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  • 100% Match is told from the perspective of Bart Bartley, a fast-food employee longing to start a relationship. He's also a man who commits multiple homicides and poisons the food he cooks at his restaurant just because he can.
  • Agent G: G starts the story as a Affably Evil assassin who works for Murder, Inc. and takes any contract as long as the money is good. Gradually, he evolves into a somewhat more Noble Demon sort of character but never quite shakes off his Antihero qualities.
  • Iason Mink of Ai no Kusabi while the Deuteragonist, is the initial villain of the story because of his kidnapping and brutal abuse of Riki but is ultimately an Anti-Villain with Tragic Villain traits.
  • Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is a deliciously Ax-Crazy Serial Killer who tortures and murders a wide variety of innocent people in the story, simply because he likes the feeling. But even if he's just imagining that, he's still an unlikable, self-centered, elitist, racist, shallow bastard.
  • Aside from the boatman and the epilogue's police, every character in And Then There Were None is culpable in someone's death, ranging from negligent homicide to premeditated murder. The one who seems most sympathetic and protagonist-like within the ensemble (Vera) turns out to be the most culpable. Subverted in most adaptations.
  • VISSER, part of the Animorphs series, focuses on the trial and history of Visser One, who began a campaign to turn all humanity into slaves to aliens.
  • Beyond Birthday from Another Note.
  • Lysander in the last Apprentice Adept book, Phaze Doubt. Much of the book is spent trying to lure Lysander over to Phaze/Photon's cause (doubling as distracting him from his "real" mission as The Mole). Even though he's essential in the good guys' eventual triumph, he never actually switches sides.
  • Archvillain: Kyle, at least in the eyes of the public. He thinks of himself as Not Evil, Just Misunderstood. It's left up to the reader which view is more accurate.
  • The titular character of Artemis Fowl in the first book. A greedy, Magnificent Bastard Chessmaster, at only twelve years old. He starts actually helping out in the rest of the series, begrudgingly at first, but then continuing on to become a genuinely good person, officially pulling a Heel–Face Turn in The Opal Deception.
  • Barry Lyndon. The title character is based on a real-life cad, and William Makepeace Thackaray hides no joy in having his villain protagonist gets what's coming to him, including a Karmic Death. Stanley Kubrick's adaptation makes Barry far more sympathetic (though still a jerk).
  • In the second book of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Nathaniel becomes one of these as part of his Character Development, especially unfortunate seeing as how he had previously been disgusted with the behavior of magicians who acted similarly to how he started to in the book.
  • Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr, who's a burglar, and Martin Ehrengraf, a criminal lawyer whose clients are always innocent - no matter what he has to do to obtain that verdict...
  • In Blood Meridian the protagonist is an unnamed teenage runaway and The Sociopath with no regard for life (including his own), Walking the Earth and killing people over minor inconveniences. The story revolves around him joining a gang of Psycho For Hires that slaughter Native Americans (with some of their members ironically being them) for profit. However, he occasionally displays Moral Sociopathy as he's never mentioned to take part in the gang's more gruesome acts and has a vague code of honor that prompts him to show mercy to helpless people, before having a Heel–Face Turn at the end of the novel and becoming a traditional cowboy.
  • The Blood Pack philia from the novel Blood Pack. While they're obviously the established villains of the book (or at least one of the villainous factions), and definitely evil, much of the story is told from their perspective and we see the individual personalities and the close relationships of its members. It makes their deaths, as told from the perspectives of the Ghost protagonists like Gaunt and Rawne, feel oddly abrupt, underwhelming, and sad, as to the good guys, they're just enemies to be put down.
  • Jill from Blubber has no qualms in bullying an Actual Pacifist classmate. She never seems to think of her as a sensitive human being.
  • Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath, from The Broken Empire Trilogy, by Mark Lawrence. The main protagonist of the Broken Empires series, Jorg endures many emotional and physical traumas throughout the series leaving him deeply damaged, resulting in his largely being unfeeling to the suffering of others. Willing to hurt or kill anyone in his quest to ascend to the throne of the Broken empire. Jorg runs away from his father and his home, after the brutal murder of his mother and younger brother, coming to lead a band of vicious outlaws known as the Brotherhood. As the series progresses, Jorg commits atrocities, often with incredible cruelty, causing pain to others purposefully, even when other means of obtaining his goals seem more likely to succeed. Why be kind when you can twist the knife deeper? Sure you've just killed a farmer, but why not taunt him about how worthless his life was, and explain how your men will find his daughters entertaining before they are killed as well. Truly, if ever a character deserved the villain protagonist title, it is this one. The first chapter shows that. And that is before developing (and stealing) dark and terrible powers of his own. While his actions by the end of the series could ultimately redeem his, the "ends justify the means" has seldom had a more dubious application.
  • The Burnt Orange Heresy: James Figueras is a pretentious, misogynistic snob who commits burglary, arson, and murder over the course of the novel in the name of becoming the most renowned art critic in America.
  • The Butcher Boy: By the end of the story Francie has become one.
  • The Hitman from Thomas Perry's first novel The Butcher's Boy. He is a sociopathic, amoral killer of considerable ability who has to evade both government agents and Mafia thugs when a Mafia boss tries to have him killed after a successful hit on a U.S. Senator that can be traced back to the latter.
  • Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado: Montresor intentionally leads his friend Fortunato to a horrific, slow, terrifying end, all because said friend insulted him (the friend doesn't even seem aware that he offended Montresor at all).
    • Poe was quite fond of this trope, in fact. The protagonist in The Telltale Heart is a complete sociopath who murdered his roommate for extremely arbitrary reasons (though his guilt caught up to him, if that's how you chose to interpret it) and Prince Prospero in The Masque of the Red Death is perfectly fine with letting the peasantry die while he and his friends party up a storm.
  • Manfred, the lord of The Castle of Otranto, who tries to forcibly marry his own son's fiancee in order to avert the destruction of his line.
  • The title character of Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont, a figure of absolute evil who is opposed to God and humanity, and has renounced conventional morality and decency.
  • A Christmas Carol: Ebeneezer Scrooge is the villain of the story. He's introduced as a crotchety Rich Bitch and spends the story being persuaded to make a Heel–Face Turn.
  • The narrator and protagonist in The Chronicles of Fid is a villain who has spent decades terrorizing the world's superheroes. Told in largely anachronic order, Doctor Fid’s backstory and motivations are explored throughout the novels’ adventures.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: Edmund Pevensie for the first half of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He intended to commit something vile against his siblings, even before the witch persuaded him into doing it. Fortunately, he does a Heel–Face Turn and becomes an Anti-Hero later.
  • The Cleaner by Paul Cleave is written from the first person perspective of a psychotic serial killer who considers killing, mutilating, and raping women "just a hobby."
  • Alex from A Clockwork Orange. During the first part of the book, he just wants to have fun. For him, this "fun" includes riding out with his "droogs" to brutally beat up elderly hobos, run over animals, rape and ultimately murder. Once he's given the Ludovico Treatment, the tables are turned and he becomes a helpless victim at the mercy of others, including his former victims. Alex ultimately retires at the end of the book.
  • Gerald Tarrant of the Coldfire Trilogy is the true embodiment of a villain hero. From the beginning of the first book he is foreshadowed as the boogieman of a country. He is what parents threaten their children with to get them to go to their beds on time, and it is completely justified. The only reason he is a protagonist is because the thing that is threatening the world just happens to be a threat to him as well. He is a Magnificent Bastard who feeds on suffering and fear. But he also has an amusing side, in a state of near exhaustion in a land where he might be attacked at any moment, he still uses a part of his magic to fix his clothes and hair to look dashing.
  • Agent Six of Combatants Will Be Dispatched! zigzags this. He's part of a group called Kisaragi, who are a self-styled evil organization with the goal to Take Over the World. They already have, so they send Six to a new world to take that one over, too. Six, for his part, is a complete pervert, a sexual deviant, and a huge jerk. But he's also a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, and Kisaragi really sent him to this world because he's just too nice deep down, and they're hoping that he earns enough Evil Points to really become a despicable bad guy. In spite of that, his Combat Pragmatist tendencies and desire for every woman around him earns him no small amount of disdain in the new world. That being said, the "good guys" prove that they're not exactly paragons of virtue, either, nor are the Demon Lord and his army really all that bad.
  • The central character of Alberto Moravia's The Conformist, is a member of Fascist Italy's Secret Police.
  • The titular character of The Corrupted Chronicles of Coco Claramisa is so obsessed with attention, that she is willing to go to any extreme just to ensure that she remains the star attraction of her family circus.
  • Kaizan Nakazato's classic literary work Dai-bosatsu Tōge (The Great Bodhisattva Pass), generally considered one of the longest works ever written in world literature, revolves around the exploits of Tsukue Ryonosuke, a psychopathic samurai who commits several evil deeds.
  • Haplo of The Death Gate Cycle begins as one of these. In addition to being the main character, he is also a member of the Patryn race, which seeks to subjugate all the worlds under Patryn rule. Later, he becomes less of a villain.
    • Specifically, his progression goes thusly- in the first two books, he's the flat-out Dragon to Lord Xar, and though his backstory makes him sympathetic, there's no real doubt that he's a bad guy. Then, in books 3 and 4, he starts getting pitted against people much worse than he is, moving to more of a Type V Anti-Hero. From the fifth book onward, Haplo has reevaluated his purpose and place in the universe, and though he never loses his ruthlessness or hard edges, he softens up enough to settle in as a Type III Anti-Hero.
  • The narrator of The Debt to Pleasure, although his villainy is only gradually revealed over the course of the book.
  • Jonas from Decomposing Angel is quietly malicious and has some interesting morals. His boss is even more evil.
  • The Demolished Man: Ben Reich, the industrialist/murderer.
  • Edward Montague's Demon Of Sicily, who promises two holy people fulfillment of their wanton sexual urges in exchange for their souls.
  • Demon Seed follows Proteus IV, an AI that becomes determined to forcefully impregnate the female occupant of the Smart House he takes over, so he can become human.
  • Dortmunder: Donald E Westlake also wrote a series of novels under his real name about John Dortmunder, a professional burglar. The books are much Lighter and Softer than the Parker series, and generally Played for Laughs. Several of these have also been turned into movies, including The Hot Rock''.
