant of Henriquez, the object of desire of Victoria de Loredani. Teaching Victoria of poison to eliminate those in her way, including Henriquez's brother, Zofloya happily kills one servant who does not die immediately. After having Henriquez raped by Victoria, leading to his suicide, Zofloya bids Victoria to murder his beloved Lilla and then brings the ruin and suicide of the rest of the cast. Revealing his true identity as Satan to Victoria, Zofloya gloats over the latter's downfall before killing her as well.
• Zombie: Quentin P. is a young man with an unhealthy obsession over lobotomies. Upon figuring out how to perform his own makeshift lobotomies, Quentin decides to create his own lobotomized Sex Slave who's fully obedient to him. Quentin kidnaps and tries to perform the lobotomy on four different men, botching the procedure and killing them all in the process. When he kidnaps his fifth victim, a twelve-year-old boy, a drunken Quentin tries to rape him, only for the boy to escape. Several weeks after the incident, Quentin kidnaps a teenager and repeatedly rapes him before accidentally killing him.
• The Zombie Room, by R.D. Ronald: Dyson Steiger is the leader of the Club, an organization of Human Traffickers responsible for forcing hundreds of girls and young women into sexual slavery. Steiger has the girls stripped of their identities through intense psychological damaging in order to make them more compliant. He's also responsible for the deaths of Tatiana's family and her deafness by ordering a bombing in the area they were in. He later orders a shipment of explosive weapons brought to Garden Heights for the purpose of conducting a wave of terror throughout the city to boost the influence of those under his thumb.
• Zones of Thought:
  • A Fire Upon the Deep: Flenser got his name from his first steps as an Evilutionary Biologist — vivisection. Later, after becoming a ruler, he went far, far beyond that, among other things essentially turning Mind Rape of his subjects into a semi-industrial process. Flenser is a heartless sociopath, who demands absolute loyalty from his underlings, but has none to them. To him, everyone is a tool, although he can hide that well until the time comes. He murders followers and discards even his trusted bodyguards without a second thought. His own second-in-command (who, as revealed later, was essentially his offspring as well) hated him more than anything in the world, but too mentally scarred to resist. His striving to Take Over the World seems almost not worth mentioning compared to his other aspects. The book gives many glimpses into Flenser's mind and about the only non-horrible thing there is his ability to enjoy the beauty of nature.
  • A Deepness in the Sky: Tomas Nau leads The Emergents. As part of their defeat of the rival Qeng Ho, Nau rapes and kills their fleet commander in front of her daughter. Following that Nau has the daughter mind-wiped and charms her into falling for him. Because the mind-wipe is imperfect, every so often Qiwi remembers what happened, tries to kill Nau, who then has her scrubbed and starts the process again. This continues for decades.
  • The Children of the Sky: Vendacious upholds the tradition of horrifically evil villains and maybe even surpasses his predecessors, if not in scale and inventiveness of evil deeds, then in sheer sadism and pettiness. This guy adopts most of the old Flenser's methods, such as manipulation, treachery, absolute ruthlessness, and totalitarian control through physical and mental torture. And uses them to pit the two greatest centers of civilization in the world against each other, when neither side has any real reason for conflict. Vendacious thinks that justifications are for the weak; he recognizes that his actions are meant to stroke his own ego and enjoy the feeling of power, and is perversely proud of that. He deliberately makes his own underlings' lives hell, just to see with how much tyranny he can get away with.
• Zoo City: Odysseus "Odi" Huron is a record producer who turns out to be animalled to a huge white crocodile. Huron sexually abuses starlets under his control, which drives Songwezu of twin pop sensation iJusi to flee. To free himself of his animal, Huron has his assassin partners kill a succession of innocents, disguising them as serial killings so he can take their animals for the ritual of muti. Having Songwezu's twin brother murder her, Huron binds his crocodile to him and then kills him as well. It is later revealed he has been feeding other victims to his crocodile, with dozens of bones located in its lair.

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