What’s a worthy protagonist without a formidable rival? If you love diving into a good book, then chances are you’ve come to appreciate the tension and complexity that a memorable villain can add to a piece of fiction. Here are five of the most unsettling and enduring villains to ever appear between the covers of a book:

 

Long John Silver from Treasure Island

Long John Silver is one of the most fiendish characters ever created by author Robert Louis Stevenson. He is a shrewdly calculating and treacherous one-legged pirate whose duplicitous nature makes him quite a slippery challenge to the story’s hero, Jim Hawkins. Though he starts out as a mentor to Hawkins, his commitment to his own best interest makes him willing to turn on his young mentee without an ounce of regret. 

 

Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist

Bill Sikes is among the most vicious characters ever penned by Charles Dickens. He is a rough, violent, and brutal career criminal, both a robber and an exploiter and abuser of children. He is prone to sudden bouts of terrifying rage and even goes so far as to explode in anger and beat his girlfriend to death, one of the most viscerally terrifying scenes to appear in any of Dickens’s novels. Dickens gives Sikes no redeeming qualities, and this makes him one of the darkest villains in literary history. 

 

Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley

Tom Ripley is the brilliant villain in a series of crime novels by Patricia Highsmith. He starts out as a petty criminal getting by on his smarts in the realms of forgery, deception, and impersonation. Eventually, he goes so far as to murder a wealthy young man and assume his identity. Whenever Ripley’s charade is questioned, he is willing to resort to extreme (and often bloody) measures to keep his assumed identity protected. His wicked and ever-scheming ways make him one of the brilliant bad guys ever inked onto paper. 

 

Count Fosco, The Woman in White

This villain from Wilkie Collins’ popular novel became the archetype for many crime-novel antagonists – a corpulent, refined, cultured, self-indulgent but shrewdly intelligent and calculating villain, hiding deviance beneath a well-dressed exterior. Fosco conjures a scheme to deprive Laura Fairlie of her wealth and soundness of mind, and chillingly destroys Laura’s sister without an ounce of regret.