Sandbox / Monster: Literature (D to G)

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

D

• Daddy Love, by Joyce Carol Oates: Chester Cash, known by young Robbie as "Daddy Love", is a part-time preacher who may have murdered his much older wife for her money. A pedophile, Cash abducts little boys and conditions them through torture—both physical and psychological—to be his alone, while also molesting them. After kidnapping young Robbie and crippling his mother, Cash spends years abusing him horribly, while murdering the boys once they grow too old and seeking out a replacement.
• Daemon: The Major brutally kills Roy Merritt, cuts off/out Loki's fingers, tongue, and eyes, orders his mooks to throw Sebeck and Laney into a wood-chipper, and saves teenage girls from brothels—all so that he can get them Darknet accounts and then behead them to steal their Darknet identity, keeping their heads chemically alive to spoof the biometrics. Oh, and he came up with the real "Operation Exorcist" plan to expunge Daemon from civilization: Alpha Strikes. Invade Darknet communities with full military force, then send in mercenaries who proceed to destroy every piece of technology present and execute every man, woman and child.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc IF: Junko Enoshima, in this What If? scenario, is the same despair-adoring psychopath and abusive younger sister of Mukuro Ikusaba who conditioned the latter into admiring despair. Having kickstarted "The Tragedy" with Mukuro, resulting in tons of destruction and riots, Junko wipes the memories of her friends at Hope's Peak Academy to have them all kill each other. Lying to Mukuro that she'll survive the killing game, after her attempt to kill her fails, Junko tries to pin her and the injured Makoto Naegi as the masterminds behind the game. When Mukuro turns against her, Junko promises to reset the game and have an amnesiac Mukuro compete as herself to make her and everyone else suffer, later presenting the students with an impossible deadly challenge to win their freedom, knowing they will most likely fail and fall into despair.
• Danger Zone One:
  • Vol. 2: Beneath These Streets: Dr. Harlan Melchor was once the head of Valcott University's Engineering Science Department, before getting blacklisted for desiring to sell his machines as military weapons. Faking his death and hiding out underground, Melchor plans to finish the Harmonic Resonator, which will create an earthquake big enough to destroy all of Pallad City and kill millions, even torturing a kidnapped Reena Saffron with vibrations in order to activate the machine with her screams.
  • Vol. 3: The Unhappiest Place on Earth:
    • "Miss Bliss" is a sadist out to dominate others. Working with Fantasy Funland owner Dalton Trayer to secure funding for his theme park, Bliss establishes a human trafficking operation underneath the park, kidnapping young girls to be eventually sold as sex slaves. Bliss also tortures women for sexual pleasure, doing so to Madison Wynter with hopes of mentally breaking her to the point of becoming her latest pet.
    • Sven is Bliss's perverted henchman. Assisting Bliss in securing the right women for her sex trafficking operation, Sven decides to have some fun once Bliss is away by attempting to rape the women under their captivity as a way to test the merchandise before selling them, with the implication that this isn't his first time.
• Daniel X has fought many vile villains from The List of Alien Outlaws on Earth, but these are the worst:
  • Zeboul, known near-exclusively as "Number 1" or The Prayer, is the ultimate villain behind every bad occurrence in the franchise. Number 1 is an ancient God of Evil who uses his influence to drive entire civilizations into evil, and is responsible for empowering Abbadon in his horrific torment of humankind as a "show" for Number 1's viewing pleasure. Behind every major member on "The List", from setting up special shoots for Number 5's TV butcher shows to enabling Number 6 to wipe out Daniel's homeworld, Number 1 solidified himself as Daniel's Arch-Enemy by murdering the boy's parents and trying to kill him when he was a toddler. Harnessing his power from the evil others do, Number 1 becomes so tired of the Milky Way galaxy's innate goodness that he attempts to wipe out its billions of lifeforms just to "tip the scales" back in the favor of evildoers. Number 1 was an utterly sadistic monster of an alien, hell-bent on destroying everything good in the universe just to satisfy his love for all things evil.
  • The Dangerous Days of Daniel X: Ergent Seth, Number 6 on The List, is a powerful criminal who plans on eventually killing off the human race. In the meantime, Seth abducts dozens of kids at a time and uses them as slaves and drug-runners. Learning of Daniel X's hunt for him, Seth terrorizes and mentally torments the boy before he critically wounds and captures him. Seth then takes Daniel to his home world, where Seth taunts him about the fact that he has wiped out most of the population. Finding an underground city full of surviving citizens, Seth begins slaughtering them before Daniel challenges him to a duel. Accepting the challenge, Seth orders his child slaves to observe the fight, just so they would be in his crosshairs if he needs leverage.
  • Watch the Skies: Number Five on The List, also his only known name, is an "entertainment" director. Showing up on planets with lesser tech than his, Five mind-controls entire towns into performing entertaining acts, kills them in sadistic ways, then sells footage of these acts to illegal alien networks. Arriving on Earth, Five murders dozens of people through vaporization and Psychic-Assisted Suicide, including his own henchmen for unintentional insults, filming all the way. When his master plan to impregnate dozens of women with clones of himself to increase his filming to a galaxy-wide scale is thwarted by Daniel X, Five holds his girlfriend hostage and tries to kill Daniel while bragging the fact that he filmed the murders of Daniel's parents. Surviving his near-death at Daniel's hands, Five plans on infecting all technology on Earth and causing worldwide chaos, while also calling in reinforcements to help conquer the planet.
  • Demons and Druids: Phosphorius Beta, Number 3 on The List, has used time portals to hold civilizations throughout history in a grip of fear. Terrorizing London, England in the present as an "arsonist", Beta regularly burns down entire blocks, engulfing oil refineries, schools, and day cares. Amassing a small army by turning innocents into extensions of himself, Beta uses them to collect as much organic material—including humans—as possible, then ships it off to his home world, where it is used as "fast food". While trying to kill Daniel X and his friends, Beta reveals his hand in the murder of Daniel's parents while boasting of his plans to burn down London, then move on to the rest of the world until all that's left is a husk.
  • Armageddon: Abbadon, Number 2 on the List, is The Devil himself. A member of the reality warping Alpar Nokian race who reveled in destruction unlike the rest of his kind, Abbadon took up a job as chief entertainer for the Prayer, using his abilities to become Satan and begin terrorizing all of mankind. Abbadon is responsible for an untold number of atrocities throughout humanity's history, everything from The Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide having been perpetrated to Abbadon's tune simply to put on a show for the Prayer's enjoyment. Abbadon soon enough grows tired of merely tormenting the Earth and kicks off a full-scale apocalypse, in which he enslaves millions of humans to be tortured for eternity in Abbadon's "Hell" and slaughters billions more. Abbadon plans to turn the planet into nothing but an agonizing wasteland for any life left upon it, and is such a gleeful sadist that when Daniel X tries to stop him, Abbadon tries to sentence Daniel's Love Interest to an eternity of torture out of spite.
• Daphne, by Josh Malerman: Daphne Vann, in life, was a towering woman well known for disturbing anyone she encountered in the town of Samhain. Daphne was also a Serial Killer who captured children, killed, and then ate them. Upon dying, Daphne is far worse; a brutal ghost who approaches those who think of her, Daphne begins to haunt the Samhain girl's volleyball team, killing one girl after the other in horribly brutal fashions before centering on Kit Lamb, and trying to kill her and everyone around her.
• The Dark Crystal novelization, by A.C.H. Smith: skekUng the Garthim Master, who lacks the honor and sportsmanship of his movie counterpart, was a driving force behind the genocide of the Gelfling race as the creator and lord of the Garthim warriors. Becoming the new Emperor, skekUng has podling slaves drained for essence and sends the Garthim to recover the surviving Gelflings, as well as massacre the podling village in their path, or take survivors to be drained as slaves. Later having the Gelfling Kira sent to be drained, skekUng loses his mind with power and will even kill his fellow Skeksis if opposed, plotting to exterminate all of Thra's life with the Garthim to reign supreme.
• "The Dark Eidolon", by Clark Ashton Smith: Namirrha, born Narthos, is a beggar boy nearly killed by the carelessness of Prince Zotulla. Surviving and nursing a monstrous grudge, Namirrha becomes a great necromancer and invites Zotulla and his lover to a banquet. Having all their guests murdered, Namirrha then savagely tortures Zotulla and his favorite mistress, forcing Zotulla to watch the pain of the latter while also summoning demonic horses to trample Zotulla's chief city, killing everyone except those in Namirrha's palace.
• Darkened (formerly Deadworld), by Bryan Smith: The Dark One is a being from another world who is the equivalent to a visiting thrill killer. Causing an apocalyptic event that wipes out most of humanity, the Dark One possesses other humans and moves through the survivors to torture them for fun. Upon locating the heroine Emily, he rapes her in the body of her lover Warren and has her former stalker try to rape her as well.
• The Darkest Legacy: Both halves of this despicable duo are responsible for selling and trafficking psi children:
  • Joseph Moore is a wealthy businessman running for President of the United States on an anti-psi platform. Arranging terrorist attacks that kill dozens, Moore blames these attacks on psis to justify his policy on sending them to his "personal training" compound. There the children are abused and treated like animals, and can be sold to Gregory Mercer as slave soldiers.
  • Gregory Mercer is the leader of the international crime syndicate Blue Star, dealing in crimes such as assassinations and Human Trafficking. Abducting children around the world, Mercer would have them experimented on to try give them psi powers, resulting in many of them dying. Manipulating the survivors into being loyal to him, Mercer used them as a wet work team before several of them escaped. Mercer works with Moore to help arrange his terrorist attacks so he have access to more psi children so he sell them as slave soldiers.
• The Dark Game, by Jonathan Janz: Roderick Wells is a reclusive, utterly demanding author whose bestselling books and sponsorships have made him the most esteemed author in the world. The seemingly-human Wells is actually a cunning Ancient Evil who devours the talent, the creations, and the very souls of other creative minds to fuel his own life. Wells has fed upon countless souls, and he's all too gleeful to try and devour the next batch of ten authors he's lured into his mansion after playing elaborate mind games with them. Even his own wife is nothing but another creation, a hollow servant and a sex toy for him for when he's bored.
• The Darkglass Mountain Trilogy: Eleanon, leader of the Lealfast, is a Jerkass with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that takes his whole species along with him. He treats women, especially his sister, like garbage, and forces his sister to act as sexual bait. As the speaker for the Lealfast, instead of working for what is best for them, he deliberately alienates any allies that extend a welcoming hand to the Lealfast so he can retain control over them. In order to meet an Eldritch Abomination and secure a deal with him, he lets thousands of his own people get massacred in battle, then blames it on Axis. He then makes a deal with said Eldritch Abomination which enslaves the Lealfast to it forever. When he finds a woman, Ravenna, under a curse to not be noticed, he claims he can lift the curse, then instead modifies it so she becomes invisible to everyone but himself, forcing her to become his spy.
• Dark Hollow: Hylinus the Satyr is the son of Nodens and a rapist who uses his spell to bewitch women. Having been summoned by Nelson LeHorn to assist with the crops, Hylinus brainwashed and raped Nelson's wife and daughters before being sealed off. Returned in modern day before writer Adam Senft, Hylinu proceeds to bewitch and rape every woman he can, sometimes having their husbands murdered as offerings or solely for being in his way.
• Darkhurst series, by Gail Z. Martin:
  • Scourge: Lord Mayor Ellor Machison is a participant in a conspiracy to hold the "Balance" for his own benefit. Unleashing monsters on his own city that kill countless innocents before having the monsters purged, Machison ruthless hunts down those who hunt monsters without his permission, personally torturing them to death or madness. Machison is also a sexual sadist, routinely raping women and murdering them in bed. In order to get an edge over his rival Merchant Princes, Machison has one killed, as well as his youngest daughter, to send a message to the others. When he realizes the ghosts of his victims want revenge on him, Machison has a Blood Witch in his service sacrifice people to guard him with magic, completely guilt-free of the many lives he's destroyed for his own power.
  • Vengeance: Adder Shadowsworn and his partner Argus Nightshade are Blood Witches who help to maintain the Balance by using the Cull: by murdering others, they use the resulting death to summon monsters on an innocent population, killing people to feed the Balance and strengthen their wealthy patrons. Having their own agendas, Nightshade is also a depraved monster in his spare time, keeping a garden decorated with his victims—some still alive in a state between life and death. Deciding to harness the power of the horrific Eldritch Abomination, He Who Watches, Shadowsworn puts together a huge Human Sacrifice, with the two, along with a third Blood Witch named Wraithwind, attempting to bind He Who Watches, not caring that they will be annihilating entire kingdoms with the powers they unleash.
• A Dark Lure, by Loreth Anne White: The Watt Lake Killer, Eugene George, is a horrific Serial Killer obsessed with Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. After kidnapping a woman, The Killer would torture and rape her for months before releasing her into the woods as part of a "chase," and, when he got tired of hunting her, The Killer would murder, gut, and cannabilize his victim. When one of the women, Sarah Baker, escaped, The Killer framed his mentally retarded brother for the crimes, getting him life in prison. The Killer is later arrested after murdering a State Trooper, with no one aware he is The Watt Lake Killer. When he is released 12 years later, The Killer tracks down Sarah and begins tormenting her, killing an innocent woman in the process. After capturing her, The Killer molests and tries to rape Sarah, kills one of her friends when he interferes, then tries to strangle Sarah to death before meeting his end. Viewing his victims as "prey," The Watt Lake Killer was a hunter, a rapist, and, most of all, a psychopath.
• Darkman novelization, by Randall Boyll:
  • Louis Strack Jr. is the conscienceless CEO of Strack Industries and is ultimately the man behind Dr. Peyton Westlake's mutilation and transformation into Darkman. Strack is the one paying Robert G. Durant to torture and slaughter his way through anyone who refuses to acquiesce to his corporate takeover of the city, from the mob outfit in the opening to Peyton and his innocent assistant. Strack has no compunction using Peyton's Love Interest as a hostage after having dated her himself; in the same scene, he reveals he arranged for his first wife to die in a plane crash. In a storyline excised from the film, Strack resolves his differences with his own father by paying Durant to murder him.
  • Sam Rogers, aka Smiley, is a far cry from his film counterpart. Smiley, as a teenager, killed many neighborhood animals and his baby sister Sarah, often digging a hole in the ground and sticking the victim's head in, watching them suffocate with a sick grin. Smiley would eventually join the ranks of Robert G. Durant, engaging in violence for the hell of it and participating in the violent torture and attempted murder of Peyton Westlake, the soon-to-be Darkman.
• Darkness Series:
  • Swemmel, the half-mad king of Unkerlant, is probably the single most tyrannical ruler in the story. Seizing power after the Twinkings War, Swemmel's first act as king was to have his twin brother and rival Kyot boiled alive in a cauldron, before launching a massive purge of the nobility. Ruling through fear alone, Swemmel cut a deal with King Mezentio of Algarve to divide Forthweg between them, then invaded neutral Zuwayza while the rest of the continent was distracted by the war against Algarve. When the Algarvians double-crossed Swemmel and invaded Unkerlant, Swemmel sacrificed his own peasants in magical rituals in order to buy time, declaring that so long as he had one subject left at the end of the war and Mezentio had none, he would be the victor. When the war begins to swing in his direction, Swemmel proves himself as bad a winner as he is a loser, enslaving Algarvian prisoners, executing Grelzan prisoners, and boiling "King" Rainero of Grelz the same way he did Kyot. A paranoid megalomaniac, Swemmel finds himself the most powerful man on the continent at the end of the war, and is contemplating starting a new one against his erstwhile allies Lagoas and Kusammo.
  • The unnamed interrogator is a low-level government functionary and professional torturer in Jelgava. Initially an employee of King Donalitu of Jelgava, the interrogator goes over to the Algarvians when they conquer the country, and takes a special interest in would-be loyalist rebel Talsu. Arresting Talsu, the interrogator tries to torture him into giving up names of fellow "traitors", traitors whom he knows do not actually exist. When Talsu refuses, the interrogator instead tortures his wife, until each of them gives up names to save the other. Talsu is released, but strong-armed into helping the interrogator uncover more "traitors" under pain of being arrested again. When the war ends and King Donalitu returns, the interrogator turns his cloak again and arrests Talsu for conspiring with the Algarvians to prevent Donalitu's return, denouncing his unwilling accomplice as the vilest of traitors. Responsible for the execution of dozens of innocent people and making Talsu's life a living hell, the interrogator abused anyone who came into his power, while dismissing his own treachery as the acts of a Consummate Professional.
• The Dark One, by Guy N. Smith: Marcel Hart, a Satanist teenager, is a vicious child who causes deaths for his own amusement, murdering multiple people via magically induced "accidents" to sacrifice them to Satan. When his own parents have issues with him, Marcel kills them as well, in addition to a young woman he was sleeping with via a rather public murder. Staying with his parents' friends, the Gorlays, Marcel plots to sacrifice them to his master as well, children included.
• The Dark Ones, by Bryan Smith: The demon Andras, after freeing himself from his imprisonment, sets about corrupting the town of Ransom in revenge for his imprisonment. Savagely murdering those around him, Andras controls others into orgies and depravity, with mass rape of those who will not submit to him. Mind-controlling heroine Natasha Wagner into being his "bride" while forcing her to enjoy all he does to her, Andras has his followers spread out and begin slaughtering and raping all in their path with the intention to overrun the world.
• The Dark Sea Annals:
  • Morlan is the Big Bad of the series and the evil brother of King Aravel. He is either directly or indirectly responsible for virtually every evil that takes place in the series. He doesn't seem to start out as this, being the Token Evil Teammate of the Council, but he soon drops right off into this territory. He tricks his brother and his allies into beginning an all-out war with the Gorracks by sending his troops disguised as Gorracks into villages and slaughtering the innocent villagers. He regularly takes part in Black Magic, approves of and assists in Cythraul's ceremonies, and makes a pact with Satan himself. He also killed his father and later his brother.
  • Cythraul, Morlan's stone-cold, sadistic Torture Technician and right-hand man (or rather, elf), is a cold-blooded killer with absolutely no remorse or mercy in his heart. He is a pure sadist, taking great pleasure in watching others suffer, which mostly takes place in his dreaded Bone Chapel; a temple that is filled with the carefully arranged bones, skulls, and corpses of his victims. He treats his torture of others like an art, knowing every detail in the anatomy of all the races and exploiting them in the most painful way possible. He has no problem with performing his "experiments" on children. He is also a skilled assassin, and tries to kill Abbagael and the baby Telwyn via a poisoned razor on his ring. He even mentally regrets having to kill the baby quickly. This is all just from the first book; he gets even worse in the next.
  • Quevara, the Red Queen, is a viciously seductive, Omnicidal Maniac with a fetish for all things red; namely blood and fire. During her reign, she was The Dreaded, and was infamous for slaughtering her subjects just For the Evulz. This included using them as living torches to light her throne room, (often lighting the children on fire first, and forcing their parents to watch before it was their turn.) and butchering her subjects just to see the streams turn red with their blood. When she was merged with the great dragon Raudrim, she took on part of his savage, greedy nature and became bent on destroying and massacring everything in her path.
• Date A Live: Sir Isaac Ray Peram Westcott is the absolutely monstrous Director of Deus.Ex.Machina Industries. A sadomasochistic Mage who discovered his love of pain and despair when his village was slaughtered by humans, Westcott uses "revenge" against humanity as a veil to mask his true motive to simply cause destruction. Torturing and experimenting on hundreds of women and children to turn them into his enslaved "Wizards", Westcott summoned the First Spirit years ago, wiping out 150 million humans in the process, and begins hunting down every Spirit to torture and drive them insane so as to steal their Sephira Crystals. Upon obtaining a Sephira by torturing Nia for five years then forcing all the pain from those years on her at once, Westcott ups his game in slaughtering civilians—including children; sending entire fleets of his own troops on suicide missions in between maiming and killing them on a whim; and dragging entire cities into bloody conflicts. Westcott proudly proclaims every last one of his crimes as being nothing but a hobby to him, and when beaten after first trying to rewrite reality to one where he reigns supreme over a tortured humanity, Westcott tries to drag everyone, his own Dragon included, down to death with him, spending his final moments in glee at his former "friends" mourning his demise.
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone: The world of Eretz features this monstrous pair of Seraphim brothers:
  • Emperor Joram leads the Seraphim on genocidal purges of the Chimaera, alongside his younger brother, Jael, enslaving the survivors of their attacks to suffer as their empire grows. Within his empire itself, Joram forces women to become his concubines, mistreating them to the point they have attempted suicide to escape him; he also slaughters his own guards for perceived disrespect. Horrifically raising his own children to become front line soldiers for his armies, Joram shrugs aside their deaths when they are killed for the "glory" of his empire. When he lays siege to the Chimaera capital of Loramendi, Joram sacrifices hundreds of his own troops to weaken the enemy's defenses, then invading the city to massacre the thousands within, both soldier and innocent civilian alike. After winning his bloody conquest, Joram intends to further expand his tyranny, next laying eyes on a peaceful group of seraphim, ever-hungry for more power.
  • Jael leads his brother's elite forces "The Dominion" and is the one who murdered Akiva's mother. His unit feared even among Joram's empire for their brutality, Jael leads them on purges of Chimaera villages, and relishes the chance to murder unarmed women and children personally, as well as torturing prisoners, in one notable case force-feeding the ashes of Ziri's comrades to him. A being of voracious lust, Jael rapes both civilian women and his own female soldiers. Seizing the throne with Joram's death, Jael kills his own nephew and all the guards present for his coup, leaving only his niece, Liraz, alive to become his Sex Slave. Discovering the human Earth, Jael intends to present himself as a messianic figure, then manipulate them into eliminating his enemy races, by manipulating the humans into giving him dangerous weapons to annihilate his enemies. When confronted by Akiva, Jael uses his own men as human shields, caring for nothing but his own selfish conquest.
• Daughters unto Devils, by Amy Lukavics: The nameless demon is a sealed, sadistic force that preys on the innocent. Killing those who wander into its territory, the demon delights in mental torture and driving them insane before killing them. Causing the deaths of the heroine Amanda Verner's father and baby sister, the demon possesses her mother and tries to kill Amanda and all her siblings, wishing to escape its prison to kill and torture to its heart's content.
• The Dawnhounds: Varazzo, a member of the Hainak Kuay-Vitraj police department, turns out to be a member of the conspiracy seeking to destroy the city. Solely because he doesn't think he's respected enough for his position, Varazzo helps to ship in massive amounts of a Synthetic Plague that reduces the infected to mutated monstrosities, using his connections to seal the city from the inside with the hope that whatever is left of Hainak will make him President. A treacherous sadist, Varazzo genuinely enjoys killing and abusing the "blank" slaves he's given, and he tries to murder the one honest cop on the force while snarking he'll throw in a quip at the funeral.
• "De Vries Quartet" (Colonel Vaughn de Vries), by Paul Mendelson:
  • The First Rule of Survival: While outwardly a respected criminologist and psychologist, Nicholas Steinhauer is in fact a sadistic Control Freak and pedophile. Having very likely murdered his younger brother when they were teenagers, Nicholas would manipulate his other brother and an emotionally disturbed cop into kidnapping three young boys before listening in via audio as the boys were raped for years by up to 6 men. During the investigation Nicholas would go on TV and purposefully spread false theories both to throw off the police and to gain publicity to fuel his ego. When Marc commits suicide to avoid arrest, Nicholas's only concerns are using Marc as fodder for his next book, and when the operation is shut down Nicholas simply plans to repeat his crimes, stopped only when Vaughn's friend carries out an extrajudicial killing. Despite having a Freudian Excuse in his abusive father, Nicholas would ultimately exceed the man in evil.
  • The History Of Blood: Tony "White Mamba" Uys is a former member of the AWB determined to fund his revolution against the ANC. Angered by what he saw as the politicians disregarding his sacrifice by giving away the country, Tony would turn to crime in order to right what he saw as an egregious wrong. Beginning his crusade by murdering an anti-apartheid politician, Tony would graduate to animal poaching and human trafficking. In the former he would allow mass death on a debilitating scale while having anyone who wouldn't be cowed into submission murdered; in the later he would facilitate the recruitment of countless white girls who would be raped, forced to swallow cocaine and then sent to Thailand where they were condemned to either a lifetime of sexual slavery or the vicious local prisons. After Vaughn confronts him in his home, Tony abducts Vaughn's youngest daughter to send a message, leaving her alive purely to avoid attracting too much heat. Despite his claims that he was fighting for a higher cause, Tony Uys was ultimately little more than a thug who trafficked in human misery.
• Dead Lake, by Darcy Coates: Michael Paluhik is a man who fantasized about killing all his life and decided to act on it one day by murdering his best friends on a camping trip. Faking his death, Michael starts to murder hikers who would trek into the forest and cut off their fingers to store in jars as trophies and dumping their bodies under the dock in the lake, claiming the lives of 20 people over the years. Eventually zeroing his sights onto heroine Sam, Michael cuts her off from civilization and terrorizes her before gleefully trying to murder her, all while sporting his Slasher Smile.
• Deadlands novels:
  • Ghostwalkers, by Jonathan Maberry: Aleksandar Deray is a necromancer who uses his forces to harrow settlements, killing many people and raising them as fodder for his zombie armies. Enslaving others as Harrowed, infecting them with Manitou and keeping them as slaves via Ghost Rock, Deray sacrifices others for power and intends on building an army to conquer America. Having one Harrowed, Lucky Bob, attempt to kill his own daughter Jenny, Deray is later revealed to be running a prison camp, and has the prisoners massacred to test out his iron giant Samson. Leading an attack on the city Paradise Falls, Deray attempts to slaughter everyone there before running rampant through America, building his own empire on bloodshed and ashes.
  • Thunder Moon Rising, by Jeffrey Mariotte: Jasper Montclair is a wealthy man turned Black Magic practitioner who holds the skull of the deceased Shaman Thunder Moon. Raising a group of monstrous, inhuman creatures, Montclair sends them on killing sprees, murdering civilians and entire families to feed the power of the skull of Thunder Moon. Advancing in strength, Montclair kills more people, intending on sacrificing a little girl named Little Wing to harvest her power and send his beasts to massacre entire population centers, all to reshape the land as he sees fit.
• Dead Silence, by S.A. Barnes: Max Donovan is a Verux executive who presents as a kind, grandfatherly old man to heroine Claire Kovalik, but is in truth a ruthless corporate sociopath. A failure with an experiment resulted in a whole luxury ship liner slaughtering one another, and Max sends another crew to die retrieving the special device that caused it. Luring Claire to return with a full ship, Max intends to sacrifice the entire crew and wipe them out so he can return a hero with a "tragic" story to retire with full honors.
