I’ve always wondered about the Wild Cards books. Are they any good?
Daniel Quilp from Dicken’s Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. There is no other character in a book that I have wanted to beat the shit out of more than this man.
Several from Catch-22 Milo is evil. Col Cathcart and Col Korn may just be stupid and mean. Arfy may just be crazy but he is evil.
And Aaron the Moor from the lesser-known Titus Andronicus. Driven by pure malice, and at the end he boasts of it – “If one good deed in all my life I did / I do repent it from my very soul!”
I’d say they’re “uneven”. Since they’re mosaic novels that consist of stories/chapters by several different authors, you’ll probably like some parts and not like others. If you can find them, I thought they were worth reading; there are some damn interesting characters.
I thought the first was quite good, and each subsequent one was somewhat less good than the one before; I stopped after #3, having seen that pattern in other series before.
The aunt who worked her niece to death in Zola’s The Earth. Serena in Ron Rash’s book of the same name. Ellen in Leave Her to Heaven, who arranged the drowning of her husband’s disabled brother because she was jealous of their relationship. The little girl in The Bad Seed.
Uriah Heep.
Max Cady from Cape Fear was terrifyingly evil.
This, this, a thousand times this. I really hated Tim Roth for a while after watching the movie, which is a testament to how talented of an actor he is.
Richard III from Shakespeare’s play of the same name
Elmer Gantry
Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves
And, of course, Ma- . . . errmmm . . . the dude from the Scottish play. [eeeewwwww! hot potato off your drawers but we’ll make amends!]
Sauron is “truly evil” but, in the books or in the films, never develops as a “character.” No lines.
Worse yet, he’s the kind of bad guy who is always absolutely convinced he’s the good guy. See The Fundamentalist, Well Intentioned Extremist, and Knight Templar. (TVTropes links.)
Norman Arminger in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series. He’ll do anything, kill or torture anyone, to forge his neo-Norman-French empire. And everyone keeps pointing out how many lives he saved by his ruthless methods after the Change, and how most cities the size of Portland ended up as death zones. Even the Prophet Sethaz, enemy in the more recent novels, isn’t so pure-evil as that (he is possessed by Higher Powers, after all).
Stirling really likes pure-evil villains, so long as they’re total badasses. Like William Walker in the Island in the Sea of Time series. Or the whole Draka culture.
[Edmund]Oh, you mean MacBeth?[/Edmund]
Speaking of pure-evil characters . . .
Actually, his wife was a far nastier piece of work.
Carcer Dun, Night Watch.
Max Piper, from the prose Fables novel Peter and Max.
Francis Urqhart, from the “House of Cards” trilogy. Pure, unrepentant evil, with a knack for betraying and killing characters we’ve grown to like.
That said, I’d vote for him (or, I suppose, for the Tories under his leadership.) As I’ve said previously on this Board, the greatest crisis of Urqhart’s time as PM was when the King became actively engaged in opposition to the Government. Never mind that the King was a decent man attempting to advance humane policies - a constitutional monarch who thinks he can shape policy in this way when it suits him is a grave threat to democracy. The King had to be taken down, and Urqhart did it quite neatly.