  • Lord Soth of Dargaard Keep, a death knight, was originally a villain in the Dragonlance novels. Three novels were later released starring Soth as the main character: Knight of the Black Rose and Spectre of the Black Rose by James Lowder and Voronica Whitney Robinson, and the eponymous Lord Soth by Edo van Belkom.
  • Baron Harkonen from Dune during his POV segments. You so want him dead for his crimes and perversions, but while waiting for his comeuppance, you can't help but admire his brilliant political maneuvering and epic-level scheming.
    • Subverted in Book 4, where Leto II says that the Baron wasn't really evil at all, just a very excessive individual. And Leto II knows evil better than anyone, since he has most of humanity living in his head.
    • A popular Alternative Character Interpretation is that Paul and Leto themselves are villains, or as David Brin put it "everyone in Dune deserves to die". Paul starts a religion and unleashes the bloodiest holy war in human history for revenge, even if he later starts preaching against the faith when he loses control of it. While Leto II oppresses humanity for 3,500 years in order to make them conform to his prophecies.
      • Brin misses the point that Leto saw no other way to save humanity from extermination, and with such a heavy responsibility weighing on him, the end justified any means.
  • The Eagle Has Landed follows a group of Nazi agents attempting to assassinate Winston Churchill. You'll still likely find yourself rooting for them at a few points.
  • The title characters of Edgar & Ellen are sadistic, misanthropic Nightmare Fetishist brats who play nasty pranks, con people, abuse animals (including their own pet), and are generally unpleasant people.
  • Ellen and Otis: Otis Spofford, the class troublemaker and all-around nuisance, is the main character of the second book of the series.
  • The titular character in The Enormous Crocodile is a semi-comedic version of this trope. He tries to disguise himself as a coconut tree, then a see saw, then a wooden crocodile on a roundabout, and finally a picnic bench. Each time one of the other animals in the jungle steps in to warn the children and they run off in panic. He gets his comeuppance when the elephant gets hold of him.
  • The protagonist in Everybody Loves Large Chests starts off as a dungeon mimic that loves eating adventurers. It Ranks Up into a tentacled abomination that loves devouring entire towns.
  • Eye of the Needle has a villain co-protagonist, since it spends far more pages following the spy's progress across England than it spends with the heroine who eventually brings him down.
  • While The Gap Cycle has plenty of protagonists, most of whom are villainous to some extent, it's strongly dominated by Angus Thermopyle, a man who starts the story as a pirate, murderer, and rapist. He does get a bit less horrible over the course of the story, but even at the end he's a Noble Demon at best. Stephen R. Donaldson has stated that he hesitated to publish the first book in the series, because he didn't like what it said about him that he found it so easy to write Angus.
  • Girls Don't Hit: The main character is an unrepentant hitwoman who feels only annoyance toward most people.
  • In John C. Wright's The Golden Age, Ao Aeon points at Phaethon's behavior and assures him he is obviously the villain of the piece. In The Golden Transcendence, Phaethon cites this to explain his behavior to Daphne, who is obviously, he explains, the heroine.
  • Amy Dunne of Gone Girl is a murderous, highly narcissistic, dangerous, vindictive sociopath, but the story's just as much about her as it is about her husband Nick, and she narrates about half the book.
  • Slappy's Nightmare, the 23rd book of Goosebumps Series 2000, features recurring villain Slappy as the protagonist. He's still a Jerkass and thinks about (but never does end up) killing a pre teen girl but he's also suffering from a curse that forces him to do good deeds in order to keep on living. He also plays this role in the SlappyWorld books Slappy, Beware! and The Dummy Meets the Mummy (and technically the whole series, since he's the one narrating the stories).
  • Steerpike is the protagonist of the first Gormenghast novel, in which he either manipulates or assassinates the Groan family and their associates.
  • Isaac Asimov's "Green Patches": Half of the story is told from the perspective of a a Saybrook organism that was genetically engineered to match the appearance of insulated wires.
  • Grendel by John Gardner is a Twice-Told Tale, retelling Beowulf with Grendel as the protagonist.
  • Mary Gentle's Grunts! tells the story of a group of orcs just trying to make their way in the world. After they loot a dragon's hoard that has weapons from assorted universes, including some from the US Marines and assorted literature (including Das Kapital, which turns one female orc into a Communist Commissar). The book is an acid-tipped parody of Lord of the Rings, and none of the characters are heroes in the traditional sense.
  • To at least one other protagonist's surprise, Clem's motives for assembling the Hand of Mercy are only a part the problem- as a Fallen angel, he's the villain by default. To a lesser extent, Nana Sophie and Salve aren't loyalists either, so it could be argued that most of the main characters are, at the very least, officially morally grubby.
  • The abominable Protagonists, from the novel Hell's Children, by Andrew Boland, are this.
  • Horace Dorrington from the short stories by Arthur Morrison is a corrupt detective who won't hesitate to cut deals with the villains or even kill his own clients, if he can profit from it.
  • Robert Reed's short story "The Hoplite" has the protagonist being a thoroughly brutal warrior of Alexander the Great's army, who was Resurrected for a Job - subjugating rebellious countries through use of massive firepower and a suit of Powered Armor. The protagonist murders several innocent people and children in revenge for being betrayed.
