All novelists are villains. Like despots, we fantasise that thousands of people will pay attention to our lengthy speeches, and often hold the delusion that it will do them good. Having no army, we grip our audience with a trick called literature, though we're usually fairly confident that people want to listen to us anyway.
The narrator of my book Consent calls himself a practitioner of “people studies”, which means he is a serial stalker, and eventually much worse. He expects to be hated, and dreams of no more than a fair hearing. “I have only tried to live by simple principles with doggedness and honesty,” he says, “and with an open mind.”
The villains on this list are murderers, torturers and rapists (sometimes all three), but when they say they do not feel remorse, we often admire their frankness. Many of these books were condemned as immoral when they first appeared, because they seemed to humanise the evil they explain. We don't want villains to be human. We want to make them suffer, and compassion gets in the way. Maybe their victims weren't human either, in their eyes.