• Dead Space: Martyr: Craig Markoff is a high-ranking military officer who is obsessed with unearthing the Marker. Breaking into Michael Altman's house to torture information out of him about the Marker, Markoff forced Altman, his girlfriend Ada, and Altman's coworkers to retrieve the Marker, which led to several of Markoff's employees killing themselves or losing their minds due to the Marker's influence on them. Forcing Altman to continue regardless of the danger the Marker posed, Markoff leaves everyone inside the facility to die when Necromorphs attacked, solely so he could record video footage of how the Necromorphs and the Marker operate. Ordering Krax to kill Ada, Markoff tells Altman that he will become the founder of the Church of Unitology, after which Markoff had Krax killed when he deemed him "expendable". Forcing Altman to fight a Necromorph-enhanced Krax using nothing but a spoon, which led to his death, Markoff continues his experiments on the Markers and the Necromorphs, single-handedly causing the events of the entire franchise.
• Dear Laura, by Gemma Amor: "Mr. X", real name Stanley Aston, is a despicable pedophile who dedicates his life to terrorizing the titular Laura. After kidnapping, raping, and murdering Laura's best friend Bobby, X begins sending the teenaged Laura letters demanding "favors" from her—such as used clothing or hair clippings—in exchange for supposed information on the missing body of Bobby. X stalks, harasses, and psychologically devastates Laura for years, pursuing her even when she moves away, and the culmination of his brutality is when he drives Laura to pull out one of her own molars as a "gift" for him. When Laura finally marries and has a child, X goads her into a final confrontation by threatening her child, where X sadistically twists the knife by tricking Laura into digging up a grave in search of Bobby's corpse, only for it to be nothing but deer bones. When police investigate, X's property is revealed to be littered with not only the decapitated head of Bobby, but also the bodies of at least 7 children he has raped and killed.
• Dearly Devoted Dexter: Martin Henker, or Doctor Danco, is a disturbingly cruel man from Doakes's past. Discovering his psychopathic tendencies in medical school, Henker enlisted in the military and participated in the El Salvador civil war solely to torture prisoners. Betrayed by his unit, Henker returned to the U.S. to hunt his former colleagues, kidnapping them to play a twisted game of "Hangman". Henker would not only inject them with brain damage-inducing chemicals, he would first cut off their tongue and remove a limb for every wrong answer, which would always happen since his victims are unable to communicate, placing a mirror in front of his victims so they could see everything. Forcing a man to watch him dismembering Doakes, Henker tried to make Dexter his next victim before his death at the hands of Deborah.
• Death and the Arrow (Tom Marlowe Adventures, #1), by Chris Priestley: Shepton is a former soldier who led an ambush on his own comrades to steal a caravan of silver, then shortly after massacred a Mohawk tribe, children included. When Tonsahoten, a survivor of the attack, comes back years later to get his revenge, Shepton shows no concern for the deaths of his friends, and later even expresses glee at the fact that he doesn't have to share the rest of the silver. When 15-year-old Tom Marlowe is unable to answer Shepton's question as to Tonsahoten's whereabouts, Shepton tries to kill Tom just for the hell of it.
• Death Comes as the End: The killer in this historical Murder Mystery is Yahmose, the quiet, self-contained eldest son of ka-priest Imhotep. After killing Imhotep's new concubine, Nefret, in a rage, Yahmose discovers that he enjoys the power that committing murder gives to him, and he proceeds to murder, in rabid succession, his wife Satipy; his brothers Sobek and Ipy; a slave boy who acted as his accomplice; his grandmother Esa; and the cleaning woman Henet; and tries to kill his sister Renisenb, before being stopped. Maddened by bloodlust, Yahmose was a threat to anyone he thought more worthy than himself, and anybody under his power.
• The Deathless Girls, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave: Boyar Valcar is one of Dracul's Boyars, who rules the south. A cruel slaver, Valcar has Irish Travellers children kidnapped to be slaves. The boys are forced to work in the fields all day under the Beaver. In his castle he has many teen girls forced to work in the kitchen under threat of beatings or as serving girls who he makes sleep with him and his men. Anyone who angers him are killed on pikes outside of his castle. He also regularly sends slaves to be sacrificed to Dracul. Having Lil and Kizzy's Traveller village burnt down and the adults killed, he forces them to be slaves and later hands Kizzy over to Boyar Calazan to stop him reporting to Dracul about him.
• The Debt To Pleasure, by John Lancaster: Rodney "Tarquin" Winot is the manipulative, smug, and twisted narrator of the novel, using the guise of a "cookbook" to in truth educate the readers on his philosophy in life. Having grown up a rather monstrous child, Tarquin tormented his older brother Bartholomew at every turn, framed one of his nannies for theft leading to her suicide, and directly engineered the deaths of two of his house servants. Once an adult, Tarquin's vile ways only increased, as he murders his parents with an explosion, sends one of his neighbors into the shooting range of some hunters, and poisons his own brother, all while performing needlessly petty acts such as kneeing a child in the face for annoying him. Tarquin ultimately gets away with his crimes by poisoning two journalists investigating him, and gleefully proclaims his ideology that destruction and murder are the "natural beauty" of humankind, singing praises to tyrants and mass murderers for their understanding of "artistic vision".
• The Deep (Nick Cutter):
  • The "Fig Men" are a duo of subterranean eldritch horrors who behave like a pair of mad scientists. Taking advantage of a world-devastating plague to create a supposed miracle cure called "ambrosia", the Fig Men lure human scientists to the bottom of the ocean for the purpose of studying the ambrosia, only to begin subjecting the scientists to grotesque forms of Mind Rape and Body Horror mutation that leave them broken and in constant agony; two scientists are reduced to living beehives, aware and in mind-shattering pain as new bees constantly propagate within them. The Fig Men are revealed to have kidnapped the little boy of the novel's protagonist, Luke Nelson, so they could spend the decade torturing and warping the kid into an abomination with which to break Luke's mind. In the end, the Fig Men are set to come upon the surface world, free to inflict their horrors upon the rest of humanity.
  • Beth Nelson, the incestuous, sadistic mother of Luke and his brother Clayton, was a grotesque Fat Bitch who controlled her household through utter fear. Beth abused both her husband and her sons, turning the former into a servile sex toy while seeking for years to do the same to her kids. Her constant sexual abuse of Clayton, well into his adulthood, helped warp him into an emotionally deficit mad scientist and prompted him to eventually kill her.
• Deepgate Codex: Scar Night brings us Ulcis, the god of chains. After rebelling against his mother, Ayen, and being flung to Earth, Ulcis takes up residence in a seemingly bottomless abyss. Using his Herald, Callis, as his representative, Ulcis gathers an army of followers and orders them to construct the city of Deepgate atop of his abyss, promising salvation and a chance at reclaiming Heaven from Ayen to all those who die in his service. This results in the creation of a culture of people who dedicate their lives to waiting to die, creating a high suicide rate, and a total lack of anything approaching an appreciation for life. This is not the bad part. The bad part is that Ulcis is lying. He has no interest in reclaiming Heaven (he'd much rather Take Over the World) and he and his undead horde of angels instead devour the souls sent to him. That's without getting into his treatment of his daughter. Having found an attractive corpse, Ulcis reanimated her, raped her, and then impregnated her, keeping her alive so that he might enjoy her suffering. When his daughter's birth resulted in the woman dying again and being released from her agony Ulcis tried to hang the child from one of the city's foundation chains. When the girl chewed through the rope, Ulcis recaptured her, abused her, and had her gangraped by his undead, gloating that there was no point in taking her soul because by the end, there wasn't one left. When he encounters his daughter again (her having since become an amnesiac Serial Killer), he gloatingly informs her of what happened to her, forces her to recall it, than indicates that all of his soldiers remember her and would love to do it again. "They remember you. My little Rebecca. My little carnival freak."
• Deliverance: The hillbillies—"the Mountain Man" and "the Toothless Man"—are a pair of vile, backwoods rapists who serve as the ultimate danger of the story. Indicated to regularly assault and even kill people, the hillbillies hold Ed and Bobby at gunpoint, tying Ed to a tree and torturing him before forcing him to watch as Bobby is violently raped by the Mountain Man. The Toothless Man then intends to rape Ed, after which the hillbillies plan to kill them both. When the Mountain Man is murdered by Lewis to save his friends, the Toothless Man hunts the group with a shotgun to silence them all, and possibly succeeds in killing Drew in the process.
• Deltora Quest:
  • The Shadow Lord—born Malverlain, a mortal sorcerer from Dorne—was exiled by his brothers after a fight for the throne. Arriving on an isle where four sisters sung with beautiful voices, his hatred for their singing made him imprison them far apart from each other and later kill them. Upon arriving in Deltora, he tricks the Pirrans into breaking up the Pirran Pipe that was defending them and then invaded Pirra, turning it into the Shadowlands. Eventually becoming an Eldritch Abomination, the Shadow Lord invaded Deltora with its armies, slaughtering thousands before being driven back by the King wielding the Belt of Deltora. For a millennium, the Shadow Lord implanted spies to manipulate the royal family, until finally breaking the Belt and invading a second time. Subjecting the land to a tyrannical reign of oppression and capturing thousands of Deltorans for experimentation, he was only defeated a second time by the reassembled Belt. The Shadow Lord was then revealed to have implanted creatures called Sisters slowly poisoning the land, but when destroyed would release the grey tide that would kill everyone.
  • Laughing Jack, aka James Gant, is a Con Artist and servant of the Shadow Lord, who swore servitude in exchange for power. Captaining a ship with a rigged gambling room, indebted losers became slaves forced to row the oars. Tasked with turning off Bonepoint lighthouse, Jack scams Red Han the keeper with an unpayable debt, before taking his daughter Verity hostage. Enticing his mutinous crew with gold, Verity magically binds this vow. Jack murders her in retaliation, cursing the ship and everyone who died with undeath. Surviving, Jack magically turns Red Han into a horse and abuses him. Jack becomes a moneylender and scams people of their money, property, and sometimes lives. Ordered to dispose of a boy possessing the Belt of Deltora, he planned to throw them into a whirlpool. Later he captures his sister Ava, dressing as her to trick the heroes to their deaths. After failing, Jack takes Jasmine hostage and demands the Belt of Deltora, planning to use Ava to accept the Belt and then kill her.
• The Demon Princes: The titular Demon Princes are a group of vicious space pirates who together massacred a colony world and sold the survivors into slavery. Three of them are the nastiest of the bunch.
  • Attel Malagate, known as "The Woe," is a Smug Snake member of the normally peaceful alien race the Star Kings. Malagate plans to despoil a peaceful planet and establish his own dominion over it, murdering anyone who tries to stop him. Malagate remains hidden for most of the novel, his two Co-Dragons committing murder and mayhem for him as he schemes to conquer his home planet and rise above humanity and his own people
  • Kokor Hekkus, a Serial Killer known as "The Killing Machine," kills sapient beings to harvest substances from their bodies that prolong his life. Hekkus has been at it for over a century and has no compunction kidnapping and doing his harvesting from children. Hekkus has remained on his planet for years in order to enact wars, conquests and atrocities for his own amusement, causing every misfortune that befalls the world solely for a love of the chaos with which he surrounds himself.
  • Viole Falushe, ruler of the Palace of Love, runs a self-centered cult around himself and his "beauty," having the most beautiful people of his world taken to serve him for their whole lives. Falushe experiments with women in forced breeding programs to create a clone of the woman he once desired most, and force her to love him. The forced breeding program is what made the original woman commit suicide.
• Demons, by John Shirley: Dale Winderson is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who preys on the insecurities of the young man Stephen. Having once raped a woman and tricked Stephen's father into taking the fall for it, Winderson plans to use Stephen's gifts to unlock the secrets of the Black Pearl to call demons to the world, offering the entire town Ash Valley to be massacred by the demons. Winderson intends to ascend to near-godhood by offering the entire world to the demons, not caring what they will do to so many innocents as long as he profits.
• "The Dentist", by Aaron Beardsell, from COFFINWOOD: Dr. Richard Payne is a Serial Killer masquerading as a dentist. Having developed a fixation with torture, Dr. Payne began drugging, kidnapping, and torturing several women to death; he would later use the victims' skin, eyes, and bones to create furniture for his office. Having already killed at least twelve women, Dr. Payne targets Claire Hadley after she reveals she has no relatives. Once she's inside his office, Dr. Payne wastes no time sedating her and attempting to kill her.
• Department 19 series:
  • Dracula, previously known as Vlad Tepes, is the Big Bad of the series, the first vampire ever to exist, and, despite his Faux Affably Evil manner, puts all other vampires to shame with his monstrousness. After being resurrected, he devours hundreds, procured for him by Valeri Rusmanov, to regain his full power. He later kidnaps Blacklight Director Henry Seward and subjects him to brutal torture, including ripping out and eating his left eye in Zero Hour, in which he also kills numerous Operators, including Acting Director Cal Holmwood. He is also responsible for turning thousands of violently unstable inmates into powerful vampires, resulting in numerous deaths across the world. After vampires are revealed to the world, he secretly funds anti-vampire attacks to destabilize the UK, as well as to distract Blacklight and possibly the other supernatural departments; this leads to the deaths of several vampires. Once at full power, his first move against humanity is having vampires attack trains and planes, killing tens of thousands. He then seizes the city of Carcassonne in France, taking over 100 hostages, and gives its inhabitants two days to leave. At the deadline, he gives orders to "Burn it down. Burn it all down." This leads to the deaths of thousands more. His ultimate goal is to Take Over the World, which will result in countless deaths, vampires becoming the dominant species, and even the slightest dissent being punishable by Cruel and Unusual Death.
  • The Rising:
    • Dante Valeriano, the Vampire King of Paris, claims to have been turned by Valeri Rusmanov centuries ago. In truth, Dante is a former peasant named Pierre Depuis who is far younger than he claims. Despite this, Dante runs Paris brutally, painfully killing any vampire who dares object to his rule. On a nightly basis, Dante has humans abducted and brought to his personal theater where they are tortured, murdered and eviscerated on stage with their blood drawn for the thirst of the vampires in attendance. When Frankenstein betrays Dante and rescues a girl who had recognized him from his human life, Dante is left a shattered shell of himself, feeding upon multiple humans to regain power and continuing the horrible "performances" at his theater until he finally captures an amnesiac Frankenstein, fully intending to torture him slowly to death in retribution. While not having the body count of Dracula, Dante's unique brand of sadism, with far fewer resources, stands out.
    • Professor Richard Talbot, real name Christopher Reynolds, is the head of Department 19's Lazarus Project, which aims to reverse vampirism. However, Talbot is in fact trying to find a way to eliminate vampires' weaknesses, a goal which involves brutal torture of vampires. Before escaping, Talbot is in the middle of killing the vampires who are being studied; a young vampire would have been the next victim. Talbot kills the 23 other members of Lazarus with sarin, and was about to kill a teenage member before being shot. We learn that he had done this before, torturing vampires and killing his staff. Talbot is also The Mole for Valeri Rusmanov, and is thus responsible for the kidnapping of Department 19's Director Henry Seward, and the 68 members of Department 19 who are killed—including Kate's boyfriend Shaun Turner—when Valeri leads an attack on Department 19's headquarters. While not having the body count of Dracula or the Rusmanovs, Talbot qualifies as one of the worst humans in the series, despite his seeming-politeness.
  • Battle Lines: General Garcia Rejon uses every bit of his limited page time to stand out. Previously a Mexican general, Rejon became head of the Desert drug cartel by having its previous leader—and every person tangentially connected to him—murdered. Rejon was eventually broken out of the Supermax prison he was sent to and turned into a vampire by Dracula's forces. Rejon immediately regains control by having 68 high-level members of the Desert cartel brutally tortured to death. When the heroes launch an assault on Rejon's compound, unwittingly killing a woman, Rejon forces a group of scantily-clad young women—whom he's also heavily implied to have coerced into sex for jobs—to fight them off, armed only with knives and machetes.
• Deptford Mice series:
  • Jupiter is a powerful sorcerer and the Big Bad for the original trilogy. Born as a deformed kitten named Leech, he grew envious of his older brother and hated him for possessing magical powers he longed to have. After he lets his brother die in a fire, he gains control of his body and later becomes a malicious god-like entity. With hundreds of rats at his disposal, Jupiter forced his army to dig underground so he could unleash the Plague onto the world, and allowed his rats to slaughter dozens of innocents. When his plans to unleash the Plague fail and his spirit is trapped in limbo, he cajoles Madame Akkikuyu to try and resurrect him, and even convinces her to bring a corn dolly to life, which later went on and murdered two Fennywolder mouselets. Once his spirit was released, Jupiter quickly took control of a power station and started to freeze the city. After gaining more power, he brainwashes Morgan into bringing his horde of rats to the station so he can kill them all and use their spirits as his new soldiers. He then attacks Audrey Brown's friends and family, killing several of them all while he attempts to destroy the sun and start a new ice age. A savage, bloodthirsty cat who demanded to be worshipped by all, Jupiter only cared about killing his brother and destroying the world, no matter how many innocent lives were lost or how many loved ones he chose to neglect.
  • Deptford Histories:
    • Lady Morwenna, from The Oaken Throne, is the traitorous handmaiden for the Starwife and the High Priestess for the Hobbers. After years of planning, Morwenna betrays and kills the Starwife before ordering Rohgar and his legion of bats to destroy Greenreach; anyone who survived was fed to her pet toads. Seeking the Silver Acorn, Morwenna also has the bats bomb Ysabelle's hometown of Coll Regalis, before ordering the Hobbers to hunt her and her friends down and kill anyone who gets in their way. After the Hobbers and bats fail, Morwenna finds Ysabelle herself while posing as a good Samaritan, and later steals the Acorn from her and tries to feed her to her toads. With the Acorn in her possession, she wastes no time betraying and killing Rohgar, and once Hobb is resurrected, she immediately tries to use him to kill Ysabelle. A cunning squirrel who enjoyed hearing her victims scream, Morwenna stands out as being one of the few villains in the series who resurrected a demon and nearly used him to Take Over the World.
    • Wendel Maculatum, also from The Oaken Throne, is a traitor in disguise and the High Priest for the Hobbers. Posing as a comical jester, he traveled alongside Ysabelle and her group in hopes of acquiring the Silver Acorn. After separating from her group, he and his Hobbers kidnap or kill her and her friends before he uses the Acorn and the blood of three dead squirrels to summon Hobb. He and his Hobbers constantly stalk and taunt Ysabelle's group as they travel through the woods, even going as far as throwing a mouse's head at them just to scare them. When his true identity is discovered by Tysle Symkin, the former immediately murders the latter and flays his corpse, leaving it for Ysabelle's friends to find. His Hobbers later attack and destroy a stronghold full of warriors; while fleeing with Ysabelle's group, he finally reveals his identity and gloats how Ysabelle and her friends are doomed, and nonchalantly taunts Giraldus over Tysle's death. Even after Wendel dies, he reappears as a ghost just to kill Vesper out of spite and to fulfill a curse he placed on him earlier.
    • Thomas: The unnamed High Priest of Sarpedon is the leader of the Scale, which longs to resurrect the serpent god Sarpedon, also known as Suruth Scarophion and Gorscarrigern. Seeking nine fragments of a jade egg, the high priest and his vast Scale army scourged the world and killed anyone in their path. After running into the Calliope, he capsizes the ship and kills hundreds onboard before heading to the Temple of the Twelve Maidens and massacring everyone in and around the temple, leaving their defiled corpses to be found later. After acquiring the seventh fragment, the high priest and his army head to Hara, where he attacks the city and slaughters thousands in hopes of finding another fragment. Once the high priest steals the last two fragments from Thomas, Woodget, and Simoon, he takes them all to the Black Temple so he can resurrect Sarpedon and offer them to the god as a sacrifice. When Thomas and his friends greatly damage the high priest's army, he chases after Thomas's crew using a statue possessed by Sarpedon's spirit, longing to kill them out of spite.
• The Deptford Trilogy, by Robertson Davies: "Willard the Wizard" is a Stage Magician and secretly a drug-addicted predator who uses his job to regularly assault young boys. Taking special interest in little Paul Dempster, Willard kidnaps and rapes him on a weekly basis for years, keeping Paul by terrorizing and lying to the boy, traumatizing him for life.
• "Dermot", by Simon Bestwick (link): The titular Dermot is a chubby, unassuming man with a horrible Dark Secret. Dermot, who may not be entirely human, has a special gift: He can sniff out dangerous monsters, allowing the police to swoop in and kill them before they can do any harm, thus preserving the masquerade. Dermot is no altruist, though, and demands a sinister price for working with the police: children. Each day, as payment for services rendered, Dermot is walked down to the cells beneath the police department and offered a chained-up child, a process Dermot has been through dozens or even hundreds of times. When the cops walk back in, Dermot is naked, the "tools" in his briefcase already cleaned of blood, and the child is gone—save for their bones. Despised by everyone he works with, and luxuriating in this reputation, Dermot is a horrible allegory for the industrialization of child abuse.
• Destroyermen: Captain Hisashi Kurokawa of the Imperial Japanese ship Amagi is a brutal sadist and madman. Allying with the monstrous Grik, Kurokawa kills thousands when his ship destroys the Neracca home in an attempt to get at the USS Walker. Torturing his own crew at the drop of a hat, Kurokawa also gives one tenth of them to be devoured by the Grik in exchange for his own life after a defeat, before managing to climb the ranks by offering the Grik Japanese military technology. Conducting horrible experiments on the Grik, Kurokawa frequently orders their suicides for his own failures and consistently tries to kill both his enemies and innocent people. When he captures his Arch-Enemy Matthew Reddy's pregnant wife, Kurokawa tries to compel her assistance by threatening to have her comrades raped and later orders all prisoners besides her executed. Treacherous to the end, Kurokawa dies scheming how he will ally with Reddy before betraying him after Reddy thinks he is trustworthy.
• Devil May Cry Light Novel prequel: The vicious swordsman known only as Gilver—revealed in Before the Nightmare to be an Evil Knockoff of Vergil—is an ice-cold mercenary who shares the elegance and arrogance of the son of Sparda but none of his noble qualities. Rising through the ranks of Bobby's Cellar, Gilver cemented himself in the criminal underworld by slaughtering everything in his path, leaving trails of mutilated corpses in his wake. Gilver's massive body count and sadism inspires many other hitmen to return to the old days where wanton destruction was the norm. While initially a nasty rival obsessed with beating Dante, Gilver is in truth a demon supremacist who has been summoning them to wreak havoc around the city and personally murdering Dante's friends to isolate him, showing his true colors by feeding the entirety of Bobby's Cellar to demons as his way of starting a plan to merge both worlds and let the hellish dimension consume all of humanity.
• The Devil Rides Out: Mr. Mocata is a ruthless Satanist who runs a cult where innocents are sacrificed to the Devil and nobody ever gets to leave. When cultists Simon and Tanith attempt to escape, taking refuge with the friends of the heroic Duc d'Richlieu, Richlieu and Mocata engage in a battle for the souls of those involved. Mocata uses horrible mental torture on Tanith to make her try to murder everyone in the mansion and uses horrible illusions to torment Richlieu's friends to kill them as well before kidnapping their ten-year-old daughter to sacrifice her to Satan.
• The Devil's Bed, by Doug Lamoreux: Francois De Raiss is a devil worshiper who corrupted his branch of The Knights Templar into the mass Human Sacrifice of young women. Horrifically mutilating his victims before drinking their blood, De Raiss was eventually put to death for his crimes but swore revenge. Revived in the present as a vampire, De Raiss massacres several people for his enjoyment and revives them as undead thralls, intending to turn France into a bloodbath as revenge for his deserved fate.
• Devil's Creek, by Todd Keisling: Jacob Masters, minister of the Church of Voices, begins to worship a horrific ancient deity beneath his church at Devil's Creek. Intending to unleash it, Jacob fathers six children, abusing and molesting them, before trying to sacrifice them. Defeated, Jacob returns decades later to brainwash and control much of the nearby town, having them slaughter one another and eventually burn themselves alive as an offering to his god. Attempting to sacrifice his children at last to unleash his deity, Jacob plans to form a kingdom of slaughter and chaos over the entire world, admitting to his "favorite" son Jack that he never once felt any love for any of his children.
• Diamond Brothers series: While a very comedic and funny series, there are still some monstrous and serious villains to contrast:
  • South by Southeast: The assassin Charon, in truth Tim Diamond's girlfriend Charlotte Van Dam, is a deadly killer hired to kill an MI6 Russian Double Agent named Kusenov as a statement, as her employers know the hit is impossible. Instead, Charon lures Kusenov to England, killing several in the way before murdering an MI6 agent with ice skates. Charon rigs a bomb in an auction house where Kusenov wishes to buy a painting, intending to kill everyone in the room. Having been thwarted, Charon decides to spitefully murder Tim and his little brother Nick before establishing a permanent group of assassins to continue to profit from death and murder.
  • I Know What You Did Last Wednesday: The killer is Johnny Nadler, a former school friend of Tim's and a bitter loser who, following ten years after graduation of always coming in second, irrationally blames their former friends for their own failures and thus decided to murder them all. The killer starts off by murdering their best friend Rory McDougle by cutting him into multiple pieces, then lures the other seven to Rory's private island, which they had rigged with remote control traps, and began picking them off using methods that represented the school subject they had surpassed the killer in methods including poison, impaling and being crushed to death. Upon failing to make their final intended victim, Tim, fall to his death upon the jagged sea needles, the killer confronts Tim and Nick at gunpoint and admitted to have enjoyed their killing spree, before trying to murder them both.
• The Diaries of the Family Dracul:
  • Prince Vlad Tsepesh, formerly Vlad III, is the vampiric head of the Tsepesh household. During his time as ruler of Wallachia, Vlad earned the name "Dracula" ^note which means "son of the Devil" for his various acts of torture and sadism towards his subjects. Desiring immortality, Vlad made a pact with the Dark Lord to become a vampire, and has feasted upon hundreds of victims throughout the centuries, with infants comprising much of his prey. As per his bargain with the Dark Lord, Vlad offers up the souls of his family's firstborn son of each generation, binding them to him from infancy via a blood ritual. He has no tolerance for disloyalty among his family; he proved this by killing his "brother" Petru's wife and eldest son, Stefan as punishment for his unwillingness to serve him. Following Petru's death, Vlad attempts to corrupt his son Arkady to be his servant and terrorizes his pregnant wife Mary. He even violates his covenant with his family to never transform his own kin into vampires by transforming Arkady and his sister Zsuzsanna into vampires. He later abducts Mary's son Stefan and attempts to perform the blood ritual on him, only to kill him in a rage upon learning he is not Arkady's biological son, following this by killing Arkady himself. Over two decades later, Vlad moves to London to expand his array of victims. There, he turns Lucy into a vampire and kills her mother, corrupts, then later kills, Renfield, and performs a blood ritual with Mina Harker. Vlad's ultimate ambition is to achieve godhood through the use of a special manuscript, thus giving him dominion over all evil in the world.
