Fiction’s Greatest Monsters

If you can muster even an iota of sympathy for Lily Bart, the fallen beauty in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, you'll surely have it out for Bertha Dorset. Sure, Bertha's husband, George, is a snooze, and it's almost admirably ballsy the way she gallivants around with a younger man right under George's nose. But to deflect attention from her affair by accusing Lily of having unbecoming relations with George? And... to then sabotage Lily's attempts to make a living for herself after the accusations cause her social status to plummet? Bertha, burning with jealousy over Lily's beauty, intelligence and general wit, will stop at nothing to humiliate her. Enlightened readers of today may see in Bertha's actions a way of acting out against the oppression of the day, but until Bertha has her feminist awakening and realizes that the patriarchy's the real doozy, I'd suggest you steer clear.
— Sara Jaffe

I'm no psychologist, but I'm going to bet that singled-minded obsession and sociopathic behavior are deeply linked. When someone wants one thing so badly that it takes over his entire brain and being, the desire takes on a corrosive quality. I picture a sort of walking-dead Ahab, eyes wild, skull half-eaten away by the obsession to avenge himself on Moby Dick. In other words: sucks if you're stuck on a boat with... him.

The horror and the marvel of Ahab is, in part, the singularity of his fixation, but it's also the realization that we run into versions of Ahab every day: the greedy über-capitalist, the kid who won't stop screaming until he gets his ice cream, the country so bent on revenge it attacks the wrong target. The real horror of Ahab, perhaps, is that there are Ahabs all around us—and maybe even versions of him within ourselves.
— Sara Jaffe

Forget Kate Winslet. Forget, even, Joan Crawford's Oscar-winning 1945 turn. All dramatizations of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce play up the titular character's craven, desperate nature, but daughter Veda is the real monster here. As the dark, twisted mother-daughter relationship evolves, Veda grows from ungrateful brat to scheming, lying sociopath. Divorced, penniless Mildred takes the only job she can find during the Depression as a waitress, but is terrified of her snobbish... daughter's judgment. As she builds a successful pie empire, Mildred thinks she'll finally win Veda's approval, but her daughter scorns her for having to work for a living. She idolizes flashy, "sophisticated" men with no substance, so Mildred marries one who drives them to ruin. She fakes a pregnancy to blackmail a rich family. She becomes – literally – a diva (singing opera, that is). By the time you get to the book's climactic confrontation, you'll find yourself rooting for child abuse.
— Regan Hofmann

Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is full of oddities – talking cats, men whose shadows only appear at half strength, clouds full of mackerel – and yet the twin appearances of walking, talking versions of brand icons Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker rank among the strangest. Sanders, for his part, says he's just a metaphysical concept, but Johnnie Walker claims to be the physical embodiment of the whiskey shill, and lovingly explains... that in order to make his otherworldly, soul-stealing flute, he must saw the heads off cats and eat their hearts.
Not content to act alone, Walker forces an old, sweet, childlike Mr. Nakata to assist in his sanguine project. With one of the most subtly brutal and straightforward lines in the entire novel, he commands Nakata keep his eyes open while another cat is decapitated: "Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything…In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes."
— Leah Friedman

She frames two schoolboys for rape after bringing them the rope and convincing them to tie her up with it. She seduces a schoolteacher and drives him to suicide. She sets her house aflame with her parents still in it, her pockets laden with stolen money. Later, in the wake of her years of lies and manipulations, and after a dirty tryst with her brother-in-law, she shoots her husband with a pistol... and abandons her children. She poisons a local madam, takes over her brothel, and transforms it into a den of sadism. And she does it all – all the lying and conniving and manipulating – with little rosebud lips, a tiny, perfect, doll-like frame and gold hair as lustrous as autumn wheat. By offering not a hint of the moral cesspool beneath that luminous surface, she's elevated from reprehensible to terrifying. Ugly monsters are easy, quotidian, identifiable. The true stuff of nightmares is Cathy Ames's own pristine, immaculate filth.
—Jess Wilson

Killer. Pedophile. Legal professional. Massively tall but hairless and pale as a worm – if worms could lift cannons singlehandedly and appear, eerily, creepily, in more than one place at the same time. He is always there; brutality and evil personified.

He is there, falsely accusing a revival preacher of raping young girls and goats, provoking the crowd to riot and murder. Enticing children with sweets, playing games with them, raping them, scalping... them, making them disappear. Pitching puppies off stone bridges into swollen rivers to drown. Glorifying warfare. Inciting others to violence. And maneuvering incessantly, relentlessly to obtain more and greater knowledge and power. "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge," he says, chillingly, "exists without my consent."
— Jess Wilson