Literary Villains

I'm contemplating a series of posts revolving around villainous characters in literature and the root of their cruel tendencies. Asking what might make a character tick is a lot like asking what makes a person tick - there are very few brief answers. I'm not sure how many blog entries this may give me. A lot of it will honestly depend on how long the topic holds my interest.

Currently, I'm planning blog entries on Tom Riddle AKA Lord Voldemort from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Henry Bowers from Stephen King's It, Javert from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Bill Sikes and Fagin from Oliver Twist, Saruman and Sauron from J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series, and Xayde & Gmork from Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. Any villains you'd like to see added to the list?

For the purposes of these entries, I will be examining each villain on their own. These aren't compare and contrast pieces - that may come later, just because I'd love to see Voldemort own Xayde. Lol. In these blogs, I intend to look at each villain: what makes them bad, what might explain their particular brand of evil (if any back story was provided in the original work), and why the readers so love to hate them.