What makes a beguiling bad guy? Or, heaven forbid, an enchantingly conniving woman? In recent fiction, who are the villains we love to hate or hate to love? What characteristics are we attracted to? Complexity? Seductiveness? Brilliance? Sheer cruelty? Who can stand up to the Shakespearean Iago or Dickens’s Uriah Heep?
What I’ve found in writing fictive villains like Tony Amato in my fourth novel, Beautiful Dreamers, is that they come in all shapes and sizes, as does the trauma they both derive from and strew in their paths. They can take center stage, bawling out their villainy or they can lurk in corners, pulling strings. They can have deep histories, or they can emerge out of the ether, the full-blown embodiment of Evil with a capital E. They can be representative or individual, physically beautiful or hideously ugly, manipulative or straightforward in their villainy. We like to think we’d be immune to their schemes and betrayals. What these recent novels tell us is that we aren’t, nor are we immune becoming them. As Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula has shown us, the line between villain and victim can be razor thin.
Ray Hanrahan from The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
The title says it all: the self-proclaimed artist Ray Hanrahan is the smarmiest, whiniest, most generally disagreeable narcissist you’ll ever meet. Readers may indeed peg him as more a pain in the neck than a villain, but he makes every attempt to wreck the lives of his wife, Lucia, who is the true artist in the family and who must mask her own professional aspirations so as not to anger him, and his three children, one of whom, his daughter Leah, caters to his every whim. Ray is the egoist par excellence; all attention and allegiance must go to him. In the beginning, I found the man so obnoxious that I almost couldn’t continue reading; I wanted to wring his neck and shout to his family, “Get out! Run for the hills.” (There is something so disgustingly patronizing about Ray’s relationships with the female members of his family that every demeaning manipulative comment, seems like patriarchy on steroids.) When Ray finally gets his big break after many years of lying fallow, the family is thrilled. (Perhaps now he will be appeased; perhaps now he will loosen his iron grip.) His wife plans a huge party after the opening. His estranged daughter Jess comes into town, not without trepidation and a fresh rush of anger. Ray refuses to let any of them see his new paintings, and the stage is set for his well-earned collapse.
The “Thin Lady” from Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
The institution of American slavery is the true villain in this wrenching fourth novel of the two-time National Book Award winner. In this neoslave narrative, we follow Annis and other slaves as they are sold and driven south in a hellish journey that ends in New Orleans. The “lady,” as Annis calls her, doesn’t make an appearance until almost halfway through the novel when she buys Annis in the city slave market; When the lady questions her knowledge of mushrooms, fearful of being poisoned, Annis’s impossible choice is to lie and go with the woman (Annis does know mushrooms), or succumb to the sex trade in light-skinned young Black women. At first glance, her new mistress seems like the lesser of the two evils. As time goes on, though, “the lady” evolves into a grotesque monster. She inflicts the cruelest of punishments without cause or thought; she is oblivious to the suffering of others, from the slow starvation of the skeletal serving women in her household to doling out the ultimate punishment—sending slaves down into “the hole” for days without food or drink. “The lady” is the embodiment of evil. For her and for the institution she represents, villain is too small a word.
Billy Turner from The Crocodile Bride by Ashleigh Bell Pederson
Billy Turner in Pederson’s debut novel is a cringe-worthy villain, an alcoholic who sexually abuses his 11-year-old daughter Sunshine when he gets drunk, which is often. But, like so many villains’ stories, Billy’s doesn’t emerge full-blown but is rather the result of multiple traumas that go back for generations. Set in the swampy community of Fingertip, Louisiana, Sunshine turns to a family myth of a young female figure who tames a voracious crocodile in nearby Black Bayou. It’s a story told to her father as a boy by a mother desperate to find her way out of a brutal marriage. This is a tangled web of intergenerational abuse, and Billy Turner is as much caught in it as his innocent daughter is. The novel raises the serious question of how stories might help victims and villains alike break free from intergenerational trauma.
Angel Maso from Transcendent Gardening by Ed Falco
Like Billy Turner, Angel Maso is as much victim as villain, as pathetic and tortured a serial killer as you’ll ever meet. When he’s first introduced, Angel is a self-proclaimed pacifist, shy and withdrawn; he has a pet groundhog named Frankie; he teaches poetry in the local high school and loves to garden. He doesn’t own a gun. What combination of factors would force a man like Angel to pick up an AR-15 and murder 55 people? For author Falco, this is not a rhetorical question; he was teaching at Virginia Tech in the spring of 2007 when 32 faculty and students were murdered and 23 injured in the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and remained so for nine years until the Orlando nightclub shooting. Set in a gun-toting mountain town in Georgia, the novel depicts Angel as a rejected ex-husband and the victim of a brutal father—a poetic soul who lives almost exclusively in his own head, conjuring a beautiful alter-ego named Shelly. When he gives up gardening, is fired from his job teaching poetry at the local high school, endures multiple provocations from a violent neighbor, including the shooting of his pet, and is denied timely mental health counseling, he snaps. The genius of this novel is that it leaves the reader with the nagging suspicion that, given the country’s gun culture and dearth of mental health counseling, this could happen to many American citizens.