  • In Kim Newman's The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, Colonel Moran and Professor Moriarty are the main characters, with Moran being the narrator. Moran is a thief, misanthrope, cheat, thrill-junkie who kills animals for sport and men for pay. As a protagonist, he's somewhat sympathetic due to being kind of funny, and though he's very capable, Moriarty often manipulates him for his own reasons. Likewise, Moriarty is shown as taking joy in solving problems (either scientific ones or seemingly impossible crimes), but he has very little in the way of positive emotions or impulses. Both have Freudian Excuses, Moran had a mean angry dad so he became a mean angry man, and Moriarty's father was even worse.
  • In House of Chains, the fourth book in Malazan Book of the Fallen, the first quarter of the book is, atypically, spent following the single Point of View of Karsa Orlong, a careful Deconstruction of the "barbarian fantasy". Karsa comes from a society that glorifies violence, rape and bullying, but even his closest friends find him to be almost too aggressive for them.
  • The titular character of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. However, unlike most of the characters on this list, he does get redeemed at the end.
  • Aur from How to Build a Dungeon: Book of the Demon King is a cold and nefarious man who made a point in his introduction that he absolutely loathes humanity and will do whatever it takes to make them bend over to his will through all kinds of evil plans. Throughout the series we see he wasn’t joking: he goes on to enact genocide, enslave human settlements, and rape women to submission until they start liking it.
  • Ravenloft's I, Strahd, is a novel about the history of - who else? - Strahd, a vampire overlord who was cursed after killing his brother to take his bride, forcing the woman into suicide to escape him.
  • John Barnes' "Kaleidoscope Century'' is told from the fractured viewpoint of Joshua Ali Quare, a mercenary in an alternate future who works for what used to be the KGB before it took over both the The Mafia and The Mafiya.
  • Johannes Cabal the Necromancer: The title character is a soulless Necromancer trying to collect a hundred souls for Satan via a demonic carnival, and his own brother comes to believe he's irredeemable. To Johannes' own surprise, in later books he becomes more of an Anti-Hero and wins the grudging respect of Necromancer's Hero Antagonist.
  • The very end of Katanagatari shows that Togame always intended to sacrifice people, swords, friends, even her own feelings in a mindless pursuit for revenge. Period, end of story. She still genuinely loves Shichika, and she has a very good reason for her behavior, but she never managed to let go of her desire for Revenge Before Reason, to the point where she often goes against her very nature in order to achieve it.
  • The unnamed protagonist of Kill the Boy Band and her friends Erin, Isabel, and Apple are a group of obsessed teenage fangirls who kidnap the least popular and attractive member of a boy band. The narrator is the most sympathetic of the group; she half-heartedly tries to free him, and after his death attempts to expose her friends as his kidnapper and his ex-girlfriend as his killer, but the police won't believe her improbable story.
  • Lady Susan Vernon of Jane Austen's epistolary novel Lady Susan. Despite being the novel's central, most prominent figure, she is an unscrupulous, manipulative vamp engaged in a sort of pre-affair with a married man while at the same time trying to snare the man her daughter is in love with as she struggles to force said daughter to marry a man against her will. Lady Susan does not change at all over the curse of her story. Her daughter Frederica is the more sympathetic heroine.
  • Brendan Stokes in Edmund Power's The Last Chapter starts out as an "aspiring novelist", i.e. a pathetic, conceited, talentless hack. He finds a manuscript while looting his dead neighbor's apartment, promptly steals and plagiarizes it, lies his way to success, and on the way expands his repertoire with adultery, blackmail, and eventually, double homicide.
  • The Liar series written by a Polish author Jakub Ćwiek take place in modern time Earth where all of the main religions of the past and present are real - there are Greek, Hindu, African gods and many mythological creatures that were either very powerful at some point or still live in the hearts of men (for instance, Santa Claus and his Slavic counterpart). The protagonist of the story is the Norse god Loki, who was imprisoned by his father out of fear of making Ragnarok come true. Unknown to Odin, Asgard was about to be attacked by the army of Heaven after God disappeared without a word and left angels in charge. They allied themselves with Loki and thanks to his treason easily wiped out the Norse. The series follows Loki's footsteps as an assassin for hire, hunting various deities and beings who are deemed by angels to be pagan and offensive to their plans. Depending on reader's viewpoint, not only Loki is an evil protagonist, who betrayed his people in exchange for his life and a job, but angels themselves are seen as bloodthirsty monsters who want to exterminate all other pantheons.
  • We spend so much time experiencing The Liveship Traders through Captain Kennit's POV that it sometimes becomes hard to remember that he really is the villain of the piece. Just an extremely charismatic, sympathetic villain who tends to overshadow his more heroic fellow-protagonists.
  • Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Altogether a charming, well-spoken and eloquent historian of French literature, liked by the reader and nearly anyone who meets him. Too bad he is also a pedophile who marries a woman in order to abuse her twelve-year-old daughter, then proceeds to lie to said daughter about the death of her mother while taking her on a not-quite-consensual road trip, on which he at first tries to drug her so that he can have intercourse with her, then manipulates her into letting him do it anyway. And then offers as his excuse that she wasn't a virgin.
  • The Lorax follows the story of the Once-ler, who starts to cause the devastation of a forest to consume the area of all its Truffula trees to sell them on the market, being opposed and scolded by the titular Lorax.
