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To that end, below are a few of my favorites from the wide world of literary villainy. But what exactly does “best” mean when it comes to bad guys (and gals)? Well, it might mean any number of things here: most actually terrifying, or most compelling, or most well-written, or most secretly beloved by readers who know they are supposed to be rooting for the white hats but just can’t help it. It simply depends on the villain. Think of these as noteworthy villains, if it clarifies things. A writer called Julia Donaldson was also writing songs for Playdays at this time and her song A Squash and a Squeeze was commissioned to be a picture book. Axel Scheffler was recommended as an illustrator for the text and an award-winning team was created. Made iconic by Anthony Hopkins, of course, but made brilliant and terrifying—a serial killing psychiatrist cannibal, come on—by Thomas Harris. “They don’t have a name for what he is.” Also, he has six fingers—though they’re on his left hand, so it couldn’t have been him who killed Mr. Montoya. Still, it puts him in rare company. I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). After graduating with a first class degree, Axel moved to London where he began illustrating for a variety of English and German advertising companies, magazines and newspapers. He took his portfolio to a number of publishers and Faber commissioned him to illustrate The Piemakers by Helen Cresswell and The Bottle Rabbit by Bernard McCabe. In 1989, Walker asked Axel to illustrate a text by Jon Blake, You’re a Hero, Daley B.
His arm has grown long indeed,’ said Gimli, ’if he can draw snow down from the North to trouble us here three hundred leagues away.’ The book was widely read as an antisuburban novel, and that disappointed me,” Yates said in a 1972 interview. In everyone’s favorite horror novel about America in the ’50s, onetime bohemians Frank and April Wheeler move to the ‘burbs, and find it. . . extremely stifling. But it’s not the suburbs exactly but the Wheelers’ inability to understand one another, their fear, their creeping, cumulative despair, that are the forces of destruction here. A dragon who was drawn to the fortune of the Lonely Mountain? It’s pretty amazing when you meet him for the first time. Plus he pretty much doesn’t care about the world. He just wants his fortune and to lie there with it. The Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid Axel Scheffler was born in 1957 in Hamburg, Germany. At school, although always good at art, he never really considered a career in illustration. But long before he began his professional life, he had won his first drawing prize for an international chocolate company – his prize was a cuddly lilac cow.
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One of my television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published.
Here’s a villain you can’t help but root for—I mean, sort of. You feel his pain as he tries to insinuate himself into the life of the man he so admires (and perhaps loves), and as he is first welcomed and then pushed away. Less so when he murders his beloved and assumes his identity—but somehow, as you read, you find yourself holding your breath around every corner, hoping he will escape yet again. Our goal is to introduce readers to new authors, to cultivate fandom for our included authors, and to provide exclusive cover editions for readers to add to their collections.Cathy Ames is cold as ice—a sociopath who had to learn as a child how to mimic feelings to get by—but soon also learns how easy it is to manipulate, destroy lives, and murder people to amuse herself. Apparently all this is available to her because of her remarkable beauty. In the end, she has a single feeling of remorse and promptly kills herself. Axel went on from school to study History of Art at the University of Hamburg – but he didn’t like the course and decided to leave. Knowing that he wanted to live in another country and learn a second language, he moved to England to study illustration at the Bath Academy of Art. The villainess of choice for every man who has ever claimed his wife made him do it. But I’ve always found Lady Macbeth more interesting than Macbeth himself—she’s the brains behind the operation, not to mention the ambition. Her sleepwalking scene is one of the best and most famous of all of Shakespeare’s plays. Even this makes me shiver: Axel has achieved worldwide acclaim for his humorous illustrations, and his books have been translated into over 29 languages. He has enjoyed particular success in his award-winning picture book collaborations with Julia Donaldson, but is also the best-selling illustrator of novelty books such as The Bedtime Bear. In 2006 he was been called upon to design Gordon Brown’s annual Christmas card!
The Big Bad Wolf, the Evil Queen, the Stepsisters, Joker, Darth Vader – these iconic villains have stayed with us for a very long time. We read about them, we see them in movies, in the originals and remakes. What makes a villain iconic? What makes them timeless? For you to remember them years and years later and still know what the story is about and what the villain did so the hero couldn’t achieve their destiny. These book villains tell their story, you might even relate to them a bit, but the way they do things might not be the right one. Of course it’s O’Brien who does most of the dirty work—but it’s Big Brother (be he actual person or nebulous invented concept) that really, um, oversees the evil here. It’s a bold move, to leave the book’s central evil so undefined – an edgeless darkness given shape only through the actions of its subordinates. But the effect is to create a truly unforgettable baddie: vaster, bolder and more terrifying through his absence than he could ever have been through his presence. When we give shape to something, we circumscribe it; the limits we impose are unavoidably reductive. As I grew older and read (and reread) The Lord of the Rings to myself – and, over recent months, to my own six-year-old – I was able, as I couldn’t as a child, to perceive the flaws: the social conservatism; the overly archaic language; the dearth of women. But 30 years on from my first encounter with him, Sauron’s power to chill hasn’t diminished one iota. Our capacity to imagine and comprehend evil changes as we age, and because Tolkien leaves his villain untrammelled – a blank space upon which we may each project our own bete noire – he evolves as we do. We never outgrow him.
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Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. Isn’t it awesome? We can just make dinosaurs! There is no foreseeable problem with this. We can totally handle it. As “the most evil woman in creation,” she is on a mission to torture and kill as many children as possible, and often uses murder as a focusing device in meetings. She’s also kind of brilliant—I mean, murdering children by turning them into animals their parents want to exterminate? I have to say, that’s smart. The patriarchy is the very villain of this story. It forces women into fighting and competing between themselves. As we know, the government is led by it and women in this society don’t benefit from anything. They are mistreated and put into boxes of how they should live their lives. So who doesn’t want a book that smashes the patriarchy with Latinx leads and a queer romance? Because I do. Lada Dracul from And I Darken More about Julia: “I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).
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