Serena Pemberton from Serena by Ron Rash
Rash’s novel was published in 2008. I include it here because the title character seems starkly contemporary in her amorality, ambition, and greed. From the moment we meet her at the beginning of the Great Depression, Serena Pemberton is determined to slash and burn her way to a fortune, a female version of Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, who vows to do whatever necessary to erect an empire to his own giant ego, regardless of the human and environmental costs. Galloping through ancient Smoky Mountain wilderness with an eagle in tow, Serena uses and abuses the poorly paid company work force. She’s determined to extend the family fortune by using violence against those who advocate making the Smokies a national park. Childless herself, she plots to kill her husband’s illegitimate young son so that he doesn’t inherit the business. She later turns on her husband. There is nothing Serena won’t do to further her own goal, which is the accumulation of money. She’s manipulative, destructive, rapacious, vicious. And it isn’t just money she wants; it’s power. It’s hard to conjure a more destructive force.
Amos from The Prophets by Robert Jones
Like Ward’s Let Us Descend, The Prophets is a neoslave narrative. But while Ward’s novel shines a light on the horrific disciplinary relationship between master and slave, Jones’s story is more complex. Operating under the umbrella of the oppressive master/slave relationship is Amos the betrayer. Like the young lovers Isaiah and Samuel, Amos is a slave. There are certainly white villains aplenty roaming Jones’s novel about life on a southern plantation called “Empty”: the slave master Paul, who is cold-blooded in his operation of the farm; his wife Ruth, who tries to seduce Samuel and has him punished when he doesn’t respond; their son Timothy, who forces (and obtains) sexual favors from Samuel. But Amos is a particular kind of villain; a preacher, he convinces himself and others that, counter to West African traditions, homosexuality is counter to a Christian god’s will. Amos’s betrayal of the lovers, after they resist the breeding project they are forced into, is best for the slave community as a whole, or so he convinces himself and others. While the results of this betrayal are horrifying, there’s a lifting at the close of this lyrical novel that owes much to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, with the intimation that the worst of villains and villainous institutions can never extinguish the human spirit.
Victor Prine from Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh
In Haigh’s novel about an abortion clinic in Boston, the 60-plus-year-old retired trucker Victor Prine plots and plans behind the scenes. Like so many lost souls in American society, he’s a purveyor of misinformation from extremist right-wing radio and network “news.” He’s deluded himself into thinking that the end times are upon us and has stashed away multiple generators, arms, canned goods, and other supplies he deems vital in the emergency he perceives to be right around the corner. A white supremacist who considers white women to be “lazy” about reproducing, because, after all, that’s their role in society, he gnashes his teeth about the reproduction rates of women of color. On his website Excelsior 11, he creates a “Hall of Shame,” in which white women’s photographs are displayed as they walk into abortion clinics across the country. His plots and plans come to a final and disastrous (for him) culmination, and he becomes more pathetic than villainous.
The Good Shepherd Nuns from Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan’s 2021 international bestseller is a beautifully spare historical novel about Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes for “common” women and girls, pregnant out of wedlock, and the Magdalen laundries attached to them, which extracted unpaid labor from their victims, separating them from their children. Both were fatalities of this system, as recent gruesome discoveries of unmarked graves testify. It’s nearing Christmas in 1985 when a humble coal merchant named Bill Furlong, father of five girls, makes a delivery only to find a bare-footed and thinly clad girl, a nursing mother named Sarah, locked up shivering in the convent coal shed. The nuns, who are supported by the small-town community, including Furlong’s wife, Eileen, are a shadowy but formidable group, financed by both church and state. The villainy of the Magdalen nuns is felt in their effects on those in their care and in the smallest details: the “scrubbed” look of the girls, the way the rescued girl shakes and sobs in the Mother Superior’s presence, the padlocks on the gates. Another girl Furlong comes upon in the convent asks him to free her so that she may drown herself. There is implied threat in the smallest whisper, the slightest gesture. The effect is chilling and sinister. Keegan extends our sense of the nuns’ villainy in an afterword that outlines the story of the laundries.