  • Countess Elisabeth of Bathory, Vlad's cousin, is a power-hungry vampire who can match even the Impaler in brutality. Noted to have tortured and murdered over 650 maidens in her lifetime and bathed in their blood, Elisabeth made a pact with the Dark Lord for immortality, and has continued her killing spree in undeath. Having acquired the special manuscript by destroying its previous owner, Elisabeth uses it to increase her own power, hoping to achieve godhood through its use. Summoned by Vlad to restore his fading power, Elisabeth seduces Zsuzsanna, luring her into a seemingly loving relationship while in truth planning to sacrifice her to the Dark Lord as part of their bargain. While in Vlad's castle, Elisabeth mesmerizes and violates Jonathan Harker, joins Zsuzsanna and Dunya in feeding on an infant, sacrifices Dunya's soul to summon the Dark Lord, and turns three children into vampires. Arriving in London, Elisabeth kidnaps a young girl and tortures her to death, an act that horrifies Zsuzsanna to the point of leaving her. Following Vlad's death, Elisabeth kills Quincey Morris before assaulting Zsuzsanna to force her to help her locate the remaining key of the manuscript, promising that once she's achieved godhood, she will keep Zsuzsanna as her tortured slave for all eternity.
• The Diary of a Madman: The judge was considered an irreproachable defender of justice until after his death, when a notary discovered his secret journal revealing his true nature as an unconvicted Serial Killer. After disserting about how killing is the law of nature and life is meaningless, the judge decided to act upon his urges. He cut the throat his servant's goldfinch, strangled a boy, mocked the distress of the parents and murdered a fisherman with a spade. When the fisherman's nephew was convicted of the murder, the judge himself sentenced him to death. Watching the innocent man guillotined with great pleasure, he wished he could have bathed in his blood.
• "Dictator of the Americas", by Henry Kuttner (as James Hall): Vail Nestor is the titular dictator, who usurped control of America by murdering the rightful heir and trapping the man's son in a drugged-out haze. Enslaving the population and destroying any resistance, Nestor cruelly tests a dimensional device by throwing a rebel into it and watching as she is painfully torn apart across multiple dimensions. Promising to save the people of R'han from destruction if they will help him, Nestor betrays and leaves them to die when they outlive their usefulness, while also kidnapping Marsalaya to rape and murder.
• Differently Morphous: Shgshthx, aka Reaver, is a sadistic Ancient of the Ethereal Realm who proves to be the evilest of his kind. Crossing over to Earth to punish the Fluidics who dared to escape the Ancient's tyranny, Shgshthx possess Jessica Weatherby and becomes the Fluidic killer, using Jessica's salt elemental powers to murder numerous Fluidics, intending to set an example to all the others still under the Ancient's control. Even while not possessing her, Shgshthx torments Jessica online while posing as her friend, sarcastically giving detailed confessions of the murders just to increase her suffering. Using his Mind Control powers to frame Dr. Diablerie for his crimes, Shgshthx climaxes by permanently taking control of Jessica—leaving her brain-dead—and trapping a large crowd of Fluidics between himself and the sea, intending to massacre them all. Purely to drag out everyone's suffering, Shgshtx forces Alison Arkin into partaking in a twisted game first, with him intending to massacre the Fluidics regardless of her answers.
• Dinner at Deviant's Palace: Sevatividam is a universe-traveling energy being with a lust for draining planets' populations, particularly those populated with sapient life, of their life forces. During his travels, Sevatividam has drained countless species of their minds and lives, with his strategy always involving hypnotizing the planet's population into worshiping him, then using them as his slaves and cattle to use and dispose of as he wishes. When arriving on Earth, Sevatividam, taking the name Norton Jaybush, first started a Renaissance that he planned to use to nurse despair in their people to make them taste better, and later creates his cult of Jaybirds, psychotic fanatics who will follow Sevatividam's orders, even if it entails their death. When any of Sevatividam's cultists break his strict code, Sevatividam sentences them to his horrifying Holy City prison, where they are radioactively poisoned, drained dry of their blood to use in drugs, and locked them in suits of armor known as trash men, where their decaying limbs are replaced with pieces of trash. In the end, Sevatividam tries to manipulate Gregorio Rivas into joining him, and illustrates his power by ordering an entire room of his cultists to kill themselves before using Sivas's love interests as hostages to force him into servitude. A gleeful psychopath with a sweet tooth for innocents' lives, Sevatividam was obsessed solely with himself and his personal pleasure.
• The Dinosaur Lords: Bishop Tavares is a corrupt Papal Legate who, in the world of Paradise, is one of the leaders of the nation of Nuevaropa's army dedicated to purging "heretics" and sinners. Invading the city of Terra Ropa, Tavares whips his men into a bloodthirsty frenzy before unleashing them on the populace, having the Duke killed, his wife raped and murdered and the city put to the sword. Tavares leads his army against anyone he deems "impure", slaughtering innocent people left and right with rape and torture common. Tavares even has multiple people left hanging in trees, flayed alive and still breathing. When the Gray Angel Raguel arrives to destroy humanity, Tavares, believing himself to be "pure" and free from sin, attempts to ally with Raguel to allow him to massacre as much of humanity as he wants.
• The Disappearance, by Bentley Little: "Father" is the patriarch of the Homesteaders, a backwards society of cultists who worship Father as a priest of God, when in reality, Father is nothing but a power-hungry madman wanting only to satisfy his sickening lusts. To found the Homesteaders, Father raped several women until they gave him children, and, while using the sons as extra labor and recruiters for his cult, Father raped his daughters, using them as breeders to give him even more children, who he would then repeat the process on. Taking in "converts" to his cause by kidnapping, torturing, and brainwashing innocents, Father keeps all of the Homesteaders under his thumb with threats of torture and exile, all the while raping any and all women he wishes. After the young Joan escapes his cult once learning of his intention to rape her, Father tracks down Joan and her parents, brutally murdering the latter and forcing Joan to be locked in a room with their corpses, while murdering several of Joan's friends who attempt to save her. Father then tries once more to rape Joan, proclaiming that, as punishment for her fleeing him, he will use her as his personal Sex Slave until he tires of her and disposes of her.
• Dishonored: The Return of Daud: Maximillian Norcross of Gristol, an avid collector of rarities, is revealed to have a private collection of human beings, kidnapping them to be killed and mutilated before putting them on display; he has around a hundred corpses in his gallery, children included. When he learns that a woman might have information about the assassin Daud, he has her tortured to death before capturing Daud, hoping to make the Knife of Dunwall the centerpiece of his morbid exhibition.
• Distant Star: Lieutenant Carlos Wieder is a depraved poet who views death as the best form of art in the new age of Chile, embracing Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship for allowing him to express himself with impunity. A famous Air Force pilot and fascist propagandist by day, Wieder moonlights as a murderer of left-wing sympathizers on behalf of the Secret Police—with a certain preference for female students—all while taking inspiration from the murders to write his own poems. In one of his most sickening acts, Wieder organizes an exhibition with hundreds of grotesque pictures of his victims, a move that costs him his promising career in the armed forces. After being exiled to Europe, Wieder is hired by Neo-Nazi circles and associates of the Snuff Film underworld.
• The Divine Comedy: Dis/Lucifer was once "the highest of all creatures", above every angel and man gifted by the Highest Joy with immortality, invincibility, super intelligence, and perfect happiness. However, Dis came to love his superiority to the lower angels and only that superiority, making the supremacy of his Father unbearable. In acting on this pride, he convinced his fellow angels and the first humans to rebel against the Love known as God. With his rebellion, the Devil introduced all the evil, suffering, and death that would ever be into the world while condemning any who followed him to Inferno, a realm of eternal torment where souls are forced to endure tortures such as being transformed into twisted, broken trees; feasted upon by harpies; and being submerged in a river of boiling tar. With his angelic intelligence, Dis knew all of this would happen if he carried out his "arrogant rape", yet brought all of the tortures and crimes described in Inferno into existence without any remorse.
• The Diviners (2012):
  • The King of Crows is a centuries-old being of endless cruelty and greed. Desiring power, the King of Crows would make lopsided deals with people in need and then use Exact Words to twist their desires against them. The King of Crows then tricked the Diviners into destroying his ghost minions in order to empower himself, before leading an army of ghosts to devour whole towns and everyone in them, planning on doing this until he had consumed the entire world.
  • First novel: "Naughty" John Hobbes is a religious fanatic who believed himself to be The Antichrist and it was his job to bring Judgement Day to end the world. To this end, he began a ritual to become the Beast by killing people and eating a part of them, manipulating the wealthy Ida Knowles into letting him use her mansion Knowles End, where he murdered all of her servants and eventually her as well, causing him to be hung for his crimes. Returning decades later as a ghost, Hobbes would become known as the Pentacle Killer with deeds such as killing a woman and taking her eyes, killing a twelve-year old boy, burning a man alive, and skinning a woman, all so he could end the world and rule over the new one as a god.
• A Dollar to Die for, by Brian Fox: Banton is the cruel chief of an escaped band of bloodthirsty Braves that have slaughtered an entire cavalry detail and burned ranches to the ground on their way to the Mexican border. Arriving on the village of Tyopa, Banton gives the order for his men to rape and scalp people en masse to their heart's content. A Serial Rapist himself, Banton was known for participating in similar massacres and saving "the occasional woman" that would be taken back with him.
• Don't Be a Hero, by Chris Strange: Doll Face is a horrifying and childish psychopath with a desire only to hurt others. Having grown up bullied, Doll Face first used his terrible powers to seek vengeance on his tormentors; however, he quickly grew a taste for blood and power, and began using his powers on innocents worldwide. Be it forcing children to eat their own faces or turning others into his personal killing machines, Doll Face racks up a body count in the hundreds, and though seemingly killed after turning a school into a slaughterhouse where children cannibalized and murdered each other, Doll Face in truth was locked away by the government. Freed from his confinement by Quantra, Doll Face gleefully assists his new boss in brutally torturing and mentally destroying the young superpowered teen Sam, hoping to turn the boy into a walking weapon who will kill countless people. After Quantra is beaten, Doll Face takes matters into his own hands, skinning dozens of his own men alive then using them as meat puppets to hold back any heroes while he himself finishes driving Sam insane. Taking an unholy glee in his actions that disgust even Quantra himself, Doll Face was a truly repulsive monster who got his kicks from hurting defenseless people.
• The Doomspell: Dragwena is the wicked ruler of Ithrea, and one of the vilest Witches of all time. Banished to a black-and-white world she called Ithrea due to her propensity to raise up fanatical armies of Child Soldiers in the war of the Witches and Wizards, Dragwena promptly turned to stealing thousands of magically latent children from Earth to trap them on Ithrea. Dragwena enslaves and torments the children in every way imaginable: distorting their ages; forcing most of them into the horrible wilds of Ithrea to gather food for her; and wasting the lives of entire generations of children in grueling slavery to build her massive temple. Dragwena has slaughtered countless thousands of children through sadistic trials and torture in preparation to steal the magical "child-hope"—a young girl named Rachel—that will allow her to conquer Earth. Dragwena attempts to utterly massacre a group of rebellious children who call themselves the Sarren as well as everyone tangentially connected to them; tries to corrupt Rachel into a Witch who will enjoy killing children as much as she; and even when Rachel finally beats her, Dragwena homes in on her eight-year-old brother to snap his neck, vowing she won't die without killing one last child.
• "Down, Satan!", by Clive Barker: Gregorius is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who finds himself weary and godless one day and resolves to fill the hole in his faith with another, more Satanic presence. Gregorius, to summon Satan himself to Earth, commissions the construction of a vast torture chamber called the New Hell, a building outfitted with every torture known to man and many others never even conceived. When Gregorius is finally found alone in the New Hell, countless hundreds have already met their demise, mutilated corpses stuffed in every room of the New Hell. Gregorius boasts at his trial over the atrocities he's committed and, if the prosecutors would only let him go, promises to introduce enough suffering to top the New Hell and drown all belief in blood.
• A Dowry of Blood: Dracula appears at first to be a knight in shining armour to his Vampire's Harem but is soon revealed to be anything but. A vicious sadist who savours killing, Dracula makes a habit of charming men and women into becoming his spouses and eventually killing them if he finds them to be no longer of any use. Though he initially appears to care for his current harem, Dracula reveals himself to be abusive and possessive, planning to turn them into playthings with no will of their own but his. Over the course of the novel, Dracula murders untold numbers of victims by charming them into coming with him only to stamp out that hope that he loves them as he gleefully devours them. A horror that has lived for thousands of years, Dracula's handsome face and charisma belie the fact that he views himself as above humanity and ultimately that no one is safe from his murderous whims.
• Dracul, by Dacre Stoker & J.D. Barker: Lord Dracul, ever a sadistic wolf in the skin of a Romanian noble, took the noblewoman Dolingen von Gratz to become the object of his lust and his torturous "affections". Dracula physically and psychologically tortures Dolingen for years on end for his own amusement, regularly maiming her lovely white skin and transforming her into a vampire when she attempts suicide to escape him. Dracula balks at Dolingen's disloyalty, claims he's offered her nothing but patience and affection, then victim-blames her for all of it and kicks up the torture, trying to force Dolingen to murder innocent people and starving her blood-thirst. When Dolingen refuses to harm a young boy and girl, Dracula rips out the boy's neck and tosses their mother into the cell instead, demanding her life at the threat of the remaining child's. Dracula even captured Dolingen's old lover Deaglan; turned him into a vampire; then dismembered him and scattered his body parts to keep Deaglan's spirit in the eternal torture of undeath, killing and resurrecting an entire village just to have them guard Deaglan's heart. When Dolingen escapes again and takes the name Grace, Dracula massacres all his servants in pique, pursues her to England while killing and torturing everyone in his way, and ends the book nailing Grace to a mausoleum before promising "you'll learn to love me in time".
• Dracula: Count Dracula himself is the Trope Codifier for the modern vampire. A hideous, blood-sucking monster, Dracula commits a number of crimes over the course of the novel, including keeping Jonathan Harker prisoner and trying to drive him insane; kidnapping a baby to feed to his fellow vampires, before sending wolves to kill the mother when she demands her baby back; driving his own servant, Renfield, to madness; sending a wolf after Lucy Westenra and her mother to gain entry to her house before draining her blood and turning her into a vampire (killing Lucy's mother through sheer fear at the wolf's appearance in the process); and turning Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker into a vampire to uncover his enemies' plans against him. Dracula ultimately plans to move to England so that he can feast on the people of London to his heart's content. Overall, the vampire Count is an undead abomination devoid of humanity and worthy of no sympathy.
• Dracula in Istanbul: The Unauthorized Version of the Gothic Classic: Dracula of Transylvania is revealed as the wicked Prince Vlad III who tortured and slaughtered his way through Turkish civilians and taking the Turkish soldiers to be impaled in rows thousands-long across the Danube river. Dracula feeds a baby to his brides, having the mother torn apart by wolves, and murders the innocent Turkish beauty Sadan to make her into a vampire before attempting to do the same to the hero's own wife.
• Dracula's Child, by J.S. Barnes:
  • Count Dracula himself returns from his death in the original novel as a ravenous spirit which torments the heroes, even forcing Godalming's wife to suffer a miscarriage. Rising anew thanks to his vampiric second-in-command Ileana, Dracula proceeds to bring all of London's authorities under his control and institutes a brutal Police State where innocents are killed if they get out of line, intending to spread this worldwide. In order to keep the people in line, Dracula has Scotland Yard burned down and massacres a train full of fleeing refugees as a warning. To get back at Jonathan Harker and get his ultimate revenge, Dracula attempts to corrupt the boy Quincy Harker into a monster like himself and turn Mina into his bride out of spite for his defeat.
  • Ileana is Dracula's psychotic second-in-command, who helps to organize an army in his name. Seducing men into being her patsies, Ileana uses them as suicide bombers who tear through London, taking the lives of multitudes and paving the way for her master's return. Using the chaos to start a Mob War which erupts in London, Ileana uses this chaos to help Dracula return to life in a new host. Ileana also helps to prepare the corruption of the young Quincy Harker to allow her master full dominance over the world.
• Dracula's Demeter, by Doug Lamoreux: Count Dracula himself boards the Demeter in hopes of conquering England after it arrives on those shores. Through a mix of lust, boredom and bloodlust, Dracula begins to kill the crew, sometimes in horrific ways such as blowing a guy up or using spiders to drain him dry. Dracula becomes obsessed with a young woman onboard and breaks her to his will, forcing her lover to bow down to him before mind controlling her into killing him. Eventually disposing of her when she's outrun her use, Dracula tortures and lashes the captain of the ship to the wheel to ensure that he will arrive to begin his conquest, mixing unhinged savagery and a cultured wit into one monstrous package.
• The Dragon Egg Princess: Luzee is a malevolent fairy who seeks to control both the human and magical realms. In her quest for power, Luzee orchestrated a war between the humans and the nackwon, wiping out the dragons to spite their queen, Nanami, for rebelling against her. Sealed away in Mount Jiri, Luzee plots her return centuries later, manipulating the wicked Prince Roku into staging a coup against the Joson royal family while having the Omni Murtagh bulldoze the Kidahara forest to lure Princess Koko, the last living dragon, out of hiding, all while manipulating teenage bandit leader Micah into aiding her. Capturing Koko, Luzee uses her blood to recreate her staff while also freeing her physical form from Mount Jiri, whereupon she kills Roku and uses the staff to try to drain the essence of the Nackwon Council, starting with her sister Diana.
• Dragon Prince:
  • High Prince Rolestra is a petty, cruel man with a very high level of depravity. After murdering his father at the tender age of eight, he ascends to Princemarch's throne and used his position to play other princes against each other for his own amusement, nearly causing several wars. When his request for a Sunrunner was refused he trapped and addicted one to drugs, then slowly cut off the Sunrunner's supply of drugs when he ceased to be useful. He then attempted to use these drugs to enslave and rape another Sunrunner, Sioned, and when he fails burns his mistress Palila alive and banishes two of his children, one being a newborn. When we next hear about him he has cornered the market on the only medicine to a plague and only supplies it when enough of his rivals have died of it. When he enters a war with his greatest rival left alive, Rohan, he salts a battlefield after losing a battle out of spite.
  • Princess Ianthe, Rolestra's daughter, is a cruel and heartless woman, and just as vile as her father. She causes several of the events that lead to Palila being burned alive and her sisters being exiled simply because she didn't like them. She then concocts a plan with her father to kidnap, drug, and rape Rohan to make her son heir to the Desert. When his wife, Sioned, comes to rescue him she locks her in a lightless room and has her guards rape her for a month straight. When she finally lets them go, she releases them into the desert with only a little water and no food.
  • Mireva, a sorceress from the mountains, is a bitter and power-hungry woman. Prior to the events of the story, she introduced drugs to Palila that kickstarted several of Rolestra's villainous acts. She helps Ianthe's sons escape the fire she dies in and trains them into her tools to try to conquer the world with. While orchestrating these plots, she enslaves a princess with a mirror, forcing her to raise an army to try to invade Princemarch, which would cause the death of hundreds of people, if not more. She kidnaps a princess named Ruala with latent sorcerer powers to use as a power source and tries to blackmail another prince to do the same to him. As part of this plot she also impersonates a princess and rapes Rohan's son Pol, then has one of Ianthe's sons nearly rape the princess disguised as Pol. She also threatened to murder two children due to wanting revenge on a Sunrunner.
• Dragon Tears, by Dean Koontz: Bryan Dracman, aka "Tick Tock", is a Serial Killer who can create golems and stop time. A killer from an early age, Dracman collects the eyes of his victims as trophies and mentally tortures his invalid mother by mocking her with the knowledge of what he does so much that she literally prays for someone to kill her son. Dracman often tells a victim they'll be dead in a set amount of time, then freezes time and sends a golem to stalk them, or hunts them down himself, murdering them and collecting their eyes. Living only for his twisted desires and game, Dracman will relentlessly hound any victim he's chosen until he takes their lives and takes their eyes to preserve as a reminder of his victory.
• The DragonCrown War Cycle, by Michael A. Stackpole: Chytrine, Empress of the arctic realm of Aurolan, has a heart as cold as the tundra over which she rules. She mercilessly drives her subjects to war with blatantly false propaganda, uncaring if they die so long as they advance her goals in doing so, and the conquered territories her forces occupy are treated so brutally that their populations can be reduced to a tenth of what they were in a matter of years; a century of her rule can turn a once-prosperous nation into a wasteland. Chytrine is utterly without empathy or loyalty; when her adopted daughter Isaura turns against her, she coldly declares that she has no daughter and attempts to kill her, and though she gets a good portion of her power through her worship of the Oromise, she secretly fantasizes about overthrowing and enslaving them as well. Though she herself is half-dragon and is allied with several full-blooded dragons, she plans to betray her kin by re-forging the titular Dragon Crown, giving her the power to dominate most of their race. Her vilest deed may be how she gets her Quirky Miniboss Squad; Chytrine has a fondness for using Fallen Heroes as her lieutenants, tricking them into swearing allegiance to her in moments of weakness and then forcibly remaking them into undead warriors in a process that is supposed to be unspeakably agonizing and twists their personalities to be more in line with her desires, leaving just enough of their original selves to be horrified by what's been done to them. The nations of the south lived in fear of Chytrine for generations, for very good reason.
• Dragonriders of Pern:
  • Lord Holder Fax managed to gain control of seven Holds through various means, mostly conquest. One Hold, however, he "won" by marrying into the leadership...and then doing his level best to kill his Lady wife via childbirth. He also had zero problems with killing every man, woman, and child even suspected of having Ruathan blood in his bid to gain supremacy over that Hold. It's also heavily implied that he if not outright raped, then stole and coerced every half-pretty female in his jurisdiction that he could get his hands on.
  • Lord Holder Chalkin had a jail area that was more or less like a freezer, with small "cells" cut into rock, all of them cold and damp, into which he threw anyone that pissed him off in the slightest. A servant spilled a container of sugar and got two weeks in one of these cramped, cold cells. People were frequently kept in the cells until they died of the cold and damp, and their bodies were thrown into a lime pit, rather than given whatever passed for a normal burial. He was also heavily "tithing" his peoples' produce, whether it was food or textiles or what have you, to the point of forcing his people to starve and work themselves to death in an effort to please him while he wallowed in an excess of supplies of all kinds.
• Dragons of Requiem series:
  • Dawn of Dragons trilogy:
    • King Raem Seran sees all Vir Requis as diseased creatures who must be purged from the world by any means necessary. Ashamed of being a Vir Requis himself, Raem has multiple Vir Requis executed in public. After discovering his son, Sena, is a Vir Requis too, he immediately tries to kill him, only stopping because Issari, his daughter, begs him not to. Fed up with the sheer amount of Vir Requis in his kingdom, Raem summons a demon named Angel and has her army seek out and slaughter any Vir Requis they find as they rape many of the women in Eteer. He also allows a witch to extract blood from Issari in exchange for information regarding his exiled daughter, Laira; Raem later hires Zerra Blacksmith to kill Laira and the remaining Vir Requis in the north. Once his initial plans fail, and Raem discovers that Issari is a Vir Requis after she tries to kill him, Raem allows Angel and her demons to feast upon the innocents in Eteer so they'll grow stronger and will assist him in hunting Issari and the other Vir Requis. As they hunt, Raem lets his demons feast upon any villagers they find before confronting the Vir Requis army and killing dozens in the ensuing battle. Raem later contacts the Widejaw tribe and turns them all into sphinxes before ordering them to destroy Requiem and kill any Vir Requis they find. Frustrated over his own "disease," Raem spends his free time executing many innocents in the Abyss, before ordering Angel's demon army to eradicate all life on Earth.
    • The ironically-named Angel is Queen of the Abyss, and a fallen deity. Upon being summoned by Raem, she immediately tries to drag him to the Abyss so she can torture him, only stopping because Raem holds all control over what she does. While Raem only wants Angel to kill all the Vir Requis in Eteer, she begs him to allow her and her demons to rape hundreds of women in the city too, which Raem agrees to. Angel and her demon army Rape, Pillage, and Burn as they please while Angel keeps begging Raem to let her army feed on human flesh as well—an offer Raem later agrees to in order to strengthen her army. As Angel's demons continue to wreak havoc upon the neighboring communities, Angel stays in Eteer to ensure her demons keep raping and impregnating as many women as possible. When Issari and many other Eteerian soldiers capture her, Issari tries to take control over Angel, only for her and the hundreds of pregnant women to give birth to half-demons who proceed to slaughter even more innocents. Angel continues to rape and kill indiscriminately while her army massacres villages and cities around the country. During the final confrontation between Angel and the Vir Requis, she starts mind raping some of the characters by making them believe that their fallen loved ones are being tortured in the Abyss. While Raem was driven out of shame and the need to purge the world of Vir Requis, Angel only cares about causing as much death and destruction as possible to satisfy her lust and hunger.
  • Song of Dragons trilogy: Dies Irae is responsible for nearly driving the Vir Requis into extinction. Shunned by his father for the inability to shift into a dragon, unlike his brother Benedictus, Irae takes out his frustration by raping and possibly impregnating his brother's fiancée, Lacrimosa. Upon finding out that Benedictus will take the throne, he kills his father and declares war on the Vir Requis. As he hunts them, he kidnaps Lacrimosa and Benedictus' daughter, Gloriae, and trains her to hate and kill the Vir Requis as well. When Irae discovers that there are still four Vir Requis left in the world, he sends his armies to hunt them all down, not caring how many innocents are caught in the crossfire. After he's defeated by Benedictus, and Gloriae releases the nightshades, Irae banishes Gloriae from his kingdom. While mad that the nightshades harmed his kingdom, he later takes control of them, allowing them to terrorize the world and suck the souls out of thousands of people. Irae also takes his frustrations out on his own soldiers, going as far as having 300 of his men beheaded because they failed to kill any Vir Requis. Irae faces Benedictus and Lacrimosa a second time, and he succeeds in killing his brother before escaping and creating an army of mimics. Not content with using dead body parts, Irae builds a camp where he kidnaps thousands of individuals and harvests their body parts while they're still alive, and even hacks off Agnus Dei's hand. Irae sends his army to finish off the remaining Vir Requis once and for all, and during the battle, he kills Lacrimosa even after she confesses that she's pregnant. A racist driven by his hatred of the Vir Requis, Dies Irae stands out as being one of the worst villains in the franchise.
  • The Dragon War trilogy: Emperor Frey Cadigus is the vicious, tyrannical ruler of Requiem. Viewing the Vir Requis as weak, Frey staged a coup where he murdered everyone in the Aeternum family and overtook the throne. Afterwards, he spent several years recruiting thousands for his army; after they're put through Training from Hell, he sent his forces out to exterminate all the surrounding nations, leading to the deaths of millions. When the Resistance is formed, Frey has all his soldiers hunt down and destroy the organization, going as far as imprisoning or publicly executing anyone allied with them and opposing his empire. Once Frey discovers that Rune Brewer, the sole survivor of the Aeternum family, is still alive, he sends his troops out to hunt him down. When the Resistance retakes Lynport, Frey and his troops fly down to the city and destroy it, killing anyone in their path. Frey also lures Rune out of hiding by killing several hostages, two at a time. Frey keeps Rune alive, but only so he can torture him and convert him to his empire. During the final battle between the Resistance and Frey's troops, Frey subdues his own daughter, Kaelyn, and ties her and Rune to a chair. He then points a gun at both of them and tries to make Valien choose which person he should kill. Although Frey claims that he cares about Requiem, he uses his power to imprison, torture, and kill anyone in his way, even those who pose no threat to him.
