"The Beast. The Devil's Own. The Most Evil Man in the World—and there's a lot of competition. Everyone in my line of work has heard of Crow Lee. He hadn't joined the Great Satanic Conspiracy because he thought they weren’t extreme enough. He dealt in death curses, human sacrifice, human trafficking, blackmail on a small and large scale...and in slaughter and suffering just for the fun of it. He'd run any number of cults just because he could."
—Edwin "Eddie" Drood, aka "Shaman Bond", on the (Unholy) Crow Lee, Live and Let Drood
The Multiverse of Simon R. Green is a varied Fantasy Kitchen Sink which features morality of all kind. The following villains, though, are pure evil.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
Deathstalker
- Empress Lionstone XIV, aka the "Iron Bitch", is the quintessence of every Evil Overlord of every Evil Empire rolled into one beautiful, soulless package. Known for her wicked and lethal sense of humor, Lionstone won't just kill someone for fun; she'll think up an entertaining—to her—way to go about it. Lionstone is attended by handmaiden bodyguards culled from the ranks of rebels and malcontents because she finds it amusing to turn those into her loyal servants, has their tongues cut out, replaces their eyes and ears with more controllable cybernetics, and has them mindwiped and reconditioned into absolutely loyal attendants and bodyguards. Projects under Lionstone's reign range from the annihilation of the planet Virimonde for daring to engage in democracy, and threatening the same for others; to trying to yoke the ridiculously lethal Grendels into shock troops; to Wormboy Hell, an oubliette where rebel espers are kept imprisoned in states of constant mental violation and agony.
- Valentine Wolfe is a drug-taking psychopath who rises to lead Clan Wolfe by murdering his own father during their attack on their rivals, Clan Campbell. Valentine leads the barbaric sack of Virimonde and distributes an Esper drug with a huge fatality rate, using the corpses of those he's killed to enhance the drug before serving them to unwitting guests. Allying with Shub to annihilate humanity, Valentine intends to become emperor before he razes the empire to nothing and dances in the ashes, killing anyone who ever spited or annoyed him while violating every taboo known to mankind and others not yet discovered.
- Finn Durandal was the finest of Paragons upstaged by Lewis Deathstalker and decided to burn the empire down out of sheer spite. Organizing the Church Militant with himself at its head, Finn arranges for a riot and massacre with his "Esper Liberation Force", also imprisoning the souls and minds of other Paragons, trapping them in their minds as he uses their bodies before he begins massacring the entire Deathstalker clan. Succumbing to hedonism and barbarity, Finn kills and eats numerous alien ambassadors; destroys a planet for boredom and spite; slaughters his own men; and massacres Parliament. Once a hero, Finn shows how far one can fall for spite and gleefully admits things such as love and friendship do not exist for him.
- The Unnatural Inquirer & A Hard Day's Knight: King Artur Pendragon is the sadistic king of Sinister Albion who, with his master Merlin's help, runs Albion as a torture and murder camp. Artur employs use of the wicker men—-demonic knights empowered by innocent souls in eternal torment—-and uses them to torture and murder the population at will. Desiring power over his master, Artur enters the Nightside in search of Excalibur and helps Queen Helena in an attempted coup which threatens the entire Nightside population. Leaving his own allies to die, Artur manipulates Henson into helping him by lying that he could bring Henson's wife back to life, all while planing to use Excalibur to turn the Nightside into his personal den of depravity.
- Just Another Judgment Day: Josie Prince is the founder and funder of "Precious Memories", one of the most abhorrent businesses in the already wretched societies of the Nightside. Josie has children kidnapped off the streets of London to become sex slaves and worse, having them raped, mutilated, and tortured before the kids finally wear out and are fed to dogs. Josie has these atrocities recorded to artificial memories she then sells to her depraved clients so they can get off to the agony of children any time they want, long after the kids themselves are dead. One of the most ruthless, sadistic people in the entire Nightside, Josie is even reputed to have killed her own kids, the oldest because he wasn't turning in enough profit, the youngest because he was exposed to the horrors of Precious Memories himself.
- A Hard Day's Knight: The sadistic Merlin Satanspawn from Sinister Albion is an alternate reality Merlin who embraced his destiny as The Antichrist. Leading King Artur into mass slaughter to purge the world, Merlin orders every magical creature subjected to genocide to be the only magic being left. Running Albion as a concentration camp with regular torture, mass murder and sacrifice, Merlin takes his victims and flays them, leaving their corpses to decorate his castle, kept alive in horrific agony so he may feed on their suffering. Not content with this, Merlin even threatens to destroy the Nightside and everyone there, all to expand his twisted dominion.
- Tales from The Nightside's "The Big Game": Varney the Vampire is the king of vampires. Before Dracula arrived on English shores, Varney swept through England, slaughtering people en masse. Faking his death to return later, Varney intends a bloody invasion of the Nightside, preying on and killing so many to create an ocean of blood that extends for miles, luring in hundreds of innocents to feed his army and having them slaughtered in agony and terror to fuel his sadism.
