March 14, 2025, 12:31pm

We put a good amount of work into our villains bracket, and I think I could make a case for each of our initial 64 picks being the worst of all time. This week we’ve watched a lot of our personal favorites get voted out, but that’s just how democracy shakes out sometimes. Should Suburban Ennui and The Earth have made it out of the first round? Without a doubt, but that’s just not the world we’re living in.

As we watch the votes roll in on our final showdown, I want to shout out a few other characters who didn’t make the final selection, but are still close to our hearts. Because yes, we’ve been reading your comments and yes, we know we didn’t include your favorite — in a way, we’re the real villains of this whole thing.

One that I’ve seen pop up in the comments and was on our short list is The Shark from Peter Benchley’s Jaws. The shark is undeniably terrifying and an excellent antagonist, but firmly an anti-villain that is not doing anything more than being true to its very good predator self. This is also the case with Moby Dick, who’s arguably just a whale who bit the wrong leg at the wrong time. We could only pick one big fish, so we went with Dick, who is more interesting and more well-known.

The shark also got a bump down for being a bit too overshadowed by its adaptation: we wanted this to stay as focused on books as we could — so no Hellraiser from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, Tyler Durden from Fight Club, or even Baron Harkonnen from Dune.

I understand that it’s probably a bit too dusty, but I would have loved to see Beowulf’s Grendel in our monsters corner. A classic creepy and ravaging beast who, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, “ruled in defiance of right” as a “dark death-shadow/who lurked and swooped in the long nights,” just straight-up eating guys: Grendel “bolted down his blood/and gorged on him in lumps.” Nasty! And that’s all before we’ve even met the mother.

We had too many animals and beasts to choose from — had to let Cujo run off into the demon woods and let ancient-god Cthulhu settle back into the stygian blackness of the sea floor that may or may not be an eldritch nightmare realm — where Lovecraft belongs too, check out LaValle’s book instead.

There were a couple of architectural villains that I was sad got left out, especially Hill House, Shirley Jackson’s horror manor from The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson’s one of the best at writing a descent into madness and Hill House will really drive you out of your gourd. Her descriptions warm my lapsed-architecture-student heart: “the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house.”

We considered The Overlook from The Shining too, but we had an embarrassment of riches from King and had to draw the line somewhere.

There were some villainous objects we considered, like The Ring from The Lord of the Rings, A.K.A. the deadliest MacGuffin in history. The one I wish we could have included was All That Sand from Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. I love this creepy book, and the unrelenting sand is a horrifying presence — it just won’t stop piling up around our trapped protagonist. If you hate finding sand in your shoes, pockets, and bags after a trip to the beach, be warned: this book will get to you. And isn’t that what a villain is supposed to do?

I let myself go a little overboard in my first draft with villainous concepts and systems. To no one’s surprise, we discovered there are far too many: Alienation and Capitalism in Bartleby the Scrivener; Willful Ignorance and Systems Built on Exploitation in Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas”; maybe Loneliness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead? These are, of course, way too broad to be included, but were a lot of fun to consider. We dialed it back to just Suburban Ennui, which felt specific enough to work.

I would have loved to include Thomas More from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Mantel’s whiny and obsessive More is likely mostly fiction, but introducing fictional versions of real people felt like stretching the bracket’s premise too far.

There were some we just didn’t have space for at the end of the day. One character who certainly deserved to be in competition is Nino Sarratore from Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels. An insecure narcissist who lies and exploits nearly everyone around him would be right at home in our manipulators section. I’ve seen some people commenting about his absence too — he gets a lot of people’s blood boiling.

I regret that we didn’t include any of the great Russian lit villains, but the classics were starting to overwhelm our bracket — we could do a whole separate bracket just with Shakespeare characters. All the same, I’m still bummed that the unrepentant murderer Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment didn’t make our 64.

We also had to be honest about our own favorite villains, and leave aside some personal picks who might be too obscure — like Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, Ayoola from My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Mitsuko from Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki, Cristóvão Ferreira in Silence by Shusaku Endo — the list goes on and on.

At the end of the day, there are too many good characters in too many good books — this was always going to end in some level of disappointment. And with that, cue Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life).”

Oh and yes, we didn’t include Voldemort and let’s be serious here — you know why. I liked those books when I was a child too, but I’m in my thirties now and I read the news.