  • H. P. Lovecraft used these sometimes. In "In the Walls of Eryx", the narrator is a heartless exploiter who treats the native Venusians as subhuman in his quest to steal their crystals. In The Temple, the narrator is a heartless stereotypical militaristic German U-boat captain who murders helpless untermenschen after sinking their ship. Both are severely punished for their evil attitudes.
  • Catherine de' Medici is the protagonist of Jean Plaidy's trilogy Madame Serpent, The Italian Woman, and Queen Jezebel. Plaidy paints her as a monster who has her brother-in-law and one of her own sons murdered, and orders courtiers to sexually abuse another son to "turn him gay" and ensure that her favourite would reach the throne. She also shows the abuse Catherine endured as a child - in one scene, a 6-year old Catherine is forced to watch her beloved dog die in agony because her aunt disapproved of her crying over her other dog's death (all Truth in Television).
  • A number of the books by Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked) feature villains from well-known stories as the protagonist. For example, the queen from Snow White (in Mirror, Mirror), and one of the stepsisters from Cinderella (in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister).
  • The Man In The Corner Room has Peter, a university Student Council President who ends up feeding a large number of people to a Soul Eating demon in exchange for a vending machine.
  • Lucius Cornelius Sulla from Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series is a pretty mean guy. He brings about the deaths of his stepmother, her nephew and his stepmother's lover in order to inherit their fortune (and kills another man to frame him for the murders), treats his wife harshly to the point of driving her to suicide, and travels up north to spy on a group of Germans where he meets and impregnates a woman, he later arranges for his German family to be protected and leaves them. And that's all in the first book.
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge's title character, Michael Henchard, is proud, selfish, and short-tempered. Among his villainous acts are selling his wife Susan and daughter Elizabeth-Jane at auction in a drunken haze because he feels they are holding him back, turning on his business manager Donald Farfrae due to his growing popularity with the workers and customers, and lying to Elizabeth-Jane about her true paternity when she and Susan return to him years later and then telling her real father, Richard Newson (Susan's "buyer" at the auction), that she is dead when he comes looking for her.
  • Soltan Gris, narrator of L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth, is also the series antagonist (although you can't really call him sympathetic) who is secretly trying to stop the mission of his incorruptible, heroic counterpart Jettero Heller.
  • Ambrosio, the villainous priest of Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk, who gives in to his desire for his pupil Matilda, a woman disguised as a monk, and then is overcome by lust for the innocent Antonia. With Matilda's sorcerous help, Ambrosio seduces her, then later rapes and murders her. He is delivered into the hands of the Inquisition and makes a Deal with the Devil to avoid the death sentence that awaits him. Only after getting tortured to death does he learn that Antonia was actually his sister.
  • Hester Shaw, from Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines quartet (really, she's only the protagonist of the second book "Predator's Gold;" the first focuses on her husband and the third and fourth on her daughter), hovers between this and anti-hero. On the one hand, she is completely and incontrovertibly evil (she sells a city into slavery or death just to get rid of her rival for her husband-to-be, and actively enjoys killing people); on the other, one somehow can't help sympathising with her regardless, and because of her genuine love for Tom, her interests generally coincide with those of the other (not so evil) protagonists.
  • In the second book in the Night Watch (Series), Day Watch, part of the story is narrated by Alysa, who is the series protagonist Anton's opposite number/Evil Counterpart in the forces of darkness (they start at the same level of power; while the Big Good is Anton's mentor, the Big Bad was Alysa's lover), and she is one of the protagonists of the book.
  • Max Dembo from No Beast So Fierce initially subverts this; while he's a virulently racist, short-tempered ex-con with a warped moral code, he is genuinely trying to reform in spite of everything being stacked against him. After he snaps and decides to embrace being a criminal, however, he embraces being one wholesale.
  • No Gods for Drowning: The book is featured from the main perspective of Serial Killer Lilac Antonis who is brutally killing people all across the city-state of Valentine. Lilac's ultimate goal is to try and use the massive blood sacrifice to return her mother and save the city of Valentine from falling to rising waters.
  • Noughts & Crosses second book Knife Edge is narrated by Sephy, Meggie and Jude. During this book he's a terrorist on the run from the police who wants revenge on all Crosses. He eventually beats his Cross girlfriend to death after he finds himself having feelings for her.
  • Old Scores features two more-or-less classical vampires among the protagonists; their handful of moral compunctions and the enemy vampire's utter lack of them make them A Lighter Shade of Black.
  • Momonga/Ainz Ooal Gown from Overlord (2012), upon entering the New World, finds himself with limitless power, no rivals or higher authorities, and a large group of even eviler minions about as strong as he is that assume he wants to take over the world and take achieving it as their mission. While Ainz himself is mostly uninterested in world domination, he doesn't shy away from cold-blooded murder, torture, slaughtering the innocent, blackmail, running crime organizations from behind the scenes, and letting the truly reprehensible Demiurge do whatever he pleases. As time goes by, his morals slip more and more and his crimes are mostly kept at manageable levels by the fact that he's incompetent, bad at planning ahead, and severely lacking in ambition. The anime downplays this as much as possible to make him look like an antihero, so when later story arcs came around that made it impossible to hide, some viewers were shocked that the story had been following the bad guy the whole time.