  • Requiem for Dragons trilogy: High Priestess Beatrix Deus is the new Requiem ruler and the leader of the Cured Temple. As ruler, Beatrix routinely sought out any Vir Requis who could shift into dragons and exposed them to tillvine in hopes of ridding the Vir Requis race of their transforming power. Anyone who refused to be "cleansed" with the tillvine was either murdered or imprisoned and tortured, resulting in thousands of casualties. After Beatrix hears that Eliana, the stepsister of Cade Baker, has the power to turn into a dragon, she sends her daughter Mercy to expose her to tillvine, only to discover that Cade is a Vir Requis too. When Mercy fails to find Cade, she burns down his village and murders his stepparents. Once Beatrix realizes that there are other Vir Requis who oppose her rule, she tells Mercy to hunt them down by any means necessary, and later imprisons her own son Gemini to be tortured to death after he inadvertently allows two Vir Requis to escape. She later orders Mercy to murder thousands of infants when her supply of tillvine runs low and declares war on the Horde, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Due to Mercy's repeated failures, Beatrix summons an army of bonedrakes to sniff out the Vir Requis and finish them off. In the final battle, when she's confronted by her former lover, Korvin, who tries to persuade her to surrender peacefully; Beatrix responds by subduing Korvin and orders her guards to hang him from her Temple's balcony. While Beatrix acts like she cares about the Vir Requis, she's really a hypocritical, abusive mother obsessed with "curing" the Vir Requis of their "disease," even if it means taking innocent lives.
• Dragonvarld trilogy:
  • Maristara, rogue dragon, takes over the kingdom of Seth while poisoning their minds against her own kind so she may have the humans slaughter any dragons who attempt to remove her. Perfecting the art of stealing bodies, Maristara leaves countless women in decades of agony as she steals their hearts to use their forms, intending on a massive war she may take advantage of, happily having massacres done in her name and causing a draconic civil war before trying to murder her own granddaughter to spite her nemesis Draconas.
  • Grald, Maristara's partner in crime, is a brutish dragon who savors bloodshed and violence. Likewise stealing the bodies of men, Grald rapes the heroine Melisande to impregnate her with a son he can later use. Setting up his own kingdom and forcing women to bear his children, a process that is usually fatal, Grald makes them loyal to him while culling the weak before attempting to make Ven his new form while his son languishes in endless pain.
• Dragonvein, by Brian Anderson: The Eternal Emperor Shinzan was once a being of pure energy known as Shin'Zan, traveling through space and consuming worlds. Learning the inner workings of mortals, Shinzan eventually came to the world of Lumnia where he took a new mortal body and then took the entire world, obliterating a continent with his magic power and killing all in his path while taking the body of his greatest enemy Praxis Dragonvein, whose son survived. In one notable instance, Shinzan methodically walked through a dwarf kingdom, killing every resident horribly simply for defying him. A Serial Rapist, Shinzan has women taken and brought to him where he forces them to serve him to break them, regularly forcing them to service his guards until their minds break or he sends them back to homes that will no longer accept them.. When he seems to grow fond of one concubine, Shinzan later murders her in a fit of rage with no remorse, tortures Praxis's son, the series's hero Ethan, and intends to liberate himself from mortal flesh by destroying all life on Lumnia.
• Dr. Cyclops, by Henry Kuttner: Dr. Alexander Thorkel, having invented a powerful shrinking ray, intends to wield it on his new unwanted "guests" before trying to torture and kill them. A traitor to the US, Thorkel plans to give his technology to the Nazis to shrink entire American cities with a catastrophic death toll.
• Dr. Dredd's Wagon of Wonders (Coven Tree series), by Bill Brittain: Dr. Hugo Dredd is a servant of Satan who travels America with his Wagon of Wonders, using people or items at his disposal to do favors for small towns, in exchange for an unnamed price. Once the favor is complete, the town is consumed by greed, falls to disrepair, and all bonds of family or friendship are gone, turning the people into snarling selfish beasts. Dr. Dredd adopts a young boy named Calvin Huckabee, who can create rain and starts to abuse him, whipping him for the slightest infraction. Dr. Dredd arrives in the town of Coven Tree, which is suffering from a drought, and Dredd promises to have Calvin provide the town with rain in exchange for his unnamed price. When Calvin escapes and goes to the town's people to protect him from Dredd, Dredd does everything he can to recapture Calvin and complete the deal. Dredd summons a suit of haunted Black Knight armor to cut down everyone and everything between it and Calvin. After the Knight is defeated, Dredd summons a dragon and plans to burn down Coven Tree for defying him.
• Dread Nation: Preacher Snyder, the true power behind Summerland, is a bigoted pastor hiding behind shallow piousness. A former slaveholder himself, Snyder exploits cheap labor from the colored populace of Summerland with any infractions he can think of ruthlessly punished by his son, the town's sheriff, with torture and abuse wide under his rule. Beyond this, Snyder throws away the lives of countless of Summerland's colored populace by forcing them to patrol the walls fending off encroaching shambles, utterly uncaring about the massive death tolls and always justifying himself and his cruel rule by claiming to only serve God's chosen order. Lecherous, sexist, racist, and a proud hypocrite above all else, Snyder ignores that his sanctimony will eventually doom the entire town and everyone in it to the hordes outside.
• Dreamland—Favorite Popatecho, by Julia Spiridonova–Yulka: The Shadow is an evil, power-hungry wizard who desires nothing less than total domination over the Dreamland. He killed Ivo's father and usurped the throne from him, imprisoned Ivo's mother, and horribly abused those beneath him. After learning of a prophecy that Ivo is destined to defeat him, the Shadow tries to murder him while he is still a baby. Not satisfied with only ruling the Dreamland, the Shadow plans to condemn all of humanity to a state of coma where they are tortured by their worst nightmares. When an army of rebels tries to end his tyranny, the Shadow massacres them all even the ones who are too injured to fight back and then commands his seemingly loyal minion to prove his loyalty by killing his own son.
• The Dresden Files: Harry Dresden has had to face some pretty nasty villains over his long career. These are the worst:
  • Blood Rites: Lord Raith, aka the White King, is one of the cruelest White Court vampires, as well as one of Harry's most personal enemies. A brutal authoritarian, Raith murders his sons to avoid them becoming a threat to his power, and rapes and feeds off his daughters, reducing them to sex slaves. Feeding off of the feeling of lust from his victims to sustain his power, Raith only stops this when he kills Margret Le Fey Dresden—Harry's mother—and she uses her death curse to prevent him from continuing. When Raith's servant Arturo begins operating independently of Raith's porn monopoly, Raith furiously responds by slaughtering Arturo's innocent employees, only stopping to hunt Harry to lift Margert's death curse. Attacking Harry and his half-brother who is Raith's own son, Thomas, Raith tries to kill them both to vanquish any threat to his power. Raith reveals to Harry that he intends to turn his love interest Karrin Murphy into his personal sex slave and later reveals his intent to rape his youngest daughter, Inari, and turn her into yet another mentally-broken slave for himself.
  • Dead Beat & Ghost Story: Capiocorpus, aka the Corpsetaker, is a former student and Bastard Understudy of the evil necromancer Heinrich Kemmler. Prolonging her own life by stealing the bodies of others before torturing her victims to death, the Corpsetaker also delights in causing mental anguish, bringing devastation and destruction to the minds of the people she tortures. Along with the other heirs of Kemmler, the Corpsetaker plans to consume the souls of thousands in a ritual as a bid to become a god. Killed by Harry, the Corpsetaker returns as the malevolent "Grey Ghost" and enslaves other spirits to help her return to life. Torturing the ectomancer Mortimer Linderquist, the Corpsetaker has his mind fed to the evil Wraiths—a painful process that destroys the sanity of the victim and something she relishes in doing—hoping to break him and use him to control the spirit population of the city she is in. Allying with the Fomor, the Corpsetaker plans to crush the resistance to them in Chicago and allow them to run amok and cause mass death and destruction while she tries to return to life. Devouring the souls of dozens of spirits, the Corpsetaker attempts to regain corporeal form and tries to steal the body of one of Harry's friends to continue her immortal life of cruelty. Defined by a lifelong path of sadism, the Corpsetaker showed time and again why she was one of Harry's most vicious enemies.
  • Turn Coat:
    • "Shagnasty" is a Skin Walker or Naagloshii sent by the Black Council to disrupt the investigation into the titular traitor, and delights in causing pain in his victims, torturing them with sadistic glee. Attacking the Raith mansion, he massacres several of the personnel there and maims and cripples several others, even breaking off and eating the fingers of Lara Raith's sisters just for fun. Capturing Thomas, he has him tortured by having him hung up and than ripping strips of skin off him, piece by piece. When Thomas's vampiric Healing ability is about to give out, "Shagnasty" than gives him a random, innocent woman—as young as 16-—and, since by this point, Thomas has completely lost control of his Horror Hunger, he winds up raping them to death. "Shagnasty" than repeats the process over a dozen times simply to satisfy his sadistic whims, proving himself one of Harry's most sadistic and deadly foes.
    • Samuel Peabody, seemingly merely the pompous, paperwork-obsessed head of the White Council's clerical department, is secretly a member of the Black Council. Infecting the minds of numerous wizards, including nearly all the younger wardens, with his magical ink, Peabody subtly brainwashed several into becoming his "suicide bombers". Throughout the Red Court war, Peabody sabotaged the White Council, confusing the Senior Councillors minds and passing their secrets to the Reds, causing them to lose numerous devastating battles; Peabody also personally sabotaged Archangel's defenses, allowing the vampires to wipe out the entire city. Peabody likewise gave the vampires the information that allowed them to carry out a devastating nerve gas attack on the wounded, also killing thousands of innocent civilians as collateral. Summoning a Shoggoth for the Black Council to exploit, Peabody forcibly bound it to Catherine Taylor, risking unleashing "an era of horror and carnage as yet unknown to man". Attempting to start a civil war within the White Council, leaving them too weak to continue to stand against the Reds, Peabody brainwashed Captain Luccio into murdering Senior Councillor Aleron LaFortier, planning to ensure her and Donald Morgan's executions, escalating tensions with Aleron's numerous supporters and triggering potential mutinies within the Wardens. When Peabody was finally caught, he unleashed a Mistfiend upon the Council in an attempt to cover his escape.
  • Changes: Kukulcan, aka the Red King, is the founder of the Red Court vampires, and the creator of a system of slavery and oppression that spans thousands of years. The Red King presides over a court that enslaves mortals as Cannon Fodder, slaves and food, with a special emphasis placed on feeding upon children, as well as Human Sacrifice to his own glory. When war begins between the wizard White Council and the Red Court, the Red King shows that he had already been prepared for a protracted and brutal war by launching violent attacks, including nerve gas, with civilians being collateral damage at best, and food for his soldiers at worst. Playing the part of a blood-addicted junkie, the Red King manipulates his courtiers, pitting them against his enemies and one another, and shows no compunction in sending his own daughter to her death when she opposes him. The misery of the Red King's actions makes South America into a living hell for civilians and those who dare to oppose the vampires, and is so horrible a formerly loyal servant is driven to Knight Templar levels to destroy the Red Court at any cost. One of the most ancient, powerful and evil vampires in existence, the Red King is finally brought down by a sacrificial spell he intended for Harry Dresden's entire family line—one he was going to initiate by sacrificing Harry's 8-year-old daughter personally on the altar.
  • Battle Ground (2020) has the two leaders of the Fomor, who first appeared near the end of Peace Talks:
    • Ethniu, the Last Titan and daughter of Balor, is the secret backer of the Fomor and their atrocities. Initiating events to lure others to peace accords in Chicago, Ethniu reveals herself and launches a full-on assault at Chicago with the intent to obliterate the city, having the Fomor sweep through to slaughter all in their path while she uses her father's Eye as a superweapon to annihilate what she sees. Ethniu intends on causing a full-on supernatural pogrom to kick off a war between the human and supernatural worlds so she may take advantage of the carnage and rule the world, and when confronted by Harry has him mentally tortured by showing him visions of his daughter and friends being brutally murdered in order to drive him to despair.
    • King Corb of the Fomor is a vicious brute who orders his court's atrocities. Having numerous sapient beings taken through Human Trafficking schemes that involve children, Corb has them subjected to horrible experiments or enslaved with their minds stolen from them to serve the Fomor. Playing every side he can, Corb had also aided the Red Court in their war crimes with providing them nerve gas and upon Ethniu's rise leads his Huntsmen to sweep through Chicago, with men, women and children alike and butchered en masse, Harry even finding a bloodied baby carriage and having to defend a daycare from the Fomor siege. Upon the tide turning, Corb wastes no time killing his own men to escape to the safety of the water.
• Dr. Greta Helsing:
  • Strange Practice: The entity is a sapient remnant of the universe's creation itself. Loving chaos and feeding off the dread it spreads, the entity unleashes a wave of chaos throughout the history of humanity, killing an untold number of innocents. The entity converts a church in London to have its priests start a killing spree against the supernatural, aiming to genocide the entire supernatural population of London, orchestrating other attacks that kill many innocents, babies included. The entity feeds off the souls of its followers, inspiring them to horrific crimes with intent to keep the chaos going, all so it can enjoy itself with the horrors it creates.
  • Dreadful Company: Corvin is an upstart vampire who embraces his evil with a multitude of horror. The bloodthirsty Corvin mass murders innocents in Paris, dumping their bodies in the canals and conditions his vampires by having them locked self-aware in coffins for days to break their will. Gaining an enmity with Ruthven over scaring him, Corvin kidnaps Ruthven's friend Greta Helsing and uses her as a hostage, intending to off her as a way to get back at him and later murders his girlfriend to drink in her agony. Corvin is also a Serial Rapist of his own female vampires, being a self-confessed practitioner of Droit du Seigneur and later tries to rape Greta's new friend out of lust, being utterly proud of how evil he is.
• The Drowned Cities: Lieutenant Sayle is Colonel Glenn Stern's right-hand man, and acts as The Heavy for most of the book. The oldest soldier in Stern's service, Sayle acts as a recruiter, press-ganging children into becoming soldier boys for the United Patriotic Front, burning their rank into their faces with acid, and convincing them that the outside world has nothing to offer them. A particularly cold-blooded sadist, Sayle started the UPF's practice of mutilating prisoners by cutting off their hands and feet and leaving them for their comrades to find, and put out of their misery. The practice eventually spread to other child armies, like Taylor's Wolves and the Army of God—which Sayle intended because it means that his own boys will be less likely to surrender. Sayle treats civilians with an even more deliberate brutality, endorsing, encouraging, and participating in his boys' practice of Rape, Pillage, and Burn; he's particularly vicious towards women, informing the heroine, Mahlia, (while neck lifting her) that "maybe I'll just stand here and watch you kick. I like it when a pretty girl kicks." During the climax, Sayle even manages to violate the soldier boys' tenuous moral code, when he has one of his own boys, Mahlia's former friend Mouse, mutilated in order to try and break Mahlia, a fact that shocks and disgusts his Number Two, Sergeant Ocho. What makes Sayle especially bad is that he doesn't buy into Colonel Stern's Well-Intentioned Extremist rhetoric, nor is he a drugged-up PTSDing child, like most of his boys. Ocho notes that Sayle is Straight Edge Evil because "what got him high wasn't any booze or drug or girl. It was the hurting. Sayle liked people hurt."
• Dune series:
  • Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is a monstrous figure whose only concern is his own advancement and the glory of House Harkonnen. A hedonistic pedophile, the Baron keeps dozens of young boys to use as sex slaves. Initially lower than the Noble Atreides household, Harkonnen engineers its downfall and Duke Leto's death by using Dr. Yueh's wife to force him to betray House Atreides, only to reveal that she was already dead before having Yueh killed. When Leto's wife and children flee to the desert world of Arrakis, Harkonnen assists in trying to crush the Rebellion in an essential genocide of the Fremen people. Revealing his two nephews, brutish Rabban and intelligent, reserved Feyd-Rautha, Harkonnen plans to assign Rabban to brutalize the Fremen and then later have him removed by Feyd to cultivate the Fremen's goodwill with him. When Feyd tries to assassinate Harkonnen, the latter, in amusement, forces him to kill every woman in the pleasure quarter, chiding him "there will always be more women, Feyd." Even from beyond the grave, Harkonnen still manages to bring about even more suffering by possessing and manipulating his granddaughter Alia in an attempt to get revenge, eventually culminating in Alia's suicide.
  • Glossu "the Beast" Rabban is the most evil of the Baron's nephews. A barbarous sadist who believes strength to be the defining morality of the universe, Rabban rejected his own loving parents to instead follow in the footsteps of his uncle the Baron, valuing the man's power and ruthlessness. Becoming a hated warlord across the galaxy, Rabban murdered his own family and subjugated his homeworld to brutal tyranny in order to solidify his moniker of "the Beast". Rabban's crushing tyranny sees him head up Harkonnen "pleasure houses" for sex trafficking of countless people; oversee slave pits where he routinely murders the weak, infirmed and elderly; and force children to participate in "hunts" in which Rabban tracks down and kills them for sport. Rabban has personal enmity with a variety of allies to House Atreides, from murdering Duncan's parents in front of him; to torturing Gurney's village to death before gangraping and strangling his sister while forcing the man to watch; and poisoning a major water and food supply of the Atreides homeworld. When he is tasked to rule Arrakis with an iron fist, Rabban ushers in his reign by butchering 3 villages and torturing the village children to death in front of their parents for fun, and later leads the genocide attempt against the Fremen with relish.
• Dust City:
  • The Nimbus brothers, Karl and Ludwig, are the CEOs of Nimbus Thaumaturgical, a company dedicated to producing fairy dust. In the past, the brothers eradicated the fairy population in order to mine the leftover dust the fairies produced, seeking to be the only purveyors of the magic. When the dust began to run out, the brothers resorted to using the corpses of the fairies to create a new brand of fairy dust, testing it out on various animalia, with the dust either horrifically mutating or devolving them to their primitive forms. To maintain their privileged position, the brothers scheme to infect the entire animalia population in Dust City with the corrupted fairy dust, regressing them to their primitive stage so they can be used as labor and food for the hominid population.
  • Skinner is a crime boss responsible for distributing fairy dust on the black market and running people off of their property through the threat of violence. Years prior, Skinner sent Henry's father, George, to intimidate Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother into giving up her land, but tricked him into taking the corrupted fairy dust, which caused him to revert into his bestial stage and brutally murder the two. In the present, Skinner aids the Nimbus brothers in their plans, abducting animalia for use in their experiments. When Doc begins to uncover their plans, Skinner murders him and frames it as a suicide. When Henry and Matt, one of Skinner's dust runners, enter his house to free Fiona, Skinner turns Matt into a golden statue—a fate he has dealt upon countless other unfortunate people, including Henry's friend Jack.
• Dust Devils: Chief vampire Adam Price is an ancient monster who was the scourge of Europe. Arriving in the American West as the head of an acting troupe, Price uses this as a way to find victims. Sweeping from town to town, Price massacres many who cross his path, regardless of age or gender. After converting the unfaithful wife of hero Cody Wilson, Price decides to punish Cody for his dogged pursuit by massacring most of an entire town during a performance and trying to burn Cody's new Love Interest alive. Adam then opts to track down Cody's father and stepmother to murder them slowly before he has Cody tortured to death.
• Dying Is My Business and its sequels, by Nicholas Kaufmann, have some deeply unpleasant villains:
  • Reve Azrael is the queen of New York's undead, and desires a world void of all life, with only herself reigning over billions of corpses. Manipulating Trent into helping her, Reve Azrael subsequently covers her tracks by burning her Co-Dragons alive, while plotting to take control of gargoyle king Stryge and use his power to level New York. Foiled in this attempt, Reve Azrael forces Trent's friend Calliope to disembowel herself, psychologically torments both her and Gabrielle by puppeting the bodies of those close to them, and finally hijacks Erickson Arkwright's plan to summon Behemoth, taking control of the demon herself and rampaging into New York. Loathing all life because she cannot control it, Reve Azrael would slaughter every living thing on Earth just to secure her own power.
  • Erickson Arkwright was a member of a doomsday cult that tried to force Nahash-Dred to end the world for them. When Nahash-Dred refused, destroying the cult, Arkwright survived and took on a new identity. Murdering his stepson and his wife when they came too close to realizing the truth about him, Arkwright brainwashed his stepdaughter into serving as his assassin, spy, and lover, actions which led to her suicide when Trent successfully got through to her. Summoning the demon lord Behemoth and sending him to attack New York, Arkwright aimed to force Nahash-Dred to reveal himself so that he might take control of the demon and force him to end the world he had grown to love.

E - F

• East of Eden: Mr. Edwards is a ruthless whoremaster who manages to upstage Cathy Ames herself in depravity. Running a variety of prostitution rings across the country that he keeps in line by routinely beating his workers bloody and threatening them with homelessness or jail time to force them into servitude, Edwards forbids his women from becoming pregnant under penalty of being kicked out or having haphazard, oftentimes lethal abortions performed on them. Edwards also hides the fact that most of his workers carry sexual diseases, constantly shuffling them around so that the hapless men to whom they transmit the infections can never find the guilty parties. When he falls under Cathy's seductive spell, Edwards comes to begrudge the woman for making him feel genuine love, and plans to blackmail her into servitude as his personal whore to overcome his emotions towards her; instead, he ends up viciously beating her to within an inch of her life and leaving her for dead, Edwards rebuking love as a weakness and promising to never feel it towards anyone again.
• "Easy Bake", by Sonora Taylor, from Diet Riot: "Michael", host of Easy Bake, enjoys running his baking show as a death game. Making the contestants believe they are trapped in the show, Michael has anyone "cut" from the show murdered for real, with numerous innocents killed for not measuring up to his standards for baking. In the last contest, Michael even psychologically tortures the contestants, using the corpse of the last loser as "ingredients" for a meat pie.
• The Edge Chronicles:
  • The Curse of the Gloamglozer, Beyond the Deepwoods, The Immortals: The Gloamglozer is the most devious and Ancient Evil ever to plague the Edgeworld. The Gloamglozer is a sadistic, shapeshifting demon who, unable to truly harm prey itself, contents itself with luring victims to their death while glutting itself on their fear. Upon being accidentally recreated by the brilliant professor Linius in the First Age of Flight, the Gloamglozer sadistically torments Linius by tricking him into thinking his daughter is dead, before burning Linius to death and going for his apprentice Quint next. The Gloamglozer spends the next Age of Flight luring hapless victims to the Edge itself where it throws them off—one of its victims being Quint's descendant Twig—and opens up the Second Age creating the stone-sickness, an epidemic that destroyed the technology and economy on which the Edgeworld had been built, affecting and ruining millions. In the Third Age, before its final death, the Gloamglozer rediscovered the ruined floating city of Sanctaphrax and magically transformed it into an illusion of its former glory, using it to corral entire villages and clans of people from the Deepwoods so the Gloamglozer could prey upon them.
  • The Rook Trilogy (Last of the Sky Pirates, Vox, Freeglader):
    • Orbix Xaxis is the paranoid, fanatical Most High Guardian of the Night, leading his Guardians in exterminating the Librarians and securing ultimate power for themselves. Having betrayed his former boss Vox Verlix and massacring his loyalists, Xaxis decrees all Librarians worthy of death and goes about wiping out the entire group, capturing and torturing any survivors possible before executing them. Xaxis's favored method of execution being to feed his victims alive to the monstrous rock demons while Xaxis savors their screams, Xaxis plans to unleash all rock demons onto the Librarians to rip the faction apart. Willing to order even his "friend" Xanth be murdered for going against his will, Xaxis throws even the loyal Leddix to his death in a childish rage without a second thought, willing to torture, kill, and betray countless people to ensure his insane vision of the future comes about.
    • Hemuel Spume is the master of the Foundry Glade, a hellish factory that spreads through the Deepwoods like cancer after the stone-sickness forces a radical change in the Edge's industry. Spume enslaves thousands to slowly work themselves to death in the Foundry Glade, including the pacifistic and harmless banderbears, driving them to death at such a rate Hemuel eventually calculates as 300 a month. In cooperation with the conniving ghostwaif Amberfuce, Hemuel eventually takes his war to the Free Glades with monstrous machines called "glade-eaters," intending to devastate the Free Glades and make slaves of whomever he doesn't destroy.
    • Amberfuce is a particularly cruel Ghostwaif known for his cruelty towards his slaves and his lack of loyalty towards anyone. Allying with the evil Vox Verlix and helping in his schemes of mass murder, Amberfuce was known for taking countless slaves and erasing their minds, warping them into perfect drones. Amberfuce was also responsible for the Week of Blood, where goblin slaves were rounded up, the old and infirm butchered, and the survivors forced to dig mass graves on the spot. Amberfuce later betrayed Vox for the evil Hemuel Spume to help the latter design Vox's own superweapons, known as the Glade-Eaters, to create even more mass murder.
  • The Immortals: Custodian General Golderayce One-Eye is a slimy, selfish copperwaif who has assumed control over the Garden of Life and its healing waters, hoarding them all to himself with no care for the countless innocents subject to disease and death without the waters' aid. Golderayce uses his control over the Garden to institute total power in the city of Riverrise, having his custodians assassinate and execute anyone who defies Golderayce and impale their bodies for the whole city to see. Years ago, Golderayce's jealous possessiveness spurred him to murder his object of affection, Maugin, and then imprison her lover and friend for centuries out of spite. When the heroic Nate tries to sample some of the Garden's water to save a friend, Golderayce responds by planning to flay the man alive, torture his friends to death, and slash open the throats of two of his own servants who tried to offer Nate assistance.
• Elemental Masters series:
  • The Fire Rose: Paul du Mond is the seemingly loyal servant of Jason Cameron, but hides a truly despicable personality behind his smug appearance. A power hungry sadist with a love for hurting others, Paul schemes to betray Jason to a horrible death at the hands of his rival Simon Beltaire, and spends his free time torturing and raping young, trafficked girls to "break" them into their new lives as prostitutes. Desiring a Sex Slave of his own, Paul begins buying trafficked women to torture as he pleases, only to kill them within days' time and buy a new slave to replace them, leading to a bevy of mutilated corpses piling up that Paul regularly disposes of. When his plan to sacrifice a child goes awry, Paul aims to kidnap Jason's true love, Rose, and use her as a sacrifice just to torture his former master.
  • The Gates of Sleep: Madame Arachne Chamberten is a vain Satanist who throws countless innocent lives away in pursuit of ultimate power simply to make up for the fact that she was born without the talent of magic. A murderess who killed her own parents, husband, and even brother and the man's wife, Arachne curses her niece, Marina, as an infant to die out of spite for her family, and schemes to turn her own son into a mindless puppet, or even kill him if need be. Arachne uses a pottery business as a guise to the fact that she poisons her workers—all orphaned young girls—with lead, then forces them to prostitute themselves out when the sickness hinders their work, until they either die from the poisoning, or Arachne uses them as a sacrifice for her black magic. When Marina's curse threatens to backfire on Arachne, Arachne attempts to reverse it and plunge Marina into a coma and leave her to rot and die a horrible death, hoping to move on after and continue to expand her pottery business and ruin evermore lives for her own selfish desires.
