Whose the most horrible character in any book you've read?

[FreddoBaggyMac]

I've just finished 'The Help' and am very sad about it too [sniff] I miss Aibileen... Anyway I feel the need to make my hatred of Miss Hilly public. I don't think I've ever detested anyone in a book quite so much...

I thought I would create a tribute thread in her honour, listing the most repugnant characters in fictional history. Please help by adding entries to the list!
I nominate MISS HILLY from The Help as the number one entry.

Pretty much anyone in Game of Thrones.

Yyy to Kennet, evil rapist bastard.

And Count Fosco in The Woman in White. Brr.

I nominate the Duke from the Thirteen Clocks, whose only vice is wickedness but he practices constantly.

Eva and Franklin from 'We need to talk about Kevin'

The 'mother' from A 'Child Called It.'

ALL the prison guards in 'Sleepers'

Briony from 'Atonement'

Moriarty from 'The Final Problem'

And of course.. Fred from one of my all time fave books, 'The Haindmaid's Tale'

Also from one of my favourite books; Humbert Humbert from 'Lolita.'

That's all I can think of off the top of my head (yes, all books I've read in the past month lol)

I will come back with more.

Oh! And every bad guy in ever George Orwell's (dreamy sigh) every book. Damn that man could write villains!

I just remembered the utter misery of reading Lady of Hay, where most of the men, both present day (1980's) and past (1100's) were utter bastards, rapists and perverts.

I hated that book. The modern day male lead, who I think was called Nick, was a vicious rapist who cheated on all of his girlfriends and wasn't above beating them to keep them in their place.

Despite this we were supposed to believer that the modern day female lead still loved, wanted and desired him despite being cheated on, beaten and raped by him. I hated her too actually because she was just so one-dimensional and useless throughout the entire story and we were supposed to believe she was the reincarnation of a woman who had the balls to call King John a murderer to his face. No.

The historical bits, although still filled with brutal rapist men, were much better because Matilda seemed much more real and strong.

The Jaffe, from The Great and Secret Show, by Clive Barker. Now he was sick.

The shopoholic in those dreadful shopoholic books.

Lequeen Rochester didn't give a shit about his neighbours though - he married, or tried to marry, his governess! And his wife was mad - she set fire to the house/his bed and attacked her brother. Now, you could read it that she was going berserk at being incarcerated and trying her damnedest to get out of the house but I don't see it that way. She was bonkers.

I always thought Rochester went blind because Charlotte Bronte, plain of face and a poor clergyman's daughter, fantisised about a world in which a plain woman could be loved for the spirit and fire that was inside her rather than measured by her beauty, her birth and her wealth. Obviously there are the rather laborious parallels with Lady Blanche, beautiful and well-born but HEARTLESS to empasise this. CB bangs on at length at how passionate Jane was (i.e. as a child when she gets locked in the Red Room, etc. and the speech she gives to Rochester under the tree). In fact, the book to me resonates with her frustration at life; being judged and limited by the external and material rather than, a very CB/JE word, one's soul.

I'm clearly off piste as another favourite of mine is Becky Sharp and she seems to get a universal pasting too.

My daughters' favourite bedtime story at the moment is me paraphrasing Jane Eyre for them. I've got it down to five minutes (we have to dwell on the mad wife and fire and all the gory bits obviously as they're 5 1/2 & agog at people doing 'bad things') and, three weeks in, it's getting a bit tedious. Every bleedin' night.

The Judge in Blood Meridien

Who is Marchpane and what book is he in?

Marchpane is in Brideshead Revisited I think. I can't remember but were the parents controlling and stopped Julia marrying Charles?

or have I got muddled up with another character in another book LOL

I tried to google Marchpane but all the results seemed to be about cake.

I actually want to nominate another to my list but it isn't a person, it's a house.

Anne Rivers Siddons wrote The House Next Door, about a couple who live next to an empty plot of land they assume is too oddly shaped to be built on. But then a rich young couple employ a creative young architect to build something for them and the house he builds is pure evil, with devastating effects for everyone.

It's not the most highbrow book in the world but there are plenty of evil goings on and two in particular that were completely horrific to me. That house was just made of evil and you can feel the presence of the house spreading outwards through the neighbourhood, it really is a character in it's own right (and I love the book).

Mayor Prentiss in the Chaos Walking trilogy is pretty awful.

On the other end of the scale I get very indignant about John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey.

Pinky, from Brighton Rock

I tried to google Marchpane but all the results seemed to be about cake.

Marchmain. Lord and Lady Marchmain - parents of Sebastian, Julia and Cordelia - Brideshead Revisited.

Agreed - the Marchmains are rather awful, esp Lady Marchmain.

There is a character in a Brett Easton Ellis book that is truly evil. He kidnaps a young boy and, well it's absolutely horrific.
I really wonder about BEE, he seems to really get the horrors of the banality of evil and present it so effectively.