- Adrian Drood, The Original Traitor to the Drood family, has known many names over the centuries. Having founded the Droods, the Traitor grew discontent at their self-appointed roles and began murdering family members to replace them, guiding the family to the brutal warriors he craved them to be. Regularly assisting in horrific threats to kill countless people to keep the Drood family sharp, Adrian had assisted the Heart with its schemes, unleashed the monstrous Loathly Ones on the world, and had also helped Methuselah and Tim with their horrific end goals before allying with Unholy Crow Lee. Growing sick of the Droods, Adrian intends to help Crow Lee usher in his nightmarish hellscape, exterminating his family and starting over from scratch so that everything conforms to his twisted ego.
- The Man with the Golden Torc: The Heart is an ancient, world-hopping entity with the mind of a childish sadist that enjoys playing and "breaking" with toys. Leaving entire worlds ruined behind it, the Heart came to the ancient, sorcerous Druids long ago and convinced them to serve it, forging them up into the family of the Droods under its power. Twisting the well-intentioned family into tools through which it kills anything seeking its destruction and even pushes for the eventual genocide of everything "unnatural" through them, the darkest reveal about the Heart is how the Droods gain their torcs: the Heart, for generations, has influenced the birth of twins in the family, resulting in one baby always being sacrificed to it to create the torc for the survivor, the souls of countless infants trapped and unable to pass on within the Heart over centuries.
- From Hell with Love:
- Once a normal man who bargained with the monstrous Heart for immortality, Brother Methuselah founded the family of immortals and has helped stoke or cause wars and conflicts all throughout history and helped provide dangerous artifacts to psychopaths for both fun and profit, causing countless deaths in his wake. Methuselah, having enslaved the Kobold race which nearly led to their extinction, now plans to acquire the Apocalypse Door in order to brutally conquer Heaven. To do this, Methuselah funds the creation of the Acceleration Drug, which drives its users insane and is eventually fatal, and has thousands subjected to it without them knowing the effects, using them to lead a bloody attack on the Droods which kills hundreds of them. Even willing to abandon his own family to their deaths in order to get ahead, Methuselah shows how immortality can transform someone into a selfish monster.
- Timothy Drood, or "Tiger Tim", is a rogue Drood and a complete savage responsible for the creation of the horrific Acceleration Drug—a chemical that turns those who ingest it into superhuman warriors at the consequence of agonizingly destroying their minds and throwing them into violence. Drood allies with Dr. Delirium and Brother Methuselah to use Acceleration for their mutual ends—-making an entire village rip each other to shreds under the influence, having hundreds of his own family members killed by warriors hyped up on Acceleration, and even poisoning his and Delirium's own men with it to "clean up all loose ends"—in preparation to open the Apocalypse Door. Only loyal to Methuselah as far as it benefits him, Tim attempts to murder his own father, seeking to use the Door to cull most of humanity through armies of the damned to reign supreme over the remnants.
- For Heaven's Eyes Only: MI-13 Agent Peter McAlphine and CEO Alexandre Dusk are the sadistic heads of the Satanists seeking absolute power from Hell itself. After Peter was demoted due to losing to Eddie, he created the Satanists to get his revenge and allied with Dusk to run their home base as a torture and murder chamber. Peter and Dusk have convinced all the world's leaders to forcefully order their citizens to kill their children, even the babies, wiping out an entire generation and damming humanity to Hell on Earth. In order to ensure peoples' cooperation, Peter and Dusk create a Mind-Control Device and test it on the citizens of a town called Little Stoke, killing thousands in an agonizing manner, while planning to turn the entire Earth into their domain with Peter getting his petty revenge on Eddie for having him demoted in the process.
- Live and Let Drood & Casino Infernale: The Unholy Crow Lee is a walking human monster with a legacy of mass murder, torture, and Human Trafficking, all as befitting his epithet as "The Most Evil Man in the World". Seeking to annihilate the Droods, and succeeding in killing many of them, Crow Lee's evil manifests in ways both grandiose and petty—-from driving an ally of the heroes to violent insanity and suicide through insinuations he "loves" her, to viciously killing almost all of his own children, to tearing a living fetus out of its mother's womb and nailing it upon a cross, to lining his house with books bound in human skin and a gallery of countless people, young and old, he's set up in various gruesome states of unending torture. Even death is not enough to end Crow Lee's blight upon the world, as Crow Lee posthumously attempts to throw the world into bloody conflict fighting over the mysterious, powerful "Inheritance" he's left, only to reveal the Inheritance itself is a sealed black hole that will consume all existence when released, solely to spite everyone for not being able to rule them.
- Dr. DOA & Moonbreaker: Edmund Drood, aka Dr. DOA, is the evil alternate reality version of the hero Eddie Drood. Exterminating the Drood family of his world, Edmund centers on the main earth's version of the Droods, becoming an assassin named Dr. DOA who kills many people, even infecting some with cancer to watch them die in agonizing torment. Attempting to wipe out the Droods, he eventually centers in on "Moonbreaker" to completely exterminate human life while he returns to his world and takes it over. Gleeful about his own sadism, Edmund reveals he is happy to kill billions for nothing more than sheer spite.
