Any characters from a book that to you are just so vile, so nonredeemable that you just want to beat them to within an inch of their miserable worthless lives?
I have two.
From The Old Curiosity Shop by Dickens. Mr. Quilp really needed to meet the business end of a baseball bat. I just hated that cocksucker. I’m not a violent person but for this guy I’d make an exception.
The female villain from Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Dorotea Benedetti. That bitch must die. Die in a fire! I hate you! DIE DIE DIE!
Only these two have provoked that strong of a reaction in me but maybe I’m weird. (pffft, maybe)
Am I the only person who wants to beat up people from books?
Arslan, by M.J. Engh is a masterpiece of emotional manipulation.
In the first chapters of the book, you’d give your left leg to have one gun, one bullet, and a chance to shoot the title character. He’s the stinkingest god damn son of a bitch ever. I can’t think of any other fictional character I have hated as strongly.
By the end of the book…you not only kind of like him, you actually love him.
The author is that good.
So…right around the first forty pages or so, let me stop and beat the crap out of him, because it would feel so damn good right then. Afterward, I can read the rest of the book in relative peace.
Humbert Humbert from Lolita. He’s the only character I’ve ever had this reaction to - I’m generally quite non-violent, but as I read the book I fantasised about killing him. Die, die, die, you evil bastard!
Heathcliff and Cathy (no, not the cartoon characters). I really don’t understand their appeal as tragic romantic figures. Heathcliff is a violent bully, Cathy is a psycho hose beast, and between the two of them they torment and utterly destroy three generations of two different families, whose lives only start to improve once Heathcliff finally dies. The two may have deserved each other but they needed to be removed from the company of everyone else in the world.
Not exactly beat with a baseball bat, but slap upside the face and get her to come to her senses: V.I. Warshawski from Sara Paretsky’s detective series. The first few books were really good, but she never seems to learn and keeps making stupid decisions, based on sheer arrogance and ruthless disregard for the opinions of her friends, that get her in trouble. “Wake up and learn from your mistakes!” ::: slap, slap :::
I remember reading the book in high school and thinking that if he went to our school, that I’d beat him senseless. And I wasn’t a bully or much of a fighter at all.
Many a time I wanted to slap Harry Potter but more like Marlon Brando in The Godfather “You can ACT LIKE A MAN!” way.
My most memorable was in book 4 FOUR!. Harry wondered to himself is someone might be trying to kill him. “DUH!” When you were a baby someone tried to kill you! SLAP! In your first year here someone tried to kill you. SLAP! In your second year here, SOMEONE TRIED TO KILL YOU! SLAP SLAP SALP! WHAT HAPPENED LAST YEAR? DID SOMEONE TRY TO KILL YOU?
Rosamond from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I confess, I technically never finished this book because after some point, I flipped to the end to see if Rosamond died in a housefire or got stampeded by horses or otherwise got made to eat shit for all her heinousness, and when I discovered she did not, I stopped reading her storyline entirely.
She’s a very realistic villain. You probably know someone just like her. It’s a testament to the quality of writing that I hated her that much, but you know, I read for pleasure and to escape from people like her in real life. I don’t need that kind of aggravation from literature, too.
And fortunately, Dorothea’s plotline makes up for this grief.
Well, maybe I’d like to give a kick in the shin to Allison from Robert B. Parker’s Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole novels. She’s not a villain, but wow, is she annoying.