  • Paradise Lost. Half of the story follows the War in Heaven, in which Satan himself is the protagonist. Putting Satan center stage and allowing him to work his diabolical charisma on the reader is a major source of the poem's appeal.
  • Parker, the central protagonist of a series of novels that Donald E Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark. Several of these have been filmed (most famously as Point Blank (1967) starring Lee Marvin, and Payback starring Mel Gibson), although the central character is not named Parker in these adaptations due to the author's request. Parker has no moral hang ups about killing, stealing, or torturing to get what he wants, and what he wants is usually money or revenge for not getting money.
  • Grenouille of Patrick Susskind's Perfume. He's (probably) a sociopath who feels no emotion for other humans and his greatest ambition is to create the world's most beautiful perfume - by murdering young women to harvest their scent.
  • In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian Gray is corrupted by Lord Henry's ideas of hedonism and becomes a cruel man who does whatever he wants, regardless of the consequences, and ends up causing pain and death to several people. His portrait reflects Dorian's inner soul (and ages for him as well) and becomes uglier and uglier with each evil act he commits until it becomes monstrous.
  • In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, Penny and her friends accidentally end up as supervillains rather than superheroes due to a run in with a particularly bitchy apprentice hero. Penny tries desperately to correct misconceptions and become a hero, but her friends clearly enjoy being villains. After they continuously foil villainous plots and rescue innocents and are still seen as villains, she just gives up and rolls with it.
  • In Robert Caro's The Power Broker, Caro shows how Robert Moses turns into this while in power, despite starting out as an idealist and doing heroic things at first.
  • Umberto Eco's novel The Prague Cemetery stars a racist, misogynistic forger whose only redeeming feature is his love of good food. He works as a Pet Rat for various reactionary groups and at one point disposes of a political opponent who was in possession of sensitive documents by sinking the ship he was on, killing the rest of the passengers in the process. The book starts with him penning down why he hates Germans, Italians, French, women, Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, and many others, and ends with him penning The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as his magnum opus.. Notably, Eco wrote the book in part because of a Self-Imposed Challenge to create the most despicable protagonist in literature.
  • The Private series Spin-Off Privilege is from the point of view of Ariana Osgood, the villain of one of the books in the series.
  • Professor Moriarty Series: Moriarty is an intelligent and charismatic man who has some standards (he hates child killers, stalkers, and sex-traffickers) and generally faces people worse than he is. However, he is also a satanist who tortures or murders many of his enemies, sometimes without giving less detestable ones the chance to switch sides, tries to destroy the lives of Sympathetic Inspector Antagonists, sometimes gets perfectly innocent people killed during his operations, and once executes a loyal (albeit stupid) employee just because the man's wife was a traitor.
  • The Pyat Quartet by Michael Moorcock. Colonel Pyat - a cocaine-addicted, self-aggrandising, violently anti-semitic Jewish engineer who worships Fascism and may or may not be a rapist. He's also the narrator of his series of novels, despite being an outrageous liar.
  • Mary Tudor in Philippa Gregory's The Queen's Fool. She is of the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds variant of this trope.
  • While The Quest of the Unaligned is not actually written this way, the author suggests that you should always try for a villain who you could do this for if you wanted, as it's an excellent way to avoid cliché storytelling.
  • In Rabbit, Run, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the protagonist, does things like abandoning his wife and son on a whim, but the reader wants to see what Rabbit will do next to make a mess of his life and of the lifes of people around him.
  • Because O. Henry spent time in jail, many of his stories, like The Ransom of Red Chief, focus on (relatively small-time) criminals.
  • Renegades has Nova, who's the protagonist of the trilogy and a member of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists out to plunge Gatlon back into the chaos. The story opens with her attempting to assassinate the Council that rules the city.
  • Reverend Insanity: Reverend Insanity by Gu Zhen Ren is the story of Fang Yuan, who has gone through a Protagonist Journey to Villain before the story starts, and now has no problem murdering and betraying his way through the story in pursuit of his ultimate goal.
  • Reynard the Fox: In this medieval tale Reynard is the protagonist, but hardly an admirable character. He lies, cheats, murders, rapes, steals and betrays everybody and manages to get away with all of it in the end.
  • Tanya Degurechaff from The Saga of Tanya the Evil. She's a black-hearted, vicious, utterly ruthless Child Soldier sorceress in an alt-universe World War I where warfare is supplemented by magic.
  • The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis is framed as letters of advice from a senior demon, Screwtape, to a younger field agent called Wormwood seeking to tempt a mortal to damnation.
  • Thornhill is one of these by the end of The Secret River, having facilitated a genocide in order to avoid having to sell a hundred acres.
  • Secret Santa (2004): Erik Bigelow is the POV character and focus of the story. He's also a bullying slacker and thief who gets anyone who might be promoted over him fired and sexually harasses his executive assistant Marcy and the associate editor of Antiques Now!
  • Mercedes Lackey, in one of her The SERR Ated Edge stories featuring fantasy elves in the real world, had a cold-hearted, ruthless bitch of an antagonist who was quite willing to kill children if the job required it. The only problem was that she was going after a family that were protected by those same, very powerful, elves acting in secret to protect them. The sheer magnitude of her hapless floundering around as she was constantly thwarted in one long Humiliation Conga would make you feel sorry for her if you didn't remind yourself that she was a murderous sociopath.
