The 10 Best Book Villains of All Time, Ranked
Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
Sign in to your Collider account
Before getting into things, a villain can be different from an antagonist. An antagonist is the character in opposition to the protagonist, generally, but a protagonist can be more villainous than the antagonist, particularly if the story they're in is about their moral downfall, or if things take place from their point of view (if it’s narrated in the first-person, they might even try to justify the things they do).
So, these characters all do bad things, and stand out for feeling evil within the stories they belong to. Some are the main characters of those stories, and technically the “protagonists,” but when things get a bit unusual in that way, it'll be pointed out. Also, there will be so many omissions, yet this is an honest attempt to highlight the most memorable (and capably evil) villains in book history.
10 Napoleon
'Animal Farm' (1945)
Animal Farm is one of those books you were probably made to read at one point, if you went through school, or if not, you likely know the basics here. It’s a novella that takes place on a farm (unsurprisingly) where the animals revolt against the humans that were once in control, and then after their whole revolution, there’s an attempt to build a utopian society that’s ultimately dystopian.
The appropriately named Napoleon is the novella’s main villain, and does the most damage out of all the animals in the story, aspiring for power and competing with others to eventually become the dictator of the whole failed utopia. He’s definitely a more active antagonist than the main one found in George Orwell’s other iconic book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Big Brother in that novel is still worthy of an honorable mention here.
9 Lord Voldemort
'Harry Potter' (1997–2007)
There’s only one book in the Harry Potter series where Voldemort doesn’t appear in some capacity, yet in that book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, he’s still felt and has some kind of influence on certain things. As a result, he’s easily identifiable as the central villain of the whole saga, and his growing power throughout the final few books occurs alongside the series as a whole getting darker.
Well, the main characters growing up throughout also plays a role in the series feeling more like a young adult story by the end, rather than the children’s story it (arguably) was early on. Voldemort orchestrates a good deal of death and misery throughout Harry Potter, as a series, and is directly in opposition with the titular hero the whole time, so he’s a no-brainer for inclusion here (and he does stick around/survive for a long time, by villain standards).
8 It, AKA Pennywise the Dancing Clown
'IT' (1986)
The 1970s did see Stephen King introducing Randall Flagg, who is more prolific than the titular villain from IT, just because he shows up in The Stand, The Dark Tower, and some other stuff. It, though, is more memorable, and inspires more fear, because that’s kind of It’s whole deal, with the more popular name, Pennywise, being just one of the many forms It takes on.
There’s an extra layer of evil here because of It targeting children, more often than not, and ultimately doing a whole lot of damage to the town of Derry.
It is a shapeshifting being that emerges every 27 years and takes on the forms that It believes will most frighten and torment its victims. There’s an extra layer of evil here because of It targeting children, more often than not, and ultimately doing a whole lot of damage to the town of Derry, as well as a fair few prominent characters throughout the (epic-length) novel’s duration.
7 Joffrey Baratheon
'A Song of Ice and Fire' (1996–Present)
He’s the worst, right? Or one of the very worst. A Song of Ice and Fire has its fair share of villains, and Joffrey Baratheon ultimately isn't quite the main villain, but he’s certainly the most detestable for the time he spends in the whole ongoing series. He’s awful right from the start, but becomes tyrannical when he finds himself in a position of power, becoming king of Westeros.
Certain characters senior to him technically have more control, and might well do more damage to House Stark in the overall scheme of things (namely, Tywin, Joffrey’s grandfather), but Joffrey is just so ridiculously evil the whole time. He takes bad situations and makes them worse, and then seems untouchable for what feels like a rather agonizing time, having all the qualities least desirable for a king.
6 Victor Frankenstein
'Frankenstein' (1818)
With Frankenstein, you’ve got a decent argument on your hands if you want to highlight one or the other of the two main characters as the villain. The Creature is the antagonist, since Victor Frankenstein is the protagonist of the novel, but Victor is the one who gives life to something he shouldn’t have, and then neglects the creature he’s made (which wasn’t the best decision and all).
It can vary, though, where one’s sympathies might lie. That’s part of what makes Frankenstein so interesting: that whole interplay, and both characters doing terrible things to each other. But Victor cast the first stone, so to speak, by making the Creature, and yeah, even if it’s not original to say “Victor is the real monster,” that’s what’s being said here. Takes a monster to make a monster and all that.
