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Characters who creep you out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just finished James Lee Burke’s latest novel, “The Tin Roof Blowdown,” which has been on the New York Times best-seller list for two months. It’s technically a crime thriller, but as folks who’ve glommed onto Burke’s work already know, that’s like saying John Le Carre writes spy novels.
The setting, as with all of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series, is New Orleans and environs, but now he’s diving into the deep, deep post-Katrina waters. It’s a living hell where packs of young black men go on looting binges through abandoned houses with crowbars, and white power brokers seize the opportunity for graft on a whole new level. The first group is more immediately intimidating, the second far worse to the overall health of the city.
The plot is complicated, and I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t read it, but Burke pulls off a couple of things worth noting:
He really makes the reader feel some of what happened during Katrina two years, and care about how poorly the restoration has been handled.
And he gives us a bad guy who creeped me out big-time, a nasty degenerate named Ronald Bledsoe. Although hired as a goon by one of the book’s villains, he’s the kind of guy who would be evil for free if he wasn’t getting paid, as Robicheaux remarks. The scenes where he calmly stalks Robicheaux’s teenager daughter Alifair are not easy to read. Brrrr.
That got me thinking about bad guys in books who are so bad that you can hardly keep reading. I know Hannibal Lecter is that for some people, or at least he was before Thomas Harris over-exposed him. Good ol’ Stephen King has come up with a few doozies, like Randall Flagg in “The Stand.”
Voldemort and Sauron, on the other hand, may have given some kids nightmares, but they’re more scary as forces working against the heroes than as fully realized characters, to me anyway. And when I think back on villains of the literary canon, like sadistic Wackford Squeers in “Nicholas Nickleby,” I hated them while I was reading, but they didn’t give me the willies.
So who is in your Bad Guy Hall of Fame? I’m talking fictional characters who just worm their way into your head and raise a little hell in there.
Comments
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By ron
September 12, 2007 7:52 AM | Link to this
Fictional characters don’t bother me.We have enough real characters to go around.The two in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,”rank right up their with the best of the creeps.
By hi there
September 12, 2007 8:20 AM | Link to this
I agree with Ron. Alice Sebold’s rapist (she wrote “Lucky,” a memoir of her rape) is one of the creepiest characters to come along- and he’s real!
By Jeff
September 12, 2007 8:27 AM | Link to this
There are a couple from the Reacher series that are pretty bad. Neither of which are anywhere NEAR polite enough to even DESCRIBE here. (Suffice it to say that when Reacher kills them in particularly gruesome ways, you say he wasn’t gruesome enough… THAT is how much you want these guys dead!)
The bad guys in “Without Remorse” are particularly bad. Rape, torture, feeding people to crabs, displaying mutilated bodies (so bad as to be nearly unrecognizeable as human) in public fountains, and making others in their control watch it all as a message to “stay in line” are just SOME of the things these guys do. When Kelly begins doing the things he does “without remorse”, virtually any guy that reads the book would have at least WANTED to do the same and WOULD have felt the same if he did it.
There was once a little-known book I read called “Code Alpha”, about bio-terrorism, and the bad guy’s second-in-command was a particular sadist.
Pavel Kazakov, from some later Dale Brown books (I know he shows up in Warrior Class, and I THINK that is the first one, though he survives for at least 2, maybe 3 books.) Russian, rich, willing to manipulate the entire Russian government to get what he wants and do ANYTHING he needs to in order to get his desires fulfilled. Winds up ordering the rape and torture of one man’s wife. This wife dies in her husband’s arms. Kazakov doesn’t exactly like what the husband proceeds to do…
All in all, I like these villains more because the hero winds up doing exactly as I would have wanted to do, given the opportunity.
By lovelyliz
September 12, 2007 9:07 AM | Link to this
ron
I have to agree. The saying truth is stranger than fiction applies here. I am always creeped out more by real life characters like Charles Manson and the like than by fictional bad guys.
By Jerry
September 12, 2007 9:14 AM | Link to this
Daniel Bunkowski was the overweight serial killing machine in several novels by the late Rex Miller (pen name of Rex Miller Spangberg — most notably, “Slob,” his first novel, nominated for the Bram Stoker Award when it was published, about 20 years ago.
The hero in Miller’s books was a homicide detective, Jack Eichord, who specialized in serial killer investigations and Bunkowski was a terrifying character who came back in several more novels. He is somewhat obscure, but a worthy addition to any literary Bad Guy Hall of Fame.
Also known as ‘Chaingang,’ Bunkowski weighs about 500 pounds, is surprisingly nimble, has low-level ESP. A rapist, torturer, murderer, he is one of the more frightening bad guys I’ve come across. Though I’ve only read ‘Slob,’ he apparently comes back in several more books.
Miller, who died a few years ago, was in some ways an unsung master of pulp crime-horror (nightmare-inducing) fiction, definitely worth checking out.
One quick addition — Lou Ford, the chilling main character in Jim Thompson’s classic, “The Killer Inside Me,” deserves some attention by this cyber Hall of Fame.
By Phil Kloer
September 12, 2007 10:20 AM | Link to this
Hey Jerry, yes, Jim Thompson deserves a whole wing in the Bad Guy Hall. I’ve read most of his noir books and almost always the villian has some particularly neat bit of menace going on. If you like noir, check out the Hard Case Crime series of paperbacks. They are a mix of new works and re-issues, with newly created versions of those classically sleazy covers of the 40s and 50s. I subscribe to their club and get one paperback a month in the mail for something like $7.
By grabbingsand
September 12, 2007 11:57 AM | Link to this
You know, everyone has a tendency to point the creep-stick at Hannibal Lecter, but for all of his predilections, his approach and intentions are fairly well grounded. (Grounded in his own broken sense of justice and morality, yes, but the foundation he’s created is firm.) The true creeps are the ones where you never quite know their reasons or motivations, or when the forces that drive them are so far removed from reality as to make the very thought of their logic too chilling to consider.
And so, I’m saying that Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill) — the “making-a-woman-suit-from- the-flesh-of-actual-women” antagonist from Silence Of The Lambs — is Harris’s creepiest creation.
By Jeff
September 12, 2007 1:05 PM | Link to this
grabbingsand:
That reminds me, the villain from Jeffery Archer’s Venom was slap CRAZY!!!
(He killed people by letting brown recluses bite them multiple times, then had sex with the corpse!)
Read the book to find his motivation… good book, but too freaky for me to read again!
By Kate
September 12, 2007 4:02 PM | Link to this
Hedda Gabler from the Ibsen play is a ennui-nasty sort. Oh, and Cathy from East of Eden is cut from the same mold—soul-less.
The mom in We Were the Mulvaneys—Corrine—was evil. Worse so because she thought that she felt she was above reproach.
Are we doing the book club, Phil? I won’t be around on Oct. 8, so you may want to invalidate my vote! Unless, of course, you change the date.
By SharonH
September 12, 2007 10:37 PM | Link to this
The original Dracula from Bram Stoker’s book was the first character to sufficiently creep me out so that I could not sleep until I returned that book to the library.
By Jen
September 14, 2007 6:51 PM | Link to this
Man, I’ve got to remember to check out The Book Page daily! It’s not always right there on AJC.com’s main page and sometimes I forget.
I think what makes the characters of James Lee Burke’s book so terrifying is because they’re fictionalized version of the people in NOLA today. So, they represent real people.
Otherwise, I have to agree, I never find fictional villains to be truly scary because I know they’re fiction. It’s only when there’s some element of reality there that I start getting creeped…