Penguin books who is scariest villain

When it turns out an immortal legend is actually real and is out to seek vengeance, the first obstacle in saving your people is convincing them to start believing what they thought was a myth. What if sunrise only came every 28 years? Check out our schedule to catch your favorite Penguin Teen authors' panels and signings! PenguinTeen : Cover reveal! Heated competition leads to even hotter romance in this YA summer rom-com from LillieLabyrinth.

Seems plausible…. PenguinTeen : RT thenerdaily : "With a sapphic romance, a thrilling murder mystery and a refreshing take on vampires and other myths, The Coldest Touch i….

PenguinTeen : Cover reveal time! Adelina from The Young Elites Sometimes the scariest thing to watch is a heroine slowly becoming a villain as the darkness inside takes over. Ophiuchus from Zodiac When it turns out an immortal legend is actually real and is out to seek vengeance, the first obstacle in saving your people is convincing them to start believing what they thought was a myth. The Others from Nightfall What if sunrise only came every 28 years? These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages.

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Children's Gifts. Stocking Fillers. Penguin Tote Bags. Isokon Penguin Donkey. Home Articles Children's Articles The most terrifying book villains of all time. The most terrifying book villains of all time. John Robertson. Gormenghast Mervyn Peake Buy the book. Lewis She can hear your thoughts, turn dissenters to ice, control the seasons and her cackle carries on the wind like an untreatable airborne virus.

But you're still not convinced of her sheer purity of evil, consider this: she cancelled Christmas. Need I go on? The Woman in Black by Susan Hill She's the embittered ghost who haunts the eerie Eel Marsh House.

Turns out, whenever a child sees her she spellbinds them into suicide, and whenever an adult sees her she kills their first-born, no matter how long she must wait. The real horror inside Tom Ripley is that he's so polite, likeable and charmingly starry-eyed, you find yourself willing him to succeed in his campaign of remorseless manipulation, murder and identity-theft.

A psychopathic misanthrope of the highest order, Kevin is a morality vacuum who hates his mother, goads a girl with eczema into gouging her own skin, and possibly behind the "accident" that left his sister without an eye. Then he massacres a group of children after luring them in his school's gym.

If there were ever an argument that some people are just born evil, Kevin is it. Ratched is the tyrant asylum nurse, so sinister that cold air seems to follow her as she patrols the corridors of the Oregon State Hospital unleashing her finely-tuned sadism on anyone under her care. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake Calm, calculating and driven only by his own self-interest, he creeps about the crumbling corridors of Gormanghast castle manipulating and murdering his way to the top.

Matilda by Roald Dahl A headteacher who hates children? There are plenty of those in the real world, but none who hates them so much that she denies having ever been one herself. And certainly none who takes such pleasure in publicly humiliating her wards, throwing them over fences for wearing pigtails or force-feeding them cake in assembly is, in Dahl's words, "more like an eccentric and rather bloodthirsty follower of the stag-hounds than the headmistress of a nice school for children".

He is, in short, a master manipulator, so skilled at convincing his victims to do his bidding that he even manages to marry a noblewoman who knows he killed her husband. A cat-stroking tyrant if he had a cat , a child killer, a mass murderer of his rivals and a terrible king with a writhing hatred for all humanity. Literature is not short of monstrous slave owners, but Simon Legree is down there with the worst of them. He is as happy to have an enslaved person whipped to death for believing in God as he is to spur an unbroken horse refusing a saddle.

He is a sexual predator and a violent sadist — one of the vilest characters in all literature. Few figures in The Handmaid's Tale are more ruthlessly terrifying than Aunt Lydia, the imperious instructor who brainwashes, manipulates and tortures handmaids into obedience.

But what makes her truly horrifying is not just her cruelty, but also her gender: a woman a former family court judge, no less indoctrinating other women into sexual servitude under Gilead's violently patriarchal new world order.

The Call of Cthulhu by H. Lovecraft Lovecraft was the high priest of nightmarish monster gods, and Cthulhu was his most fearsome creation. Kindred by Octavia Butler He's a slaveowner with a conscience, which only makes him more despicable. Rufus Weylin is petulant, needy and selfish — a pathetic mysoginist who craves the love of his enslaved people but also doesn't mind raping them so long as the pretend they enjoy it.

Dark will grant you your wildest dreams in return only for your soul to fuel his sinister travelling carnival where laughter goes to die. Want to be young again? Sure, you just have to ride his creaky merry-go-round backwards, to the tune of the funeral march, to take a year off your age with every revolution.