5 Tom Ripley
'The Ripliad' (1955–1991)
Throughout The Ripliad, Tom Ripley is the main character, and therefore the protagonist, but overall, he’s a villain because of his actions. The five books in the series written by Patricia Highsmith have him executing a series of cons, crimes, and murders, with him being very good at what he does, and also very interesting as a character to follow throughout what ends up being a surprisingly sprawling series.
It might not be impossible to argue he’s an antihero of sorts, but it would be extremely difficult. You might have to have the charisma and genius of Tom Ripley himself to do so successfully, or at least to do so while living to argue another argument. As a source of conflict and tension, though, everyone’s likely to be in agreement about Tom Ripley. The guy’s perfect at generating those sorts of things.
4 Sauron
'The Lord of the Rings' (1954–1955)
Big Brother was mentioned a little earlier as a villain who’s not particularly active in the story, but always a presence and intimidating in other ways, and Sauron serves an honestly not too dissimilar purpose in The Lord of the Rings. The whole saga is mostly about preventing Sauron’s return, with the One Ring being the thing that has to be destroyed to ensure Sauron goes away for good.
All the misery and horror in the epic that is The Lord of the Rings is either caused by Sauron, or happens because the fight to prevent further destruction by Sauron is that intense and high-stakes. The mystery around him goes quite a long way toward making him more frightening, and so he kind of benefits from not really getting that much character development (at least within the main story that is The Lord of the Rings, because there is other material written by J.R.R. Tolkien that elaborates/explains a little more).
3 Annie Wilkes
'Misery' (1987)
She is technically just a human being, compared to the likes of Randall Flagg and It/Pennywise, but Annie Wilkes deserves to be crowned the best of Stephen King’s villains more or less because she’s comparatively so mundane. Annie possesses no supernatural powers at all, and there aren’t even really hints that she might, and she manages to be frightening in other ways.
Annie doesn’t need supernatural powers, in other words. She takes her favorite author, Paul Sheldon, hostage, and then reacts badly when she learns that he’s concluded the series of his that she was a particularly big fan of. That’s a bit of an understatement. But that’s what Misery is all about, and it’s incredibly compelling while being very confined and small-scale with its cast of characters. It’s really just Annie and Paul, with the former being almost as iconic as villains get.
2 Judge Holden
'Blood Meridian' (1985)
Of the handful of reasons why Blood Meridian is so mortifying, the character of Judge Holden is probably the most prominent. Various other characters in this Western book also do horrifying acts, but Holden is a special kind of evil, and he’s also more frightening because of how little is known about him… besides the fact that there is some potential historical basis for the character.
Blood Meridian isn't necessarily a historical book, outside some of its characters being based on real people, or inspired by them. Still, that slight possibility of Judge Holden having been a real person, coupled with what Cormac McCarthy does with his version of that potential person, adds up to something remarkably unsettling. There’s just the right combination of knowing and not knowing, when it comes to Judge Holden, to make him about as intimidating as a literary villain can be.
1 Humbert Humbert
'Lolita' (1955)
One final protagonist who’s also a villain, Humbert Humbert is what that protagonist/narrator goes by, but it’s a pseudonym he writes under while recounting a hugely distressing history. Humbert justifies his actions and sees himself as morally superior, all while recounting a story that involves him becoming infatuated with a 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita, becoming her stepfather and then her sole guardian.
He commits abuse consistently and while Lolita (the book) doesn’t go into graphic detail with some of those scenes, there is enough for it to be hugely disturbing. Humbert being the narrator makes him more despicable, because spending time in his head, or reading his thoughts, is not a nice place to be, and then it’s made harder when the book is somehow so compelling (thanks to Vladimir Nabokov, of course, but in-universe, Humbert is still being frustratingly good at writing and being witty, all the while openly disclosing the most horrific things while committing pen to paper).
Lolita
- Release Date
- June 13, 1962
- Runtime
- 154 minutes
- Director
- Stanley Kubrick
- Writers
- Vladimir Nabokov
-
James Mason
Prof. Humbert Humbert
-
Shelley Winters
Charlotte Haze
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.