  • Phoenix and Ashes: Alison Robinson is the stepmother of the novel's protagonist Eleanor and the murderer of her father, one of many victims Alison has left behind her in her history of marrying and murdering for wealth. An evil Earth Master with a capacity for capricious violence behind her dignified façade, Robinson has Eleanor enslaved to a geas that involved hacking Eleanor's finger off, and Alison gleefully tries to have Eleanor driven to insanity within the depths of an Elemental-infested mine later. Alison once bargains with a disease Elemental she unleashes to prolong World War I, kickstarting The Spanish Flu in the process so she can reap power from the death of millions. Not even her own flesh and blood is safe from her curse, as she drains the life from her own two daughters, as well as one of her associates, leaving her daughters as withered, catatonic vegetables. Prim, proper, and viciously sadistic, Alison Robinson is a Wicked Stepmother to put the worst of them to shame.
  • The Wizards of London: The seemingly respectable Lady Cordelia Bryce-Coll is nothing more than a wicked sorceress who pledged loyalty to a sealed Elemental called the Ice Lord in exchange for power. Cordelia moves herself up in society in an especially wicked process; murdering children to bind their souls to a dream world, and using their spirits to subliminally whisper suggestions in the minds of nobility to move Cordelia up in life. Cordelia has killed dozens of children with the attitude of throwing away unwanted puppies, and even experiments on two of them to swap her body to escape the limitations of a female body in Victorian society, intending on repeating this body-surfing process to attain immortality. When the Ice Lord reveals it intends to freeze over all of Great Britain in eternal winter, Cordelia is only too happy to hand it over the key to its seal so long as she reigns supreme.
• The Elemental Trilogy: The Bane, originally Pyrrhos Plouton, is the Lord High Commander of Atlantis and the most powerful tyrant and mage the world has ever known. Afflicted with a deadly illness in his past, the Bane resorted to using taboo sacrificial magic to save himself at the expense of his close friend, a fate he would later inflict on his entire family. Conquering the mage world, the Bane spends centuries regularly sacrificing young elemental mages to prolong his life, in addition to bodyjacking people who closely resemble him when his original body falls out of use. When Iolanthe Seabourne's status as an elemental mage is revealed, the Bane becomes hellbent on capturing and sacrificing her by any means necessary. In his pursuit, the Bane wipes out hundreds of his own soldiers to prevent his use of sacrificial magic being revealed to the public; orders thousands of civilians in the Kalahari Realm put to death as a warning to the Domain; and tortures Prince Titus while inhabiting his father's body, stopping at nothing to extend his life beyond humanely possible.
• James Ellroy works:
  • Clandestine: William "Doc" Harris is a charming, clever criminal convinced of his superiority. Wooing Marcella DeVries to marry her, Doc corrupts her brother Johnny and two other men into absolute devotion to him, having them perform oral sex on him to demonstrate his dominance. Stealing tons of military morphine, Doc uses it to perform abortions of "inferior" children. Out of misogyny, Doc also kills any women not referred to him by men, with "lots and lots" buried in unmarked graves after he does the deed, and later makes one underling take the fall by threatening to expose his homosexuality. When his own child is stillborn, Doc has Johnny give up his own son to raise as Doc's "moral heir" and attempts to corrupt the boy by preaching his elitist philosophy, and personally kills Johnny and Marcella.
  • The L.A. Quartet & The Second L.A. Quartet:
    • The Black Dahlia: Sergeant Friedrich Charles "Fritz(ie)" Vogel is a Dirty Cop whose malice and vileness stand out even in the dark, corrupt halls of the LAPD. A brutal sadist who enjoys "interrogating" suspects, Fritz frequently tortures confessions out of people with no care for if they are truly guilty, simply wanting to accomplish arrests. Going so far as to try to pin the Black Dahlia murder on an innocent party by torturing a group of men into confession, Fritz's nastiest act is revealed to be the time he raped an entire brothel of women out of spite because he contracted syphilis while sleeping with hookers. Fritz spread the STD to all of the women he raped, and even blinded two of his victims by rubbing his infected genitalia on their eyes.
    • L.A. Confidential & Perfidia prequel: Pierce Morehouse Patchett uses his public persona as an eccentric, successful businessman to mask his crimes, covering up a series of murders of children by the insane son of a media mogul. Patchett later allows for Japanese attacks during World War II, including Pearl Harbor, and even engineers more, so the festering prejudice will allow him to purchase Japanese-American owned properties cheap. With his Fleur-de-Lis prostitution ring, Patchett pimps to wealthy associates, even having young boys and girls pose in sexual photos for his depraved clients. Patchett also uses his background in chemistry to modify heroin and create more potent batches to flood the streets and even modifies some doses to have his partner overcome police truth serum. Batches of his new concoctions are tested on one of his runners, and when the man fails to kill an investigating police officer, Patchett tortures him by injecting him with a series of bad strains.
    • This Storm: Salvador "Salvy" Abascal, head of the Mexican Sinarquista party, poses as a fascist to profit from the world conflict. Once having participated in a gold heist, Salvy comes to his current office with the proceeds and radicalizes hopeful operatives by demanding they each commit three murders. With thousands enslaved in his plants, Salvy allies with Dudley Smith in a plot to run Mexican and Japanese slaves to America, along with heroin, to continue lining his pockets. Betraying Dudley, Salvy uses the opportunity to run saboteurs along with their slaves, plotting to eradicate rival fascist factions and violently rob Americans to line his own pockets.
• The Elric Saga: Jagreen Lern is the ruthless Theocrat of Pan Tang. Becoming the champion of the forces of Chaos, Jagreen Lern takes to murdering the friends of Elric while also running his domains with brutality, Human Sacrifice and turning countless people into living, tormented statues. Jagreen Lern proceeds to lead an army across the lands, massacring those he comes across and conducting human sacrifice and torture. Torturing Elric when he is captured, Jagreen Lern later mutates Elric's wife into a twisted abomination Elric is forced to euthanize. Jagreen Lern later leads the forces of Chaos to dominate the world, stopping at nothing to harm Elric himself.
• Emma Kane/Jacob Thorne series, by Todd Travis:
  • Creatures of Appetite: The Iceman—Jeff Gilday—is a twisted psychopath who, after being rejected by his long-time crush, Barb Mullens, in favor of his best friend, decided to murder Barb's young daughter, Darcy. To avoid suspicion for the crime, The Iceman decided to mask Darcy's death as just one of numerous killings, and, to this end, began kidnapping young girls between 5 and 12 years old, at which point he would sadistically murder and eat them. After butchering 20 girls, 9 of whose body parts he left in an area highly-populated by children, just to terrify the kids, The Iceman kidnaps Darcy, and, when dropping off one of his victims' bodies, opens fire on numerous police officers. Framing an innocent man for his crimes, The Iceman forces him to eat body parts of one of the children to further incriminate the man, then shoots him in the head to make it look like a suicide. Capturing Emma Kane after murdering her current date, The Iceman tries to force her to watch as he kills and eats Darcy, at which point he plans to do the same to her. When Kane's partner shows up, The Iceman tries to murder an officer, leaving him crippled for life in the process, then makes one last attempt to escape by using Darcy as a human shield. When questioned by Kane as to why he ate the children, The Iceman simply replied, "They taste good."
  • Trophies:
    • Lawrence and Bradley Beale are a father and son duo of socialite serial rapists. Lawrence, having witnessed the Bosnian rape camps and viewed them as an achievement, sets up a horrific island he dubs "Heaven", where he and Bradley bring dozens of women over the years to be raped and turned into subservient slaves to be sold into sexual slavery before being murdered once they outlive their usage. Lawrence murdered Bradley's mother—his own wife—to keep her "taint" from infecting the boy, much to Bradley's approval, and while Bradley prefers torturing, raping, and "breaking" women, his father routinely murders women while he rapes them, taking sick glee in seeing the light go out of their eyes as he ends them.
    • Maynard "the Caretaker" is the head of security of "Heaven," spending his free time keeping an eye on the dozens of women there and torturing them with their shock collars if they step out of line. Responsible for raping and beating the women when they first are brought to Heaven to make sure they learn their place, Maynard is also the head of "Hell", a nightmarish torture chamber where he takes women who have been too disobedient and either maims, brands, or, on most occasions, tortures them to death. Maynard spends his final moments as Caretaker continuing his sadistic streak as he tries to torture Emma Kane's best friends to death out of spite towards the woman.
• "The Empire of the Necromancers", by Clark Ashton Smith: Mmatmuor and Sodosma are a pair of necromancers thrown out of their hometown for unspeakable sorcery. Mmatmuor and Sodosma decide to resurrect the populace of the dead empire of Cindor, binding the souls of the dead people to their command and ruling as despots. Mmatmuor and Sodosma constantly torture and humiliate the former nobility of the city to slake their mutual sadism, resurrect the fairest corpses to serve their necrophilic lust, and keep the empire enslaved to their cruel whims even as the souls of the deceased become aware of, and tormented by, their predicament.
• Enderverse: The Shadow Saga & Children of the Fleet: Achilles de Flandres, Bean's Arch-Enemy, is a megalomaniac obsessed with conquering the world. Becoming a Serial Killer in his teens, Achilles murders anyone he thinks has seen him as weak, which includes a surgeon who repaired his malformed leg. Recruited by Battle School largely due to his natural charisma, Achilles is expelled and institutionalized just two days later after Bean exposes his crimes, only to be freed shortly afterward by agents of the New Warsaw Pact. Achilles then begins manipulating various powerful nations into a series of brutal wars, intent on gaining enough influence over the eventual victor that he can effectively rule himself, and caring nothing for the resultant death and destruction. He also tries to have the School destroyed along with its students, simply out of revenge for expelling him. Driven by hatred both for Bean and for his friend and later wife Petra—whom he was attracted to, which made him feel weak—he murders an old friend of Bean's out of sheer spite, and sabotages the couple's efforts to have children just so he can crush their hopes utterly before killing them both.
• Endless Night, by Richard Laymon: Simon Quirt is a member of a group of friends known as the Killer Kruls who are serial murderers and rapists ever since high school, when they gang-raped, tortured and murdered a classmate. Killing and raping tons of innocents since, Quirt slaughters the family of heroine Jodie's friend Evelyn, save her brother Andy, and becomes obsessed with hunting Jodie down. Killing and raping multiple innocents along the way, Quirt kills his "friends" when they seek to punish him for leaving survivors and eventually tries to rape Jodie after murdering Andy.
• English Fairy Tales' "Mr. Fox": Mr. Fox himself presents himself as a rich and gallant man to woo Mary for marriage. After he and Mary get engaged, Mary sneaks into his castle and learns that in truth Mr. Fox is a Serial Killer of young women, filling an entire room with their blood-soaked bodies, while Mr. Fox also steals any valuables they might have on them.
• "Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center", by Harlan Ellison: The bearded man who comes to Prince using the name "Gunther Duvoe" is a demonic being who goes from town to town painting people's darkest secrets to tear them apart. Culminating in his depiction of a vigilante murder committed in Prince, Duvoe delights in the ensuing riots killing many, revealing his nature to the horrified Reverend before shooting the man dead and leaving to continue his work.
• Entombed, by Guy N. Smith: Eli Lealan is the head of a Satanist sect that practices Human Sacrifice. Lealan kills multiple people with his coven, enslaving and tormenting their souls while even brutally murdering children in the sacrifices. Lealan intends to free and summon Satan himself to set him upon the world, even betraying a loyal follower as a sacrifice by having her hanged in pain and terror while relishing it all the while.
• Eon: Dragoneye Reborn & Eona: The Last Dragoneye: The evil High Lord Sethon is the brutal second son of the emperor who eventually launches a coup to slaughter all the Dragoneye mages; kills an infant heir to the throne—his own nephew—in front of said nephew's mother; and has the palace inhabitants raped and murdered. A savage tyrant, Sethon has countless people oppressed and killed, while attempting to start new wars with neighboring nations. In his own time, Sethon is a Serial Killer of both male and female prostitutes, and when he captures Eona, he shows no hesitation in having her tortured before trying to execute her.
• Erast Fandorin series:
  • Murder on the Leviathan: Marie Sanfon is a skilled, ruthless and utterly self-serving serial criminal. She encourages her lover Charles Renier, son of a deposed rajah, to look for his father's hidden treasure. When the clue to the treasure's location, a shawl, is found, Marie, with some help from Charles, murders ten people, including two children, just to steal it. Later, Charles, at her prompting, commits two more murders aboard the Leviathan whenever the shawl's safety is threatened. Finally, when Marie's attempts to frame another passenger fail, she decides to Leave No Witnesses and urges Charles to steer the ship, with a thousand passengers and crew, onto rocks. Her calm doesn't falter when Charles takes all the blame as the plan is foiled or when Charles is killed by the French detective who also wants the treasure. Marie only goes berserk when Erast Fandorin throws the shawl into the sea, proving that she cares for no one and nothing but money.
  • Special Assignments' "The Decorator": Sotsky, also known as Pakhomenko and as Jack the Ripper, is a brutal and bloodthirsty Serial Killer who claims that by dismembering ugly people he makes them prettier. He is first arrested after an ugly prostitute he hires to torture dies from his beating, and the prison time strips him of his last shreds of humanity. After his escape, Sotsky begins a series of murders and butcherings in London, before continuing in Moscow. While he feels some pity for one of the police clerks on the case, Sotsky still kills said clerk's mentally disabled sister and her nurse, and eventually murders the clerk himself when the latter gets too close to the truth.
  • The Coronation: Dr. Lind is a crime boss hiding a ruthless nature behind her kindly exterior. Dr. Lind specializes in high-profile kidnappings where she has the victim killed after getting the ransom. Infiltrating the royal family as a governess, Dr. Lind arranges the kidnapping of her charge, four-year-old Prince Mikhail, and demands the Orlov Diamond as a ransom, knowing that its loss would be a horrible diplomatic blow. When Erast Fandorin is hot on her trail, Dr. Lind has her goon provoke the Khodynka tragedy, where thousands are crushed to death in the crowds while she escapes. Dr. Lind makes it clear she has no political agenda in her workings against the Romanovs; her only motives are Greed and the joy she gets from making her crimes as heinous as possible.
• Escape from Eden, by Elisa Nader: Thaddeus corrupted the once kindly Reverend Elis Eden and helped him create the isolated community of Eden. Thaddeus uses Eden as a way to force the followers of Eden to be used as sex slaves for willing buyers through a Human Trafficking syndicate they run, with their victims' families threatened with the same fate should they resist. Thaddeus spurs Eden into violence, and when their plans are discovered, tries to have all the Eden cult members forced to fight each other to the death, with Thaddeus even forcing the two protagonists to fight. Thaddeus eventually makes his leave of the location, but not before instructing his second-in command to gun down the innocent children of Eden who'd been taken to safety.
• Et je prendrai tout ce qu'il y a à prendre (And I Will Take Everything There is to Take), by Céline Lapertot: Charlotte's unnamed father, obsessed with controlling his wife Mathilde and his child Charlotte, is introduced by beating his wife, all because he had a bad day. When his 7-year old daughter is slightly angry at him for frightening her friend, he responds by punching her and sending her to her new bedroom, the cave, for 10 years. Adopting a loving façade to keep controlling his family and hide the abuse from anybody else, he doesn't hesitate to threaten his daughter into keeping the abuse a secret from his own parents, all the while still keeping his loving façade. When Charlotte's grades worsens, he beats her with his belt and destroys her favorite book in a rage. When social services visits his house, he blames Charlotte and forces her to watch as, with a smile, he destroys her old bedroom and several things she held dear inside. When a 16-year old Charlotte dates a guy named Guy, he stalked her and later attempted to rape her, thinking his control over her is slipping.
• Even Though I Knew the End: Zashiel is an angel that was banished from Heaven and forced to seek penance on Earth, only for Zashiel to lose faith on how they were to return to Heaven. For this, Zashiel became the White City Vampire by possessing young women to murder people who were damned so they could steal their souls, breaking the minds of the women they possessed and rendering them catatonic. Using the souls they gathered Zashiel then abducted Helen Brandt's brother Ted to use his pure soul as a sacrifice to summon the Archangel Michael to let them back into Heaven, and then tries to kill Helen and her lover Edith when they try to stop them.
• Everland: Queen Katherina is the warmongering ruler of Germany obsessed with world domination. Having poisoned her husband, the former king of Germany, Katherina proceeded to wage war against the surrounding nations, slaughtering millions of people, earning her the name the Bloodred Queen. Creating the deadly Horologia virus from a poisoned apple, Katherina unleashed the virus on England's population, wiping out most of its adult population and leaving those eighteen and under to suffer a long, painful demise from its effects. Even her children aren't exempt from her cruelty, as she gouged out her son Hook's eye on his thirteenth birthday and physically abused her stepson Jack. She also performed ghastly experiments on countless animals, transforming them into half-machine monstrosities that terrorize the kingdom. When she learns that several of her prisoners have escaped, Katherina brutally kills one of them, deeming him useless. Upon her defeat, Katherina fatally wounds her son as a final act of spite.
• Everworld: In this dark world where All Myths Are True, these gods reign as the worst even among their fellow Jerkass Gods:
  • Ka Anor is the one being that even the gods fear. The god of the insectoid alien Hetwan, Ka Anor invaded Everworld with his army of mind slaved soldiers, intent on conquering the pocket universe and devouring all of its gods. A huge sadist, Ka Anor's single most horrific act might be his cannibalization of Olympian cupbearer Ganymede. Having captured the young god, Ka Anor takes the form of a swarm of insects, and strips him down to the bone, keeping him alive to the very last second, as the heroes watch in horror. During the siege of Olympus Ka Anor offers Zeus the chance to escape with five chosen gods, if he will sacrifice the rest of his pantheon to Ka Anor's appetite; it is later revealed that Ka Anor had no intention of holding up his end of the bargain. His Hetwan legions violate every conceivable rule of warfare, even by ancient terms, using acid and fire as their main weapons. Ka Anor shows that even in a Crapsack World, there are some who rise above the rest in monstrosity.
  • Search for Senna & Land of Loss: Huitzilopoctli, lord of New Tonochititlan and the Aztec god of war, maintains a steady stream of human sacrifices via his Aztecs abducting countless beings for him to eat their hearts. In the war with the Vikings, Huitzilopoctli makes his debut and slaughters numerous soldiers, ending in breaking the Viking lord Olaf in half to devour his heart and having all prisoners treated to be fattened for sacrifice, a gigantic procession to his pyramid that kills so many, Rivers of Blood pour down the steps.
  • Realm of the Reaper & Entertain the End: Hel is depicted here as far worse than her Norse Mythology counterpart. A Two-Faced monster, her cruelty extends to her servants, who are kidnapped from elsewhere and castrated when they are made to serve her. This pales though compared to what she does to those who end up in her domain. Those who are unfortunate to come to her hell domain are buried up to their chin in rock, and has their head used as a cobblestone, until the skin is worn away and their skulls are crushed. Ax-Crazy to the extreme, she lives to torture people and even among the variety of gods and monsters in the series, she is by far one of the worst.
• Every Stolen Breath, by Kimberly Gabriel: Richard Stewart is Mayor Henking's chief of staff and the mastermind behind the Swarm, where he has a Death Mob of teens beat a target, usually to death, with at least 12 victims. A lot of Swarm members are forced to join under threat of blackmail, with many members being scarred for life or committing suicide. When Kellee Morrell refused to cooperate, Richard framed her father, Bill, as a fall guy and then had him killed. When Steven Finch came to close to the truth, Richard had him killed and his investigation shut down. When Steven's daughter Lia witnesses a Swarm attack, Richard has her stalked for over a month. Richard also frames a Latino gang for the Swarm's crimes. Richard forces Lia to watch her best friend Adam killed, before trying to do the same with her Love Interest, Ryan.
• Evil Whispers, by Owl Goingback: Mansa Du Paul was a wicked sorcerer in life. Having sacrificed numerous children to the Loa, Mansa was killed by the Seminoles and his wicked spirit lingered in the land for centuries more. Seeking new hosts, Mansa inevitably leads them to destruction and murder of entire families, before stealing a little girl's body and going on a killing spree to empower himself, plotting to feed her soul to the Loa to return to life and power.
• The Executioners, by John D. MacDonald: Max Cady is a despicable rapist and thug who was put away 13 years ago for assaulting a teenage girl in a drunken haze. Freed from prison, Cady abducted, tortured, and raped his ex-wife for days, threatening to murder her children if she reports the assault, then begins stalking and tormenting Sam Bowden and his family as revenge for Sam offering testimony that got Cady locked up. Poisoning the family dog so the children see her die, brutalizing a local girl and trying to shoot Sam's oldest son dead are all ways that Cady terrorizes the local community. After a failed attempt to murder Sam's wife and two boys with a car crash, Cady breaks into their home, murders Officer Kersek for protecting the family, then tortures and tries to rape Sam's wife, eager to give Sam "the word" on what suffering is.
• Ex-Heroes: Agent John Smith is a metahuman who uses his mind control methods to get anything he wants in life, including making many women sleep with him against their will. One young woman dies of a brain aneurysm due to the stress of this, but Smith views the event with amusement rather than remorse. Smith gets a government job and uses his powers to initiate a Super-Soldier program so he can control the soldiers into doing his bidding. Smith views the billions of deaths in the Zombie Apocalypse as nothing more than an obstacle to his plan, keeps his soldiers from rescuing any civilians, and arranges for several of them to be killed to cement his control. Smith tries to put his soldiers against the protagonists, abandons everyone when danger reaches their base, and hijacks the mind of a resident of the Mount to upload a copy of his mind into her body and take over the Mount while trying to trap the heroes in a horrific, permanent nightmare.
• "Exorcist Road" novella & Exorcist Falls, by Jonathan Janz:
  • Malephar is a demon with many, many long years of possessing, corrupting, and murdering all those who placed themselves in his path. With this legacy of murder, Malephar targets the priesthood, inducing suicide in one priest before ending up in the body of the hero Father Jason, guiding him to evil in order to kill the "Sweet Sixteen Killer", Danny Hartman. Torturing Jason into compliance at times, Malephar later flees from him to possess a priest who has lost his faith. Revealing himself to Jason, Malephar mutilates and flays a nun alive, telling Jason he will coax Hartman's nephew into new heights as a murderer while murdering Jason's Love Interest and her daughter while framing Jason for the nun's death.
  • Danny Hartman is a seemingly friendly police officer, but in actuality is hiding the fact that he is the infamous Sweet Sixteen Killer, a vile kidnapper and murderer of teenage girls. Spurred to his wicked ways due to a rejection by his childhood crush, Hartman began raping, torturing, and killing young girls in horrid ways, and used his position to cover them up. Ultimately planning to slaughter his brother's entire family, Hartman corrupts his nephew into becoming a killer like himself before executing his current police partner, trying to frame Father Crowder for the crimes, and welcome the demon Malephar into his body so as to kickstart a bloody reign of terror for decades to come.
• "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant": The titular dragon, having existed since time immemorial, forced mankind to feed it ten thousand souls, pumping it up to eighty and eventually one hundred thousand as it grows. On many occasions, the dragon would lock its victims up to waste away for years, while ransacking villages for either the delay of its deliveries or its own amusement, continuing to remain a looming presence over all mankind until the day it died.
• The Face, by Dean Koontz: Vladimir "Corky" Laputa is a Serial Killer and anarchist dedicated to overthrowing society and committing as much chaos as he possibly can. As a member of a ring of like-minded anarchists, Corky masterminds a scheme to kidnap a famous actor's son, slowly torture and starve him to death in a small chamber, and broadcast it to the world so they can see the boy's suffering. Corky regularly murders vagabonds and drifters, murders his co-conspirators to cover his tracks and locks a professor in the chambers he intends to use for the child before poisoning him fatally.
• The Facts of Life and Death, by Belinda Bauer: John Trick is a misogynistic killer who terrorizes the city of Limeburn as the ET Killer. His hatred of women beginning when his mother spent too much time dating men who could provide for them, the Killer grew to view her as nothing but a filthy whore, a mindset he then attributed to all women. Once losing his job, he begins killing women to make himself feel powerful simply because he's too lazy to find another job, meaning his wife Alison is the provider for his family, which makes him feel weak. The killer's method of murder is particularly vicious, as he forces the women he targets to strip then call their mothers on video chat, who he then forces to watch as he suffocates their daughters, cackling in glee at their pain. Even in his seemingly kind persona as ten-year-old Ruby's father, he is drilling his misogynistic mindset into the girl, causing her to despise women and even herself when she begins puberty. In the end, he flies into a rage when he discovers Ruby is not his biological daughter, and attempts to torture and kill her in front of Alison, murder Alison herself, then move on to her parents and continue his spree, with him practicing for Ruby's death by attempting to kill an infant in front of its mother.
• The Fade, by Demitria Lunetta: James "Jim" Pratt is Shannon's seemingly loving boyfriend, but is in truth a depraved Serial Killer. Having a lifelong lust for his sister Kaitlyn, Jim attempts to force himself on her, only for her to rightfully reject him out of disgust. Jim then murders her by having her Bound and Gagged and then walling her up alive. Jim then set about turning his obsessions to her three best friends, killing them too when they wouldn't live up to his expectations, being proud of how much effort it took to perform. Gaining an obsession with Shannon due to her possessing the looks of his sister and the other girls, he ingratiates himself into her life as her boyfriend, all the while planning to off her should she not live up to his impossible expectations. After Shannon's father finds out about his murders, he brutalizes him while planning to kill both him and Shannon after she rejects him. While he makes excuses and tries to blame his victims, ultimately Jim is just a self-entitled pervert who will never accept what a monster he really is.
• The Fairy Rebel: The Fairy Queen is the tyrannical ruler of fairykind who imposes draconian rules that govern how fairies eat, dress, have babies, and think, with her first command being they love only her and no one else. When Tiki and Wijic break her rules to help the human couple Jan and Charlie have a baby named Bindi, the Queen imprisons Tiki in a wasp nest and takes her magic away, leaving her to starve or be stung to death. Once Bindi is born, the Queen takes revenge on her eighth birthday by imprisoning Tiki and Wijic, draining their magic, and giving Bindi a magic necklace and twig that exaggerates her vices. Under the Queen's control, Bindi summons countless toys and is nearly crushed to death, and the Queen is barely stopped from killing Tiki, Wijic, and the humans with her wasps.
• False Memory: Dr. Mark Ahriman uses his status as a psychiatrist to mind rape his patients and use them however he sees fit. Some he sends to commit homicide and/or settle his personal vendettas, some he drives to creative suicide for his own entertainment and some he uses for other things. While most of his patients wind up "cured" (read: stripped of the phobia he himself planted in the first place), there's always a chance he'll decide they're more fun to destroy. If the patient is a pretty woman, she's probably screwed, in many ways. He gets away with it for twenty years before anyone properly catches him.