The only catch: you must live in a child's body with the mind of an old person forever. But his covenants are bespoke, and he'll find the payment that best fits your needs. The Strange Case of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde We all have a dark side, Jungian shadows of the soul Jekyll's chemically-induced alter ego. Jaws by Peter Benchley She's the teeth of the sea, the monster of the deep blue, the hulking mass of murderous flesh that will rise silently from the dark and tear you limb from limb because that's just what evolution has hardwired her to do.

The book and the subsequent movie franchise caused Benchley such guilt over the shark stigma he spawned that he became a shark conservationist in later life. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. Tolkein If you've ever lost your wedding ring down the kitchen sink, you have an idea how of Sauron felt. The all-powerful necromancer is what happens when Big Brother gets a little too obsessed with jewellery, and will stop at nothing to get his bling back.

And plugholes, presumably. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy He's the self-styled lothario and Tess' persecutor spat out by the pernicious rape culture that Hardy brought to light long before activists gave sexual abuse a vocabulary. Driven only by lust, he roams the Wessex countryside searching for his next victim, manipulating and coercing his way through life to indulge his sordid obsessions.

Brighton Rock by Grahame Green A teetotal year-old Catholic gang leader who roams wind-swept Brighton armed with a razor blade, a bottle of acid and a hatred for all humanity especially women , Pinkie is the embodiment of pure evil — the Devil with a baby face.

You by Caroline Kepnes A truly dedicated villain grabs you by the throat and tightens his grip page by page. Joe Goldberg is that villain, a stomach-turningly vile manifestation of unconscionable evil and sexual predation. He is a psychopath and a misogynist who sees women only as the sum total of their sexual organs. He hates women, while also wanting to possess them entirely. That, of course, starts with stalking and ends in kidnap, imprisonment and murder. Peter Pan by J.

Barrie Captain Hook is not the real villain in Peter Pan. He's no less lost than any of the Lost Boys. No, the real villain is the crocodile — the only thing Hook is scared of, and a literal manifestation of the ravages of time. Just as the crocodile bites chunks off Hook until he devours him completely, time slowly nibbles away at the rest of us, to the end.

The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross present. A headteacher who wears sunglasses can mean one of two things: he's either desperately hungover, or he's a megalomaniacal alien warlord who uses his glowing green eyes to hypnotise his victims in his bid to take over the world.

Either way, the sunglasses are a definite red flag. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead The cruelty inflicted on the students at the nightmarish Nickel Academy comes from nearly every aspect of life at the school — and every aspect of that life is controlled by Maynard Spencer, its abusive, manipulative superintendent.

Merricat, or Mary Katherine, to give her formal name, introduces herself well in the opening paragraph of Jackson's chilling novella: "I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise". What makes her so frightening is the level of power and manipulation Jackson manages to eke from such a naive outlook - and one that keeps you grimly turning the pages until the book's closing twist. Pine by Francine Toon Perhaps the strangest thing about the woman in white that haunts Pine is the fact you quite want her to return.

The ethereal presence at the heart of Francine Toon's debut novel leaves the feeling of kisses, an animal smell and precious trinkets for her loved ones. But who is she, and why is she there? Beowulf unknown. Perhaps only one so terrifying could prove so ripe for reinvention. More than a millennium on from Beowulf's publication and the fearsome monster at its core continues to provide inspiration. Contemporary illustrations may prompt comparisons to the Gruffalo, but be careful - mess with Grendel and face his mother, an arguably more terrifying presence.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Everyone remembers his 'hideous progeny' — hard to forget a man made of assorted body parts, I suppose — but actually, Frankenstein's creation was just another innocent soul ruined by bad parenting. It's the snivelling, selfish, self-pitying Victor — a metaphor for humankind's endless hubris — who is the real monster of this masterpiece.

When Lu-Hai Liang emigrated to the UK as a child, his English was struggling — until a door-to-door salesman introduced him to audiobooks. The author and chef reflects on a life of reading, from following in Evelyn Waugh's footsteps at Oxford to swimming with sharks to why poetry is the place to go when things are falling apart.

Many have been lost to years of cutbacks, but libraries and their staff continue to play important roles for their communities, from counsellors to childminders to family tree researchers. To mark Libraries Week, one ex-librarian celebrates Britain's 'secular churches'. For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more.

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