  • The Shadows Between Us: Alessandra and her love interest, Kallias, are evil and horrible people by any stretch of the imagination, and the story follows their growing romance. A key element in the story as the two grow only more in love with each other the more they learn about each other's more villainous traits.
  • Unlike his more known movie counterpart, the original book has Shrek as a gleeful Jerkass who enjoys causing misery with his horrific ugliness and his powers, from stealing lighting from clouds by eating them to eating a peasant's pheasant.
  • Simon Darcourt from A Snowball in Hell spends an awful lot of time narrating his crimes to the reader with glee.
  • Cersei Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire, when she's the POV character. Victarion fills this role as well. Jaime and Theon start out as this, but undergo a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Doctor Impossible from Soon I Will Be Invincible is pretty comfortable with being the Evil Mad Scientist, albeit with a sort of flamboyant Silver Age kind of villainy. But even if he turns out to be a fairly nice and somewhat misunderstood guy, he is breaking out of jail for the thirteenth time to launch yet another Evil Plan to destroy or Take Over the World, and that's not even counting ones where he got away.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • Death Star focuses on the various people on the first Death Star. Most of them are Punch Clock Villains, really, who either think that The Empire is flawed but good or don't think they can join the Rebellion, either because they are stuck or they think it would just be curb-stomped (they are on the Death Star). The cast includes the gunner who pulled the trigger to destroy Alderaan, a pilot who shot down enough X-wings to become an Ace Pilot, a Force-Sensitive cultured stormtrooper, a surgeon who'd been stuck in service since the start of the Clone Wars, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Darth Vader. The survivors all either join the Rebellion (it blew up the Death Star! Maybe there's a chance!), flee to somewhere far away, or are Darth Vader. The Rebels aren't seen much—they're out there, but they don't show up for long. Leia's in the novel long enough to impress and guilt the surgeon who's treating her for torture, but the others don't get voices or faces, let alone names.
    • The Darth Bane trilogy follows the exploits of Darth Bane, a Dark Lord of the Sith. It is interesting in that it follows the mythical hero's journey, as made famous by the films, but with a negative character.
    • "Nightlily: The Lovers' Tale": Feltipern Trevagg is Corrupt Bureaucrat and a high-functioning Sociopath, introduced maneuvering a widowed mother into having to sell her house to him in order to stay alive (presumably so that we don't feel so bad when his blood stains the hotel bedsheets aqua).
    • James Luceno's Darth Plagueis follows both Plagueis himself and (even more so, ironically considering the title) the rise of his apprentice, Palpatine.
    • Dark Lord—The Rise of Darth Vader, also by Luceno, focuses on the nascent Dark Lord's transformation from the shattered remnants of Anakin Skywalker to the confident, callous Sith Lord seen in the original films.
  • The unnamed protagonist of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, which is full of squick.
  • Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald sets up Moran and Moriarty as the heroes in a Twist Ending. Throughout most of the story the reader thought Moran was Watson and Moriarty was Holmes.
  • Tofu from Super Minion is an escaped Bioweapon Beast completely driven by self-interest and with no compunction about killing and inflicting pain. Ironically, his job as a henchman for a supervillain is one of the best influences on him, as Hellion's Henchmen are remarkably civic-minded for a supervillain and Tofu knows that he'll do a lot better following their rules.
  • The Supervillainy Saga stars Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless, a Ridiculously Average Guy who has the disturbing desire to be a supervillain. He becomes extremely good at, even if there are some boundaries he won't cross. It helps his victims tend to be much-much worse.
  • Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and its sequels. His most significant acts include murder for the purposes of identity theft, art forgery, and taking revenge on a random guy who pissed him off by tricking him into thinking that he's dying of cancer, then persuading him to become a hitman. The Ripley books were Highsmith's only series, but the central characters of her books are almost always either Villain Protagonists or pathetic losers who suffer horribly.
  • Tale Of The Necromancer: The story shows the gradual transformation of the protagonist, from a simple man who wants to save himself and his loved ones from death, through a cult leader, to a nascent sorcerous overlord.
  • Most of the protagonists in Tales of 1001 Nights are thieves.
  • Tarkin, also by James Luceno but in the new Star Wars Expanded Universe, follows the rise of Wilhuff Tarkin through the Empire's ranks.
  • The monstrous sorcerer Yasunori Kato is generally labeled as the protagonist of Teito Monogatari, although the story does focus on the perspectives of many other characters including a disillusioned Yukio Mishima.
  • Thérèse Raquin is all about a woman who murders her husband to be with her lover.
  • In These Words Are True and Faithful, Ernie is the villain, but his inner confusion and the choices that it prompts him to make are the reasons why there is a plot.
  • In the picture book This Is Not My Hat, the protagonist is a tiny fish who's escaping with a stolen hat. He knows the hat is not his, but he's going to keep it anyway because the rightful owner is much too big for it.
  • Touching Spirit Bear: Cole Matthews started off as a villain. He attacked someone because that person did what any sane man would do if someone raided a building. Flashbacks show that he probably would've not been this this hadn't his father been so abusive.