• Father Brown's "The Sign of the Broken Sword": The supposed noble war hero General Sir Arthur St. Clare was, in actuality, anything but. A venal coward, torturer, and slaver who sunk deeper and deeper into sin during his lifetime, St. Clare eventually outright murdered a fellow soldier who confronted him on his crimes. Simply to hide the body of the deceased soldier, St. Clare comes up with a treacherous plan to hide the body among hundreds of other corpses, and so deliberately leads all 800 soldiers in his own regiment into a battle he knows is a suicide mission. With the highest body count of any killer in the series, Clare's treachery is regarded as a particularly irredeemable type of evil even by the famously pious Father Brown.
• Fault Lines trilogy, by Tim Powers:
  • Last Call: Georges Leon is a sociopathic card player who will stop at nothing to gain immortality. Originally devising a way to body jack his own children, Leon successfully turned his eldest into a soulless puppet before attempting the same on his 5-year-old son Scott, planning to make even more children and do the same to them afterwards. When his wife shoots him in the groin and saves Scott, Leon creates a new method to steal others' souls and bodies by tricking them out of people during card games. Though he has to wait decades before collecting the souls, Leon also curses those who owe him with bad luck that leads to the ruination of their lives and the deaths of those around them. Along with murdering his way into becoming the "Fisher King" crime lord, Leon routinely orders the executions of any who would stand in his way, even the infant children of his targets to make sure they don't grow up to seek revenge. Leon ultimately plans to continuously steal the bodies of hapless card players and prolong his own life as long as possible, having zero true care or concern for anyone but himself, bar keeping loyal servants around to inflate his own ego.
  • Expiration Date: Sherman Oaks is one of the two main antagonists of the novel, and handily the more evil. A ghost hunter who both inhales the ghosts for himself and captures them to sell on the black market, Oaks has devoured thousands of ghosts over his centuries of immorally prolonged life, viewing each one as a tasty meal for him to consume. Not content with average ghosts, Oaks murders the artistically talented and inhales their ghosts, wanders military hospitals to steal the ghosts of dying soldiers, and drains newborns of their "ghost shells", parts of their psyche that break off for a few seconds due to the stress of birth, leaving the children with a large chunk of their personality missing as they grow up. In the present, Oaks catches wind of a powerful ghost, and, after brutally torturing and murdering a man and woman for information regarding it, begins tracking their son, Kootie, who now possesses the ghost, planning to kill the child then inhale the ghost all for himself, selling off his thousands of captured ghosts to fund his expedition. At the end of his rope due to withdrawal from not having inhaled a ghost recently, Oaks tries to kill everyone he can in the end, showing nothing but sadism and a sick curiosity for power all the way to his death.
• FBI Profiler Series, by Lisa Gardner:
  • The Perfect Husband: Jim Beckett, a brutal Serial Killer with an intense hatred of women, marries a young woman, whom he enjoys mentally abusing and occasionally raping. In his spare time, Beckett rapes, tortures and murders women, desecrating the bodies afterwards; in one case, he inserted a tree branch into one of his victims. Beckett even brags that upon the death of one, he went to visit her dying father in the hospital and told the man exactly what he'd done to his daughter. After he escapes from prison, Beckett kills several police officers and rapes and murders his fangirl accomplice. He later tortures a policeman to death with a knife and sets about trying to find his former wife who got him caught so he can slowly torture her to death as well.
  • The Third Victim: Richard Mann, real name Henry Hawkins, is an egomaniac who gets off on holding power over others. His crime, which he has done at least twice before, is to manipulate a troubled child until the child is utterly dependent upon him. He then has the child commit a school shooting, resulting in two deaths while Mann himself murders a teacher who will be mistaken for a victim of the rampage, where Mann can simply abandon his erstwhile apprentice. Mann threatens the shooter and his sister if they say anything. When the heroine, Rainie, gets too close, Mann sends the murdered teacher's father a sex tape of her and the principal so he'll kill the principal and Mann can take his time killing Rainie and then kill everyone else who knows about him before skipping town to continue his game.
• Felix Castor series:
  • The Devil You Know: Lukasz Damjohn, originally from the Balkans, established himself in England as a pimp and a slaver who has girls lured over from Eastern Europe and summarily enslaved, with "high earners" sent to high-class brothels while the others go to horrible ones where they can be brutalized and wasted, while addicted to drugs to ensure their dependence. Their "training" includes mental breaking, along with rape and occasional physical violence. When a girl is accidentally killed by a recruiter, Damjohn attempts to have Felix destroy the girl's ghost and send her to oblivion. He also has his personal exorcist summon up a succubus to devour Felix body and then his soul. When Felix gets too close to the truth, Damjohn has the dead girl's sister kidnapped to lure Felix out, sparing her only because he intends for her to make him money until she's too "wasted" to work any more.
  • Vicious Circle: Anton Fanke is the head of a Satanist church in America and desires Hell on Earth. Fanke's lover and right-hand woman seduced an exorcist, getting herself pregnant in an occult ritual so Fanke could raise the little girl as a sacrifice to the demon Asmodeus, also allowing Asmodeus access to the world to bring about destruction and ruin. Fanke managed to sacrifice the child, but when her father interfered, Asmodeus could not devour her soul and Felix unknowingly bound Asmodeus into a mortal host at the same time. Years later, Fanke has several people killed before murdering his old rival and pinning the blame on Felix, before preparing to finish the sacrifice by having Asmodeus eat the soul of the girl he murdered.
  • Asmodeus himself (who also appears in later books), once freed from the asylum he was locked in while in the body of Felix's best friend, slaughters everyone in the near vicinity, and proceeds to hunt down everyone close or formerly close to his host body, whereupon he mutilates them before murdering them; he even travels to Macedonia to personally slaughter his host's brother on death row while telling said host to "count down to zero" so he'll see everyone he loves killed. Asmodeus plants wards to steadily weaken the self control of Felix's succubus ally Juliet (which could put any man around her in mortal danger) and kidnaps Juliet's human wife with promises to rape and torture her to make Juliet angry enough to attempt to devour Asmdoeus, allowing Asmodeus to free himself while his host is eaten. During one of his murders Asmodeus even kills a nearby homeless man just for his shoes. He also uses Exact Words to torment Felix during an exorcism, preventing him from saving the mortal host. While angry at being bound to the mortal host, Asmodeus had previously been evil and sadistic, even to other demons; he worked with Fanke to bring about Hell on Earth.
• The Fell of Dark: Grigori Rasputin is an ambitious Con Man turned vampire who desires to bring forth Azazel into the world to create a dystopia where vampires will kill or enslave all of humanity. In order to gain followers, Rasputin preys on people with insecurities or vulnerabilities before twisting them into his disposable slaves and soldiers. Attacking a club that protagonist Auggie is partying in, Rasputin doesn't care about anyone caught in the crossfire and kidnaps and tortures Auggie's parents to draw him out. Intending to have all bow to him, Rasputin threatens to kill Auggie's parents with a blowtorch before ordering the deaths of everyone when things go wrong.
• Ferals Series: Gideon Marshall, known better as the Spinning Man, is a sinister spider feral who seeks to take over the city of Blackstone by any means necessary. Instigating a war between the ferals in an event known as the Black Summer, the Spinning Man murdered his childhood friend Elizabeth Carmichael and her husband, and would've killed their five-year-old son Caw had the crows not taken him to safety. The Spinning Man's evil persisted even in death, as he attempted to torture Caw and Lydia when they entered the Land of the Dead to force them to return him to life. Seemingly destroyed by Caw's crows, the Spinning Man returns to the mortal realm by possessing Caw's friend Selina. Now going by the name the White Widow, the Spinning Man engineers a new crime wave, while simultaneously tormenting Caw via personal attacks, turning his allies against him and murdering one of Caw's crow companions, all the while draining Selina of her life force so that he may return in physical form. Eventually luring Caw back to his old home, the Spinning Man fully drains Selina of her life force, killing her before Caw's eyes, before promptly murdering Caw himself.
• Fevre Dream:
  • Damon Julian is an ancient, powerful vampire who enjoys preying on the young and beautiful. Most vampires are slaves to the Red Thirst and don't enjoy killing humans to satisfy themselves, but Julian is so old he no longer feels the hunger at all. All his murders are committed because he enjoys it. Julian delights in tormenting and toying with his victims and keeps his human servant, Sour Billy Tipton, loyal with promises to make him a vampire—a joke for Julian's amusement as vampires must be born instead of turned. Julian has Sour Billy, who has been nothing but effective in keeping Julian alive and concealed, drink human blood and eat human flesh with false promises. When he learns another vampire named Joshua has created a serum to save vampires from the thirst, Julian steals control of the vampires from him and crushes a baby's skull in front of Joshua just to prove a point about how he can do anything he wants.
  • Sour Billy Tipton himself is a vicious slaver who swears allegiance to Damon Julian under the illusion Julian will make him a vampire. Sour Billy was long a brutal racist who abused slaves under his watch, going so far as to spite a man who disapproved of his cruelty by beating and raping a slave atop the man's grave. Upon becoming Julian's servant, Sour Billy regularly buys, kidnaps, or lures innocents to the waiting maws of Julian and his vampiric associates, bleeding and handing the victims off to be torn apart by his master. Sour Billy becomes the operator of the Fevre Dream when Julian takes command of it, and uses his authority to burn alive several of the staff; enslave and torture the black people on the boat; and become a cannibal who devours the meat and blood of several people in his quest for immortality. The ultimate enabler of Julian's evil who helped his master kill hundreds of people for his own selfish gain, Sour Billy attempts to murder Julian in the end for his inability to make Sour Billy into the vampire god he's always wanted to be.
• Final Destination series:
  • Destination Zero: Sean Reilly is one of the three masterminds behind the South Hill Metroline bombing. A former Irish terrorist exiled from his country, Reilly met up with freelance terrorists Dan Hoffman and Leon Khalid and conspired to force the American government to give them $100 million. After setting off a bomb on a subway train that killed almost forty people, Reilly gave false demands for the FBI to release various imprisoned terrorists around the world and to deposit the $100 million into offshore bank accounts. When Reilly and his allies are caught, Reilly leaves his allies to die in a shootout, and later kills multiple civilians and police officers in his attempts to flee from the police.
  • Looks Could Kill: Delbert Davis is the long-deceased father and grandfather of William "Brut" Simms, and a hideously mundane evil in contrast with Death itself. A controlling and predatory family man, Davis would try to isolate his family for years, growing obsessed with his oldest daughter, Becky. Regularly raping Becky until she became pregnant with William, when she escaped, Davis would prey on his next daughter, impregnating her as well. When Becky becomes engaged and has a reunion with her family, Davis would furiously slaughter his family, including children and infants. Davis would then go on a shooting spree, killing several people before being killed by police. While William was the sole survivor of his family, Delbert's actions were the initial catalyst for William growing up into the sociopath he is in the present day.
• Final Girls, by Mira Grant: Marline is a sociopathic hitwoman who is sent to find Dr. Jennifer Webb's technology and retrieve it. Marline is known for killing people brutally and unnecessarily on her jobs, and when she invades Jennifer's lab, she proceeds to massacre all of the technicians there, before torturing Jennifer mentally via the latter's own technology to induce a heart attack. After this fails, she attempts to murder Jennifer and torture her more.
• The Final Girl Support Group: Skye Elliott, son of Dr. Carol Elliott, is a misogynist who arranges the death of the first Final Girl Adrienne to help set up the others. Having groomed and corrupted the teenager Stephanie and disguising her as a "Final Girl" to win the trust of heroine Lynette all so he can gain access to the camp Adrienne founded and slaughter everyone there out of pure spite for his mother by murdering the victims she had helped.
• A Fine Evening in Hell, by Kristopher Triana: Willem Trout is an elderly White supremacist, but when criminals Max and Bastian come to him for help, they and their hostage Heather learn how monstrous he is. Not only a murderer who burns a corrupt police officer alive and murders those who displease him, Trout is a predator who lures in teenage girls and takes them hostage where he rapes them and pimps them out to perverted clients. When Heather discovers this, he plans to rape her as well, only reacting to the death of his lover Faith with intent to turn Heather into a replacement Sex Slave.
• The Fionavar Tapestry:
  • Rakoth Maugrim, the Unraveler, is a deity from outside of Fionavar who loathes the world he had no part in making. Long ago, Maugrim arrived in Fionavar and began corrupting what he could with the intention of annihilating the world entirely. After freeing himself, Maugrim captures the heroine Jennifer and, vowing to take everything from her, rapes her, while taking the forms of her father and lovers to destroy all happiness she may have. Aware his rape has gotten her pregnant with his son, thus binding him to Fionavar, Maugrim gives Jennifer to a servant of his to rape and torture for a night as long as he kills her at the end of it. When Jennifer is saved, Maugrim later inflicts a brutal winter on Fionavar, killing many by freezing and starvation, while using his forces to ravage the land. When he meets his son Darien, Maugrim is gleeful about a chance to murder him, vowing to not only to kill him but to unmake him utterly as to regain his invulnerability.
  • Metran, First Mage to the High King of Brennin, at first seems to be a harmless, senile old man. Revealed as a servant of Rakoth Maugrim, assisting his master in returning from imprisonment, Metran arranges the massacre of heroine Jennifer's soldiers to deliver her to Maugrim to be raped and murdered. In the second book of the trilogy, Metran obtains the Cauldron of Kath Meigol, powering it by draining the lives of hundreds of minions, resurrecting them and killing them again to create a killing frost over the lands that dooms many people to die via cold and starvation. Another land suffers a killing rain from Metran's powers, poisoning and killing almost everyone within its borders. When finally killed, Metran is attempting to shift the death rain over to the High Kingdom to wipe it off the map, driven only by his greed, hunger for power and hatred towards Fionavar.
• Fire Bringer: Sgorr is a psychotic and sadistic deer who loves nothing but power and pointless killings. Once a member of the Herne's Herd, Sgorr one day became fascinated by violence after having observed the human world. Wanting to commit an evil act himself, he kidnapped a human infant, then brutally killing him and eating his heart. He admitted that he believed that by killing him he would be stronger then humans. After having been banished by the Herd, Sgorr teams up with Drail, the leader of a rival herd, becoming the chief of the Draila, an infamous military unit. When he finds out that Rannoch, the newborn son of his longtime rival Brechin, carries a prophecy who could lead to Drail's downfall, Sgorr sends the Draila to kill him. While Rannoch menages to escape, Brechin is killed while his mate Eloin is forced to become part of Sgorr's private harem. After having discovered that Drail is more interested in ruling, Sgorr, who prefers conquest and bloodshed, kills him by pushing him off a cliff, before ordering all of Drail's sons to be killed as well. Under his commands, the herd starts conquering other herds by force and killing anyone who tries to oppose. His last act of evil is trying to kill the now grown up Rannoch by crushing him with a boulder.
• Firefly:
  • Big Damn Hero: Hunter Covington is a sadist to rival Adelai Niska. Working with a remnant faction of Browncoats to trap, try, and hang "traitors" to the Independent cause, Covington has no problem with the fact that these people are to be summarily executed by a Kangaroo Court, and stops by to watch Mal's planned execution because watching a man die by hoist hanging is his idea of a shiny evening's entertainment. He also keeps at least one bondswoman, who he plans to kill slowly by serious knife play for informing on him to the Feds. His neutrality during the war is explicitly because it was more profitable not to choose a side.
  • The Magnificent Nine: Elias Vandal leads the Scourers, a band of vicious marauders on the arid world of Thetis. Vandal claims to have once been a Reaver, and while some doubt this claim due to the fantasicalness of it, they have to admit he fits right in with Reaver ethics, such as they are. Vandal and his Scourers typically bully small towns into giving the Scourers the rights to the town's water wells, forcing the townsfolk to buy their own water back from the Scourers. If a village resists, the Scourers will cut off all avenues of escape and destroy all access to water, leaving the people to slowly die of thirst and desperation. Anyone who crosses Vandal will be tortured to death, even his own Scourers. But the icing on this detestable cake is that Vandal, and by extension his Scourers, have a preference for very young women, carrying away any attractive teenage girls to their camp to be "rut dolls". That they're always on the lookout for new ones indicates their tastes run to violent and brutal, and the girls who fall into the Scourers' clutches don't last long.
• The Fireman: The "Marlboro Man" is the leader of the Cremation Crews, which massacre people infected with Dragonscale out of bigotry. When the Marlboro Man discovers Camp Wyndham, he has the person who brought him and his Cremation Crew there killed before his Crew begins slaughtering the residents; the Marlboro Man himself shoots Renée's Love Interest in front of her before trying to murder her.
• The First Law series:
  • Bayaz, First of the Magi, at first appears to be a kindly, if grumpy, old wizard-mentor archetype. The truth is far more sinister. Bayaz has been the secret puppet master of The Union for centuries, sending countless men to pointless death against his Rival Turned Evil Khalul. While Khalul is a threat with his incredible magic power and legion of Eaters, those who have gained sinister powers upon eating human flesh, Bayaz manages to be far worse. He sadistically dominates the new king when the young man tries to stand up to him, revealing him as nothing more than an expendable Son of a Whore; starts a peasant uprising which claims many lives; leaves his supposed friend, Yulwei, to die when the latter learns too much; and when Bayaz uses the magical equivalent of a WMD that wipes out a huge faction of his own men and thousands of civilians, Bayaz's only response is a satisfied grin and to say "It works", not caring that another of his brother's disciples was caught in it. Bayaz even sabotages any attempt at peace that would save countless lives by killing the crown prince and framing an innocent Gurkish ambassador for the murder, just so he can keep waging war on Khalul. It is then revealed that Bayaz was the traitor and murdered his own lover, and it's implied that he also killed his master, Juvens, and Khalul fell to darkness to bring Bayaz to justice. It's further implied Bayaz might even be a cannibal himself and has no compunction using the Eaters for his own benefit.
  • The Heroes: Stranger-Come-Knocking, originally named Pip, is a brutish Northman giant with a fascination for civilization, who proclaims himself chieftain of all that lies east of the Crinna. A savage tactician who lures Governor Meed's army away from his command post so as to ambush and slaughter the dozens of servants, chefs, and other unarmed staff at the outpost, Stranger-Come-Knocking takes Finree dan Brock and Aliz dan Brint as hostages and beats one of his own men into a bloody pulp just for touching Finree. Stranger-Come-Knocking plans to turn Finree and Aliz into breeding slaves to give him "civilized children" as he boasts to have done to entire tribes' worth of women in the past, and he eventually betrays King of the Northmen Black Dow and arranges for Calder to take the throne. Stranger-Come-Knocking is revealed to have been an agent of Bayaz the entire time who deliberately escalated and bloodied the war in the North before turning on Dow for Bayaz's schemes. Stranger-Come-Knocking shows himself to be truly vile even by Northmen standards, a traitor to his own people who will go to any lengths to get what he wants.
  • Red Country: Grega Cantliss is a bandit who owes money to bandit Papa Ring. Setting on the frontier, Cantliss murders numerous innocents to enslave over twenty children to sell to the Dragon People of Ashranc. Murdering one child who tries to escape, Cantliss believes he is selling the children to be violated or cannibalized, unaware the Dragon People merely seek to adopt them. Frequently abusing his lover Bee, Cantliss also tries to lead Nicomo Cosca and his mercenaries to slaughter the Dragon People for money and burn Ashranc to ashes.
  • The Age of Madness trilogy:
    • Judge, one of the leaders of the Great Change and mistress of the ferocious Burners, is a wild and sadistic adjudicator whose verdict is always guilty. Having numerous prisoners hanged in Valbeck with areas under her control devolving into savagery and lawlessness, Judge attempts to burn the city down upon fleeing and later helps to capture Adua. Industrializing mass murder in her show trials, countless innocents and even her own allies are tried for fictitious crimes. Judge plans to implement such trials all over the Union and has dozens to hundreds condemned a day, with each tossed from the Tower of Chains to dash upon the stones below.
    • Lord Fedor dan Isher is a corrupt, self-serving member of the Open Council, who schemes outright treachery against the kingdom. A brutal land baron who forces many families into the streets under threat of death down to the children, Isher grows annoyed at his own funds being depleted for the sake of the kingdom, so he decides to stage a civil war to secure himself power. Isher tricks his own ally Wetterlant into getting himself hanged so that Isher can frame it as an "injustice" committed by the crown, manipulating the idiotically ambitious Leo dan Brock into treachery. After organizing a massive army that Leo leads into bloody war at Stoffenbeck, Isher quickly abandons thousands of his allies to die to save his own skin, then weasels his way back into an alliance with King Orso to fight the Burners. Once their mutual foe is defeated, however, Isher immediately works with Leo to turn on Orso, kill him and many of his loyalists, and take over the Union for themselves. Isher then promptly betrays Leo to throw in with Savine instead, always valuing what serves himself best above all else.
• The First Victim, by J.B. Lynn: The "Baby Doll Strangler"-—actually the father-son duo of Oliver and Billy O'Neill-—are perverse serial killers who kidnap teenage girls to torture and rape them, before strangling them to death and leaving their bodies with lollipops jammed in their orifices. Billy, in actuality the cousin of Bailey O'Neill, seeks the latter's childhood crush Emily Wright, with Oliver kidnapping Emily and keeping her captive to molest her at his whim. After Emily escapes, Billy lures Emily back by engineering an accident that almost kills her father, as Oliver and he murder, rape and kidnap girls, even murdering Bailey's comatose sister—-a previous victim of their attacks—-and even murdering their own mother/grandmother.
• Five Nights at Freddy's franchise:
  • The Silver Eyes; The Twisted Ones; The Fourth Closet: William Afton, aka Dave Miller, was the co-founder of both Fredbear's Family Diner and Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Unable to deal with the stress in his life, he turned to the life of a Serial Killer to relieve it. Starting off by murdering the child of his business partner Henry, Afton later lured five kids backstage, killed them, and stuffed their bodies inside the animatronics, causing them to become possessed by their spirits. Later, while working as a security guard at a mall, he notices an android based off Henry's daughter Charlotte along with her six friends, and decides to try and kill them For the Evulz. He kidnaps Charlotte's friend Carlton and places him in a springlock suit, gleefully telling him that if he makes one wrong move, the suit will slowly crush him to death and his spirit will be unable to pass on. He later kills an officer and takes Charlotte hostage when the group tries to escape. Returning as Springtrap, Afton sends out animatronics to kill Charlotte and her friends out of revenge for causing his death. It's also revealed that he reduced the animatronics to their endoskeletons and mashed them together, keeping all of the souls in excruciating agony.
  • Fazbear Frights: Eleanor is a demonic mechanical being who serves as the true mastermind of the events of the series. A monstrous Serial Killer who feeds off the agony of her victims, Eleanor is responsible for murdering dozens of victims in grotesque manners. In her first appearance in the series, Eleanor mutilates and murders a young girl named Sarah who had helped her to steal her organic body parts. The mastermind to many of the grisly murders to occur in the series, Eleanor has decapitated a teenage girl through an animatronic; driven a woman insane and to death; and traps the soul of a deceased boy so he can experience his organs being removed. Each of her victims' souls is trapped in her ball pit where they're forced to experience their horrific fates over and over again. Reviving and empowering child serial murderer William Afton, Eleanor is responsible for him causing mass death and chaos through the series and helps empower him to become an amalgamation monster of animatronics that threatens the entire city. Ultimately, Eleanor intends to gain the power of "Remnant", planning to use it to superempower herself and spread suffering across the planet.
• "Flanaganverse":
  • Ranger's Apprentice:
    • The Icebound Land: Lord Deparnieux, one of many warlords ruling over pockets of territory in the lawless country of Gallica, is a petty thug who doesn't pretend his reign is anything but one of terror. Deparnieux searches for any excuse possible to terrorize innocents, forcing a servant to pick a punishment for a cook who served cold vegetables; when given the option of flogging, Deparnieux opts to flog the servant and have the cook left to die in a cage. Deparnieux adores the cages, having dozens of subjects caged up and left outside to be pecked to death by birds for any reason he can think of, most of which he cheerfully admits can be boiled down to "displeasing him". Deparnieux toys with and murders a young man whose elderly parents Deparnieux randomly murdered, and tries to goad the noble Ranger Halt into a similar duel solely so Deparnieux has an excuse to kill him.
    • The Kings of Clonmel & Halt's Peril: Tennyson is the leader of the Outsiders, a Scam Religion that extorts riches out of innocent people by pretending their god protects them from raiders that are secretly under the Outsiders' control. Tennyson regularly has villages annihilated, leaving at most a few survivors to spread the word and sometimes none whatsoever to illustrate what would happen if he isn't able to "intervene" in an attack. Tennyson assassinates King Ferris after Horace makes a fool out of him; tries everything to dispose of Horace from drugs to rigged duels; murders an innocent family of farmers; and finally abandons his own men to die in his pathetic attempt to escape and abscond with his ill-gotten riches. Despite his appearance as a holy man, Tennyson was nothing more than a greedy crook who thought he deserved everything the world had to offer.
  • Brotherband: Zavac is the vicious captain of the Raven, a Magyran pirate vicious even by the standards of his people, with around 200 ships slaughtered, plundered and robbed by him and his crew. Debuting by massacring a Skandian fleet and leaving a man and his young nephew to drown after he promises to save the boy, Zavac steals the Andomal, a precious treasure of the Skandians, and afterwards slaughters an unarmed, peaceful ship of traders, gruesomely torturing its captain to death. Finding the traders with a cache of emeralds, Zavac heads to the source city, Limmat, razing and massacring his way through the city and enslaving the populace to drain their emerald mine dry. When the city is liberated with him, Zavac abandons his close allies to die.
• Flesh and Silver, by Stephen L. Burns: Brother Fist is the dictator of Ananke. Having taken over the moon and constructed its religion around himself, Fist subjects the populace to oppression, slavery, sickness and death to keep power, but also for the sick thrill of watching them suffer. Enslaving the Bergmann Surgeon Marchey to save his life when he is dying of cancer, the ruthless Fist gleefully remarks how any cure is only for himself and will be withheld from anyone beneath them. The worst deed of Fist's is his right-hand woman Scylla, real name Angel, whose mind he warped and reshaped until she was his loyal bodyguard and killer, which Fist proved by having her flay her own mother alive.
• Flesh Welder, by Ronald Kelly: General Jeremiah Payne is the leader of a group of roving brigands in the guise of military authority who prey upon the survivors of a desolated humanity. Dr. Rourke, the titular doctor, treats a young child who relates how Payne murdered his father and raped his mother in the midst of forcibly conscripting men for warfare. A vile, disgusting Politically Incorrect Villain who carries around the ears of his victims, Payne, upon his debut, Payne proves his reputation by snidely blowing out the brains of a lethally injured woman Rourke is operating on to make his more trivial wounds Rourke's priority. Payne, horribly injured after fatally dismembering a child to terrorize the populace, is left in Rourke's hands whereupon he awakens to a horrifying yet richly deserved fate.
• Flickers, by Arthur Slade: Absalom Cecil is a mysterious, wealthy film producer in the Silent Age of Hollywood seeking to make the world's first sound film for his own nefarious purposes. Responsible for sacrificing a part of himself to bring the hornet-like zebûbs into the world, Cecil uses them to murder an upstart farmer after initial attempts to retrieve his two infant children Isabelle and Beatrice fail, fully intending on murdering the latter in the process and only sparing her to use as a tool once she inadvertently survives. Raising the children under subtle emotional abuse and torturing them when they get out of line, Cecil sets up an orphanage for the pure purpose of picking children to feed himself—even comparing it to a slaughterhouse—and only relents when he's found out, murdering the orphan who gets too much detail and massacring all of the orphans himself before using his servants as an alternative food source. Callously murdering any other threats to his plot, be it with his own hands or through the zebûbs, Cecil ultimately reveals he's a Humanoid Abomination from outside reality who seeks to let the rest of his kind into the world with the implied intention of devouring all humanity, attempting to force Beatrice to watch as Isabelle is devoured before her eyes by his eldritch "twin." Unflinchingly ruthless in pursuing his goal and willing to raise two children for years at a time purely to use them as tools, Cecil is an unfeeling monster barely able to pass as a human being.
• Floor Four, by A. Lopez Jr.: The Mangler, Henry David Coleman, was once a vicious Serial Killer with the gruesome deaths of 8 people on his hands. However, after dying in a hospital as the result of a shootout, The Mangler's spirit continued to haunt the building, harming and killing as many people as possible. When a group of teenagers throw a party in the now-abandoned building, The Mangler murders one of the kids along with Jack, the only man capable of keeping The Mangler's spirit inside the hospital. Haunting a young boy named Brandon for months afterward, The Mangler ultimately killed the boy's nanny, kidnapped him, Mind Raped him, then tried to force him to become his puppet, resulting in the death of another boy. Regaining enough of his power, The Mangler kills numerous other people, including a child, then plans to continue psychologically tormenting Brandon into insanity. The Mangler is the result of a homicidal lunatic gaining ethereal form, and all the powers it entails.
• The Forgotten Legion: The fugitivarius Scaevola is a political opportunist and cruel thug introduced attempting to capture a renegade slave given sanctuary by Decimus Brutus's mistress, the former prostitute Fabiola. After being repulsed, Scaevola begins murdering her subordinates and eventually invades her home when she is away, killing and selling her slaves, murdering her soldiers and torturing the original runaway slave to death to get information. Upon locating Fabiola, Scaevola tries to rape her before being driven off, and even castrates a boy just for annoying him. Later allying himself with Marc Antony, Scaevola takes to murdering supporters of the Republican faction in Rome's civil war, and when Fabiola takes over her old brothel, Scaevola orders a blockade of it to prevent her from getting any business before stalking Fabiola and stabbing a friend of hers in the Temple of Orcus, an unthinkable crime in Roman society. Finally, Scaevola invades the brothel to kill everyone inside, with intent of having the prostitutes raped by his men so he can rape Fabiola himself and torture her to death.
• Forty Words for Sorrows: Eric Fraser, with the help of his girlfriend and partner-in-crime Edie Soames, kidnaps, tortures and outright murders teenagers. His first victim was the thirteen-year-old Katie Pine, whom he ditched in a mine shaft after he fatally tortured her. His second victim, Todd Curry was filmed on a videotape that showed Eric hitting Todd in the head with a hammer until Todd's death. His third and final murder was Billy La Belle, who was Buried Alive. One day, when eighteen-year-old Keith London visits town, he meets up with the seemingly-nice couple Eric and Edie, who invite him to their home, where Eric drugs him and ties him up, planning to find a place where he can film his death. One night, when a burglar called Woody, breaks into their house and tries to free Keith, Eric arrives and shoots Woody dead. Eric only pretends to love the low-self-esteem Edie and even describes her as nothing more than a "reptile pet" to help him with his murderous schemes. When Keith tries to break loose and holds Edie hostage, Eric has no qualms with knocking her down with a crowbar in order to catch Keith and kill him.
• The Fourth Reich, by Robert D. Van Kamper: President Nikolai Bulgakov, leader of the New United Empire and the Fourth Reich, is the second coming of The Antichrist as the cloned reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Posing as an ambitious but honest politician seeking to unify the world, Bulgakov murdered several people from his early years and even caused a plane crash to kill a single writer, and considers inciting a Civil War in Russia to overthrow President Vladimir Katanov. Not satisfied with his position as Prime Minister, Bulgakov assassinates his friend and the man's disabled father to frame the double murder as a political act ordered by Katanov. After staging a successful coup by poisoning Katanov and assuming the Presidency, Bulgakov buys most of the world's grain supplies and allows nations to suffer with wars and famine to force more countries to join the NUE, blowing up the Vatican shortly after revealing his true identity to the world to retaliate against a Cardinal who opposed him. Now the dictator of his own One World Order, Bulgakov kills millions of people in a continuation of The Holocaust and televises the public execution of a resistance leader, his actions leading to a wave of disasters and diseases around the world in the form of divine judgement.
• Fox Craft: The Mage, real name Keeveny, is a former Elder Fox who fell into darkness and treachery. Seeking to gain ultimate power by unleashing the White Fox, uncaring to the untold amounts of destruction this will wreak, the Mage uses his mastery over the foxcraft ability of pleaching—weaving two minds together—to strip entire masses of foxes of their free will, converting them into his unwilling slave army known as Taken. Having personally massacred Siffrin's entire skulk in the past, the Mage sends the Taken to terrorize the land, converting more foxes into his army and killing those who resist or are of no use, all the while decaying the Wildlands by draining it of its life force, or maa. He tricks Haiki into betraying Isla and her friends by offering to release his family, who in truth are already dead, nearly resulting in all their deaths. It is later revealed that he has been abducting young foxes with exceptional maa, planning to use them to unleash the White Fox upon the world.
• Fragment: Thatcher Redmond originally comes across as just a Smug Snake with a nihilistic worldview, but only pages after we meet him, we find out that he killed his love child to avoid paying child support. He drips with contempt for humanity, and when faced with the incredibly deadly Henders life forms, he sees the opportunity to advance his plans. He leaves his fellow scientists to die on Henders' Island, does everything he can to eliminate the intelligent and gentle Hendropods, and releases five Henders Rats onto the ship with the intention of unleashing them on an unprepared humanity.
• Frankenstein:
  • Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Dr. Victor Frankenstein himself (now known as Victor Helios), the Big Bad of the first trilogy, is a chillingly evil mad scientist obsessed with creating a new "Master Race" to replace humanity. Having abused and abandoned his first creation Deucalion, Frankenstein creates new and improved models that see him as their father and their God, also creating wives for himself only to inevitably grow bored with them or enraged at a minor defect before murdering and replacing them. Indulging in pointless cruelties, such as eating baby mice he boils alive just to experience the height of sensation, Frankenstein plots to wipe out all normal human beings and replace them with his own "improved" race to reign over them as a god forever.
  • The Shadow of Frankenstein: This tie-in novel to the Universal "Frankenstein" films features Jack the Ripper. During his original killing spree, he used his victims' wombs in a potion to grant him immortality. Initially he felt remorse over his first murder, but he immediately embraced his enjoyment of killing (as otherwise the spell wouldn’t work). About half a century later, the effects of the potion are wearing off, so Jack continues killing and mutilating several prostitutes. Jack meets the Monster, who had befriended some of the women. As the Monster desperately tries to save Jack's dying victim, Jack taunts him. Discovering the Monster's near-indestructible body, he kidnaps Dr. Frankenstein's wife Elizabeth and holds her hostage to force Frankenstein to create him a new body like that, so he can live forever. He also stabs a man who tries to expose him, cuts off the foot of Frankenstein's best friend and leaves it as a "souvenir" to give Frankenstein a ransom note written in blood. Out of any character in the Frankenstein series, Jack the Ripper truly is a monster.
  • Monster: A Novel of Frankenstein: In this retelling of Frankenstein, the original novel's titular character and his libertine co-conspirator are worse in this novel than their original counterparts, from the original novel and real life respectively.
    • Victor Frankenstein is a medical student turned necromancer and alchemist, driven by the belief that as a powerful man he can do whatever he wants. Framing the young apothecary Friedrich Hoffmann for the vicious murder of the latter's fiancée, Johanna Klemmen, resulting in Friedrich's execution, Frankenstein uses Friedrich's brain to construct a patchwork being using the dark arts, having previously trapped a woman he calls "Sophie" in her own severed head with her teeth and larynx removed. Abandoning Friedrich when his lair is compromised, and having created a magical bond between them, Frankenstein takes advantage of Friedrich's frenzied search for him to abduct hundreds of youths. Confronted by Friedrich, Frankenstein eventually reveals that the captives will be part of a performance involving various hideous acts of torture and murder. Frankenstein also reveals that he and his guests have full control over Friedrich and allows his female guests to rape the latter. Pressuring Friedrich into compliance by promising to bring Johanna back, Frankenstein expresses a morbid curiosity whether Johanna will still love Friedrich in his new form.
    • The Marquis de Sade is a depraved playwright and novelist who acts as a co-conspirator to Victor Frankenstein. Shortly after he is introduced, the Marquis sexually abuses the sapient severed head "Sophie" with Frankenstein's permission. Upon returning, the Marquis expresses disdain for Friedrich's conscience, expressing his intentions to force Friedrich to perform sex acts as part of the performance where hundreds of youths are sexually abused, tortured, and killed in various horrific ways onstage. Initially intending to rape Friedrich's "bride", the Marquis is only prevented from doing so due to Frankenstein's pragmatism.
  • The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein: Victor Frankenstein is in truth an obsessed sociopath who believes Elizabeth Lavenza belongs to him. Having created the monster Adam, Victor is revealed to have been murdering men and women for "spare parts", having mutilated and left his old friend Henry Clerval to die in order to take his eyes for Adam. Victor throttles his own child brother William to death to frame the governess Justine in irritation for her friendship with Elizabeth and to take Justine's body for his experiments. Victor attempts to experiment on Elizabeth to make her his perfect woman, willing to slaughter all in his way to make this happen.
• Frankenstorm, by Ray Garton: Ramsey von Pohle, aka Ram, was once an aggressive bully to Andy Rodriguez but grew up to become a cop and a bigoted, ruthless psychopath. When Ram found out that his wife had cheated on him with another man, he murdered her and took out his anger on his children by murdering them. In the present, he came of as a kind person who wanted to help Andy get his son, Donny, back from his drug-using, ex-wife, Jodi. When they arrived at her house to get him back, Ram took the opportunity to kill everyone at the party, including Jodi, calling them trash that can never be reformed. While talking with Andy, he admits and alludes to having killed many people in the past, including his high school teacher, grandfather, and high school coach for petty and unknown reasons. After arriving at a house to deal with a situation and finding the house itself destroyed by the hurricane, Ram ignored the screams from the children and others who needed his help, leaving them out there in the hurricane. When he reunited with Andy and Donny, he murdered the cop that picked him up from the house, and when things started to not go his way when Andy and Donny tried to get away from him, he killed a man, another cop, and nearly killed them both. Having been responsible for many murders and feeling no remorse, Ram reveals himself as a truly vile individual.
• The Freakshow, by Bryan Smith: Miss Monique is the leader and the most dangerous of the extradimensional creatures called the Freaks, and direct servant of the Dark One. The most vicious of an entire race of nightmarish sadists, Monique leads the Freaks to torture and slaughter the populations of entire small towns in every twisted way imaginable, sparing the survivors only to be made the slaves of the Freaks' deranged pleasures. Monique has savaged thousands of towns throughout history, entrapping the souls of the millions she kills in an ever-screaming chorus within the Freaks' own dimension. Monique makes a regular hobby of personally torturing, raping, and enslaving everyone that comes in her path, using her powerful Psychic Powers to dominate the minds of people to make them do whatever humiliating, atrocious things she wants; upon coming to Pleasant Hills, Monique horrifically tortures Heather Campbell and her fellow survivor Josh, forcing Heather to cannibalize living people and watch as Monique leads droves of people to be killed in a twisted carnival for her own amusement. Monique finally intends to possess Heather and, as she does with all her hosts, keep her alive and aware to see all the atrocity Monique will do through her hands until Monique authors the death of all humanity.
• Friday the 13th: The Jason Strain, by Christa Faust: Caleb Carson is a Corrupt Corporate Executive whose pride and joy is Xtreme Elimination 2, a reality show in which Condemned Contestants are pitted against each other and "special guest" Jason Voorhees in the jungles of South America. After Jason is kidnapped from the "set" and unintentionally given the ability to spread a zombie plague by a group of scientists, Carson becomes psychotically obsessed with salvaging his series, going as far as having his mercenaries massacre the facility that had developed a cure for the virus so that he can abduct Jason and the other remaining competitors from it and start over in America, not caring that Jason was still highly contagious and could potentially end all life on the planet if not given the vaccine. Carson afterward reveals that he had framed "star contestant" Butch Malone for the double homicide that landed him on death row, knowing that the only way he could get Malone to agree to compete on Xtreme Elimination 2 was by ruining his life and leaving him with no other option, with the worst part being that Butch never had a chance of winning anyway and was set up from the start to die a "dramatic" death in the final round of the game.
• Fright Night (1985) novels:
  • The Novelization, by John Skipp and Craig Spector, based partly on the original script: Jerry Dandridge lacks his movie counterpart's saving graces. A sadistic vampire who makes a point to "savor each death", Jerry marks his arrival in town by feeding on, murdering, and mutilating three victims, attempting to kill Charley for discovering that he's a vampire. Hunting down Charley and his friends and turning "Evil" Ed with the false promise that he would be granted the power to stand up against his bullies, Dandridge kills two bouncers for getting in his way; rapes and turns Amy; and locks Charley in a room with the latter, giving him the choice to either kill her or be turned by her. After Charley's escape and the death of Dandridge's servant, Dandridge makes one last-ditch effort to finish off Charley and Peter before sunrise.
  • Origins, by Tom Holland & A. Jack Ulrich: Vlad Tepes is the man responsible for the turn of Jerry Dandridge to evil. Centuries ago, when Jerry was a heroic prince named Gellert, Vlad called him to fight in his armies. Vlad's habit of torture and impaling hundreds disgusted Jerry, who begged leave to return home, only for Vlad to slaughter his entire domain for sheer spite.
• From the New World: These two Predecessor Villains necessitate the brutal culling system of the present day "Ethics Committee":
  • The Emperor of Delight was a self-obsessed monster who made his entire populace clap during his coronation, immolating the first 200 to stop with his Psychic Powers. With his terrified population having to celebrate for three days in torment, after his passing, he was forever remembered as the "Emperor of Eternal Screams".
  • "Boy K" was a psychopathic "fiend" who used his powers to slaughter his fellow villagers. Starting with his teacher and classmates, K returned to the village and caused a bloodbath with many deaths. Immune to the "death feedback" programmed into humans to prevent them from attacking each other, K was delighted in massacring people unable to protect themselves from him.
• Full Tilt: "Cassandra" is the mysterious, sadistic entity to blame whenever "something horrible happens in the world-something senseless". A creature who has prowled Earth since the day of the Minoans—one of the civilizations she ended—Cassandra has a special fancy for leaving no survivors in the disasters she creates. A horrible bus accident that leaves only one survivor, Blake, attracts Cassandra's eye and causes her to stalk him until high school. There Cassandra spirits away his younger brother to lure him to her Amusement Park of Doom: a nightmare powered by the eternal torment of thousands of children. The luckiest are merely forced to be slaves for the living, interactive worlds the amusement park consist of; others are trapped within the halls of the park, or literally fused into the machinery of the park itself in everlasting states of labor. Cassandra is a devious predator who does this all for one reason: her amusement.
• Fusion Fire: Dru Polar is one of the top-level leaders of the Shuhr. Polar is in charge of training up the teenage "potential adults", and all of them live in terror of him and his mercurial moods, as upsetting him—no matter how trivial the reason—will lead to their death, most likely as an involuntary test subject. He is also determined to increase his already off-the-charts Psychic Powers. In trying to reach this goal, he experiments on live people, subjecting them to a painful process without anesthetic or sedatives, a process that has killed every subject he's tried it on before he could actually test his theory. The Shuhr culture is ruthless, cutthroat, and revels in the pain of others, but even the other high-ranked Shuhr, ostensibly his peers, regard him as cruelty-obsessed and tread cautiously around him in order to avoid attracting his ire.

G

• The Galbraith Series, by John Nicholl: Dr. David Galbraith is an absolutely horrific pedophile, using his position as a child psychologist to target boys as young as three years old for abuse, rape, and torture that he films. Galbraith subjects his wife Cynthia—whose first fiancé he murdered—and his two daughters to horrible physical and mental torments out of hatred that his children aren't boys he can molest, and he runs a massive pedophile ring in his free time that leads to the abuse of hundreds of children. Often killing small animals in front of the children to terrify them into compliance, Galbraith tortures one of his victims to death and then drives his accomplice to suicide to eliminate him as a witness. Upon choosing his latest victim Anthony, Galbraith bludgeons the boy's mother to near-death then plans to torture Anthony to death, film the whole thing, and then send the footage to Anthony's family. When Cynthia tries to save Anthony from Galbraith, Galbraith brutally beats her and promises to torture her to death for crossing him.
• "The Garden of Adompha", by Clark Ashton Smith: King Adompha and his equally vile court magician Dwerulas rule Sotar, which is known for Adompha's royal garden, hidden from the eyes of all but himself and Dwerulas. In truth, Adompha and Dwerulas capture or execute anyone disfavored by them in Sotar in order to butcher them and have Dwerulas fuse their remains to the plants of the garden, creating half-human, half-vegetable hybrids suspended in a strange state between life and death. Adompha orders a servant girl murdered purely for her hands, ordering the rest of her body fed to the plant her hands will grow upon, and furthermore murders Dwerulas on nothing more than an impulse. Dwerulas manages to curse Adompha in retaliation, resulting in Adompha's garden turning upon him and raking him to pieces.
• Geek Love: Arturo "Arty" Binewski is a horrific Big Brother Bully who murders many of his infant siblings. Failing in his attempts on his psychic brother Chick, Arty later tries paying a group of teenagers to murder Chick, before tricking Chick into becoming a surgeon for his cult, using Chick's abilities to mutilate cultists, maiming them into limbless beings like Arty. Catching his younger conjoined twin sisters sleeping with another man, Arty arranges them being raped by one of his underlings, resulting in them becoming pregnant, before ordering one of them lobotomized along with many members of his own cult. Discovering his other sister's pregnancy, Arty beats her and tries to have her child cannibalized.
• Gentleman Bastard series: The Falconer of Karthain became the leader of the magical supremacist wing of the Order of the Bondsmagi to spite his mother, and is the worst person that even that faction has to offer. A petty sadist who sees himself as part of a Superior Species, Falconer persuades the rest of the Bondsmagi to accept Capa Raza's black contract, then offers to carry out the contract himself, murdering seven of Capa Barsavi's garristas, his daughter Nazca, and finally Barsavi himself for Raza, and torturing Locke Lamora into assisting with Raza's plot. Following Barsavi's death, Falconer murders Locke's friends Calo and Galdo, and his apprentice, Bug, and hypnotizes Dona Vorchenza into allowing statues full of Wraithstone to placed at Duke Nicovante's ball, all as part of Capa Raza's plot to "gentle" the nobility of Camorr. Captured and crippled by Locke and Jean after his final attempt at murdering them goes awry, Falconer survives, and makes a comeback, murdering the nurse-attendant who had kept him alive, and then having his mother, Archedama Patience, eaten alive by crows.
• George Miles Cycle, by Dennis Cooper:
  • Closer: Tom Brathwaite is the worst of the manipulative men that George Miles comes across. A sadistic murderer who mutilates his victims before killing them, Tom once held a presentation for murder enthusiasts and showed them a personal Snuff Film of Tom brutally killing a random hitchhiker. Continuing to murder young men to satisfy his fantasies, Tom mutilates George to such an extent that his backside is left disfigured.
  • Try: Ken McCauley, Ziggy's depraved uncle, is a greedy pedophile in love with his own lack of morals. Having participated in the sexual abuse of his nephew, Ken videotapes himself raping many more boys in his attempts to rise higher in child pornography circles. When Robin—one of his countless victims—ends up overdosing on Ken's drugs, Ken contacts a necrophile and lets him have his way with the boy's corpse in exchange for money, all the while gloating about how marketing Robin's death will give him the fame that he so desires.
• Ghost Girl (2021): Ol' Scratch is a spirit that feeds off peoples' wants and desires, seemingly granting their wishes while in truth draining them until they're worn-out husks. Arriving at the town of Knobb's Ferry during a storm, Scratch charms a kindergarten teacher into granting him a position as principal of the local school before disposing of her and the prior principal, taking her bracelet to prevent her ghost from passing on. Scratch uses his new position to reach all the residents of the town, seemingly fixing their problems while devouring their souls little by little, slowly killing them. Scratch seeks to use Zee, Elijah, and Nellie as mortal vessels to gain corporal form; during his attempt to break them into giving in, Scratch takes advantage of Zee's guilt over her mother's death by blaming her for it and accusing her of being a murderer.
• Ghostlight: Captain Nicholas Viker is a wicked ghost who seeks to make himself supreme over both the living and the dead. A bloodthirsty soldier in life who was killed after murdering his general, Viker spends decades devouring other ghosts to grow in strength so as to harm the living, his reign of terror only ended by the efforts of Keeper Strand and his daughter Rebecca, though not before Viker murdered them and devoured the former's ghost. Reemerging in the present, Viker sets about devouring any ghosts he comes across, including that of a 4-year-old girl, while seeking the power of the ghostlight, even threatening to devour Gabe's father to force him to hand it over, following though on his threat when it fails. Upon acquiring the ghostlight, Viker corrupts it and uses the "ghastlight"'s power to amass an army of malevolent ghosts, seeking to kill the living and turn the world into his dominion of the dead.
• Ghost Story, by Peter Straub::
  • The creature named as "Alma Mobley", an ancient creature that helped spawn the myths of vampires, is a sadist with ages of seducing, manipulating and driving men to madness and death. Having arrived in Millburn to kill more, and being temporarily stopped by the Chowder Society, Alma returns years later to destroy them and all close to them, breaking their minds and killing them horribly while attempting to wipe out Millburn itself.
  • Alma's right-hand monster, Gregory Bate, was a sadist who molested his young siblings. Upon his death, Gregory bargains with Alma to become a creature like her and becomes a vicious Serial Killer, brutally killing the inhabitants of Millburn while using the enslaved shade of his dead little brother Fenny, eating residents alive while glorying in the sadism and attempt to destroy Millburn.
• The Gilded Chamber: Haman the Elamite, the most trusted advisor of King Xerxes, will go to immoral lengths to obtain power, silencing anyone who opposes him. Introduced having amputated the tongues of attempted assassins, Haman finagles his way into Xerxes's graces, and proceeds to purge the royal court of alleged traitors over the course of a few years, with the gallows stated to be a "permanent fixture" in the royal courtyard and possibly anyone being a spy in his service. Additionally, Haman prolongs the war in Sparta, and has a puppet governor installed in Egypt to bloodily stifle dissent. Concurrently forcing people to bow to him, Haman plots a genocide against the Jewish people as retaliation for Mordecai, also known as Marduka, refusing to bow on account of his graven image. Later revealed to be in league with former Queen Vashti, Haman had also arranged for the current Queen Esther to miscarry at the hands of his abused wife Zeresh, later taunting Esther over her miscarriage when she confronts him over his attempted annihilation.
• The Girl from the Well duology:
  • The Girl from the Well: The Smiling Man, real name Quintilian Densmore, is a Serial Killer and the worst of the monsters that Okiku hunts down. Once arrested for attempting to rape a minor, Quintilian learned from the experience that he should simply murder his victims. Abducting, torturing and raping children, Quintilian eventually murders them, with a body count in the dozens. Upon being drawn in by the "beauty" of 15-year-old Tarquin, or "Tark", Quintilian abducts him and his cousin, intending on torturing the former to death before keeping Tark to use, abuse and eventually dispose of as well.
  • The Suffering: The Kannushi of Aito, the wicked Hiroshi Mikage, is a former Onmyoji who seeks to harness the power of the Hellgate. Convincing the villagers that sacrifices are necessary to suppress the power, Mikage has young women tortured and murdered to offer them to the Hellgate after making them suffer more by killing those they loved, with his own daughter being the final intended victim. In the present, Mikage lures Tark and Okiku to the village, intending on killing Tark to make Okiku suffer more before offering her to complete the ritual and seize ultimate power.
• The Girl Next Door: Ruth Chandler believes that all women are whores, and as such should be treated like animals. When her nieces Susan and Meg move in with her after the deaths of their parents, she subjects Meg to an escalating series of atrocities that include hanging her from the ceiling and ordering her sons and some of the neighborhood children to rape her, mutilating her with a blowtorch, and forcibly removing her clitoris, forcing Susan and neighbour boy David to watch as she does. She also punishes Susan, a disabled girl, for her sister's perceived disobedience; while also molesting her in secret.
• Give the Dark My Love & Bid My Soul Farewell, by Beth Revis: Governor Bennum Wellebourne once used his necromancy to raise the dead to fight off the tyrannical Emperor from Lunar Island, before his thirst for power lead to him cursing his subjects with a plague to raise more undead for his army to take the kingdom. Captured and sentenced to death, Wellebourne attempted to murder his own son when he came to visit him, and when this failed, performed a spell to have his soul survive his own execution and took control of the Emperor's body. Extending his life by jumping into the different successive rulers, Wellebourne brought about a century of tyranny and oppression, and quashes the risk of rebellion with a vicious plague killing thousands by having them rot to death, including the council members who sought independence for the now ill-treated Lunar Island. As his soul begins to exhaust, Wellebourne attempts to manipulate his way to feasting on the thousands of souls of his victims to replenish himself.
• "The Glittering Death", by Caleb Roehrig, from His Hideous Heart: The Judge, aka Jason Thomas Hurley, is a misogynistic, fundamentalist killer who targets girls aged 15-25 and kidnaps them 11 days before the full moon. The Judge then keeps them in an electroshock cage in order to torture them in order to make them "confess" to their "harlotry". After the full moon is over, The Judge drugs them and cuts their hearts out while they're still alive and conscious as trophies before dumping the bodies. The Judge even proves himself a complete hypocrite in the end by targeting the virginal Lauren, showing himself to be just a sadist who hides behind pretensions of holiness.
• Goblin's "Presto": Roman Emperor is a famed magic man who is accused of "dirty magic", or real magic. The rumors are true: Roman makes a bargain with the eldritch spirit of Death for power, emptying out old graves as a sacrifice to her, but the true bargain is filling them up again. At each show, Roman kills dozens of believers with his power, especially children, to keep his power and fame going—the same show that the protagonist Pete is now attending, with clear implications the latter will be another victim of Roman.
• Goblin Slayer: On his quest to exterminate every goblin, the Goblin Slayer himself has encountered beings at least as vile, if not more so, than the goblins themselves:
  • Vol. 3: The Dark Elf is a member of the Evil Sect who has women butchered and vivisected as sacrifices while leading goblins in the sewers of Water Town to cause as much havoc as he can. Having manipulated numerous attacks, the Dark Elf helps to inspire previous assaults by the goblins, including the Goblin Lord's attempted razing of Goblin Slayer's town. Later resurfacing during the "Harvest Festival" arc, the Dark Elf intends to use his goblins to massacre and violate all in their path while he summons Hecatoncheir, the hundred-armed giant, to obliterate the rest, and goes on a rampage to throw the world into chaos and devastation, intending on summoning many more monsters to kill as many people as possible.