  • The Twits are a variation, as they are introduced before Muggle-Wump and get a lot more of the focus in the first half of the book. The position of protagonist is later given to Muggle-Wump.
  • Nemecko from The Ultimate Killing Game is casually homicidal. It's a part of his job.
  • The protagonists of James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. While most of Ellroy's main characters are simply dark Anti Heroes who Pay Evil unto Evil, Kemper Boyd, Ward Littell, Wayne Tedrow Jr., Dwight Holly, and Pete Bondurant are a motley crew of extortionists, drug peddlers, mercenaries, con men, and assassins who are out for nothing but their own enrichment.
  • This is usually the case in The Vampire Chronicles. Some protagonists are sympathetic characters, some have a few good qualities, but most are villains, at least in the traditional sense.
  • Lucifer Niggerbastard is anything but a saint in The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard.
  • Villains by Necessity: Sam, Arcie and Valerianna (an assassin, thief and dark sorceress), though the former two aren't as villainous.
  • The Virus: Olivia Cromwell maybe a mercenary for hire but it becomes quite evident that she is just a sadist who takes pleasure in being cruel and commuting atrocities. To Olivia, there is no greater pleasure than towering over her helpless victim and raising her heavy heeled boot over their skull.
  • A.E. van Vogt's classic sci-fi novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle opens with his previously published story "Black Destroyer", recounting the powerful, feline predator Coeurl's battle of wits against the crew of human space explorers who arrive on his planet. Partly because the story's told largely through Coeurl's eyes, and partly because the human characters' Expo Speak dialogue makes them seem bland and uninteresting in comparison, his eventual defeat almost comes across as a Downer Ending. In the end, though, perhaps Coeurl had the last laugh: the Space Beagle's crew has passed on into obscurity, while he's gotten a Shout-Out as an enemy in practically every Final Fantasy game.
  • While some would argue that every Warhammer 40,000 novel has a Villain Protagonist by default, the Chaos Space Marine novels definitely qualify for being one of the most unambiguously villanous factions. These include Graham McNeill's Iron Warriors, Anthony Reynolds' Word Bearers, Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Black Legion, and Simon Spurrier's Night Lords
    • In the Thousand Sons trilogy (another Chaos Marine series), Ahriman might have honourable traits, sympathetic motives, and arguably noble goals, but at the end of the day, he’s still a Chaos Space Marine and he is by no means a heroic character. The second book drives this point home early on when he exterminates the population of an entire world, simply to set up a single element of a trap for one of his enemies that won’t even be sprung for centuries.
    • Many xenos-centric books fall under this category. Especially Andy Chambers' books, Path of the Renegade and Path of the Incubus, which feature the Dark Eldar as protagonists - arguably the worst people in the Warhammer 40,000 setting.
  • The Warrior Cats manga The Rise of Scourge focuses on how Scourge became the feared leader of BloodClan, and the novella Tigerclaw's Fury shows what Big Bad Tigerclaw got up to during his exile after his failed attempt to kill Bluestar.
    • The novella Mapleshade's Vengeance is about Mapleshade and her Start of Darkness.
    • Hollyleaf and Ivypool are briefly this.
  • Forgotten Realms' War of the Spider Queen series. All characters walking along the plot are fit in range from casual backstabbers to neighbor-sacrificing Lloth priestesses, and violent half-demons. Which does not prevent some of them from being charming and all of them from having more or less good points.
  • Thought we don't find out until halfway through Within Ruin Virgil is the reason behind nearly every awful thing that has happened throughout the novel, including the plague.
  • For most of the book The Woad to Wuin, the normally cowardly Anti-Hero Sir Apropos of Nothing descends into this. And fully enjoys it.
  • The protagonist in The Wolves of Paris is a bloodthirsty, power-hungry wolf-dog who has no slouch on killing livestock animals for food, and delve deep into his canine savagery as he starts eating human flesh.
  • As one might expect from a book titled Worst. Person. Ever., its protagonist Raymond Gunt is a crude misogynist who accepts a B-unit cameraman position to get sex and legally abuse and enslave a homeless man he takes on an assistant. And when he's not incurring karma, he's stealing food from starving contestants, stressing someone enough to cause a fatal heart attack, and aiding in the frame-up of a cabbie he antagonized for assault.
  • Byronic Hero Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. His life ambition is to wreak vengeance on all who have (in his opinion) stood between him and his would-be lover Catherine Earnshaw. He achieves this by mentally and physically abusing them, and embezzling their property. He extends his revenge to the children of his enemies.
  • Wyatt is the thief protagonist of a series of novels (starting with Kickback) by Australian author Garry Disher. You will end up barracking for Wyatt as his schemes bring him into conflict with worse criminals who lack even Wyatt's basic sense of honour and ethics.
  • Yellowface follows June Hayward, a struggling author who propels herself to fame after stealing, editing, and selling the manuscript of her dead friend, presenting it as solely her creation. June is a petty, cruel, bigoted egotist who's deeply in denial of the harm caused by her actions and her own character flaws. Even when she's actively considering committing murder to keep her secret hidden.
  • You (Kepnes) is told from the perspective of Joe and it revolves around his unhealthy obsession with Beck.


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