  • Vol. 9: The Ice Witch is a hedonistic vampire who enjoys preying on young women. Gaining the loyalty of a group of carnivorous sasquatches, she unleashes them upon the local villages to slaughter the innocent Hare Folk, while blocking out the sun to allow no respite. With numerous innocents massacred, the Ice Witch plans to have villages slaughtered to give herself cover in an innocent town and kill freely for a century.
  • Vol. 11: The Guard Captain of the Desert Kingdom is an impulsive, brutal man who murders the rulers so that his supposed superior, the Prime Minister, can be the puppet master of the more intransigent Desert Princess. Deciding to raise an army of goblins to secure the coup, the Captain funnels innocent women to a goblin breeding camp to be used as breeding slaves before unleashing them on the city. When exposed, he reveals he plans to awaken a dragon to get it to do the attacking for him.
• The Goblin Wars, by Kersten Hamilton: Fear Doirich, the Dark Man, is the god of the goblins. Having created goblin-kind by cobbling together creatures from different worlds, Doirich led them in invading Ireland and, upon being driven into Mag Mell by the Fire Bolg and Milesians, sealed the gateway, forcing the Fire Bolg to travel aimlessly without a home. Seeking vengeance against Amergin, the Milesian responsible for his imprisonment, Doirich kidnapped, tortured, and killed him and his Highborn lover Maeve, sparing their daughters Aileen and Roisin with the intent of forcibly breeding a new race bent to his foul will. As per a blood covenant with a cruel rich man seeking vengeance against a traveler, Cumhaill, for running away with his daughter, Doirich cursed the lovers and their ancestors to be hunted by goblins for all eternity. Having Aileen killed, Doirich thus seeks to subjugate her daughter Teagan and kill Teagan's young brother Aiden, having his goblins torment and kill their loved ones along the way.
• God of War novelization, by Matthew Stover and Robert E. Vardeman:
  • Ares is an insane, sadistic deity who kickstarts the entire plot with his ambition. Turning the warrior Kratos into his corrupted weapon, Ares uses Kratos to pave a path of blood and death across Greece, killing untold thousands in horrific massacres before tricking Kratos into murdering his own family to destroy the last of his humanity. After Kratos betrays him and allies with Athena, Ares—who enjoys spending his free time killing hundreds of humans at a time for fun—wages war on the city of Athens, killing entire forest populations on his way to destroy Athens. Setting Athens aflame as he sends his hordes to kill everyone inside the city, children included, Ares personally slaughters countless fleeing civilians before being confronted by a vengeful Kratos, who Ares proceeds to Mind Rape with images of his dead family. Upon obtaining Pandora's Box, Ares boasts his plans to use it on Olympus itself, hoping to kill his father Zeus and sister Athena before subjugating all of existence under his mad boot.
  • Medusa is far worse than her video game counterpart. Medusa keeps tortured slaves under her thrall, one of whom she blinds and has sex with regularly, something heavily implied to have befallen many slaves before him. Medusa's vile nature is fully revealed as it is seen she regularly has her servants cook human infants for her to devour as a meal, and when a disgusted Kratos tries to kill her for this crime that horrifies even him, Medusa ends up murdering one of her own slaves in a blind anger.
• "God's Judgment on a Bishop", by Robert Southey (link): Bishop Hatto is a greedy bishop who has saved up plenty of grain but, when a famine comes, doesn't want to share it with the starving people. Annoyed by their pleas for help, Hatto lures them to his barn, claiming they would get food there, but instead burns the barn down with the crowd of people inside it. Hatto gleefully compares his victims to rats who deserved to be killed, and doesn't repent even as a swarm of actual rats attacks and eats him alive.
• The Gods of Mars: In this second novel in the John Carter of Mars series, the Big Bad, Issus, ancient ruler of the First Born Black Martians, has manipulated the Martian religion into a cult surrounding her. Making the First Born into a violent force that routinely kill and enslave others, Issus lures victims to her domain in the Valley of Dor where they are killed or made into her slaves. Many are forced to fight in the arenas to die for her entertainment while the women are made into her handmaidens who only last a year before she kills and eats them. Throwing John Carter and friends into the arena, Issus has a slave revolt massacred when John gets them to rise up against her. Out of spite, Issus later locks John's beloved princess Dejah Thoris and two other women who love him into a chamber that will seal off, leaving them nothing to eat but one another. With no care for her own people, Issus stands as among the worst Barsoom has to offer.
• Gone series:
  • The Gaiaphage is the being responsible for the FAYZ after nearly causing a nuclear meltdown. The Gaiaphage in attempts to escape the FAYZ create a deadly plague, create giant man-eating bugs and manipulate or Mind Rape people into serving it. After stealing the body of a newborn, the Gaiaphage sought to kill every last person in FAYZ including all the young children before it could escape to assimilate most of humanity, leaving the rest for it to torment.
  • Drake Merwin is a monstrous fourteen-year-old who managed to earn the hatred and fear of everyone in the FAYZ. A psychopath even before the series began, he was sent to Coates Academy for shooting a boy with an air rifle, and was diagnosed by staff as a sadist. A few days after all the adults disappeared, Drake essentially became a Psycho for Hire, first serving Caine Soren in his efforts to take over Perdido Beach, then switching his allegiance over to the Gaiaphage after it helped regrow his amputated arm into a whip-like weapon. Drake's many crimes include preparing to feed a daycare full of little kids and infants to mutant coyotes if they resisted him; threatening to cause a nuclear meltdown if Sam didn't allow Drake to torture him; commanding an army of mutant bugs to massacre Perdido Beach; and whipping and slave-driving a pregnant girl across a desert. Drake was also a virulent misogynist, who victim-blamed his mother for her abuse at his stepfather's hands, insults every girl who crosses his path, and expresses an intent to torture, rape and murder Astrid, Diana, and even the Gaiaphage after it stole a female body as its host. Drake's goal wasn't power, it was pain. He admitted that he tortured and murdered his fellow children because he enjoyed it, because it made him feel powerful, and he believed that despite all the diagnoses psychiatrists had tried to give him, the word that best summed him up was "evil".
  • Monster & Villain: Brigadier General Gwendolyn DiMarco desires to make Super Soldiers no matter the cost. To this end, she runs the classified military base "The Ranch" as second-in-command to Tom Peaks, and has horrific experiments conducted there, such as mutating people into human-animal hybrids, leaving many in constant pain; forcefully turning people into cybernetic killing machines; keeping alive and aware severed heads in jars to study them; and using the brains of infants to pilot suicide drones. When the horrors of the Ranch are exposed, DiMarco orders a battalion of tanks to attack Dillon Poe in an attempt to distract the public, unconcerned about civilian casualties.
  • Villain: Dillon Poe is a would-be comedian bitter that he never got powers. After gaining a Compelling Voice, Poe causes several massive riots in Las Vegas, killing hundreds for his amusement. Once the military intervenes, Poe would uses Human Shields to ensure his own safety, finally drenching dozens of people in gasoline, threatening to set them on fire if anyone threatened him.
  • Hero: Robert "Bob" Markovic was a predatory businessman before being mutated into a sapient swarm of plague-bearing bugs. Using his new abilities, Markovic attempts to take over New York City by infecting all of New York City Hall and Police Plaza with every deadly disease to exist, leaving everyone there in a state of twisted agony begging for death. Taking control of Grand Central Station, Markovic infected one man there as an example of what he can do. Markovic then hijacks a train, taking its passengers hostage as he heads to Washington to take over the government and attempts to kill the heroes—including his own daughter Simone—as they try to stop him.
• The Good Demon, by Jimmy Cajoleas: Gasper, The One Wish Man presents himself as a kindly, eccentric old man, but is in truth a depraved monster who desires power above all else. Charming people with promises of fulfilling their dreams, Gasper will take them for all they're worth, including their lives and souls. To keep his powers strong, Gasper has for centuries sent a demon to befriend children with the promise that he'll make them bond to their friend "forever". In reality, Gasper cuts them open and has a legion of a thousand demons sent into them so that he can draw power from controlling them. This process drives the child insane, causing them to self-mutilate themselves over months, possibly years, ripping out pieces of their skin until they die from the agony, at which point Gasper binds their souls to him and starts again. When the heroine Clare's cousin Cléa attempts to save his latest victim, Gasper has her murdered and added to his soul collection. Gasper says "Power is its own reward" and he would step on anyone to get more of it.
• "Good Hunting", by Ken Liu: The Governor's Son is a sexual deviant with a lust for machines. To suffice his perversions, he forces the prostitute, Yan, to endure a painful surgical procedure which converts her into an android, before forcing her to become his personal Sex Slave by threatening to cast her off into the streets limbless should she not fulfill his depraved desires.
• "The Gorgon", by Clark Ashton Smith: The mysterious old man is a figure who has somehow transcended time itself. Gaining the head of Medusa, the old man becomes a Serial Killer, luring in countless individuals from different time periods to trick them into gazing upon the Gorgon to turn them into stone, trapping them in unending pain and terror, which he then adds to a macabre gallery of trophies for his own amusement.
• Gormenghast: Steerpike is a vicious sociopath who was once a kitchen boy but rose to become of the most powerful figures in Gormenghast. Steerpike sets fire to Earl Sepulchrave Groan's beloved library, resulting in the Earl's insanity and eventual suicide, setting himself up as a hero who rescued everyone else within. Steerpike burns the master of ritual, Barquentine, to death to steal his position and steadily either discredits or murders those who stand in his path while also seducing Fuchsia Groan, plotting to dispose of her as well. Steerpike kills Sepulchrave's twin sisters by sealing them in a room and leaving them to starve, murdering the former servant Flay when he and Young Earl Titus catch Steerpike gloating to the corpses years later. Escaping into the castle, Steerpike decides to destroy everyone he can if he cannot rule the castle. Described as having forsaken any conscience he might once had possessed, Steerpike will lie, cheat and murder, stopping at nothing to claim power he feels should be his.
• Graceling Realm: King Leck, though at first seeming to be a kind and noble ruler, is quickly revealed to be the most monstrous character in the story. Blessed with the Grace of Compelling Voice at birth, Leck abused and tortured everyone around him, from small animals to his own father before murdering the man. Eventually taking control of the kingdom of Monsea after murdering all of the current royalty, Leck uses his ability to kidnap, torture, and experiment on hundreds of women and little girls, raping and mutilating each of them for weeks on end before reviving them solely to do it all over again, even forcing his own horrified servants to do it while he watches. Regularly abusing and raping his wife before murdering her, Leck attempts to raise his own daughter to be his "perfect heir" by torturing and possibly even raping her. Sadistic beyond belief and viewing his various atrocities as "art" that should be honored, King Leck was the worst this fantasy series had to offer, horrifying and repulsing all those who knew his true nature.
• The Graveyard Book: "The man" Jack Frost is the most dangerous and wicked assassin of the Jacks of All Trades, and is the main antagonist of the novel. First seen after murdering an innocent child and her parents, Frost tries to stab a baby to death in order to prevent him from growing up to become a threat to his organization, and, when the toddler escapes, Frost nearly murders an innocent man while in his pursuit of the child. Years later, Frost returns to kill the boy, now a teen named Nobody "Bod" Owens, and, after sending his fellow Jacks after the boy, knowing they will most likely fail and die, Frost kidnaps Bod's best friend, Scarlett, and tries to kill both her and Bod for "pride in his work", at which point Frost plans to use the Sleer to remake his organization in his image and make himself all-powerful. Sociopathic and cruel, Jack Frost is a dark villain to match this dark novel.
• The Great And Secret Show & Everville, by Clive Barker: Kissoon is a treacherous member of the Shoal, a secret society dedicating to protecting reality and the dream sea, The Quiddity. Murdering and torturing his fellow members, Kissoon allied himself with the Iad Uroboros, a monstrous race from beyond reality, and plots to deliver reality to them to consume. Manipulating massive amounts of torture and death to take a body to escape his prison, Kissoon attempts to summon the Iad Uroboros with the belief they will exalt him for his treachery against mankind. Consumed with sadism and a lust for power, Kissoon's cruelty even shows him gleefully murdering his own mother when he encounters her in the past.
• Greatcoats series, by Sebastien de Castell:
  • Patriana, Duchess of Hervor, is a ruthless aristocrat who led the nobility into a brutal and bloody war to overthrow King Paelis for daring to attempt to reduce the privileges of nobility in favor of increasing the rights of the common people. Years later, Patriana schemes to gain more power by placing her daughter on the throne. When the hero, and former member of the Greatcoat order, Falcio val Mond, falls into Patriana's hands, Patriana reveals her penchant for cruel torture to "create monsters" as a general practice while also revealing she has turned a creature called a Fey Horse into a killing machine by torturing its children to death in front of it. To break Falcio further, she attempts to feed a young girl Falcio is protecting to the creature. It is later revealed Patriana's "daughter" is a fake and her true daughter is the girl's maidservant Trin. Upon revealing this, Patriana ruthlessly abuses the girl she's raised as her own for eighteen years, planning to control the throne no matter who she has to destroy.
  • Shuran is the Knight Commander of Aramor, sworn to protect Duke Isault and his family. Betraying his oath, Shuran murders Isault, his wife and children, as well as a former Greatcoat he frames for the crime. Secretly arming peasants to revolt against the nobility, Shuran then has his knights massacre them while plotting to foster discontent and civil war across the realm to seize more power for himself and eventually exterminate the entirety of the old aristocracy. Revealing himself as the son of the former Saint of Swords Caveil, Shuran desires to take the title from his father's killer, the Greatcoat Kest, to satisfy his own ego. To win, Shuran gleefully cheats, even deciding to torture Kest's friends and rape a thirteen-year-old girl to make sure Kest can't fight him with a clear head.
• The Greatest Magicmaster's Retirement Plan: Godma Barhong is an arrogant researcher who will go to any lengths to sate his scientific curiosity and prove his genius. As the head of the Element Factor Separation Project, he tampered with the mana information of child test subjects, uncaring of the painful side effects and the death of one of his subjects. After becoming a fugitive, Godma acquires hundreds of kidnapped children and shuts off their nervous systems in order to mold them into combat puppets, and then sends them to attack soldiers, civilians, and a military school in order to test their capabilities. He kills any subject who loses the ability to fight and abuses a sapient subject, Melissa, when she protests. In order to kidnap Alice for his experiments, Godma sacrifices several subjects to cast a mass destruction spell on her school as a distraction, and later casts it again on the heroes using Melissa's life. When cornered by the military, Godma prepares a contingency plan to smuggle his data to his backer, hoping that others will continue his horrific research.
• The Great God Pan: Helen Vaughan, the spawn of Pan and a mortal woman, is a seemingly respectable woman who delights in cruel perversion. Having broken the mind of a boy when she was young, her "friend" Rachel returned from the woods, half-naked and insane, begging her mother to know why she let her go into the woods with Helen before vanishing forever. Helen married one respectable man ruining and eventually murdering him before taking part in cults that involved orgies and Human Sacrifice, driving others to suicide or murdering them in her wake.
• The Green Ember series: Morbin Blackhawk is the leader of the Lords of Prey and is responsible for the horrid state the country of Natalia is in. After slaying King Jupiter Goodson, Morbin teamed up with Redeye Garlackson, and together they razed the Great Wood, killing or kidnapping countless innocent rabbits. Those who weren't corrupted by Morbin were forced to become his slaves and servants, where they're constantly abused for showing even hints of defiance. Morbin and the Lords of Prey also occasionally take some of the child slaves away from their families so Morbin and the other birds can eat them. During his crusade to find the Green Ember, Morbin sends Redeye and his wolves around Natalia to look for it, where they burn down various settlements and kill anyone in their way. Eager to crush the rabbits' resistance, Morbin uses traitorous rabbits and his hordes of wolves and birds to attack the resistance, culminating in the alleged death of Prince Smalls and the massacre of hundreds of rabbits. As the resistance continues to fend off Morbin's forces and interfere with his plans, he and the Lords of Prey order their subordinates to kill all of the child slaves solely as a show of force against the other slaves. After the resistance rescues most of the slaves, Morbin and all of his forces attack First Warren, where they slaughter thousands of soldiers and civilians during the final battles.
• The Gregory Sallust series, by Dennis Wheatley, has these two Nazis:
  • Gruppenführer Grauber is a sadistic Gestapo chief who loves nothing so much as torture. Having risen to power over a pile of tortured bodies, even holding his own allies' loved ones in captivity to torture should they step out of live, Grauber forms a deep enmity to Gregory Sallust himself. Torturing his friend to death and trying to torture his lover Erika, Grauber happily tortures innocents with anything from cigars to electricity, later promoted and put in charge of military operations where he has thousands liquidated before taking a final chance to torture Sallust into a blind, deaf and mute wreck.
  • Heinrich Himmler is one of the highest-ranking members of the Nazi regime, and is the architect of both The Holocaust and much of the conflict in the story. Himmler decrees that all Jews and any others he deems "inferior" are to be systematically thrown into concentration camps and executed, hoping for the total genocide of anyone Himmler believes to be less than his idea of perfect. Millions lose their lives due to Himmler's machinations, and when Himmler is given a more personal role in leading the military, he showcases his cruelty and incompetence as he executes countless people for petty reasons and threatens to have the entire family of any Nazi soldier shot if they are captured without a fight during battle. Himmler's sole good quality, his friendship with Hitler, is shown by the end to have been one of ambition, as Himmler unflinchingly betrays Hitler in an attempt to side with the Allies and reign over Germany once World War II is over.
• The Grey Bastards, by Jonathan French: Captain Ignacio is a soldier seemingly allied with the Grey Bastards. A greedy and treacherous man, Ignacio does not hesitate to sell the company out while allying with the Sludge Man, a sorcerer of the swamp. Running a secret trafficking ring, Ignacio has elves kidnapped to be sold into sex slavery, uncaring if they are violated along the way, with one such elf named Starling given to the Sludge Man as a potential sacrifice to his plans.
• Griffin Ranger: Dr. Deverall is a monstrous scientist commissioned to create and release a genocidal plague to wipe out the griffins and hanz. Putting his subjects through torturous experiments, Deverall even forces the captive griffins to rape one another to produce eggs to incubate the virus and swiftly kills those he finds useless by repeatedly infecting them with strains of the virus. Ordered to terminate the griffins by his superior, Deverall instead kills only half, attempting to keep the rest as a private "zoo" for himself to enjoy tormenting.
• Grim, edited by Christine Johnson: In this anthology with an updated spin on classic stories from The Brothers Grimm, these villains stand out as true monsters:
  • "Light It Up", by Kimberly Derting: In this adaptation of "Hansel and Gretel", the unnamed Ranger is a seemingly kind man who welcomes strangers into his cabin but is in truth a depraved Serial Killer. Bringing people into his cabin with the promise of food, he instead drugs and butchers them for food, something he has done to hundreds of men, women and kids, as illustrated by the photos of the victims he keeps in his personal trophy case. Capturing the heroine Greta and Hansen, he remarks, as he plans to cut up and kill a distressed Hansen, how tasty he's going to be to eat.
  • "Skin Trade", by Myra McEntire: In this adaptation of "The Robber Bridegroom", Helm and Calen, along with their repentant brother Locke, run the band Skin Trade and are Serial Killers. Kidnapping women with flawless skin, the brothers take them home and skin them alive in order to sell the skin on the black market, with the two partaking of their blood and flesh afterwards. After Locke feels remorse and falls in love with a girl and plans to leave them, out of spite Helm and Calen kidnap her, intending to butcher her too. When Locke tries to save her, Helm offers to let her live for perhaps another day before he kills her if he's allowed to butcher and eats part of Locke, being such a gleeful psychopath that he's in love with the idea of eating his own flesh and blood.
• The Grim Company trilogy, by Luke Scull: The brutal barbarian chieftain Krazka One-Eye, later known as the Butcher King, is known as the best fighter and the most evil man of the northern clans. When the warrior known as the Sword of the North disobeyed their leader, the Shaman, Krazka brutally raped his wife and sent her to be burned alive as punishment. In the present, Krazka attacks a chieftain who has stopped paying tribute due to famine, humiliates him in a fight after killing his wife as "motivation", and sends him back to be burned alive before he has every civilian in the walls massacred. Allying with a demon called the Herald, Krazka allows demons to be called forth to slaughter all in their path, with his forces becoming infamous for war crimes. Overthrowing the king of the north, Krazka tortures him and keeps him alive as a trophy while buying the Herald's cooperation via gathering children to be sacrificed to its hunger, caring for nothing but his own power and domination. Keeping the sorceresses of the north enslaved and subjected to torture and rape, Krazka even forces them to burn down areas with his own men, reasoning they'll still kill more of the enemy; while also taking to regularly raping women and even boys, murdering them during the night and discarding them after. Relishing in his title, "the Butcher King," Krazka is obsessed with making himself a legend, and relishes the pain he inflicts upon others.
• Grimms' Fairy Tales:
  • "Hansel and Gretel" (KMH 015): The Wicked Witch is the archetype for the evil witch in the woods. Described as wicked and godless, she lays a trap with her edible house for children, whereupon she captures them, kills them, butchers and cooks them for her feasts. Upon capturing Hansel and Gretel, she attempts to fatten up Hansel, before growing tired of his seeming inability to gain weight. Intending on burning Gretel alive before eating her brother, the witch proves to be one of the most terrifying and evil monsters in any of the Grimm brothers' stories.
  • "The Robber Bridegroom" (KMH 040): The Robber Bridegroom himself appears to be a charming suitor seeking the hand of the heroine in marriage. In truth, the Bridegroom is the head of a group of bandits and a cannibalistic Serial Killer who tricks the women into coming to his home whereupon they are murdered and carved up for food. When the heroine visits and hides, she witnesses a young captive dragged in and killed by her fiancé and his men, realizing the fate that would await her, with the Robber Bridegroom being a dark reminder that evil may hide beneath kind and trusted faces.
  • "The Fitcher's Bird" (KMH 046): The unnamed sorcerer poses as a poor beggar going from house to house to kidnap young women to be his brides. When he captures one of three sisters, he promises her a happy life so long as she doesn't enter a chamber while he's away. He gives her an egg to take care of to see if she'll pass his test. When she investigates the chamber and discovers the dismembered corpses of his previous victims, he butchers her as punishment; he goes on to kidnap her sister, in which the process is repeated. Kidnapping the third sister, she proves clever enough to cheat his test and discover the truth, having her sisters magically re-assembled, whereupon they plan and carry out revenge by setting the sorcerer and his gang on fire at their wedding.
  • "The Juniper Tree" (KMH 047): The evil stepmother, upon marrying the husband, grew to resent her stepson, knowing that he would inherit the family's wealth when he got older. Forming a plan, she convinces her stepson into looking into a chest for an apple, only to then decapitate him by slamming the lid onto his neck. The stepmother uses a bandage to reattach her stepson's head, and she manipulates her daughter, Marlinchen (or Marlene in some versions), into thinking that she killed her own brother. She then takes the body, cooks it into a stew, and she serves it to her unsuspecting husband. The story repeatedly makes it clear that the stepmother cared only for herself, and that she committed these actions out of greed, as well as a genuine hatred for her stepson.
• Grounded for All Eternity: Samuel Parris, in life, was a manipulative reverend who orchestrated the Salem Witch Trials to profit off the mass hysteria. Upon escaping Hell, Parris's soul returns to the mortal coil to wreak havoc once more. Parris corrupts the residents of Salem and plunges the town into chaos, shifting the balance of good and evil in order to strengthen himself. Taking over the town, Parris orchestrates another witch hunt, attempting to have the young witch Charity executed to prevent her from getting in his way. Parris ultimately seeks to rule the world as a deity and tear down Heaven and Hell, regardless of the cosmic consequences it would wreak.
• Guild Hunter series: Elena Deveraux, Archangel Raphael, and their allies have various horrifying enemies to face in this world ruled by angels:
  • Charisemnon, Angel of Disease, is a monstrous Archangel presiding over North Africa who murders those who fail to pay him a tithe of their earnings, and sexually preys upon the young girls in his region. Allying with the vile Archangel Lijuan who has power over death, Charisemnon combines his own powers over disease with hers and the two launch a war using the horrific zombies known as "Reborn", beginning his battle killing or injuring the angelic protectors of New York to attack to allow Lijuan to wipe the city clean of life. A wicked manipulator, Charisemnon also brainwashes his own vampires into joining in the attack and throwing away their lives for his cruel attempt at power. Seemingly beaten back, Charisemnon resurfaces to mutilate and experiment on his most loyal of allies to create a new strain of infection to conquer the world in war, leading to the deaths of millions with his abominable experiments and attempt for Armageddon. Planning to betray even Lijuan should the opportunity arise, Charisemnon desires to leave his mark on the world though sheer infamy, and revels in his evil.
  • Archangel's Shadows: Giorgio, once a brilliant doctor, has grown bored with immortality and vampirism. Seeking to alleviate his ennui, Giorgio takes to serial killing, murdering multiple women by draining them slowly and painfully, spreading a drug to turn other vampires into monsters, and delighting in seducing women to be his "cattle" so he can use them as playthings and play them against one another. Upon his "factory" being found, it is revealed Giorgio keeps many victims alive and in agony, torturing them for his own sick amusement.
  • Archangel's Heart: Gian, leader of the Luminata, runs his territory in Morocco as a twisted overlord, with women in the area forced to serve as pleasure slaves for his angel subordinates or risk horrible fates. Gian himself was obsessed with heroine Elena's grandmother Majda, taking and torturing her vampire husband Jean-Baptiste for decades while having Majda turned into a vampire after failing to kill her baby. Torturing Jean-Baptiste in front of her, Gian also rapes Majda to spite him as well, believing he can do whatever he want as an angel.
• "The Gulf Between", by Tom Godwin: William Cullin is an officer who desires nothing so much as to make humans as obedient as robots. Sending his own to their pointless deaths in war just for his own glory, Cullin later defects to Russo-Asia and becomes the brutal head of their Secret Police. Upon learning of a powerful space craft that can assist in world domination, Cullin kills many people to possess it, including poisoning a doctor with access with an agonizing drug, so he may bomb the Earth into submission.
• The Guns of the South: Andries Rhoodie is the leader of the South African Neo-Nazi group AWB who seeks to create a permanent bastion of white supremacy in the world. To this end he steals a time machine and travels back to 1864, arming the Confederacy with AK-47s to help them win The American Civil War. After this plan succeeds, Rhoodie and his group buy hundreds of black slaves, promptly torturing, starving, and raping them out of sheer racial hatred. When Robert E. Lee becomes Confederate President on a platform of gradual emancipation for slaves, Rhoodie sends a team of commandos to kill him and the entire Confederate government, culminating in a massacre in which dozens of bystanders, including Lee's infirm wife, are killed. With the Confederacy having turned against them, Rhoodie has his group wage a war that gets thousands of Confederate soldiers killed out of spite.

---